The Rope ap-17

by Nevada Barr

  Bracing herself for the eight-legged hordes, Anna curled her fingers around the edges of the flaps and yanked them open. On one, hidden before she’d unfolded it, was an address, typed on plain white paper and taped down with clear tape.

  Anna recognized the address. “This was being sent to my sister, Molly?”

  “It turned up in the outgoing mail at Wahweap,” Steve said. Jim Levitt hovered at the opposite end of the table, noticing everything and saying nothing. Anna suspected he might be in the doghouse for relaying to Jenny—and so to her—the information that Anna was considered a suspect. Regis had retreated to his own porch and leaned against the wall in the shade, an audience of one watching the play.

  Anna looked in the box: NPS uniform shirts and shorts, bedding, underwear, black Levi’s, black Reeboks, a picture of Zach on the beach at Cape Cod. “These are my belongings,” she said. Confusion boiled out of the box in the place of tarantulas. “The stuff from my room. Somebody was mailing it to my sister?”

  “Looks that way,” Steve said.

  He was waiting for her to say she didn’t send the box or admit she did. Instead she said, “You dusted it for fingerprints. Whose were on it?”

  “There were a lot of prints. Mail here gets picked up and hauled down to Wahweap sometimes in one boat, sometimes handed off to two, even three. Loaded and unloaded, then, finally, Wahweap. There are a lot of prints.”

  “Are mine on it?” Anna asked, afraid that in this surreal place, where Disney and Dali and T. S. Eliot fought over landscape design, the whorls and ridges of her fingers had made it to the cardboard.

  “They are now,” Steve said. He took an efficient-looking folding knife from his belt and cut off one of the flaps she had handled. “Yours aren’t on record,” he explained. “We had nothing to compare. I ought to be able to lift them off this. If not, Jim here can use you for practice taking prints. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV.”

  Anna felt as though Steve Gluck had stolen something from her. He could have asked. Was the tricky business to throw her off balance? “I wasn’t on balance,” she said waspishly.

  Ignoring the apparent non sequitur, Steve said, “Give me a half hour or so, then meet me on the dock. Bring the skunk. I found him a home. Skunk paradise.”

  With that he left. Jim gave Anna what she assumed was supposed to be an encouraging smile and trailed after his boss. Regis looked as if he were going to say something. Then Bethy called, and he went inside without speaking.

  Buddy had a home. Sadness welled up, pricking Anna’s eyes with tears. Of course Buddy had to go. She knew that. She just wasn’t ready now, not today. Putting the thought from her, she lifted the smudged packing box and carried it into the duplex. In her bedroom, she set it on the floor.

  Buddy stood on his hind legs, his tiny forepaws not quite reaching the edge of the drawer. “I’m sure going to miss you,” Anna told him. “Skunk paradise,” she told Buddy, “Ranger’s Honor. That’s got to be a step above Scout’s Honor.”

  With the skunk kit as her sole companion, she removed the items from the box. Sheets went on the shelf in the closet. They were the cheapest kind Walmart carried and held no comfort. For a few more nights, Anna would sleep on the worn flannel Jenny had lent her. Towels she hung in the bathroom, uniform shirts in the closet. Socks she put into the top drawer of Buddy’s condo.

  Next she pulled out the pair of black jeans, beneath which were a black T-shirt and her Reeboks. It was then that it registered.

  They were the clothes she had worn the day she climbed up to the plateau. The day she disappeared. A jolt of panic twitched her as if a mad puppeteer had been entrusted with her strings. Muscles jerking, she flung the trousers from her.

  “Uh, uh,” she heard herself grunting, the sounds of disgust she made when finding a revolting substance on her flesh.

  Panting as if she’d run the quarter mile uphill from the dock, she crabbed around the box and the foot of the bed until her back was wedged in the corner of the room opposite the door where no one could come up behind her.

  “You’re okay,” she told herself. “It’s okay, Buddy,” she said when she heard alarmed skritching from the bottom drawer. Two bead-black eyes appeared over the edge. “Don’t get scared and stink up anything, and I won’t either.”

  Seeing and talking to her tiny friend centered Anna in a way nothing else could have. “What will I do without you, Buddy?” she whispered.

  The Levi’s lay between them, crumpled like the legs of a person shot down while running. They repulsed Anna the way seeing her own skin flayed from her body, or her scalp hanging from a stranger’s belt, would have.

  Shame drenched her. She didn’t want anyone to see them, ever. No one knew she’d been wearing them, that they had been stripped from her body. Even so, she wanted them hidden or gone, destroyed. Still with her back to the wall, her eyes moved to the items remaining in the box: black T-shirt, Reeboks. Panties. Panties peeked from beneath the running shoes, the bright candy colors she wore under her uniform.

  Pushing away from the wall, she fell to her knees, looked beneath the bed, sprang up again and rolled open the closet door. Crazy as it was to be looking for the boogeyman, she didn’t care. Hidden places were threats. She needed to be able to see what was coming for her.

  Satisfied she was alone, she stepped warily around the discarded trousers, leaned down, and, with thumb and forefinger, pinched up a corner of the neatly folded T-shirt and flung it over by the jeans. Using the same fingers, to keep the taint at a minimum, she plucked out first one Reebok, then the other.

  The panties had been carefully displayed, fanned out like the petals of a flower, making a colorful circle on the bottom of the box. The center of the flower was a tangerine lace pair folded in a careful square. Anna wished she didn’t remember which pair she’d had on, didn’t remember pulling the soft nylon up her legs, zipping the black jeans over the bright lace, but she did.

  This box had been prepared as carefully as a stage is dressed. The panties were the centerpiece. A joke, a mockery of Anna, being mailed to her sister, and Molly would never have known what it meant. Anna could almost see the monster’s self-satisfied smirk as he pictured Anna’s only living relative handling the last things her sister had worn when she was alive and, maybe, silently thanking whoever had been so kind as to take such pains in packing her things.

  She was rubbing the palms of her hands compulsively on the thighs of her borrowed khakis. “All the perfumes of Arabia,” she murmured, forcing herself to stop.

  The monster had stripped her, packed the clothes she’d been wearing with those stolen from her room, then addressed the carton to Molly Pigeon in New York. This was very creepy; creepy, but not life-threatening. Yet Anna felt a sense of dread as deep as if her life—or something very like—could be snatched from her by scraps of cotton, leather, and latex.

  The monster—or monsters—had touched everything in the box with scaly clawed fingers. Cleared out Anna’s room so it would look like she’d moved out, gone home. Monster claws touching her things was creepy, but those he had actually stripped from her body freaked her out, and the tangerine-colored panties terrified her.

  The pants and underpants, could they tell her, in fact, that she had been raped? That she wasn’t lucky Anna, the girl who hadn’t been raped, but one of those “rape victims”? Fluids or bloodstains or tears that would indicate she had been penetrated by the monster or a stick or fingers or—“Stop it!” she commanded herself. “Just fucking stop it!”

  Shame pooled cold and low in her abdomen, shame for wanting to distance herself—even if only mentally—from women who had suffered this special brand of degradation, from Jenny.

  What if she had been sexually assaulted? Was that worse than having WHORE cut into her skin? Worse than days and nights of drugged nightmare? Worse than a dislocated shoulder and a battered skull? Than hunger and thirst and finding a dead body?

  It was not. The shame attached to rape was me
n’s shame, shame they were too weak to carry: that their gender could do this, that they could do it, that they wanted to do it, that they could not protect their wives and sisters and daughters from it, that they could not stop it. That a thing they believed to be solely theirs could be taken by another man. That, should a child be born, the cuckold would be left to raise another man’s bastard.

  Snatching up the tangerine panties, Anna brought them to her nose, determined to know if there was a scent, a signifier of anything.

  They smelled of laundry detergent. Kneeling, she examined the shirt and jeans, sniffing and running her hands over the fabric. They, too, had been washed. The running shoes were wiped clean; even the soles were free of dirt.

  Of course they had been washed. Anna sat back on her heels, a Reebok in her hand. Mr. Monster would wash them to get rid of any trace evidence. Now Anna had pawed and sniffed every item, rubbing them around on a carpet that undoubtedly had trace evidence from seasonal rangers that went back ten years.

  She should have watched more NYPD Blue and less Molière.

  THIRTY

  Steve Gluck stood in the doorway to her bedroom, thumbs hooked in his belt, a pained expression on his face, as Anna explained about the black clothes, the shoes, and the panties.

  When she’d finished, the district ranger said nothing. Pushing back his ball cap with a forefinger, he scratched his head. Anna wondered if he intentionally embodied the cliché or if his scalp itched.

  “Okay,” he said finally, settling the cap firmly. “Jim and Jenny said when you came in you were wearing cutoff jeans, sandals, and a bathing suit top. We bagged everything but the shoes for possible trace evidence. Now you’re telling me you were wearing these.” He pointed accusingly at the pile Anna’d made as she’d tossed the offending items from her.

  Guilt lapped around her ankles. She hadn’t told them the clothes she’d come back in didn’t belong to her, that she’d been stripped, and in turn stripped the corpse. What difference would it make? She gave them the clothes. Telling would have made her feel dirty, violated in their eyes; more men taking mental snapshots of her naked and helpless.

  “I didn’t think it mattered,” she said truthfully. The words sounded lame. They sounded like a lie.

  Gluck looked at her, a hard piercing stare. “Now you know it matters. You want to fill me in?”

  Anna told him then of waking naked, of taking the dead woman’s things. Speaking of it made the wounds on her thigh burn. Still, she didn’t tell him about the cuts. He would ask to see. He would want to take pictures. That’s what they did with evidence. Even the thought was intolerable. It was personal, a secret that was hers to keep, it didn’t matter—at least not to anyone but her and the monster.

  Steve let out an explosive sigh and shook his head the way a teacher might at an impossible child. “So the anklet you ‘found,’ did you find that in the sand or on the dead woman’s ankle?”

  “It was on her right ankle.”

  “The watch?”

  “Left wrist.”

  “Is there anything else you haven’t bothered to tell me?” he asked.

  Guilt rose to knee level. Anna had been attacked and nearly killed, and yet it was she suffering the suspicions and accusations of law enforcement. It was she they interrogated. Fury rose. Guilt boiled away.

  “No.”

  Steve Gluck put the black trousers, T-shirt, sneakers, and the tangerine panties in a paper bag, leaving the rest of the box’s contents in Anna’s room. He didn’t give her any hope that these laundered artifacts would yield useful information. Not only because they had been sanitized but because testing for trace evidence was expensive and took time. The park didn’t have enough of either resource to throw down what appeared to be a rat hole.

  Since there was no federal law against homicide, Kay’s murder fell under the jurisdiction of the state of Utah. Kane County had significantly less money and manpower than the park. Kay’s clothes would probably either rot in an evidence locker or be returned to her relatives when the corpse was identified.

  Along with the clothes, Buddy was to go. Putting it off as long as possible, Anna took him insect hunting one last time, then made a wonderful nest for him in the bottom of the emptied packing box. For his water bowl, she cut a foam coffee cup in half and secured it to the side with duct tape borrowed from the maintenance barn. Finally there was nothing else to be done. She whispered her good-byes and gratitude. Buddy allowed her to kiss him on his little skunk head; then she carried him across the square of lawn to Jim Levitt’s porch, where Steve was drinking coffee.

  Steve politely ignored her sniffling as he told her he was longtime friends with an old Navajo who ran a filling station outside of Fry Canyon on 95. Lawrence Yazzi had kept a pet skunk for eight years. A year or so back it died. He’d been on the lookout for another. Buddy would be de-stunk, Steve warned her. There was no help for that. He was too little to be let go on his own. “Lawrence is good people,” he finished as he took the box and Buddy from Anna’s arms. “Your pal here has got it made skunkwise.”

  Anna nodded. She didn’t walk with them down to the dock but waited in the duplex until she was sure Steve would be headed back toward Bullfrog. A little after noon, she went down, bought a Dangling Dog, chips, and a Coke, and sat at one of the picnic tables wondering what to do with herself, where to go, who to be, what to feel, what to think.

  It was a relief when Jenny’s Almar putted into the harbor, its blunt nose plowing through the blue-green water. Whoever Anna was, and whatever she felt, she suddenly knew what she wanted to do: work. Not with her mind but with her body: to walk, chop wood, dig ditches, lift heavy objects and carry them up steep hills, clean Westminster Cathedral with a toothbrush, load all the human manure on Lake Powell’s beaches into five-gallon cans.

  She rose and went to meet Jenny as she leaped to the dock and began winding the bow line around a cleat.

  * * *

  By day’s end, Anna’s shoulder was killing her and she was so tired she could barely think. Other than the aching of her knitting flesh, this was ideal. Taking pity on her, Jenny let her sit and sip red wine poured from a red fuel jar dedicated to that purpose, while Jenny set up camp.

  They were spending the night in the grotto at the end of Panther Canyon. Two adults and two children under the age of ten had pitched their tents beneath the curving wall to the lake side. Their boat, scarcely powerful enough to tow the two Jet Skis tethered to it, was beached nearby. To give them their space, Jenny had chosen to make camp at the opposite end of the crescent.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” she said as she shook out the collapsing tent poles and began snapping them together on the elastic rope that joined them, “but we are camping five yards from where an army of party boaters relieved themselves for two days. They’d actually marked off that part of the grotto with empty beer bottles and jury-rigged a privacy screen for those few individuals who remained sober enough to appreciate such an amenity. Would you believe I hauled fifty-four pounds of human waste out of here? Four five-gallon cans.”

  Anna pulled her feet up, her knees to her chest. “Did you get it all?”

  “Ah, that is the question I ask myself as I dig and burrow in the beaches of Lake Powell.”

  “Maybe the park should replace the sand with clumping litter,” Anna suggested.

  Jenny laughed. “I’ll mention that to the superintendent next time he asks a GS-5 seasonal for her opinion.”

  The tent was orange and dome shaped and sat lightly on the sand like half a melon on a plate. Human waste or not, Anna would leave the tent to Jenny. The space inside was too small and the color too much like sandstone at sunset for Anna to allow herself to be enclosed within. The day had been ninety-two and cloudless. The night would be warm. The tent was for privacy and to keep out the bugs and the sand.

  “I’m going to go introduce myself to the neighbors and see if I can’t strike up an elucidating conversation about poop,” Jenn
y said as she tossed the stuff sack containing her sleeping bag into the tent.

  “The little kids ought to love that,” Anna said. The wine was good. She stretched out her legs and felt the muscles begin to relax.

  “Kids are great audiences for poop talks,” Jenny said. “These are a little young. Boys eight to twelve are the best. Want to come?”

  “I’ll pass.” It was after six, suppertime for campers. Anna had yet to let go of the schedule she’d kept for so many years; lunch around three, supper at midnight after the curtain came down.

  Though the sun still shone on much of the lake, it had long since set in the narrow tongue of Panther Canyon. Twilight would last several more hours. Anna leaned back into one of the “chairs” Jenny had brought up from the boat. They were clever things, two thin pads with a fabric hinge between that could be locked into an L shape by snapping straps that extended from the four corners. Camping had changed from the heavy canvas and cots Anna remembered from when she was very small.

  She watched Jenny cross the sand to the visitors’ camp. Jenny was wide hipped with long strong legs. Muscles in her calves bunched as she stepped over the uneven ground. Her shoulders were square and her arms brown from working in the sun, biceps well defined. Jenny moved with the ease and grace of a warrior who had vanquished the invaders and returned to tend the land.

  Physical strength had never been high on Anna’s priority list. Her work had demanded the ability to organize and focus. A stage manager’s greatest asset was the gift of paying attention at all times and to all things so none of the thousands of threads that must be woven together to create the director’s vision was lost, late, or broken.

  Zachary, her husband, tall as he was, was not a strong man. He was willowy, slender, and supple, with long fingers that could speak as eloquently as most men’s tongues.