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"Fog on the thirty-first," she says. "Hasn't done that in years."

"What does it mean?"

"Means you can't see your hand in front of your face," she says, and gives the dinosaur kid a second apple.

I pack my car. I leave the case files on the passenger seat and the headphones on top of them.

Then I sit in the Larch cabin at the table for an hour with my recorder, and I say the hardest thing I've ever said into a microphone. It takes nine tries. When it's done, I walk up the east track to his cabin, where the radio's hissing behind the back door, and I set the recorder on his porch step with a sticky note on it.

PLAY ME.

Then I turn around and walk up toward the boulder field, into the fog.

6

Cole

The fog comes up the valley from the creek.

I watch it from the radio room window. By four it's covered the water. By five it's at Edna's, and the lights along the valley road go soft, then out. Kids are knocking on doors down there in costumes. Their voices come up the slope wrong. Close. Then far.

Nine days since she walked out of my cabin in yesterday's clothes. I was on the ridge with the binoculars both times. She looked up the track. I looked down it. Neither of us moved.

I couldn't go down until I had something to bring her. I didn't have it.

Then, Edna keys the valley channel. She never uses it for anything but weather.

"Cole."

I pick up the handset. "Edna."

"She's packed the car. Case files on the front seat. Headphones on top." A pause, and the crackle of her thinking. "Thought you'd want to know. Fog's coming. Do something."

She signs off. I turn the volume up on the hiss and sit with my hands on my knees. I don't want to hear the track.

At half past four Edna comes back on. The car's still there. Nora isn't in the cabin. Her boots are gone.

I take the handset off the hook and put it back. My hands aren't steady.

I open the back door.

The recorder is on the step. Yellow note. PLAY ME.

The fog is already at the porch rail, cold on my face. I sit down on the boards and press the button.

Cole. It's me. Close to the mic, the way she talks in the dark with her headphones on. I'm at the Larch cabin table. It's take nine, so you're getting the one where I don't cry.

A breath.

Theo called Friday. A network wants the show. Vancouver, a studio, eight episodes. I said yes. I sign Monday.

I close my eyes.

The finale doesn't say if anyone's alive. I told him tonight. He yelled. It says the seven were people, and that one of them has a mother who calls a tip line on the first of every month. It plays her message. All of it. Nothing else. I'm not airing a second of her interview. I'm not airing a word about you. The tape's yours. Or hers. You decide.

The tape hisses.

You talk strangers home every week. You talked a man off a scree slope for two hours and I heard every word. It's the kindest thing I've ever heard.