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Nora

He gets closer every day, and I can hear it.

That's my whole job — hearing things. The way the room tone changes when a source is about to lie. The half-second pause before someone says a name they don't want to say. And for three days on the creek trail I track him the way I'd track a voice in a noisy room: not by seeing him, because I never see him, but by the shape of the quiet he makes.

On the first morning he's fifty meters out, maybe more. The birds go silent in a long moving pocket up the slope to my left and stay silent, pacing me, and fill back in behind.

On the second day, the pocket's closer. Thirty. I hear a branch give once under a lot of weight, on purpose, I think, and then nothing.

"You're closer today," I say to the creek, crouched on a stone with my recorder out.

Nothing.

"I can hear you. You're not as quiet as you think you are."

The silence up the slope shifts, very slightly. I'd swear it's amused.

At night he walks my walls. I lie in the loft and count the circuits, and I don't lock the door, and I never close the recorder. Every morning I play it back on the porch step. Every morning his voice is on it, once, low and even, right against the mic. Goodnight, Nora. Eat something. Your stove's drawing badly — open the damper.

I open the damper. It draws beautifully.

I should be terrified. Some mornings I am. I sit with the headphones on and my coffee cold, hearing a man I've never seen breathing on my porch at three in the morning, and my hands shake so badly I have to set the recorder down. I've done eleven seasons of this. I know how the stories end when a man circles a woman's house at night. I've read those files out loud to a million people.

And every morning, I play the tape again.

On the second afternoon I go down to Edna's for bread I don't need, and sit at her counter with a coffee, and don't ask about the hikers.

"He's been at my cabin," I say instead. "Every night."

Edna keeps wiping the same clean stretch of counter. "I know."

"You know?"

"Valley this size, sweetheart." She sets the rag down. "Are you frightened of him?"

"Yes," I say. "I'm terrified."

"That's not what I asked."

I look at her. She looks back, patient, the way I look at a source who's about to tell me the thing they came in to say.

"No," I say finally, very quietly. "Not the way I should be."

Edna nods. She picks the rag back up. "Four years he's been up that track," she says, "talking people off the mountains on that radio of his, and not one of them's ever laid eyes on him. You got him on tape the first day." She shakes her head, almost fond. "He's not hiding from you, Nora. He's never once tried."

On the third morning I announce the route to the treeline with my heart going.

"South fork. Nine. And twenty meters is close enough to talk."

Then I walk the south fork with my recorder held so tight in my fist that the plastic creaks.

Twenty meters in old growth isn't much. It's three trees. It's close enough to hear a man breathe if the creek is quiet.

"Are you there?" I ask, crouched at the stone shelf.

"Yes."