by Nevada Barr
Doug Schneider smiled grimly. Doug Schneider always smiled grimly. Jenny guessed it was probably the same smile he used when watching lambs play or Donald Duck cartoons.
“We’ll need to do a stakeout,” Schneider said.
“Sure,” Steve replied easily. “Let’s stake out in the fancy dining room overlooking the bay and get something to eat.”
Doug Schneider’s smile grew grimmer. When he raised his eyes and caught Jenny watching his reflection in the rearview mirror, she winked at him. He blinked as if she’d spit in his eye. Anna elbowed her in the ribs but didn’t look at her. Not good to be giggling girls at the district ranger’s expense.
“Who’s the boat rented to?” Steve asked.
“The guy that signed the check was a Trey Benton out of Fort Collins, Colorado. I got hold of his mother. She said he and a bunch of his buddies from a paintball club sold tickets on campus to raise the money for the boat. Kids could buy in either for one week or both. Other than her son and his best friend, an engineering student named Leo Sackamoto, she didn’t know who had bought into the deal.”
“That’s just nifty,” Steve said. “The third man could have cleared out by now. We got a dead girl on the plateau. We got the two boys dead in the slot. Pretty little line of corpses from point A to point B. The third kid, the one we assume stayed alive long enough to mess with Anna, is unaccounted for.”
“Unsub three looks good for it,” Doug said.
The cop-speak sounded silly to Jenny. It was just wrong to hear park rangers say “the perp” or “scenario” or “unsub.” It was like hearing small boys practicing saying “fuck,” like they were pretending to be bigger or tougher or more experienced than they were.
“I guess he’d look good for it if we could see him,” Steve said.
At the end of hour two at the restaurant, the rangers ran out of speculation and small talk. In their capacity as potential witnesses, females, seasonals, and subordinates, neither Jenny nor Anna had the energy to speak. At least Jenny hadn’t. Anna might have been keeping quiet for her own reasons. It was Jenny who broke the last dragging silence in over an hour of dragging silences.
“There it is,” she said, pointing out the window toward Wahweap’s mooring area. A majority of the boats on the lake did not dock but tied up to buoys and used smaller runabouts or skiffs to get to shore.
The houseboat was silhouetted against water turned silver with evening. The stone-and-sand landscape beyond had the dull glow of antique gold. Square-bowed and riding low, the houseboat drove a wide vee through the molten water.
“Vamos,” Steve said. “We don’t want anybody scattering before you girls get a chance to look at their shining faces.”
From another source Jenny might have taken umbrage at the “girls.” From Steve Gluck, she didn’t. He was an equal-opportunity kind of guy and often called visiting mucky-mucks he was shepherding around “you boys.” Jenny sensed that, in some indefinable way, Steve felt older than all other living humans.
Doug Schneider pulled up next to the houseboat as Steve threw the bumpers over the side to cushion the hulls from one another. Jenny leaped neatly over the gunwale onto the party boat and began lashing the NPS boat to the houseboat’s cleats.
Music played loud. Their arrival didn’t even make a dent in the chatter and laughter of the kids on board.
“Hey, man, it’s Smokey the Bear,” someone called down from the upper deck. “Where’s your Smokey Bear hat, Ranger Rick?”
Jenny stepped back to see who was doing the talking, caught her heel on a battered boogie board, and fell on her ass in an undignified fashion. Pratfalls were clearly considered high comedy by this stratum of society. The entire upper deck burst into raucous laughter. Someone shouted, “Not Ranger Rick, Ranger Rita!” and “Ranger Grace,” and more hilarity was enjoyed by all.
Having washed aboard on the gale of laughter, Anna held out her hand to help Jenny to her feet. Pretending not to see it, Jenny rose in one smooth motion. It was bad enough to make a fool of herself in front of people whose shit she had hauled. To make a fool of herself in front of Anna made her want to send each and every über-rich spoiled kid to sleep with the fishes. Instead of giving in to this tempting tide of pique, she made herself laugh. Helpless adult anger would delight the drunken little sots. She refused to give them that pleasure.
Doug and Steve followed them on board, and the partiers crowded back into the cabin to make room. The Wahweap district ranger gave Jenny an irritated scowl as he stepped around her. Probably feeling she’d shamed the entire Park Service by landing on her rump.
Schneider stepped to the center of the small deck in the stern and held his hands up for quiet. “No one is to leave this boat,” he ordered in a voice that had been born to shout orders to the troops from horseback.
For a second the gabble faded to a dull roar, and Jenny thought Doug had the buggers cowed. She was wrong.
“Oooh,” came a taunt. “Hey, we better not leave town or the sheriff will shoot us!”
“Who shot the sheriff?” several girls sang and leaned over the rail from the upper deck, breasts spilling from tiny bikini tops.
“He’s kinda cute.”
Doug Schneider’s hard-boned face was getting harder, his thin-line lips thinner. If he could have gotten away with it, Jenny didn’t doubt that he would have pulled his gun and fired it into the air to get their attention.
Steve ambled into the space where Schneider was affixed like a land mine waiting to be stepped on. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the box of drunken kids wearily. Scratching his head the way Jenny’d seen him do so many times over the years, pushing his ball cap back, exposing a slightly receding hairline, he said quietly, “We got us a couple of dead bodies. We think they might be friends of yours.”
Those in the front lines who heard Steve’s words passed them back. Quiet and attention flowed out from the stern until it had snuffed the jeering and the drunken fun from the entire boat.
When the transformation was complete, Steve fumbled in the left breast pocket of his shirt, saying, “We’d sure appreciate if you guys could give us a hand with identifying them so we can get hold of their folks.” He fished out a packet of Polaroid snapshots.
“These were taken postmortem and they’re going to be pretty hard for some of you to look at, but I’m asking you to try.”
A girl in her very early twenties, if that, stepped out from the wall of flesh that had formed outside the sliding patio doors to the cabin.
“How do you want us to do this, Officer?” she asked with complete sobriety.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” Jenny murmured to Anna.
Anna nodded. “Twenty years and twenty pounds ago he’d have been a great Marc Antony.”
“Ouch,” Jenny said.
“What?” Anna looked mildly confused. “Marc Antony wasn’t old and fat,” she said matter-of-factly.
Theater people were more pragmatic than Jenny would have thought. Maybe one had to see oneself realistically before she could know what had to be done to play someone else with any insight. As good an actor as he was, Brian Dennehy would probably be wasting his time auditioning for the part of Tinker Bell.
“Are you okay with this?” Jenny asked Anna.
“Yup.”
“Are you scared?”
“Nope.”
“Am I annoying you?”
“Is that a trick question?”
Jenny smiled both to herself and her housemate.
“Shall we?” Jenny asked. She and Anna moved apart and began amiably circulating through the boaters as they’d been instructed to during the ride out, making no challenges, asking no questions, just searching faces. Anna was looking for the third man who’d been present during the assault on Kay. Jenny was just looking, hoping something she saw—or something she failed to see—would trigger a flash of brilliance. At this point, even a spark would be reassuring.
The high spirits, or imitation thereof, le
ached from the gathering by Steve Gluck’s plea for assistance, the milling kids looked more like kids, tired sunburned kids who’d eaten too much, drunk too much, and secretly wanted someone to order them to go to bed early. Their densely packed bodies mumbled and shifted or asked questions Jenny pretended not to know the answers to as she swam through the human pond. She saw kids fondling each other in a desultory way. She saw kids smoking dope and shooting her challenging glances as if she were DEA and not NPS. She saw one kid puking over the rail. She saw kids who looked vaguely familiar. She didn’t see anything that helped sort out the quagmire that had culminated in the deaths of three young people and the scarring of Anna Pigeon.
Having stared into every bleary-eyed face she could find, she stopped mingling at the stern end of the upper deck and rested her forearms on the rail, looking over the now dark water to the lights of Wahweap. Jim and Steve were no longer in sight. Undoubtedly working their way through the crowded cabin and foredeck.
After a few minutes, Anna came and leaned beside her. “Anything?” Jenny asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
For a moment they stood without speaking. With what sounded like a contented sigh Anna said, “Dark is very dark out in the wilds. Dark is safe here. In the city, at night, if you find yourself alone in the dark—on an empty street or in the hall of a building—that’s when your antennae are out. There’s safety in light and crowds in a city. Out here, it’s just the opposite. Dark is good. Alone is safest.”
“Unless you’re in a solution hole,” Jenny said and immediately wished she’d bitten her tongue off. Why on earth had she felt the need to drag out Anna’s nightmare and shove it in her face? It was Anna saying, “Alone is safest,” she realized. The words had shut Jenny out.
Fortunately Anna seemed unfazed by her lack of sensitivity.
“Even in the jar. I was trapped, sure, but alone was safest. Darkness was my friend.”
Jenny bumped shoulders with Anna to let her know, safest or not, she was not alone. Anna returned the pressure, and they stood in the velvety night in companionable silence, looking over the water until Steve stepped out on the stern deck and waved them down.
Doug was in his boat by the time they squeezed and excused their way down the narrow stairs and through the main cabin.
“Any luck?” Steve asked as they came aft to meet him.
“Nothing,” Anna said.
“Nada,” Jenny added. “How’d you guys do?”
“Three positive I.Ds,” Steve said. “Not bad for an hour’s work. Get the lines, would you?” he asked, then stepped over the space between the two boats and jumped heavily on deck. Jenny made short work of loosing the bow and stern lines from where she’d secured them. This done she followed him, then turned to make sure Anna was coming.
She wasn’t. She was standing in the houseboat’s stern staring at the deck, a look of concern on her face.
Jenny held the boats together while Steve stowed the lines. “Anna?”
Anna shook her head as if answering a question she asked herself, then stepped over the gunwales and into the district ranger’s boat. He chugged away at little better than idle speed. Jenny pulled up the bumpers. Anna seemed distracted. Jenny fought down the desire to pester her with any more uninvited concern. Still, she watched her from the corners of her eyes, worried that the visit to the houseboat had upset her more than she was willing to admit.
Doug piloted the boat up and docked with military precision. A feat anyone could perform on still water, Jenny observed, but she kept her petty observation to herself. Anna was first off the boat. She didn’t stay to tie lines to cleats or even say where she was going. She trotted to the shore end of the NPS dock and stopped. Hand on hips, she appeared to be searching the beach. The grounds of the hotel and marina were well lit—tastefully, Jenny admitted, but up to OSHA standards.
Anna jumped from the end of the dock and jogged away from the marina toward the dark of a ravine that cut up from the lake toward the employee housing near the road.
“Where’s she running off to?” Steve asked.
“Beats me,” Jenny said, “but I’m going to find out.”
Jenny traversed the dock and was partway down the beach. Anna had stopped at the ravine. Hearing Jenny’s approach, she looked up.
“Jenny,” she called. “Come take a look at this.”
Hoping it wasn’t anything too grisly, Jenny broke into a jog. Anna was staring into a clump of sage bushes. As Jenny reached her she pointed into the shadows beneath.
“Is that the boogie board that caused the comic interlude during our entrance?” she asked.
It was—and there were tracks leading away from it up the ravine toward the highway.
“Damn,” Jenny whispered.
Unsub three had jumped ship.
FORTY-TWO
The boy who escaped the houseboat on the boogie board was found two days later smashed at the bottom of an escarpment below Glen Canyon Dam. There were no signs of violence on the body that couldn’t be accounted for by a sixty-foot dive onto rocks.
Anna and Jenny were again called to look at a corpse. Anna recognized the boy as the sandy-haired kid with acne who had been watching the other two as they assaulted Kay. Jenny recognized him from the grotto when the party boat was anchored there. His death was ruled a suicide.
“Kay” was Katherine Nelson from Durango, Colorado, a sophomore at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. The tattooed boy was Caleb Fieldhouse. The body Jenny recognized from the slot canyon belonged to Adam Toleodano. The suicide was Jason Mannings. Fieldhouse and Mannings were juniors at Colorado State. Toleodano was a high school friend of Fieldhouse.
According to Steve, Kay and the suicide had not known the other two prior to the trip to Lake Powell. Fieldhouse and Toleodano had a history of being bad boys and getting away with it because they were college students, white boys from decent families.
Katherine Nelson died from blunt trauma to the head. Bruising suggested she was alive when she’d been tumbled into the solution hole and died shortly thereafter. Caleb and Adam died of drowning, probably brought on by hypothermia. There were no marks of violence on either of the bodies.
As all three of the perpetrators were dead, no charges were filed.
The predominant belief regarding the suicide was that, after participating in the murder of Katherine Nelson, and possibly the deaths of the other two boys, fear of exposure, guilt, or fear of prison had driven Jason Mannings to take his own life.
Radio traffic had alerted Regis and he had met them at the dock the night they’d visited the party boat in Wahweap. At the viewing of the suicide, he backed up Jenny’s statement that the dead boy was in the grotto and with the party on the houseboat. After overhearing Jason Mannings making vicious remarks to two of the college girls when the houseboat was tied up at Dangling Rope, Regis had followed the boat back to the grotto in Panther Canyon and spoken to the kid.
Anna had admitted to reburying Kay. It was suggested that perhaps it was she who buried her first in a state of confusion and thus knew precisely where the body was. As for the drugged water, there was no proof of that. No trace of the sandwiches was found. The clothes boxed and addressed to Molly? Well, everyone knew Anna had not been happy. Perhaps she had decided to go home, then changed her mind, and due to the ensuing trauma forgotten. Anna had never told law enforcement about the word WHORE carved on her thigh and was glad she hadn’t. It probably would have been passed off as the self-cutting of a neurotic woman.
There was a collective sigh of relief when the nasty little mysteries were put in the box labeled THINGS DONE WHILE ANNA WAS NOT IN HER RIGHT MIND.
Everything tied up neatly. Crime didn’t pay. There was no honor among thieves. God was back in his heaven and all was again right in the world.
The questions bothered Anna, as they did Jenny, but the need for answers was subsumed by relief that the bad guys were dead and the desire to put the horror
in the past. Anna’s view of life, the shattered kaleidoscope with cutting edges and chasing colors, that had formed after Zach’s death, and re-formed as the fragile nature of her physical self was repeatedly challenged, began to change yet again.
Each day she rose early and ran the mile circuit around the upthrust of rock. To her amazement, most mornings Bethy Candor ran with her. Evenings she was not on the lake with Jenny, she worked out on the weights in the maintenance shed. When Jim wasn’t on duty, he worked with her. As often as not, Bethy joined them.
Within a couple of weeks, despite the temperature having ratcheted up from a cool ninety-two in July to a hundred degrees in the heat of August, if she took it at a slow jog, Anna could run the circuit twice without stopping to walk. Her arms built strength and muscle. A day of pounding over rough water or hauling heavy cans of human dung no longer left her exhausted.
Bethy began to lose weight. It melted away as if she were made of butter and dared run in the sunlight. Anna took pleasure and pride in that as well, though she knew it was not her doing.
As she grew thinner, Bethy grew bolder. When Anna first arrived at Dangling Rope, Bethy had seemed little more than a scuttling waitress, painfully shy, afraid of her own shadow and terrified of the two maintenance seasonals, Gil and Dennis. Anna guessed she’d been neither; she’d been ashamed of how she looked. Regis had exacerbated the situation with barbed remarks about the size of her derriere.
Anna’d forgotten that. Her first weeks at Lake Powell she’d been self-involved to the point of being deaf, dumb, and blind. Compared to her personal drama, those around her seemed staggeringly unimportant. With food, strength, and freedom from the fear a monster waited around the next bend, Anna came out of her self-imposed isolation.
