The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel

by Nevada Barr

  Anna swayed, her mind wanting to shut her down in a faint. The possibility that a picture of her misery might live on after she had been murdered to pleasure her killer over and over again was unbearable, worse somehow than death, torture, or rape. To be used after one was dead shouldn’t matter. Dead was dead, gone, beyond all pain.

  Except it wasn’t, not when one was alive to think about it.

  “No pictures,” Anna shouted. “No fucking pictures!”

  For a heartbeat she felt the earth around her as a comfort, clean and honest, a cloak against eyes and lenses. Shaking her head, intentionally eking out the remaining pain from her injury, Anna pushed photographs of her degradation from her reality.

  The monster.

  Anna had to understand the monster so, like Scheherazade, she could continue to live for a thousand and one nights. Better yet, so she could find his Achilles’ heel and escape. Did he brown-bag it, bring his own prey? No. Bringing victims from his habitat would raise too many questions. He took what was offered on the lake, she decided. Safer to have no connection with his victims, and, with a nice boat, it would be easy enough to pick up a party girl—or a seasonal ranger—whom nobody would miss for a while.

  If he hunted on the water, why had he found her? Unless she had forgotten climbing down off the Colorado Plateau, she was on the north rim of Glen Canyon, above Dangling Rope, hours from anywhere. Only a crazy person would travel across a zillion miles of desert from Piddlesquat, Utah, on the off chance a woman would be wandering around alone and unprotected. Had it been mere chance? Monster Man is out poaching lizards or snakes or stealing artifacts or engaging in an unrelated monstrous activity and gets lucky? Had she been stumbled upon by a psychopath?

  Anna had turned in a full circle. She had searched the smooth circumference of her bottle without seeing anything new or different, anything that could alter her circumstances. Stopping, she lowered her gaze from that single blue glimpse of sky to the hair straggling over the sand.

  There was no reason to bother the nest of hairs. A few swipes with the side of her foot and things would be as they were before—nearly unendurable. Digging up whatever it was she’d be digging up might render them completely unendurable. Knowing what was buried beneath her might make her insane. Of course, not knowing would do it quicker. Nothing drove Pigeons crazier than not knowing that which could be known.

  That’s why Molly went into psychiatry; she wanted to know how people’s brains worked. Anna went into theater; she wanted to know how people’s hearts worked. Neither she nor her sister was one to let sleeping dogs—or dead girls—lie. Anna assumed it was a girl because of the length and fineness of the hair, and because it was possible she wasn’t the first specimen to be bottled up and played with until it wasn’t any fun anymore.

  Back at the datura, Anna drew a circle in the sand, the strands of hair at the center, and then began gingerly sweeping sand away with the tips of her fingers. The hairs were long, not as long as Anna’s, but they would fall to bra-strap level on a woman of average height. As best she could, she combed the hairs from the sand carefully, laying them out to minimize snarling. Partly she did it to show reverence for the dead, and partly because, should she join this woman, she hoped similar respect would be shown her, and partly to put off the moment she would have to look on a lifeless face.

  Clearing away the dirt, she watched a well-shaped ear emerge from the earth, two small silver hoops in the pierced lobe. With the ear came the faint odor of decay. Though she hadn’t thought it consciously, Anna had been expecting a skeleton: dry, brittle, desiccated scraps of skin peeling away from bone, the way old leather peeled from the bindings of ancient books.

  The ear was lifelike, plump and pink, yet there wasn’t as much stench as a day-old rat in a subway station. The woman hadn’t been in this hole much longer than Anna.

  Memory slammed into the back of her eyes, rocking her onto her heels. The scream had come through the tortured piñon trees; hoping for water, she began to run. The clarity was more than remembering, it was reliving. She saw her abandoned pack, the sun appliqué smiling up from the hard ground as she passed the patch of shade where she’d been sitting; she felt the wadded-up map, crunched in her fingers.

  Running was hard, as it often is in dreams. Her thighs ached and her feet struck the ground heavily. A stitch was sewing her ribs to her liver. She slowed to a jog, clutching her side and panting. More screams drew her on. Anna became afraid the woman was in deeper trouble than she could handle.

  Self-preservation, learned from a lifetime in the city, stopped her headlong dash. Anna remembered trying to suck hot dry air through a throat closed from lack of moisture. She could see herself, dark clothes, pale with dust, hands on knees, gasping and thinking maybe this wasn’t something she should get involved with.

  Had she not wanted a drink of water so desperately, she might have lost her courage. She straightened up and, still breathing hard, pushed up a small rise of stone. The rise gave way to a round depression half the size of a tennis court.

  There were four people in it. A tall boy had a girl with long brown hair, wearing cutoff jeans and a bikini top, in a hammerlock, pressing down on her neck. Her arms were flailing. “Stop it,” he was yelling and laughing. “We don’t want to have to hurt you.” A second boy had his back to Anna. She remembered how his muscles rippled as the sun hit the sweat. His shorts were halfway down his butt as if he’d undone the fly to take them off. He was hopping on one foot, laughing like a hyena, trying to pull off his shorts. He staggered and fell. Drunk, she thought. The fall only made him laugh harder. The third boy, not laughing, not undressing, was a plain-looking kid with ragged brown hair and a fury of pimples across a high forehead. He saw Anna and yelled, “Holy shit!”

  The man wrestling with the girl glanced up, locking eyes with Anna. The girl must have hit or clawed him. Letting go of her, he shouted, “Fucking bitch!”

  Staggering, the girl fell on her hands and knees. He kicked her. Fighting to get to her feet, she grabbed at his shorts, her fist closing on the front of them. He bent double. For a heartbeat Anna thought he was going to help her to stand. Instead he grabbed up a fist-sized rock and slammed it into her temple.

  Anna turned and ran.

  The earth lurched and folded beneath her feet, scrub and rock jerking in her peripheral vision. Heat burned up through the soles of her sneakers. A steady strong thud, thud, thud of boots pounded behind her.

  Then nothing, then this hole, the dislocated shoulder and a knot the size of a tennis ball behind her right ear.

  She hadn’t gotten blind drunk and passed out. Bad men had clubbed her from behind. Honor intact, skull not so much. The blow accounted for the patchy memory. “Yay, me,” Anna said.

  “Blunt trauma to the head is the only cause of amnesia I know of outside paperback novels,” Molly once said.

  Long brown hair.

  The girl Anna was disinterring must have been the focus of Buttboy’s attentions. She dug faster. Grit packed the girl’s nostrils. Her lips were parted and sand had been shoved into her mouth; that or she’d tried to breathe after she’d been buried. Her eyes were open, scabbed with grains of sand.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” Curse became mantra and finally made its way from Anna’s mouth to her ears. She stopped her frenzied scooping. Clearing the dirt from the girl’s nose and mouth was not going to save her.

  “Sorry,” Anna said to the corpse. Using the end of her long braid as a whisk broom, she gently swept at the dirt sticking to the eyes and teeth. “Were you alive when they buried you?”

  Ray Milland, Vincent Price, Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum; this girl in the pit—had she awakened to find herself facedown, breathing hard grains of rock into her lungs, sand sandpapering the delicate sclera when she opened her eyes?

  Anna had to look away. Her gaze came to rest on the deflated, wrinkled white blossom of the deadly nightshade.

  “They hit you in the head,” she murmured
, unsure whether she spoke to the girl’s shade or just to keep herself company. “Then they came after me and threw us both down the garbage disposal.” From the wilted flower, her eyes drifted to the walls. With their spin of muted colors spiraling up, she half expected to hear a switch being flipped, a grind begin, and the spiral to move as she and the corpse were ground to mincemeat and sucked into the sewers of hell.

  “Young and pretty,” she thought half aloud. “It wouldn’t matter. Young and pretty or old and scrawny, monsters will be monsters. You were dead when they threw you in, weren’t you?” she asked the ghost of the girl. “Otherwise it would be you digging up my grave.”

  Buttboy with his pants half down, staggering drunk. Hyena Boy, laughing. Gang rape. Anna shows up, hoping for a refreshing beverage, and they kill the girl instead.

  The cuts on Anna’s thigh stung with sweat and sand. Roughly brushing the grit away, she ran a dirty fingernail along the marks, tracing WHORE in dried blood. There’d been three would-be rapists. There were three. One little, two little, three little monster boys.

  Her tongue was dry, big, and thick; her lips stuck to her teeth. The drugged canteen beckoned from the other side of the nightshade. Anna crawled to it, fumbled the cap off, and, in thirst and despair, drank too much, drugging herself more than she had to. Water ran from the corners of her mouth and made mud on her breasts. Instantly, she felt the drug flow into her body, felt her muscles loosening. Her head swam, thoughts sloshing like water in a washtub, slamming against the sides of skull bone and bouncing back on one another.

  It came to her then that she had to get the girl out, had to.

  Having plowed back though the battered weeds, the pain from her injured shoulder driving her as a whip drives a horse, she clawed wildly at the sand. Scratching and scraping like a maniacal cat in a litter box of burning coals.

  The dead woman’s head was freed from the dirt.

  Sore tendons shoving daggers into her, vision tunneled, Anna scooped and scraped, bulldozed with knees and forearms, kicked and dug with her heels. Sweat poured into her eyes and ran in rivulets between her breasts, leaving trails in the dust and grime. Sand stuck to her skin. Grunts and cries bubbled up the neck of her jar. She scarcely knew if she was standing, kneeling, or lying in the grave with the dead girl. Finally, hips braced against the sandstone, one foot planted on the prone woman’s thigh, the other on her shoulder, Anna rolled the body from its grave with an ungentle shove.

  Gasping and sweating, she withdrew her toes from the lifeless flesh and surveyed what she had wrought.

  A girl—the girl the boys were attacking—lay facing the scrap of sky eyes open and sand-crusted. Denim shorts were twisted around her scissored legs. A pink and yellow Hawaiian print bikini bra had been hiked up over her left breast, showing a white triangle where she wasn’t tan and a dark brown nipple. Her right sandal had come un-Velcroed during the one-sided struggle and was smashed beneath her knee. Around one ankle was a thin gold chain, K and A and Y in glittery stones dangling from it, the K wedged between chain and skin.

  “Kay,” Anna whispered. “Welcome to my world.”

  TEN

  Past the no-wake zone of the marina, Jenny opened the throttles. Twin Honda motors lifted the twenty-eight-foot Almar cuddy onto plane and exchanged its blunt-nosed sluggish push for an exhilarating rush. As she had for all the seasons and all the times she had emerged from Dangling Rope into the main body of the lake, Jenny experienced a sense of awe.

  Engineers had thrust Lake Powell into this evolving, deformed, magnificent piece of the world. Man still fighting against Nature, and Nature would not lie down and die. She would rage down the Colorado and hurl herself at Man’s fabulous wall, scream, retreat, carve out canyons, and return to pile the debris at the foot of his dam.

  When the canyons were flooded there had been angry outcries from those who loved the crooked desert channels with their stone arches, rainbow-hued walls, and wealth of history. Jenny would have loved them as well, but not the way she loved the lake, how it met the land, lifted her up, invited her to share secrets hidden for eons.

  Uplake, where the water was close to five hundred feet deep, high on a cliff wall was the bottom of a ledge where a slab had fallen away. There, upside down, as if the creature had lived when there was no gravity, was a line of dinosaur prints, three-toed marks, walking into oblivion. Geologists surmised the fossils were hidden when the sediment flipped and heaved, then lay buried for millions of years, to be exposed when the slab fell away. For eons the tracks were lost halfway down a cliff a thousand feet high. With the lake, they could be seen with the naked eye. Backcountry purists suggested that if these sights weren’t earned by the labor of hiking in to them, they were undeserved, as if too many eyes sullied them.

  That salon-tanned rich women and greedy developers vacationing somewhere they hadn’t ruined yet could see the dinosaur prints from the decks of their yachts didn’t bother Jenny one whit. Like luck, no matter how many people enjoyed beauty, one’s share of it was never diminished.

  Of all the wonders the lake made accessible to the fat, the lazy, and the inebriated, Panther Canyon was Jenny’s favorite. A conscientious mother, Jenny would never admit as much in front of the other canyons.

  Panther was one finger uplake from Dangling Rope. Like the rest of the water-filled crevices, it was a drainage for the Colorado Plateau. It also carried the brunt of the runoff from Fiftymile Mountain. Subsequently it was deeper and longer than most, snaking north and east for eleven miles.

  Desert varnish painted the cliffs to either side of the channel, intricate designs in black and red, traceries that looked like the finest lace ever tatted, then slipped into the strong strokes of an irate painter with a burning vision of the universe, only to be offset by a whimsical natural cartoon resembling Snoopy or Betty Boop, or the abstract swish of a soaring bird.

  The top of Panther’s walls were buff-colored sandstone, the middle red-gold Navajo sandstone, and, near the water, gray Cedar Mesa Sandstone: Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic. Through the windscreen of her boat she could see two hundred and thirty million years into the past.

  Jenny cut back the throttle as the channel grew slender, teal water glowing gold where shoulders of stone shrugged toward the surface, light playing from water to walls, sending darting, ephemeral fishes swimming toward the canyon rim. Panther Canyon didn’t so much end as unravel in ever smaller side canyons that twisted and shredded into the rock.

  There was only one place boats could beach in Panther, and it was Jenny’s sacred place. Shortly before one of the unraveling threads thinned to a slot that would wedge a water snake, should it swim far enough, was a clamshell grotto fifty yards long, at least a hundred feet high at the top of the arch, and twenty-six yards deep. Fine white sand, mirroring the crescent shape of the roof, carpeted the floor.

  The previous summer it was smooth and flat to where the wall curved down to meet the sand. Spring of 1995 had been wetter than usual. Flash floods roared down in grinding tides, resculpting the landscape. This summer, halfway between the shore and the back wall was a sandy shelf six feet high.

  Sheltered from the elements—and too high for the graffiti vandals to reach—pictographs survived, paintings of strange creatures twice the size of human beings with diamond-shaped torsos, tiny heads, and stunted arms that stalked the imaginations of ancient artists. Three of them kept watch over the grotto.

  This sacred grotto was Omaha Beach in Jenny’s war—a favorite camp, where people dumped excrement and trash and spray-painted graffiti on the walls. If she could not get visitors to realize that the destruction of this paradise would destroy the soul of humanity, she was doomed to failure in the lesser Edens.

  Newer larger houseboats couldn’t negotiate Panther’s hairpin turns, so most of the traffic was limited to motorboats and Jet Skis. Like drive-by shooters, jet-skiers were hard to catch in the act. Usually she only found the poop they left behind. Chief Ranger Madden laughed when sh
e’d asked if they could send it in for DNA testing and cross-check the results on the various law enforcement sites. She’d argued—futilely—that anyone who would defile the grotto had undoubtedly committed a slew of other crimes.

  Motorboaters were not so elusive. Often they camped for several nights. About suppertime, when they would be “at home.” Jenny would drop in and educate them. If, when she returned the next morning, they had not learned their lessons, she would come to dinner a second time with Jim Levitt in all his law enforcement regalia and packing ticket book and ballpoint pen.

  These were mere skirmishes. Party boats were where the battle line was drawn. Older smaller houseboats could access the grotto. Less expensive barges were often rented by the week by hordes of college kids out of Denver or Boulder, Salt Lake or Phoenix, and loaded with enough beer, drugs, and hormones to compromise the finest minds. These were barbarians sacking the city, infidels razing the mosque, heretics burning statues of Mary, Napoleon’s minions blowing the nose off the Sphinx.

  Yesterday a party boat had taken over the grotto; a disgruntled boater told Jenny this when she visited his inferior camping spot. She hoped it wasn’t the one she’d seen at Dangling Rope. That one had at least forty kids mashed into it. Arms and legs were practically sticking out the windows.

  One hairpin turn before the grotto, she throttled down to an idle and checked her watch: 10:00 A.M. Ten was the best time for contacts of this sort. Earlier and the students would be too close to comatose, later and they’d be popping beers. At 10:00 A.M. most of them were sleeping it off but, with the proper encouragement, could regain consciousness in time for a waste management class.

  Nosing the throttle open a tad, she eased the boat around the last elbow of sandstone. The party boat was moored at the near end of the beach, two lines running to tie-down bolts pounded deep into the sand. The stern rail was gaudy with beach towels, a Hawaiian shirt, three pairs of swim trunks, and a brassiere that had once been a confection of black lace and satin but now resembled a roadkill crow.