ENDORPHINS SLAMMED THROUGH Sonja as she ran up Gamble Hill, a sublime ache in her calves and thighs, body sheathed in sweat, the deep, steady rhythm of her breathing accompanying the metronomic pace of her Asics striking the dirt road as she gained the top of the hill at the same speed she’d started with a quarter mile back at the bottom. There was no better rush than being awash in her chemical high. Marijuana in high school had left her lobotomized, and her one-time dalliance with coke at Dartmouth had left her nerve endings feeling raked raw and dipped in kerosene. Not even sex with Claude got her blood surging like running did, not that they’d found the time of late.
She wiped stinging sweat from her eyes with the hem of her running shirt, tipped on her toes to flex her calves, then jogged lightly in place, her mind clearing.
Her house sat far below in the valley, a cottage that had been added onto three times since a Civil War veteran had built the original home in 1867. She could just make it out from here. It squatted in a small field that had once been an apple orchard, of which only a few fruitless trees remained. The golden autumn sunlight glanced off the slate-shingle roof whose weight caused the roofline to sag like the spine of an old mare. She loved the old house. Did not want to restore or remodel it. She loved it for what it was. Old. And a long way from Chicago and her parents. It was home, where she would spend the rest of her life. Where she would die. Knowing this filled her with the peace of mind that came with certainty.
She touched her toes, cracked her back. The road ahead traversed Gamble Ridge for 2.8 miles then took a steep descent into the river valley, where she’d take River Road north four miles back to home.
She popped in her iPod’s earbuds and cranked R.E.M.’s “E-Bow The Letter,” set it to loop, preferring its melancholic throb to music that assailed, like the System of a Down or AC/DC that inspired Claude. His clients would be aghast to know their pastoral paintings were created to such tasteless music.
As Stipe’s voice incanted Look up, what do you see? All of you, and all of me, Sonja set out leisurely to get her blood flowing again, pacing herself.
Up ahead, a woman with a lovely black mane of hair was at her mailbox. As Sonja approached, she saw that the woman was a man. His bare feet were grimed, his faded jeans torn, and his blousy tunic stained with what looked like strawberries. Or blood. Back in the day, he’d probably followed The Dead until Jerry had croaked, then toured with Phish; a UNH or UVM English major who’d retreated to where land was still cheap, and he could be left alone with his LSD flashbacks.
But Sonja thought he’d been a woman. Her radar was off, and it bothered her.
She settled into a languid stride, working up to a refreshing six-minute pace. A heart-attack pace, Claude would say. They used to jog together, before the kids. After jogging, they’d make love, shower together, then sit out on the back porch in the dark, drink a sixer of Long Trail as they listened to the tree frogs sing.
When Sonja hadn’t been able to jog the last few months of carrying George, Claude had given it up. After George had arrived, Sonja had grown depressed by her inactivity, felt like a dirty gym sock filled with custard.
When she’d finally been cleared to jog, and was able to squeeze in time for it, a trigger had been pulled, and she found she’d needed the rush to start her day right and to think straight. She’d morphed from jogging casually in whatever shorts and T she threw on, into a gearhead runner seeking the perfect two-hundred-dollar running shoe, synthetic sweat-wicking garb, and heart-rate wristband, fanatical about improving time. She’d run every weekend 5k race within a hundred miles, May through October.
Then 5k had become 10k. Then half marathons. Now, finally, the Burlington City marathon. Her eating had become regimented. Food, which she’d always indulged in for the sheer pleasure of taste—from sushi or a bloody burger, to a chocolate shake or a Velveeta & Wonder Bread grilled cheese—had been reduced to fuel ingested solely for its grams of protein, fat, and complex carbs.
She was unclear on what compelled her to run with such mania. Exhilaration and competition played a part. But there was something else. She needed something of her own; though this notion had a Virginia Woolf smack to it that gagged her. Claude had his painting, which had many times taken him deep into the night in the carriage-house studio. It also fed a part of him she never could. She loved and resented him for it. But she understood. Her own career fed her similarly. It was purposeful and gratifying work that required intelligence and precision, cunning and nerve and study. It gave her satisfaction.
She ran, the dirt road testing her ankle strength as she thought about Mandy’s car. Against protocol, against Grout’s wishes, she’d had the Monte Carlo towed to the department’s evidence garage and put the Luminol to it. The car was clean, as Rath had supposed. He was good at his work. Remote, perhaps. But there was much to learn from him, and she kept alert, particularly with the rumors of new positions possible. If Rath hinted at an angle on this missing girl, she’d pursue it in a blink. As of now, they had zilch. Even the tip money could easily have fallen out of Mandy’s handbag. And Mandy was, legally, an adult. If alive, she had the freedom to do as she wished.
Running was Sonja’s freedom. Sixty minutes a day. She paid for even that. Last night in bed, Claude had rested his latest Jim Harrison novel on his softening stomach, peered over his Rite Aid reading glasses, and said, “You think you could eat what the rest of us eat just one night a week instead of gulping juiced broccoli and fish oil?”
No, she’d said. She’d been clear about the sacrifice the marathon would demand. He shouldn’t act so wounded. Besides, once she ran Burlington, that’d be it. He said he’d heard that before. True. She was obsessed. She’d once mocked weekend-warrior athletes who never broke from their crazy diets. At George’s last birthday, she’d downed a protein shake instead of hot dogs; nibbled cake as if it were poison — a bakery cake at that. She’d always baked the kids’ cakes. But baking would have cut into her running time.
The worst was that her period had stopped and wouldn’t return until after the marathon, months from now. She and Claude had planned to have three children. An only child seemed too lonely an existence for the child. Two kids seemed like a census-bureau statistic. Three kids were ideal. She’d had a bad miscarriage between Elizabeth and George. And after the half marathon last year, she hadn’t gotten her cycle straight for six months. “What if it screws you up permanently?” Claude had said.
She’d been furious. And scared. She would be thirty-two in May, and while that was young, she was edging closer to being on the bubble with the risk of Downs Syndrome and other conditions. Conditions that, they agreed, would result in ending the pregnancy.
She was gambling her family’s future for a race. As much as she was capable at deciphering the motives of others, she was dreadful at doing the same for herself.
She ran hard now, her heart pounding like a madman’s fist at the asylum door, the air redolent with the metallic tang of minerals in the roadside ledge, wetted darkly with leaking groundwater.
The road began its descent toward the river as she fell more on her heels now, a pronounced strain on the body, the jamming of joints, the constant resistance to gravity’s wanting its way with her as she thought about the man at the mailbox. He’d looked so much like a woman. Fooled her until she was right upon him. It was perfectly reasonable to think such long hair had belonged to a woman. So why did it bother her so much?
Nearer, nearer, Patti Smith intoned hauntingly, promising over and over to take Sonja there.
Sonja’s work cell phone buzzed in its Velcro hip pouch. She slowed and took the phone out. Lou Mcreary, medical examiner here in Victory County, just south of Canaan County, and Sonja’s neighbor. He could only be calling for one reason. A body.
Sonja stopped running.