Page 6

Then quiet. The hiss runs on. Then his voice again, lower, rougher, so close to the mic I can feel it against my ear like a hand.

"Do you know what I think about? Out here. Every night."

I can't answer. My throat has closed. The walkie sits in my fist, and I don't key it.

"I think about coming up that ladder." Slow. Deliberate. Every word placed like a boot on frozen ground. "You'd hear me on the floor. You'd hear the ladder take my weight. You'd lie there with your eyes open and you wouldn't move."

I press the key. "No," I whisper. "I wouldn't."

"I think about how you'd smell. Warm, under that quilt. I think about getting my hand on your ankle and pulling you down to the end of the mattress."

My hips come up off the bed. I don't touch myself. I take a fistful of the quilt in my free hand and hold on so hard my knuckles ache, and I lie there with the speaker against my cheek and listen.

"I think about your mouth," he says. "You talk all day. I want to find out what you sound like when you can't."

"Come in." It comes out cracked. "The door's open. Come in."

"No."

"Please."

"Not like this." His voice goes quieter still. "I'm not coming up that ladder in the dark like something out of one of your files. You want me, you look at me first. In the light. Where you can see what you're getting."

I'm shaking. I'm so wet my underwear's soaked through, and I haven't laid a finger on myself, and his voice is still in my ear.

"Tell me where," he says.

"The boulder field," I say. "Up the east ridge. Tomorrow. And no more trees."

A long silence. The channel hisses. Then the key clicks off, and through the window, thin and far, the frost gives under his weight. One step, going away.

The radio crackles once more.

"Lock your door, Nora."

I don't.

4

Cole

She's sitting on the big granite slab at the top of the boulder field with her knees drawn up and her recorder in her hand, and it's running. I can see the red light from the treeline.

I stand at the edge of the pines for a long time before I move.

For years, I've kept to the trees. I've walked past hikers on the trail close enough to smell their sunscreen, and not one of them has turned around. I've stood outside Edna's window in daylight while tourists bought maps.

She's going to look at me in full daylight with nothing between us. She's going to see the scar and the grey and whatever's in my face, and she's going to decide.

My hands are shaking.

She said no more trees. So I step out of them.

Twenty meters of open ground between us. Frost silver on the grass, the whole valley laid out below the ridge, the creek a black thread down the middle. She sees me and goes absolutely still. Then she lifts the recorder to her mouth, and her voice comes across the open ground to me, low and steady and shaking at the edges.

"Twenty meters," she says into the mic. "He's out of the trees. He's big. Bigger than I thought."

I take a step.