The radio in Mara’s truck had been broken for six months. She knew this because she had ripped out the fuse herself after a fender-bender on the interstate left the stereo stuck on a static-soaked country station at full volume.
So when a voice came through the dead speakers somewhere outside Portland, Oregon, on a Tuesday night with rain hammering the windshield, Mara did not reach for the dial. She gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road ahead and told herself it was road noise.
But road noise does not say your name.
She was forty minutes from home, driving the old logging route that cut through the Coast Range because the highway was backed up with accident traffic. The trees pressed close on both sides, their crowns invisible in the dark above the headlights. The rain made everything beyond twenty feet look like static on a screen.
“Mara.”
The voice was low and even, the kind of voice that belongs to someone reading instructions. No warmth. No urgency. Just her name, coming out of a speaker that had no power source, sitting in a dash that had no fuse for the audio system.
She pulled over onto the gravel shoulder and sat with the engine running. She reached forward and pressed the power button on the stereo. The display did not light up. She pressed it again. Nothing.
She said, out loud, “I’m losing my mind.”
The voice said, “You’re not.”
Mara opened the truck door and stood in the rain. The cold helped. She breathed, counted, got back in. She checked her phone. No signal, which was normal for this stretch of road. She had a full tank of gas and good tires and she was a practical woman who had driven this route a hundred times. She put the truck in drive.
The voice said, “Don’t go past the next mile marker.”
She went past it. Of course she did.
Half a mile later, her headlights caught something in the road. A shape. Low and dark, spread across both lanes. She braked hard and the truck slid on the wet gravel before stopping.
It was a tree. A Douglas fir, freshly fallen, its root ball torn from the soft earth on the uphill side of the road. The trunk was easily four feet across. There was no going around it. The drop on the other side was a sixty-foot slope into a creek bed.
Mara sat with the engine idling and her hands shaking on the wheel.
The voice said, “I know.”
She turned around. There was no other option. She drove back past the mile marker, back toward the section of road she had already traveled, and she pulled into a wide spot where log trucks sometimes parked and she sat there and tried to think clearly.
Her first thought was that someone was playing a trick. A Bluetooth transmitter hidden in the dash, a friend with a sick sense of humor. But she had no friends who knew this route, and her truck had no Bluetooth receiver, and the stereo had no fuse.
Her second thought was that she was experiencing some kind of auditory hallucination brought on by stress or sleep deprivation. She had been sleeping badly for weeks. That was possible. That was the rational explanation.
The voice said, “Check the back seat.”
She did not want to check the back seat.
She turned slowly. The back seat was empty. A canvas grocery bag. A spare jacket. The orange emergency kit she kept behind the passenger seat. Nothing else.
“Under the bag,” the voice said.
Mara reached back and lifted the canvas bag. Underneath it was a phone. Not her phone, which was in her jacket pocket. A different phone, older, a model she didn’t recognize, with a cracked screen and no case. It was powered on. The screen showed a single app open: a voice recorder, running, the red bar pulsing with sound.
Her own breathing. Her own movements. It had been recording her.
She threw the phone onto the passenger seat and locked the doors. Her heart was going fast enough that she could feel it in her ears. Someone had put that phone in her truck. Someone who knew her name. Someone who had been listening.
The voice from the radio said, “He put it there this morning. At the gas station in Hillsboro.”
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