The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel

by Nevada Barr

  “I definitely think it’s warmer,” Jenny said after a minute.

  “Definitely,” Anna said. Marginally, she thought.

  “Mmm,” Jenny murmured in her ear. For a time they didn’t speak. Braced as they were, sharing heat, partially supported by the water, they might last a while. Not forever, not till daylight. Not even until midnight, Anna guessed.

  Since Zach died, and Anna’d given her mind to the Grim Reaper, she’d almost come to believe in his corporeal existence the way children believe Santa comes down the chimney, eats the cookies, puts the gifts under the tree, then leaves the way he came.

  Trapped in the jar, she’d realized the Grim Reaper wasn’t the guy for her, unless the monster was planning a fate worse than death. Embraced in stone and Jenny’s arms, Anna knew there was no “worse than death.” There was only life and the cessation thereof. Zach had not left her, he had died. Anna was not abandoned, she was widowed. God was not punishing her or testing her; he, like Zach, was simply dead.

  “We are probably going to die in the next few hours,” Anna said, to see what it was like to state a truth such as that.

  “Probably,” Jenny said, her breath warm on Anna’s cheek.

  “I can live with that,” Anna replied in all seriousness.

  The cold leached the life from them. Anna lost feeling in her feet, then her hands. Jenny was losing strength as well. The arms that held Anna trembled. The two of them slipped a few inches deeper.

  For bits of time, seconds, or perhaps years, Anna forgot where she was, why it was so cold, when she had been rendered sightless. She was glad not to be alone. A sharp pain in her ear shocked her back from a mind drift where she raced, soaring over a cloudless landscape.

  “You bit me!” she said.

  “You were going to sleep,” said a voice so close she wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t in her head.

  “Jenny?”

  “If we go to sleep, we won’t wake up,” Jenny said.

  Anna remembered that from somewhere. A production she’d crewed in college, she thought.

  “Savage Mountain,” she said. “K2, second highest in the world.”

  A tiny whisper of a groan let her know Jenny thought she wasn’t making sense. Anna hadn’t the energy to assure her she was perfectly sane. Perfectly, perfectly sane. Perfectly perfect. Again the gentle wafting threatened to carry her away.

  “Tell me a story,” Anna pleaded.

  “What kind of a story?” asked the warm sweet breeze in her left ear.

  “One with lots of explosions and sirens and slamming doors,” Anna replied. “I think I might be falling asleep sometimes.”

  “Okay.” Jenny was silent long enough Anna had to fight the drift by biting her tongue and the insides of her cheeks. Digging her nails into her palms was an impossibility. Her hands were either curled into fists or clamped on Jenny’s. They wouldn’t open or close. Dark was so dark she didn’t know when her eyes closed, and she couldn’t lift her hands to find out.

  “Once upon a time,” began the whisper in her head, “there was a beautiful princess named Adafaire. God, was she a princess! Right out of a fairy tale. Her hair was blond, honest blond, and straight and fine. The princess wore it long and knew how to toss her head so it shone. That hair was as expressive as a cat’s tail. Adafaire would twitch it, and disdain filled the air, toss it, and hearts pounded.

  “The princess was rich as well as beautiful and lived with other princesses in the sorority house. Delta Gamma or Theta Tau, I can’t remember. Let’s call it Kappa Kappa Damn. Picture a place the likes of me would be allowed in only as the hired help.

  “I was seventeen. Since I’d skipped a grade, I went to college a year early.”

  “Smart cookie,” Anna said with difficulty. Her brain did not seem to be in earnest about sending messages to her lips. That or her lips had become anarchists and no longer took orders from her brain.

  “Book smart, life stupid,” Jenny said. “I grew up in a podunk town, one of five daughters of parents who went out to a movie one night and didn’t come home for years. Grandma was strict because, without order, there was no way she could have kept all of us fed and clothed. Not mean, though. We all worked. Little jobs when we were little, bigger jobs as we got bigger.

  “Socially my sisters and I were functionally illiterate. No time for that sort of thing in our formative years.

  “So I get to college in the big city and lay eyes on Adafaire. She was wearing tennis whites, can you believe that? Talk about a cliché. I loved her instantly, madly, passionately.”

  Memory ticked at the edges of Anna’s hibernating mind. “The girl at the rape, one of the ones who watched.”

  “One and the same. Adafaire had taken me to the frat party; Kappa Kappa Damn girls were the frat boys’ “little sisters.” A misnomer if there ever was one.”

  “Did she want you to be raped?” Stringing seven words together took an effort, but Anna needed to know the answer for some reason.

  “I’ve thought about that a lot,” Jenny said. “I don’t think she did, consciously. Unconsciously? Maybe. Adafaire hated me because I was the one who made her realize she was gay. Lesbian. Once she knew why she had all those feelings all those years, she couldn’t unknow it and go on pretending.”

  “Sad story,” Anna managed.

  “Ah, but it has a happy ending,” Jenny murmured. The breeze in Anna’s ear felt as if it blew from the north this time. “Revenge.”

  “Count of Monte Cristo,” Anna put the words together carefully. Still, they more spilled from her tongue than were spoken. She wasn’t cold anymore.

  “I didn’t drop out of college,” Jenny said, “though I think anybody who was there that night expected me to. I wanted them to have to see me every day, look me in the eye and see my hatred. That worked for about a day and a half. Then it was like collective amnesia, like nobody but me remembered.”

  “P’leece?” Anna asked.

  “I didn’t report it to the police,” Jenny said, and Anna marveled that her words were so neat and well formed. One day, she promised herself, if I’m not dead, I will be as strong as Jenny Gorman.

  “I had a plan, and I didn’t want to be the prime suspect. I knew two of the frat boys who’d benched me by sight. The others … I think two but I don’t really know how many. The two I’d seen were seniors, roommates, BMOC. One had been accepted to Stanford for law and one to Cornell. I can’t remember in what, but I knew then. I made it my business to know. Adafaire, Leo, and Phillip never saw me after those first two days. I saw them constantly, learned everything, watched and timed everything.”

  “Kill them all?” Anna pushed out the question.

  “No. But there were a lot of thefts after the incident at the frat picnic. Jewelry from the sororities, watches and cash from four frat houses. Three professors’ cars were broken into, the stereos stolen. Handheld calculators were taken—and in the eighties, a Hewlett-Packard ran four hundred dollars. A regular crime spree. Thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth. Acting on an anonymous tip, the police found the bulk of it in Leo and Phillip’s storage area in the basement of their frat house. The police also found stolen items in their apartment and cars, along with a very expensive Rolex that had gone missing from the home of the president of the university.

  “Leo and Phillip were rich; their daddies got them off with community service. Cornell and Stanford were not that forgiving. They unaccepted them. Not what they deserved, but the best I could do short of killing them.”

  Anna didn’t know if she’d asked about what happened to Adafaire out loud, or if Jenny chose to go on with the story without urging.

  “Adafaire never admitted she was a lesbian, though she was one of the most enthusiastic and passionate ‘experimenters’ I have ever known. Beautiful and sexual and vain, Adafaire loved posing for pictures. For three or four years, every time Adafaire got close to a longed-for goal—marriage, a job, a membership—darned if one of those old pictures d
idn’t show up in the wrong person’s mailbox. Petty, but satisfying.

  “Until it wasn’t. Now even the memory isn’t satisfying. More like the taste of ashes. She knew it was me. I wanted her to know it was me. Finally, she took me to court. Since she didn’t want publicity, I got off easy. A restraining order and court-ordered therapy.”

  “Did you fall in love again?” Anna asked or thought she did. She must have, because Jenny answered softly.

  “I did. Shall I tell you about her?”

  Anna did her best to nod. Jenny’s arm had fallen from her curled fingers, and Jenny’s words were slurring much as Anna’s.

  “She had hair the color of an autumn leaf,” Jenny’s love story began. “She wandered in one day reminding me of a scared, starving, stray kitten.”

  The words might have gone on, Anna wasn’t sure. The next thing she was sure of was the water closing over her and she couldn’t raise her arms to swim.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  God damn that woman.

  When Anna Pigeon had first slunk, catlike and all in black, from the shadows of Jenny’s duplex to sit as a shadow in the evenings, the long dusky red hair roped down her back in a sailor’s queue, Regis had thought she might prove a pleasant diversion, an entertainment to get him through the summer exiled in Dangling Rope with the ever-clinging Bethy. Bethy, who was too insecure to trust him alone for five days a week in their perfectly respectable house in Page.

  Anna Pigeon had proven more than an entertainment; she had turned into a nightmare.

  “God damn that woman!” Regis shouted as he pulled back on the throttles. The red speedboat sloshed around the final curve and waked the beach of the grotto where Jenny was camping. Two tents were pitched, one at either end of the grotto. The visitors were out on the lake, Regis knew that. Riding Jet Skis with the kiddies.

  Anna and Jenny were bobbing around like icebergs in the slot canyon beyond the rock fall. If they were still bobbing and not yet drifting lifelessly toward the bottom. Adjusting the spotlight to the left of the boat’s windscreen, he idled past the grotto and into the narrowing crack. Jenny’s boat, its fat gray stern reminding him of his wife in sweatpants, was moored at the bottom of the rock fall. He cut the engines, shoved a six-cell battery in his belt, snatched up two personal flotation devices, and draped two coils of yellow nylon line over his shoulder.

  Having thrown out a bumper, he jumped agilely from the bow of his boat to the Almar and rafted the red cigarette boat of the NPS patrol boat. In seconds he was climbing the rock fall. Seconds after that, he was on the top of the rock pile.

  The flashlight yanked free of his belt, he played the beam over the water. Beneath the blockage, the rectangular pool was flat and black. From the far end, where the narrowest portion of the slot cut up in a blacker shadow toward the plateau, crescents of silver were fanning out, ripples catching the last of the moonlight. Movement.

  Damn that woman, he thought again.

  “Hey.” The voice was so close it made Regis twitch. Had he not spent years controlling his body and face, he would have jumped a foot in the air.

  “You need help? We were behind you. There’s a gray boat. Is somebody in trouble?”

  Rudely, Regis trained his flashlight beam into the face of the intruder. An Asian man, thirties maybe, tall and leanly muscled, had scaled the rocks behind him and was standing helpfully at his heels in wildly pink-and-turquoise print swim trunks.

  A witness.

  “I got a call someone may be in trouble here. There’s no time to explain.” He pulled the park radio from its holder on his belt, keyed the mike, and said Jim Levitt’s call number. When Jim’s voice crackled back, he said, “It’s Regis. I think Jenny and Anna are in trouble in the slot at the end of Panther. I’m going in. I got a visitor here—”

  “Martin,” the young man said.

  “Martin. I’m leaving the radio with him.” Regis shoved the radio and the flashlight into Martin’s hands. “See if you can locate bodies in the water,” he said sharply, uncoiling the rope. When he had a line looped over a rock that wasn’t going anywhere in the next fifteen thousand years, he kicked off his deck shoes and dove off the rock, the yellow line, held in his right hand, trailing after him.

  When he surfaced the water was alive with reflections. The Asian guy methodically sweeping the waves with the flashlight. “Anna!” he yelled. “Can you hear me? Anna! Jenny! Answer me!”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Jenny’s feet had cramped, the insteps curling in on themselves. When she’d tried to pull her toes back toward her knees, she’d lost her grip on the wall. It wasn’t like before, when they plunged; this time she and Anna, held together by muscles too cold to move, sank gently. Anna Pigeon and the warmth she shared floated away into a lightless universe.

  In Jenny’s fist was the front of Anna’s shirt. When Anna had drawn her arms around her, Jenny took a fistful of cotton to fortify an embrace she knew was going to get more difficult to maintain as the minutes clicked by. It wasn’t strength or courage that kept her holding tightly to her friend but the inability to unclench her fingers.

  Too confused to know which way was up, Jenny waited, unafraid, in limbo. The air she’d drawn in as they sank carried her back to the surface. Her lungs sucked in the oxygen greedily. Jenny was oddly indifferent, as if the bellows pumped in a body not her own.

  She had thought Anna was completely submerged. She wasn’t. Her chest was rising and falling under Jenny’s knuckles. Had she been able, she would have wrapped the smaller woman in her arms. When she could no longer move her legs sufficiently to keep them afloat, she promised herself, that’s what she would do.

  Wild and racing, lasers slashed the slot walls, cutting out ribbons of darkness that fell into the darker waters. Hypothermia was disorienting, Jenny knew that. Hallucinations hadn’t been mentioned. Not that it meant anything. Not that Jenny could hold on to the thought or care.

  A deep, ragged voice jangled through the stillness. “Anna! Can you hear me? Anna! Jenny! Answer me!”

  The shouting seemed part of the death Jenny and Anna were sharing. When it penetrated the area of her brain still operable, and she realized the cavalry had finally arrived, Jenny tried to call out. Her jaws would not open, not at all, not one millimeter.

  A splash. The cavalry had dived in.

  Hope generated enough strength that Jenny kicked, keeping them above water a few more seconds. A blow landed on her upturned face. Bone and muscles, paralyzed with cold, clanged a death knell and she sank like a stone, Anna’s shirt still caught in her fingers.

  Her hair snagged on something; there was no pain, just pressure as she was dragged. Jenny’s face came clear of the water. Her head rested on something warm; above her were stars. Slow as a dream, she began drifting on her back. An arm was across her chest. A lifeguard had jumped into the pool. Rescue had come. Salvation, she wanted to tell Anna.

  Though her mind did not remember the lifesaving moves, her body did. From a source not her own, strength flowed into her arm, enough so that she could draw Anna onto her breast. She hoped Anna’s nose and mouth were above water, and that there were not now three dead children in the deep end.

  Stars slowed, then stopped. No. She had slowed, then stopped.

  “Okay, Jenny, this is going to be a bit crude, but you’re about one angle from an ice cube. I’m putting a rope around you.”

  A light shone down from above. A beam like from the star to the baby Jesus in his cradle. In its vague glow she watched a bright yellow rope in dark brown hands pass under her arms and across her back.

  “I’m going to tie this off, okay? When it’s tied, I’ll take Anna. Don’t you worry. Hey, guy! Throw me down the PFD.”

  “Martin.”

  “Yeah, Martin. There’s two there by the rock. Throw one down.” Warm hands threaded the rope over her rib cage, pushing it between her and Anna. Jenny tried to take it and make it go around both of them, but the hand that wasn’t clenched in Anna’s shirt
front was of no more use than a club.

  The lifeguard who was saving them kept on talking. The words were too quick to catch, but the tone was comforting. Then he began pulling at Anna, digging at Jenny’s fingers to free them from the shirt. Anna was being taken from her arms. Jenny fought in her mind, screamed in her mind. Her hands let go without her permission, her arms fell away, traitors.

  “It’s okay, Jenny. Don’t fight me.” It was wrong to fight the lifeguard. Jenny used to know that. She watched him buckle Anna into an orange Mae West. Then the lifeguard went away and left them in the cold water. Anna bobbed gently out of the erratic circle of light. Jenny waited to slide under. The rope didn’t let it happen.

  “Jim. Hallelujah,” burbled up from somewhere. “Tie off that second line and throw it to me.”

  Time passed. Jenny’s eyes closed, her mind went away. Grunting, like that of a pig in labor, enticed her to open them again. Nothing remained of her but eyes and mind. Her body was a quiet invisible thing she could not feel. Perhaps she was dead and watched, as spirits are said to, hovering above the operating table while the body dies, only to swoop back down when the body is shocked back to life.

  Anna, clownish in the orange life vest and white face, bobbed back into the spotlight. Send in the clowns … Jenny heard Joni singing. No. Not Joni. It was from a Broadway musical.

  Anna would like that.

  As if Jenny’s thought were her cue, Anna floated across the watery stage until she bumped up against the rock. There she struggled, not like a woman, but like a fish on a line, then up she went. Like Lazarus from the tomb, Jenny’s mind said. Like an unlucky trout from a pool, like a woman lynched by a mob. And up. And gone.

  Now only she and two corpses remained in the deep end, said the mind that had been Jenny’s, herself and the dead men who had tricked them into going for a swim in Ted Bundy’s backyard pool.

  The sow in labor increased her grunting.