by Nevada Barr
Paul and the Kesslers began a careful ascent up between the boulders. Chrissie didn’t move. Anna didn’t know if fear or spite or hatred or fatigue glued her feet to the ground. “Maybe we’ll find Carmen’s sat phone,” Anna said. “You could call home on it.”
The offer of electronics and contact with civilization did what flood and gore failed to. With a huff that sounded so much like the word harrumph Anna had seen in books over the years that she almost smiled, Chrissie began hauling herself up after the others.
Before following, Anna set Helena down on a flat ledge. The little girl opened her eyes the merest slit. “Hello, little girl,” Anna said, and believed she saw intelligence and trust in the infant’s eyes. Whether or not it was true or only a trick of the light, she couldn’t know. It would be a cruel twist if, after all the baby had gone through, fate chose to snuff out that wee spark.
Anna ripped her long shirttail from hem to armpits and fashioned a rude sling. Immodesty was the least of her worries at the moment and, should a flash of breast offend anyone, they would have to avert their eyes. She needed both hands free. Baby and the scrap of down sleeping bag were stuffed into the makeshift Snugli, then Anna began the scramble up the rock face, leaving water that had risen to her knees.
Shadows had claimed the low places and the maze of rock and scree was dusky in the blue light. Good for the fishes, Anna thought. The closer they hugged the American bank and the deeper they were in shadow, the more difficult they would be to kill. No shots followed the one that killed Lori. Before, Anna had read the shooter’s lack of action as his losing interest or being frightened by the carnage and running away. This time she read it as stark professionalism. The guy wasn’t going to waste bullets on targets he could not hit.
Whoever it was had shot Carmen, then tried for Anna or Paul or Steve. They’d been so closely grouped there was no way to tell who the bullet was meant for. Then he’d stopped. Anna had been exposed, Cyril, too, and he’d not shot at them. Steve had been an excellent target when he made the short run to get Helena’s water before they began the ascent. The rifleman had not fired. Then he’d killed Lori, the most harmless and least interesting of individuals.
It was possible the bullet that killed Lori was meant for Anna, but she’d been a far better target when she and Cyril were returning from the cow side of the beach. If the shooter had a method to his madness, Anna could not see it. She could only see the madness.
As she climbed, she wondered if Easter was drowned, if the cow was struggling to keep horns above water as the flood washed her farther downstream, if she had once again taken to a ledge and was working her way up as she had the first time she’d found herself in this predicament and future rafters would snap pictures of a Mexican cow trapped hundreds of feet above the water and marvel at how she got there. A darker thought intruded and in her mind Anna could hear future generations of river guides pointing out the slide above the rapids and recounting the awful slaughter that had taken place there for the ghoulish delight of their patrons.
It wasn’t long before she caught up with Chrissie and had to slow her ascent and suffer the view of the young woman’s backside. Chrissie was gasping for breath and emitting little grunts each time she had to pull herself up a step more than a foot high. Scratches marked her arms and one elbow was oozing blood where the shale had scraped off the skin. Anna was proud of her for keeping on. Chrissie might be a selfish little twit, but she wasn’t abdicating. Once the choice between climbing or drowning had been given to her, she hadn’t crumpled but instead fueled herself with anger at Anna and at the unfairness of the situation and climbed.
Abdicators became as dead weight. Like Lori. Dead weight.
Without any conscious thought on Anna’s part the girl’s death replayed itself in her mind, the image so real the rocky escarpment before her vanished, replaced by the gout of blood and the woman falling. Anna’s foot slipped and she toppled sideways. Sudden movement and fear for Helena brought her back from that black hole where horrors lived on as real and horrific as the moment they had transpired.
“Watch it!” Chrissie snapped, Anna’s thud startling her. Maybe under the surliness was a thread of concern. Maybe it was even for somebody besides herself.
“Wow,” Anna said as she righted herself, one arm clamped around Helena.
“What now?” Chrissie demanded between gasps.
“Nothing,” Anna said.
The baby began to whimper. The pathetic little cries made Anna feel more helpless than the raging Rio Grande and a gunman on the rim of the canyon. “It’s okay,” she murmured. Helena knew otherwise. Okay was milk and Mom.
The ascent was no more than that of a small building in New York, twenty or thirty flights of stairs at most, had they been able to simply go up. With the twists and turns, dead ends and stops where Paul had to boost and pull people up, the baby passed up like a watermelon from hand to hand, Chrissie heaved up by Anna’s shoulder under her butt, and the twins, both tiring and neither with any upper-body strength in their long thin arms, drawn up like bony bits of rope, it was nearly dark by the time they neared the place fifty yards from the top where Carmen had turned and waved and died.
Paul stopped on a wide flat boulder top, adjacent to the slope where Carmen had left blood as she hit the shale. Desert evenings were long and sweet and there was enough light to see the darker smear on the light-colored rock. Cyril and Steve sat, backs to a rock, knees drawn up, taking the opportunity to rest, as Paul strong-armed Chrissie up the last climb to where they waited. Helena was passed up and Anna followed. They tucked themselves tight to the rock with Steve and Cyril, too close in for the killer to get a bead on them.
“I think we should stop here,” Paul said. “It’s getting hard to see and one of us is going to break a leg if we keep going.” He didn’t bother to whisper. The racket they made on the climb would have kept their whereabouts broadcast to any listener.
Anna nodded. “I think so too. How much water do we have?”
Chrissie’s half-liter water bottle was clothed in a lovely pink nylon carrying case with a Velcro closure for securing it to one’s belt. Steve had strapped it to his when he’d retrieved it. Twice during the climb it had been passed around and they all drank sparingly. After Lori was shot, there’d been no recurrence of the “It’s mine” theme. On both occasions, Anna had tried to get Helena to take water but she screwed her face up and refused to do more than suck a drop or two from Anna’s little finger. In the last half hour she had ceased crying and Anna missed it. Though it had stricken her to the bone, it signified the mite had strength to protest her situation. Now she lay so quiet Anna found herself resting her forefinger on the tiny wrist to see if she could feel a pulse.
Steve shook the water bottle. “Maybe a cup or so,” he said. “Want to see if the baby will drink some?”
This ordinary statement was anything but ordinary. Anna was so thirsty she had to wiggle her tongue around to keep it from sticking to various places in her mouth. Steve had to be as thirsty or more. To offer the gift of water in the desert as if merely passing the salt at the dinner table was a form of grace that Anna couldn’t help but admire. She’d never wanted children but, if she could have ordered a pair like the Kessler twins to be delivered fully baked, she might have given it another thought.
“You try and see if she will drink,” she said, untangling Helena from the mess of down and ripped linen that had been her home for the past few hours. “We need to find Carmen while there’s still a little light.”
Steve took the baby with such confidence Anna guessed there were smaller Kesslers in the world.
Anna didn’t bother to get to her feet but rolled onto hands and knees and crept to the edge of their platform to peer into the darkening cracks between the boulders under the bloodstain. “Carmen!” she called.
There was no answer and she’d expected none. Fortunately, there were not many places the body could have landed. A couple of yards beneath the ledge
they inhabited and beneath the stain on the shale were three enormous blocks of shale, each the size of a mobile home standing on end. They’d sheared from the cliff along fault lines, straight as a die, leaving them as square and neat as if a mason had cut them. They leaned against one another, forming V-shaped crevices twenty or thirty feet deep. Carmen could only be in one or the other of them.
Anna stretched out flat on her belly and stared into the inky bottoms of the two natural shafts. A change of what little light remained in the day made her look back. Paul was standing astraddle her, between her and where the shooter was presumed to be.
“Hey,” he said when she looked at him. “This way we go together. For better or worse,” he said, and smiled.
Anna had nothing to say to that and turned her eyes back to the dark below.
Carmen had dark hair and wore a dark long-sleeved shirt and black silk long johns; not a great ensemble for being discovered at the bottom of wells or rock falls. Anna crabbed across the ledge to where she could see into the second of the crevices.
“Could that be an arm?” she asked Paul. He knelt beside her. Like a lot of men, Paul was strong but not supple; he couldn’t coil up and snake around the way Anna and Cyril could.
He stared into the crack. Then he went and looked down into the crack Anna had first studied. “I think it’s our best bet. Too bad we didn’t save any rope. That’s a ways down and those rocks don’t promise anything in the way of foot- or handholds.”
“I can do it,” Anna said.
“Somehow I knew you’d say that,” Paul said. In the thickening dusk Anna couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not.
No matter, she had a plan.
“Let’s jury-rig whatever we’ve got for line. Even a few feet might help.”
Steve gave up a belt. After some modest twisting and contortion, Cyril offered up a spandex sports bra, and together with Paul’s belt and the linen Anna had torn for Helena’s hammock, they cobbled together a line close to seven feet long and fairly sturdy.
There wasn’t enough that it could be tied off or wrapped around something to create a decent belay, and Paul was the only one with the strength to hold it or use it to pull anyone up. He made no argument as Anna made preparations for the climb down.
Anna was relieved. The arguments had already been made in her head and, evidently, that of her husband. On the slim chance Carmen was alive, a wait till morning could well kill her. Should the shooter be waiting to make another kill, waiting till morning would give him light to aim by. Without water Chrissie and possibly the twins would be too weak to finish the ascent in the morning. Weighed against those, the dangers of Anna making a low light climb seemed paltry.
Paul held the makeshift line and Anna scraped, belly down, feetfirst over the edge of the ledge. With the line to hold on to, the seven feet was an easy descent. Steve handed the baby to Chrissie and he and Cyril took the line to hold it so Paul could follow but Chrissie huffed to life.
“Take this baby,” she said as she thrust Helena into Cyril’s arms. “I’m going to do it with Steve. I weigh more than you.”
Cyril was either too tired or too shocked to protest. Anna watched as the girls changed places and Chrissie and Steve knelt and braced themselves to take Paul’s weight. In the end, he didn’t use the line. Afraid, probably, that the two college students couldn’t hold it. He got most of himself off the ledge, hung on for a moment then dropped with a thud and an oof! to the platform where Anna waited.
“You sure you can do this?” he asked, hands on hips, staring down the crack Anna had chosen to descend.
Close up, it looked wider and deeper.
“It is Carmen,” Anna said. Crouching, she could see the pale outline of an arm and part of the guide’s face, mere smudges of paleness in the gloom but definitely human in shape. “Carmen!” she called, hoping for a twitch or a moan signifying life.
“I’m pretty sure I can,” she answered Paul’s question.
“The drop doesn’t look as far from here,” he said.
Easy to say when he wasn’t the one about to go down it.
“No time like the present,” Anna said.
She took one end of the line and put it between her teeth. It wasn’t long enough to do any good but it served the purpose of Dumbo’s white feather: it gave her courage to begin. The top of one of the boulders had been sheared off, forming a steep ramp that funneled down into the space between the two leaning rectangles of rock. More blood was smeared where Carmen had hit, then slid down and fallen after being shot. Anna sat at the top of the slide. Paul lay on his stomach on the flat. She took one of his hands then turned over on her stomach as well, facing him.
Panic gripped her as she felt the pull of the black hole she was being funneled into, a pit like the pit in her soul.
“You don’t have to do this,” Paul said softly.
“Yes I do,” Anna mumbled around the spandex bra strap clamped between her teeth. The phrase blind panic was not a metaphor, it was a description. She could see almost nothing. Black tunneled her vision till only Paul’s hands remained. Gripping them so tightly she would have broken finger bones had he been one of the twins, Anna loosed the grip her feet had on the funnel’s side and let herself slip down the length of her and Paul’s extended arms. When she could slide no farther, she forced herself to let go of Paul’s left hand, took the line from her teeth and held on to it. Paul closed his fingers around the line.
“Got you,” he said.
With a feeling she was letting go of life and sanity, Anna let go of his right hand and gripped the line tightly in her fists. The added couple of yards brought her easily to where the funnel ended and the rocks met. The space between them was no more than a yard wide for the most part, no wider than the average doorway.
Holding tightly to the bra and belts, Anna knelt on the slope and looked down. It was not as far as gloom and fear had suggested. No more than fifteen feet. Carmen, now the merest outline in the growing dark, lay at the bottom.
“It’s doable,” she said to Paul.
“Be careful.”
There wasn’t any more line but Anna didn’t think she would need it. Lowering her legs into the crack, she pushed hands and feet out to the sides and, braced between the rocks, began to spider-walk down. She made it nearly halfway before she lost purchase on the smooth shale and fell. The chute she was shinnying down flared out near the bottom, and she struck the slanting base of the rock and rolled down.
Her squawk and the forthcoming thump brought Paul’s voice down, high and frightened, the warmth gone. “Are you okay?” he shouted.
“Okay,” Anna managed, her voice sounding hollow and strange in this dry well. She hadn’t fallen and rolled more than a few yards and she had landed on something soft. Carmen. A woman Anna had killed in a similar fashion years before and beneath the surface of the earth in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico rushed out of the past and the pit and Anna felt again her knee crushing the throat, felt the weight of a mile of limestone on her neck and chest and she could not breathe.
Rolling off Carmen as gently as she could, Anna found herself crying, great fat tears creeping down her dusty cheeks.
“Wasting water,” she whispered. Carmen’s eyes were open, catching the last dull gleam of evening from the opening above them. Anna didn’t bother with a field exam. The exit wound in the middle of the guide’s chest was as big as her fist and the blood around it dry. “Sorry I landed on you, Carmen,” Anna said, still crying. “I am glad it wasn’t me who killed you, though.
“We need your sat phone. Tell me you didn’t fling it from you when the bastard shot you.” Anna’s tears were stopping. Carmen was a southpaw. Anna felt her way down Carmen’s left arm to her hand. The phone wasn’t clamped in her fist. “Butterfingers,” Anna said, and began sweeping her hand over the ground around the corpse.
“Anna?” Paul called.
“Carmen’s dead,” Anna answered, and was relieved there was no sign of her recen
t weeping in her voice. “I’m trying to find her sat phone.”
Anna could see her hands moving like pale spiders over the dirt and gravel. She could feel the muck of blood and dirt commingled and nearly dry. She hoped she would not feel an angry scaly creature or wake up a scorpion or tarantula. It was dark enough she’d never see them till they were getting to know each other far better than either party desired. Finally her hand landed on what she’d been looking for, the smooth small rectangle of plastic that could send signals to objects rotating the earth.
“Got it,” she called to Paul.
“Hallelujah!” filtered back down the crevasse. “Does it work?”
Anna opened the face of the sat phone. It lit up and displayed the usual options. She chose not to shout the answer to Paul. Knowledge they had a satellite phone might inspire the killer to be more aggressive in his quest. Or it could scare him away. Undecided, Anna slipped it into her pocket.
For reasons rooted in ancient ritual but as necessary now as they’d been then, Anna knelt by Carmen. She straightened the guide’s legs, folded her arms on her chest and closed her eyes. That done, she smoothed the hair off her temples and into the braids she wore. This was unquestionably a crime scene and she was messing it up. Since she’d begun the process by dropping eight feet onto the corpse then fondling it and running her hands and scrabbling her feet over every inch of the place, Anna didn’t feel any compunction about paying last respects.
“Good-bye, Carmen. The Rio Grande is rising to take you but I doubt even he can climb this high. We’ll be back for you.
“I’m coming up,” she shouted to Paul. Checking to make sure the sat phone was secure, she crawled up the slanted cut at the bottom of the westernmost rock. The crack narrowed there and she was able to get hands and feet on opposite sides of the chimney without any trouble. Unable to fall up, the ascent was longer and harder than the descent had been. Halfway her arms and legs began the quiver of nearly exhausted muscles.
