Page 13

His heart is slamming against mine.

"Sleep," he says, into my skin.

I do.

When I wake again, the sun is high and the bed is cold.

A note sits on the table, written on the corner of a topo map in red pencil. Repeater's iced. Back by dark. Eat something. Lock your door. C.

There's a pot of coffee on the stove. It's still warm. He left less than an hour ago.

I find my jeans on the floor by the radio room door. My bra is on the stove hook. I find one sock. After a long and humiliating search, I find the other inside the quilt.

I look in his tiny mirror. Beard burn down my chin and neck. A mark below my ear the shape of a thumbprint. Hair that has opinions.

There's no way around it. It's four kilometres of east track to the Larch cabin, in yesterday's clothes, in broad daylight.

I do it with my chin high.

A forest has no dignity to offer a woman in my position. A squirrel watches me from a stump and chatters what I'm certain is a judgment. At the creek crossing I pass a couple in matching rain shells with trekking poles, and the man says, "Beautiful morning!" and the woman looks at my hair and doesn't say anything at all.

"It really is," I say, and keep walking.

I find a pine needle in my bra at the halfway mark. Another in my ear. I'm picking a third out of my braid when I round the last bend and Edna is on her porch with her coffee, watching me come.

She takes me in, boots to hair. Her face does not change.

"Muffin?" she says.

"Please."

She hands me one. She reaches over and pulls something out of my hair and holds it up between two fingers. A twig.

"Mm," she says, and goes back inside.

At the Larch cabin I stand under the shower until the hot water runs out. Then I sit on the bed with a towel around my head and listen for boots on the east track.

Nothing comes. Not that night, and not the next.

I tell myself he's giving me room. I tell myself I'm giving him the same. Neither of us is good at it. Twice I get as far as the porch with my jacket on. Both times I look up the track and think about the way he held my hand, like he was holding onto a ledge, and I go back inside. If I climb that hill again, I'm climbing it with the file still between us. I won't do that to him.

On Friday I walk down to Edna's to use the landline, and my producer tells me I'm going to be rich.

"Network deal," Theo says. "Full production. Season twelve, all Hollow Creek, eight episodes. Vancouver studio, real budget, your name above the title." I can hear him grinning down the line. "They need the finale to answer the question, though. Are any of the seven alive? And don't lie to me, Nora. You've found one. I can hear it in your voice."

I stand at Edna's counter with the cord wrapped around my fingers.

It's everything. Eleven seasons of recording in my closet with a duvet over my head, and now a studio. A team. The kind of money that means I never have to take a sponsor I hate again. And the finale that closes the case I've been circling for two years.

"Monday," Theo says. "I need you to sign by Monday. I’ll send the files."

I say yes. I hang up. I stand there with my hand on the receiver until Edna slides a muffin across the counter without a word.

I don't climb the hill that night, either. I can't tell him about the deal until I know what I'm going to do about it. And I can't know what I'm going to do about it until I've worked out what I owe a woman in Moose Jaw who calls a tip line on the first of every month.

Halloween comes in grey.

By noon there's fog in the bottom of the valley, low and white and thick, and it's climbing. Edna stands on her porch in a witch's hat handing out caramel apples to a small zombie and a smaller dinosaur, and she frowns at it.