The Rope ap-17

by Nevada Barr

  “Steve has some more questions. He didn’t say if the chief ranger was coming or not. I figured I better hang around so he can arrest me for lying to federal officers, obstructing justice, and murder.”

  “Not to mention harassing the wildlife and keeping a pet in seasonal park housing.” Jenny added. “It’s an overnight in the grotto,” she enticed. “Warm sand, pellucid waters, godlike pictographs, plenty of human waste, and soiled TP.”

  Out of doors. Away from any place the monster might think to look for her. “What about Buddy?” Anna asked. The baby skunk was nosing around on the square of grass captured within the phalanx of gray buildings.

  “You can’t keep him, you know,” Jenny said gently.

  “I know,” Anna said.

  “Even if you de-stink a skunk, they don’t make good pets. They’re wild animals.”

  “I know,” Anna said.

  “Even if you did de-stink him and he did make a great pet, you couldn’t keep him in seasonal housing.”

  “I know,” Anna said.

  “Even if you didn’t keep him in seasonal housing, you couldn’t feed him. Feeding wild animals in parks and rec areas is verboten.”

  Anna knew that, too. “Buddy’s too little to set free to fend for himself,” she said.

  Both women watched the toddling fluff of black and white investigating a fascinating leaf fallen from a honey locust.

  “I’ll talk to Steve—or you can,” Jenny suggested. “He’ll know if there are any groups that raise beasties and return them to their natural habitat when they’re old enough. He grew up around here. His folks owned a trading post.”

  Anna thought trading posts became extinct when the Alamo fell. “I’ll talk to him,” she said, “and thanks.”

  “If they decide not to throw you in the hoosegow, radio me and I’ll come get you when you’re finished.”

  Anna nodded. The hoosegow was probably located at the nearest trading post.

  After a while Regis’s wife came out of their duplex and sat on the steps. She wore shorts and a tank top, both of which were snug, as if she’d recently put on weight. She carried a can of diet soda with her, which she set on the step beside her feet, then covered with a saucer.

  “Yellow jackets,” she said to Anna. “They crawl in, then sting you when you take a drink. I think it’s the sugar that attracts them. I’m Bethy,” she said, eyeing Anna narrowly. “Regis’s wife.”

  Anna had not only met Bethy but shared a potluck picnic table with her more than once. Apparently Bethy thought decades had passed in the jar while only a handful of days passed on earth. Since Anna felt the same, she was kind. “I remember you, Bethy. You don’t seem to have aged more than a few days since last we met.”

  Bethy giggled. “It’s so weird,” she said. “I’m, like, self-conscious to be talking to you. Like you became a big rock star or something.”

  That surprised Anna. Focused on shame, shame she struggled with and shame others would see as hers one way or another, she hadn’t given a thought to the power of notoriety. Anna could star in a movie of the week about her exciting capture and escape. Except they’d never let Anna play the lead. The role of “Anna, Wilderness Sex Slave” would probably go to one of the Baywatch babes, an actor who had the talent to fill Kay’s bikini bra.

  “It’s weird on this side of the lights, too,” Anna admitted.

  “Aren’t you getting off on it just a little bit? I mean, one day you’re just this nobody and then, presto! Everybody’s All Anna All the Time,” Bethy said.

  Either Bethy was staggeringly insensitive or there was a stream of malice running through her. “You all thought I’d packed up and gone back to New York?” Anna asked.

  “Yeah.” Bethy removed the saucer from her soda can, took three neat little sips, then put the can down and replaced the saucer. “I mean, like, all your things were gone and you don’t—you know—exactly fit in.”

  “Is that a fact?” The comment annoyed Anna, but it was true. She had not fit in. She had not tried to fit in. She had not worked and played well with others. She had not come to Glen Canyon for what it had but for what it lacked: memories.

  Anna hadn’t left New York City, her job, and her sister to spend forty days and forty nights in the wilderness healing. She had come to suffer in silence, to wallow in grief where no one would pester her with good advice or helping hands. She had come to purgatory to work off her sins that the gods might relent and give Zach back.

  Molly had hinted as much. Anna had chosen not to hear. Now she heard it in her own voice and knew, absurd and childish as it was, that was precisely what she’d been doing. Grief was not coin to purchase the beneficence of the gods, regardless of what self-flagellating hair-shirt-wearing religions might suggest.

  Bereft of hope and free of despair, Anna tilted her head back and felt the clean desert heat on her skin.

  “Regis said you’d gone,” Bethy said in the tone of a woman quoting the ultimate authority. Off came the saucer, up came the can, three tiny little sips. Can back on the planking, saucer on top, she said, “We all said you cut and ran. I mean, why wouldn’t you? All those stage-door Johnnys.”

  Anna laughed. The only place she’d ever heard those words uttered was in old movies. Even there the stage manager never got a single Johnny.

  Her laughter seemed to bother Bethy. Sounding almost accusing, she said, “Regis kept going to your place like he could find out why you’d left. None of us would have bothered. Lucky that old drunk told him you were in a hole.”

  Saucer off, can up, three little sips; Bethy was getting on Anna’s nerves. The plump little interpretive ranger had a bobblehead-doll quality about her, as if her words and movements were caused by outside forces rather than any inner logic. Anna checked her watch. Naked skin.

  She wished Gluck would show up. With Bethy’s help, she had come around to where she was actually looking forward to it.

  “Lucky,” Anna said.

  It was lucky, freakishly, unbelievably lucky. An old drunk overhears boys talk of putting a woman in a solution hole. Old drunk actually knows what a solution hole is; drunk finds a ranger and tells the ranger not only what the boys said but where that one solution hole is—in a zillion acres of solution holes—where the woman was put.

  The last ten years of her adult life, Anna had watched many of the finest actors in the country blow their lines. Remembering dialogue was hard enough for trained sober people. That a chemically impaired amateur could get it so right bordered on the miraculous. Miracle number two was that Regis believes old drunk, climbs a ruin of a trail by moonlight, no less, onto a mesa that’s another zillion acres of holes and bumps, and, in the dark, finds the very one that Anna is in the bottom of.

  “Very lucky, indeed,” Anna said. Had Regis invented the story of the vanishing inebriate? Anna hadn’t heard he’d been turned up by any of the rangers. Not surprising on a vast lake crowded with inebriates of various ages. The only reason she could think of for making up a story like that was to protect the person who did tell him where Anna was.

  Regis wasn’t more than twenty-eight or thirty. He could have friends or brothers of college age. If he was covering for someone, then he knew more about the perpetrators than he was sharing, possibly even knew who they were.

  He’d come alone and at night. All the better to tidy up any clues left by his murderous friends? Or his murderous brother’s murderous friends? “Clues” was the wrong word. Miss Marple, Inspector Clouseau, Sam Spade, Lord Peter Wimsey: They looked for clues. Tree cops looked for tracks, spoor, fire rings, toilet paper, and graffiti.

  “Does Regis have any brothers or sisters?” Anna asked abruptly. Bethy’s head bobbled side to side as she reached for the saucer atop the soda can. Next time, Anna promised herself, she would try to be more subtle in her interrogation techniques.

  Bethy concluded her beverage intake ritual, then said, “He’s an only,” with the air of admitting something she oughtn’t.

&
nbsp; Anna heard an ATV engine and retrieved Buddy. She couldn’t keep him; it wouldn’t be fair to him, but she didn’t want Jim or Steve to take the decision away from her by snatching the little skunk. By the time she had him settled in his drawer, big feet were clomping up the porch steps.

  “Jenny will take care of you if they haul me off to jail,” Anna whispered to Buddy, then went out to see what the next act in this unexpected drama held.

  To her surprise Steve was accompanied not by the chief ranger but by Regis and Jim. Letting herself out the screen door, rather than inviting them in, she heard Bethy whine, “I thought you had to work today.”

  “I am working,” Regis informed his wife coldly.

  Bethy picked up her drinking paraphernalia and disappeared into the gloom of their side of the duplex.

  Regis was carrying a cardboard box three feet long and two feet high, a packing box sealed with clear tape and covered with black smudges, as if a cat had walked through soot, then tracked it all over the box.

  Steve Gluck sat down on the picnic bench. Everything about him was heavy: the drooping belly, the jowls, the bags under his eyes. He looked as if he carried the sins of mankind on his back and they were dragging him down.

  “Okay,” he said, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger, the brim of his NPS baseball-style cap pushed up like the flag on Opie and Aunt Bee’s mailbox.

  Regis set the cardboard box down on the table. He didn’t sit down. Jim put one foot on the bench and folded his arms over his raised knee.

  “Are you going to arrest me?” Anna asked and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Steve’s hand dropped to his lap, and he squinted up into her face. “Should we?” he asked.

  “No. No. Not at all,” Anna said lamely. “I was just asking to be polite.”

  “Mind if we go inside out of the sun?” Steve asked.

  She did. Not because she was afraid Buddy would call attention to himself. They already knew she had the kit, and she was hoping Steve could find a good place for him to live and be a proper skunk. The thought of being inside, in a small dim living room with three large men—and without Jenny—gave her an unpleasant hollow feeling.

  “Sure. Come in.” And that was how vampires got into the manor house, she thought as Steve clomped in. Jim was behind him, and Regis followed, leaving the packing box outside.

  Anna’s New York instincts twitched. She ignored them. The box could probably sit out there for years and nobody would steal it.

  Both windows behind the battered couch had the blinds drawn. Neither Anna nor Jenny spent much time inside, and when they did, they wanted their privacy. The single window in the side wall was blocked by a swamp cooler. Anna retreated behind the kitchen counter, wanting a barrier between herself and the men at least until her eyes adjusted and the giant killer butterflies in her stomach settled. Steve, Jim, and Regis hulked in the middle of the small living space, blinking.

  “Sit,” Anna said brusquely.

  “Thanks. Good to take a load off.” With a sigh, Steve lowered himself into the armchair matching the sofa in both hideousness and decrepitude. Jim perched on the edge of the couch, his belt bristling with too much law enforcement gear to allow him to sit back. Regis claimed one of the stools at the kitchen counter, crowding Anna’s space.

  “You don’t happen to have any coffee on, do you?” Steve asked.

  “No,” Anna said.

  “Okay, then. Okay.” He took off his ball cap and arranged it neatly, using his knee as a hat stand. “Why did you think we were going to arrest you?” he asked amiably.

  Anna didn’t want to talk or answer or be in this shrinking space. Breathing deeply, she reminded herself it was only a dim crowded room, not a trap. Maybe not a trap.

  “Jenny said you thought maybe I knew Kay before, that maybe I killed her. I didn’t and I didn’t.”

  “That did cross my mind,” Steve said with what sounded like reluctance. “Professionally speaking, it’s important to look at the ugly what-ifs. You didn’t know her?”

  “No. I didn’t. I didn’t push her into the hole. I didn’t fall into the hole. Both of us were thrown down into it by three college-age men. I told you all this.”

  Anger was flaring. Anna welcomed it. Like cocaine, anger was a wonderful stimulant. She needed the boost.

  “I know you did,” Steve said. “I know. Frank—the sheriff you met—is a real good tracker. He said there were four sets of prints that he could find. Three big, probably the college boys, and a smaller set that might have been yours. By the way they were made, he’s sure there was a chase and the little prints were the ones being chased. So you’ve got no cause to worry on that front.” He was quiet for a minute, then asked plaintively, “You sure you don’t have any coffee? Cold from this morning would be fine.”

  “No.”

  The district ranger sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “Nasty habit,” as if Anna’s main concern were for the health of his digestive tract. “Did you know any of the boys?” he asked in the same conversational way he’d asked for coffee.

  “No.”

  “Ever seen them before?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad,” he said sincerely. “It would have made things easier.”

  Like the high of cocaine, the fierce energy of anger didn’t last. It was hard to stay mad at Steve Gluck. Anna could feel the artificial heat draining from her belly, leaving cold dregs behind. The rangers had no idea who the monsters were. They were out and about enjoying their monstrous selves, and Anna was scared to be in the same room with three men she knew and worked with.

  “Couldn’t Frontiersman Frank track them back to where they came from?” she snapped.

  Steve shook his head slowly, ignoring her slight of the sheriff. “If anybody could, Frank could, but, if you remember, where the three started chasing you was in a natural swale, wind-filled with sand. Around it is bare sandstone. Even Hole-in-the-Rock Road is difficult to follow over the harder rock. Frank could follow them most of the way to where you were in the solution hole, though.

  “They turned back a couple times—that or there were more than three of them, but Frank doesn’t think so. He got half a dozen fairly clear prints.”

  “They turned back because, after they took care of me, they went back, got Kay, then threw her down with me,” Anna said.

  “You say you buried her?” Steve asked.

  “No, goddammit, I didn’t say I buried her!” Anna shouted.

  Gluck held up both hands in a gesture of peace. “Just asking,” he said mildly.

  On the edge of his chair, Jim watched like a devoted fan at a tennis match. Regis watched only Anna.

  “I said I reburied her, and you weren’t just fucking asking,” she snarled. Snapping and snarling like a rabid dog, pacing behind the counter as if the kitchen were a cage and she the tiger: She forced herself to stop. Anna knew nothing about law enforcement and less about ranger enforcement, but she was fairly savvy when it came to the motivations and machinations of men in power. Lord knew she’d sat through Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Richard III enough times. Steve, Chief Ranger Andrew Madden, and even the sheriff of Dumbfuck County would find life a whole lot easier if it turned out she had brought this tragedy down on Kay and herself.

  Because they were not evil or stupid men didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt her.

  Stoicism: She would let in only as much as she could tolerate and show only what emotions she couldn’t mask.

  “I’m sorry, Steve,” she said politely. “Can I make you some coffee?”

  Engaging in what actors called a “secondary activity,” and normal people called keeping busy, calmed Anna. As she made coffee and got down cups, Steve asked her questions she’d already answered in various different ways. Though she disliked being made to repeat herself, and disliked the feeling of accusation, by the time the coffee was perked and the sugar spooned, she did remember a few more details.

  The boy who merely watched
was sandy-haired. He wore his hair long in front in what had once been termed a surfer cut. Acne ruined what might have been a handsome face. The kid whose face she’d never seen, the one stripping off his shorts, had a tattoo on the back of his right shoulder, a round shape like a planet or a tortoise. His hair was dark and curled at the nape of his neck. The third boy—the one who killed Kay—was big, tall and big.

  Steve ran out of questions. For a moment he sat staring into his coffee cup. Then he heaved a great sigh and pushed himself up off the couch. “I think you’re in the clear on this,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Anna said acidly. “Can I go back to being a victim now?”

  The district ranger put his ball cap on, tugging the brim down low over his eyes. “Never go back to being a victim,” he said. He stood staring at the floor, thinking. “Skunk and box,” he said as if retrieving a mental list. “Come out and take a look at the box we brought, if you would.”

  Obediently Anna followed the men out onto the porch. The instant largesse of space and light allowed her to expand her lungs. Muscles she hadn’t been aware she was tensing relaxed. Her shoulders squared, her spine straightened, and her chin came up. For a second she wondered how she could ever have felt at home and safe in the dark confines of a stage manager’s booth.

  “This is it,” Gluck said unnecessarily. The packing box dominated the picnic table.

  Because he wanted her to look at it, Anna became afraid of it. A startling image of folding back the flaps to a mass of tarantulas flashed behind her eyes, and momentarily she felt the panic that had overtaken her in the pit when she’d believed the tickle of her braid had been one of the hairy-legged things. Bugs shouldn’t have hair.

  “What of it?” Anna asked warily.

  “We were hoping you could tell us,” the district ranger said.

  Anna took a couple of steps closer to the box but didn’t touch it.

  “Why is it covered with black smudges?” she asked. Another ludicrous vision darted past her mind’s eye, Wile E. Coyote, black with smudges of blasting powder.

  “Fingerprint powder,” Gluck said. When he didn’t volunteer any more, irritation overcame caution. Grabbing the box, she pulled it to the edge of the table. It was heavy, but she could have lifted it by herself. The tape had been cut. The box had been opened, then closed again by folding the flaps together.