by Nevada Barr
Anna climbed up easily.
“Looks pretty bitey, huh?” Bethy asked happily, glancing over her shoulder into the gloom.
“Exceedingly bitey,” Anna agreed. In the surreal passage debris had collected, some half submerged in the water-filled six-inch crack at the bottom, others wedged at varying levels: entire trees, mangled and dry as bone; rocks; what appeared to be part of an ancient rusted cookstove; the bones of a raccoon or bobcat scattered like caltrops. The crack was not full, not like a junkyard or a garbage can. It was like a gauntlet devised by a particularly malicious child. It was not a place a barefoot woman in bra and panties would want to travel alone in the dark, even if she could have attained the crack without a rope.
Since their bonding in the cold water and colder prospects, Anna had suffered a sneaking suspicion that Jenny could have climbed out but stayed because of her. Knowing Jenny told the truth when she insisted she couldn’t freed Anna of a load of gratitude too heavy to comfortably bear.
Bethy gave Anna her pack, shouldered her own, and led off down the crevice. Following, Anna marveled at the human body, at her own body, the way ankles and feet moved to catch an angled stone, knees braced against walls, hands and fingers clutched and spread catching the weight of an ever-changing center of gravity. In a more sedentary life it had been easy to forget a body’s miraculous engineering and notice only its small uncomfortable failures.
Within two hours they had traversed the slot with no more mishaps than a bit of flesh peeled off the inside of Anna’s ankle by a deer antler wedged with a single prong above the strangled line of water.
For several yards near the end, the slot opened up to the width of two midsized sedans parked side by side, then dead-ended. In that dead end was a three-sided cavity running straight up for fifty or sixty feet. The wide area where they stood was dry and littered with stones and broken branches smashed when the rains carried them over the fall to shatter at the bottom.
The three-sided cavity, a chimney twenty yards high, and the circumfrance of a phone booth but had formed when a vein of weaker stone broke from the rest of the rock face.
“It’s good to see the sky,” Anna said, tilting her head back to admire the patch of blue the wider section allowed.
“You wanna eat lunch down here or up there?” Bethy asked.
“Up there,” Anna said immediately. Much as she had enjoyed the journey through the center of the earth, she was looking forward to having room to fill her lungs completely and focus her eyes more than a foot or two from the tip of her nose.
“This chimney is super high, like, one of the longest ones here,” Bethy told her, “but it’s pretty easy. It’s easier than the first one we did. That one was just shorter. Once you get going there’ll be lots of good places for your feet and hands to be at.” She pointed nearly straight up. “See that poke-outance there at the top where the chimney becomes like a weensy crack?”
Anna followed where Bethy pointed and saw a thin blue line on the rock. From where they stood it looked no more substantial than a thread.
“That rope is tied on the top and falls into where the chimney ends there. See? That’s how we go the last ten feet. Last one up is a sore loser,” Bethy said and, stepping into the bottom of the chimney like Clark Kent into a phone booth, began to ascend rapidly.
For several minutes Anna just watched. To watch anyone perform with such confidence and grace was a pleasure. In these narrow stone canyons Bethy was at her best. A vision of hippopotamuses, lumbering on land, rotund ballerinas beneath the water, made Anna smile.
When Bethy was about halfway up, Anna stepped in the chute and began to climb, albeit more slowly. As Bethy had promised, there were lots of good foot- and handholds and the regularity of the chimney’s size and shape lent a sense of security, which, climbing sixty feet with no belay, Anna deeply appreciated.
As she ascended, the view of the slot canyon changed. By the time she neared the top of the chimney she was looking down on the torturous route they’d just traversed: A dark crack in the pale stone that snaked, curling almost back on itself in one place, slithered out, then ended abruptly in hard blue sky. That would be the top of the rectangular pool, Anna guessed, where the true skinny slot began. Beyond, hidden from view, would be the block of stone that dammed the canyon and nearly damned Anna and Jenny.
From above, the distances appeared paltry, Panther Canyon, with its beautiful grotto, so close it was hard to imagine how two people had died and two more had almost died, so near civilization.
“I’m going to eat your half of the potato chips if you don’t hurry up,” Bethy called.
Anna looked up. Bethy had vanished from sight over the rim of the plateau. The rope was still twitching like a cat’s tail. As Anna watched, it began to snake upward, the end of it flipping as it was hauled up. “Very funny,” Anna shouted. A shiver welled up from the depths of the jar that still existed within her. It wasn’t funny, not at all. Anna climbed, fear giving her tired muscles added power.
“Just kidding,” Bethy laughed. The rope dropped again. Within seconds Anna had grabbed it, relief palpable in the tremor that took her when her fist closed around it.
Some kindly soul had knotted it every foot or so to make climbing it less hazardous. Deciding that looking down would be foolhardy, Anna turned her back on the void and grasped the first knot.
From above she heard the unmistakable rattle of a bag of potato chips being torn open; then came Bethy’s voice. “I’m eating ’em!”
Bethy sounded like a little kid. “Don’t you dare,” Anna called back. Hands moving from knot to knot, feet scrabbling on the last of the chimney, she began the short ascent. Once she’d cleared the rectangular chimney she used feet and thighs on the rope as well. The distance wasn’t great, no more than a few yards. Within minutes she’d reached the rim.
“That was quick,” Bethy said and smiled. “You got to kind of kick and crawl over the edge on your elbows. Here, lemme help.” She dropped to her knees and took a firm grip on Anna’s wrist.
Before Anna could say, “Thank you,” Bethy’s free hand flipped a clink of glittering silver metal from the backpack at her side. Handcuffs. In less time than it took Anna to realize what they were, Bethy had snapped them on her wrists.
“What are you doing?” Anna asked, dumbfounded. Fear followed on the heels of shock, and Anna pulled hard on the rope, dragging one elbow over the sharp lip of stone topping the cliff. Bethy, face intent, movements sure, snatched the rope with the carabiners tied to either end from beside her, threaded it between Anna’s cuffed wrists, and clicked the carabiners together, making a loop. That done, she removed herself from Anna’s limited field of vision.
Saving her breath for the work, Anna pushed on a knot with her feet and got her other elbow over the top. With a strength that surprised her, she closed her manacled hands around the next knot and yanked hard enough that she landed herself like a fish, belly-down on the plateau.
“God damn it, Bethy,” she grunted as she pushed herself to her knees.
She looked up in time to see Bethy’s foot coming at her face. Her nose exploded in pain and blood and she toppled backward.
Her hands slipped on the knots and she couldn’t close them tightly enough to stop the rope from paying out through her hands.
Then the rope was gone and she was falling.
FORTY-EIGHT
Anna shouted what she believed was her last soliloquy on earth: “Shiiiit!” Not even fit to carve on a tombstone. Scarcely had the word passed her lips than her fall was stopped with bone-snapping abruptness. Again Anna screamed, wordlessly this time, as pain seared from her broken nose and shoulder sockets through every cellular matrix in her body.
She thought she’d surely die of it, but, like a whack to the crazy bone or a little toe jammed into a table leg, intense as it was, the agony passed through her and was gone. More or less gone. Her nose still throbbed, blood dripped salty onto her lips, and her wrists ached furiousl
y where the handcuffs cut into them.
Deadweight, her body bumped gently against the sandstone, breasts, belly, and knees, as gravity settled her. Tilting her head back, she tried to make sense of the last few seconds. Her wrists were cuffed, a rope looped through them that ran in two lines toward the lip of the canyon, no more than five feet from the tips of her fingers. Bethy had made a loop of the rope with the carabiners and thrown it over a rock to anchor it before she kicked Anna back into the void.
Hung out to dry, Anna thought idiotically.
Bethy’s face popped over the horizon of Anna’s world, round and peering down, giving Anna the view babies in bassinet have of their mothers.
“You’re stupid,” Bethy said cheerfully. “You think you’re so smart, but you’re stupid. Stupider than stupid.”
Anna looked down past her toes, dangling fifty feet above a litter of shattered wood and stone. “I can’t disagree with you there,” she said.
The worst of the shock passed. The worst of the pain, Anna suspected, yet to come, fear and fury and confusion had space to explode through her with such force she jerked on the line like a landed fish. Bethy giggled.
The Perils of Pauline, Anna thought, and for a moment sheer embarrassment at her predicament stopped the avalanche of more logical miseries.
She breathed in through her nose slowly and out through her mouth more slowly still, trying to quiet the shrieking in her skull. A pathetic semblance of calm regained, she tried to think of her options.
“Are you passed out or something?” Bethy asked from above. She sounded annoyed and, maybe, a little concerned.
Anna ignored her and began her list. She could beg. Begging never worked in the movies, but in real life it was occasionally efficacious.
“Hey!” Bethy snapped. “Talk to me. No naps! No naps!”
Anna gave no sign she heard. Playing possum was an option, but only if the possum wasn’t strung over a chasm by her little possum paws.
“Stop it,” Bethy shouted and plucked the rope looped through the chain between Anna’s handcuffs. “You better not’ve had a heart attack and died.” Bethy’s voice was graveled with fury.
Anna could try talking Bethy into letting her go. Given Bethy’s rope was all that kept her from death by falling, being “let go” didn’t sound as appealing as it might have. Anna slid her eyes to the left. Nothing inspirational. To the right, a couple of feet away, was the knotted rope. If she could reach it with her foot, there was a chance she could pull it over far enough to get her fingers on it. She might be able to work her way up. Even just to the first knot would relieve the pressure on her wrists.
As she watched, the knotted rope began to twitch and dance against the cliff. From overhead came Bethy’s singsong voice: “I know what you’re thinking.” The rope twitched and danced up past Anna’s eyes, then flipped over the rim. First the gravelly anger, now the childish singsong. The change was jarring.
A last option came to mind. Anna doubted it was any more promising than the others, but she could try to reason with Bethy. Letting her head fall back, she looked into the gloating eyes of her erstwhile pal. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.
Bethy’s eyes narrowed slightly as if she suspected this was a trick question. Anna tried to look open and nonjudgmental. In case Bethy could see the repressed fury burning behind her eyes, Anna focused a few inches above the floating head.
“I know what you are,” Bethy said as if that explained her actions. “You lied. You told me you were a dyke and hated men.”
“I did not!” Anna exclaimed. Of all the reasons Bethy might have listed for dangling Anna over a chasm, that hadn’t been one she’d thought of.
Bethy’s bizarrely childlike expression turned mean. “Yes. You. Did.”
Anna knew she hadn’t. She also knew it mattered not one whit. Because she and Jenny were close, and because she didn’t vehemently deny being homosexual, in Bethy’s mind it was the same as saying she was.
“Maybe it wasn’t a lie,” Anna tried. “Maybe I was telling the truth.” To be or not to be gay, that was the question. Which answer might save her life?
“Nope. You lied. I tried to kiss you and you wouldn’t let me,” Bethy said.
“Gay or straight, you’re the last person on earth I’d want to kiss,” Anna snapped.
That was the wrong thing to say.
Bethy spit in Anna’s upturned face and withdrew her head from view.
A sigh was ordered up by Anna’s brain to express the utter futility of trying to communicate with the Bethys of the world. Her lungs did not follow through. Suspended with her arms over her head was making breathing difficult. Circulation cut off by the cuffs, her hands were growing numb. Soon she would not be able to climb up even if Bethy threw her the rope.
“Do you think I was trying to steal your husband?” Anna asked. That was the only misapprehension she could think of that might have triggered Bethy’s psychosis. Not for a second did she doubt that Bethy Candor was in the midst of a full-blown psychotic episode.
Bethy didn’t reappear. Anna strained to hear her. Paper crackled. Bethy hadn’t left.
“What are you doing?” Anna called.
“I’m eating your potato chips,” Bethy yelled back, her voice full of malice. “I’m going to eat your whole lunch.”
“Then what?’ Anna asked.
“Then we wait for my husband,” Bethy said, her words slightly garbled as if she spoke around a mouthful of food.
What then? Anna wondered but did not ask.
Bethy fell silent. Impotent rage drained from Anna. Its place was filled by helpless confusion. Years of listening to her sister had taught Anna that mental illness was more widespread than one might think. Those with sociopathic tendencies or narcissistic leanings were often presidents, superstars, business moguls. Powerful men with destructive sex addictions were in the news every other week. Lots of people were crazy in lots of ways, most of them damaging but still socially acceptable—or at least not illegal. Mental illness was as common as the cold, but full-blown homicidal maniacs were rare.
The boys who’d assaulted and killed Katherine—Kay—Nelson wouldn’t be considered insane. Brutish, certainly, but rape was a constant the world over. From what Anna’d seen, the murder wasn’t intentional, merely a by-product of anger. Rotten as shoving her and Kay into the solution hole was, it made sense in the pseudo-sanity of human existence: a crime covered up, a witness silenced, a consequence avoided.
Stripping a woman naked, drugging her, and carving WHORE into her flesh should definitely be considered serious symptoms of major psychosis. Letting two college boys die of drowning and hypothermia was also a tad too far from the norm to be considered sane.
Along with everyone else, Anna had laid the blame at the feet of the conveniently suicidal unsub three, Jason Mannings, the boy with the acne.
That was one psychopath.
Bethy made two.
Two, both bent on tormenting Anna, was too much, too many, the audience wouldn’t buy it. Anna didn’t buy it.
An anomaly that had been tacitly ignored flared in her maelstrom of thought: the box of her belongings, packed and sealed and addressed to her sister in New York. Due to the jangle of jurisdictions, the paucity of investigators, and a general wish of all concerned to put the tragic incident behind them, the mystery of who had cleared out Anna’s room had been mostly ignored. The fact that it didn’t make a whole lot of sense had been glossed over.
Bethy could easily have done it.
Bethy or Regis.
“You’re the reason Regis hit me,” Bethy said, breaking into Anna’s distractions.
“I am?” Anna called back to keep the conversation going. Bethy’s chatter might be enough to cover the noises she was about to make.
“Yeah. He didn’t like that I was spending time with you. He hates you. He said you’re ugly as dog shit on the side of a new shoe.”
Anna was swinging gently, pumping her legs to propel
her body back and forth across the cliff face like a metronome. Despite weeks of physical training, she would need momentum. She only had the strength for one good try. Gravity was a lot higher in the real world than it was in the weight room.
“And you’re the reason Regis is sending me away. He thinks I shouldn’t be around you. Regis hates your guts.”
“Sure sounds like it,” Anna said and hoped Bethy didn’t hear the effort in her voice. At the top of her truncated swing, Anna bent in half, throwing her legs upward above her hands. One heel missed. The other went between the two lines tethering her to the cliff top. Before her strength failed, Anna managed to bend her knee, catching the rope behind it.
Now she hung by her wrists and one knee. The relief to her blood-starved hands was immediate. Inch by inch she pulled her upper body skyward with her manacled hands and the muscles of her stomach and back. Sweating, smothering lungs that wanted to gasp for breath, she got herself upright, straddling the rope, her hands clamped at eye level around one of the lines. Stable, she let herself rest and tried to remember what Bethy had done.
She’d linked the carabiners, then thrown the looped rope over a rock the size and shape of a big television set. If Anna tried to climb one rope, it was possible that the loop would slip and Anna would be in much the same situation as a hamster running on a wheel.
“Regis thinks you’re a whore,” Bethy gloated. Food still factored into her diction, but a packed lunch could only last so long.
Forcing herself to move, Anna dragged one foot up, knee under her chin, and pressed the sole of her sneaker against the line, heel in her crotch, toe pointed out. “I figured as much,” she called up to Bethy. WHORE, Regis had cut it into her flesh. He hadn’t come to rescue her; he’d come back either to harm her further or finish her off.
“W-H-O-R-E. All capital letters so’s everybody would know what you were.”
Despite the heat and exertion, suddenly Anna felt chilled. The healing cuts had not been reported, nor had Anna worn anything short or sheer enough that they could be seen.