The Voice Inside

42

Maria knew the hills as intimately as a lover. She ran them every single day of her life. As she stepped out of her front door, the cool air from the ocean hit her with a bracing blow to the face. She felt dampness; rain would be coming overnight. She jogged down the steps to the street, where she did an elaborate series of stretches to loosen up for the trails.

The warning about Rudy Cutter from Inspector Easton hadn’t seemed real, but until the call came from his partner telling her she was safe, she hadn’t admitted to herself how much the threat had unnerved her. Now, she was keyed up and flooded with restless energy. It was almost too late to run — darkness was coming soon — but if she didn’t run, she knew she’d never sleep. She needed to do something normal after a day filled with crazy fear.

When she was done stretching, she studied the hills. They were lush green and bathed in gloom, with only a handful of trees looming over the densely matted vegetation like solitary soldiers. The cloud of fog had reached the summit of the ridge and was starting to spill into the valley. She wanted a demanding run tonight, on a trail that climbed sharply uphill toward the slope that overlooked Pacifica and the ocean. A hard, strenuous workout was the way to burn off her anxiety. She slid earbuds into her ears and kicked off the playlist on her Nano. Right now, she was obsessed with Ellie Goulding, so she listened to “My Blood” as she took off toward the park. With the music pounding, she couldn’t hear anything else around her.

Running was therapy to Maria. Some runners cleared their minds as they ran, thinking about nothing except their pace and their breathing, but Maria brought her whole life with her onto the trails. Right now, she thought about Jeremy. She was a wife, singer, actress, and fund-raiser, but more than anything, she was Maria Lopes, mother to Jeremy. He was her everything. The thought of being on Rudy Cutter’s list hadn’t scared her because of what might happen to herself. The heaviness in her chest was the unspeakable fear of missing her son’s life. Not seeing Jeremy grow up before her eyes. Not being there for school, sports, dances, and girls. Not seeing what he would do and where he would go in this world. His future was far more important than her own.

Maria pushed herself higher and faster, sprinting away from the dread she’d felt all day, almost crying with relief that it was over. Tendrils of fog wrapped around her arms and legs like fast-growing rainforest vines. She felt a vibration on the phone that was lodged in the back pocket of her shorts, but she didn’t let it break her stride. If you stopped halfway up the hillside, you lost your momentum. Above her, the ocean-side ridge was invisible, just a milky cloud. She ran upward into nothingness, and the only way she knew she’d reached the peak was that the ground finally leveled off under her pounding strides.

Up here, the fog swirled, like a living thing, silver and impenetrable, constantly changing. She headed west toward the ocean. The land was mostly flat but no longer paved, and she slowed her pace, because it was easy to turn an ankle on loose rock. Thick scrub brush pushed up to the trail on both sides, and the fog, as it always did, gave her a strange, disorienting loneliness. She lost track of time, and she lost track of where she was, but it didn’t scare her. She’d done this many times before.

Maria thought about the evening ahead of her. Once the nanny left, and it was just her and Jeremy in the house, she would take out her guitar and sing for her son, the way she always did. It was partly for him and partly for herself, a little piece of her past that she hadn’t given up. Years from now, she wondered if Jeremy would hear an Ellie Goulding song on an oldies station and feel a little tug in his heart and try to remember where he’d heard it before and why it reminded him of his mother.

In her pocket, her phone buzzed again and went to voice mail. It was probably Matt, calling from Malaysia or Singapore or wherever he was today, but he would understand. Running was sacred, and you didn’t interrupt the run.

She finally stopped where the trail began to turn downward. If she kept going, the path would take her all the way to Highway 1 near the Pacifica beach. It was time to head home. Maria retraced her steps, absorbed in a world that didn’t stretch more than a few feet around her in any direction. When the trail widened into an X, she knew she was back at the cross trail leading along Sweeney Ridge. Jeremy was a mile away from her at the base of the hill.

The land opened up here into a broad stretch of dirt and rock. Somewhere close by, there was a stone monument to the discovery site of San Francisco Bay. She decided to walk a while. She took the earphones out of her ears. The fog continued to play tricks with her eyes. She’d seen the oddest things up here and not known what was real and what wasn’t. One time, she’d been certain that she was surrounded by a kaleidoscope of thousands of orange monarch butterflies. Another time, she’d convinced herself that she was standing on the brink of a chasm that didn’t exist at all. She’d stood there, frozen, for several minutes before persuading herself that the cliff was nothing but an illusion.

This time, squinting into the fog, she saw a face.

A man stood on the ridge, not ten feet away from her, dressed in jeans and a black hoodie, his hands hidden. He stared at her with fixed, dead eyes. And just as quickly, he disappeared. The face vanished, obscured by the moving cloud of fog. In that split second, she recognized him.

The face, coming and going, belonged to Rudy Cutter.

He was right there.

Maria felt a chill, not from cold, but from fear. Instinctively, she took a step backward, and the trail gave way to the crackle of branches under her sneakers. She told herself that this was another fantasy conjured by the fog. Cutter wasn’t targeting her; he was going after someone else. The police had said so.

She listened and heard no footsteps anywhere around her. She was alone.

Or was she?

Something was behind her, and she spun around. Except there was nothing. And then, just as quickly, she felt someone coming near her from the other direction. She turned again.

Nothing. No one.

She wanted to call out, but she clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t move. She didn’t make a sound. She realized she was holding her breath. If I can’t see him, then he can’t see me.

But was any of it real?

Maria remembered the buzzing of her phone. She reached into her pocket and grabbed the phone and stared at the glow of the screen. Two missed calls. Both of them from Frost Easton. She had voice mail waiting for her, and she held the phone tightly against her ear to listen to the message. She wanted him to reassure her that everything was fine. Instead, his voice brought all the terror back.

“Maria, stay home. I’m sending the police. Rudy Cutter may be nearby.”

She tried to hang up the phone. Instead, her fingers trembling, she accidentally punched the speakerphone button, and the message started over and boomed into the fog. It took forever to shut it off. The silence, when the noise was over, felt ominous, as if she’d told the world exactly where she was. She stood there, waiting, panicking.

The fog got thicker and thicker.

Maria was certain now. Cutter was here. She could feel him. Blindly, not even looking down, she ran.

The San Bruno police beat Frost to Maria’s door. They were waiting for him when he arrived. Three uniformed officers stood around two squad cars, and he could see that Maria’s front door was open, with another officer just inside the doorway. He introduced himself to the cops on the street.

“What’s the status?” Frost asked.

“The homeowner isn’t here,” one of the officers replied. He was a burly Filipino kid in his early twenties. “The nanny answered the door. She said Ms. Lopes left on a run about forty-five minutes ago.”

Frost shook his head. “She went for a run? Now? I can’t believe she would take a risk like that after I talked to her.”

“Well, the nanny said she got a call from the SFPD giving her the all clear,” the cop told him.

“What?”

“Yeah, some detective called and said not to worry, she wasn’t the target.”

Frost knew who had made that call. Rudy Cutter. The spider had lured her into the web. They were running out of time.

“Where did she go?” he asked.

“The park trails. Beyond that, the nanny doesn’t know. She says Ms. Lopes likes to vary her route.”

Frost was too far away to hear noise from the ridge. A scream wouldn’t even be a whisper. All he knew was that Cutter was after Maria. And Maria wasn’t answering her phone. She thought she was safe, when in fact, she’d been lured to the hills by Cutter himself.

He stared up at Sweeney Ridge. The fog descended toward him, heavy and thick. It had crossed the summit and was stealing like a prowler into the valley. From where he was, he couldn’t see the slope of the hills now. Daylight was already fading to night, adding a black shroud to the haze of the fog.

Maria was up there. They had to go get her.

“Leave one officer inside the house, in case she gets home,” Frost said. “The rest of you, let’s go.”