The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel

by Nevada Barr

  Still crouched over the corpse as if she might devour it, Anna looked away.

  Panties—even used panties—were a terrible temptation. A woman wearing panties was braver than a woman with a bare bottom. Panties would protect vulnerable places from the incursion of grit. All in all, panties would be a fine and wonderful addition to her life.

  Anna worked the shorts down to the corpse’s knees, then carefully tugged the white cotton Hanes back into place. Kay would meet her maker, if there was such a thing, with at least a semblance of human dignity.

  Kay repaid the kindness. As Anna rolled her body onto its hip to make the final adjustment, the outflung arm, half buried during the frenzied excavation, flipped over and exposed itself.

  Kay was wearing a watch, a cheap digital Timex, the kind that can be bought at Walmart for less than twenty dollars. It was working just fine. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” Anna said. “Hey, Molly,” she called up the spout of her bottle, “it’s Wednesday, July twelfth, three twenty-six P.M.”

  With teeth and fingertips, Anna released the watch from Kay’s person and buckled the stiff plastic band around her own wrist. Arm bent at the elbow in the standard pose of the time reader, she marveled at the confidence this small machine gave her. She wasn’t anywhere or anywhen, lost in a timeless limbo of days and drugs; she was right here on Wednesday at 3:27 P.M. Time mattered, every precious passing minute of it mattered. When all was said and done, time was all anybody really had. X amount of time between cradle and grave. The theft of it was the theft of life; the gift of it, more precious than anything on earth.

  Watching the number in the last tiny digital readout window morph from seven to eight, Anna wondered how much time she had left. Allowing herself another swallow of water, she waited to see if she could feel the drug touching her insides. Maybe. Maybe when Monster Man topped it off the previous night he’d forgotten to add more of the knockout drug. Maybe it wasn’t as potent as it had been. Maybe it would be safe to drink more of it. Maybe she was just trying to rationalize drinking more. Anna felt as if she could drain the whole of Lake Powell in a couple of gulps and still be thirsty.

  Whatever the drug was, it made her groggy. The night before she’d lost control of her bladder and then passed out. Rufies, the date rape drug? Possible. Her memory was compromised, that was for sure. Chloral hydrate? Downers? Sleeping pills? Anna’s money, had she had any, would have been on the date rape drug. Not that it mattered. She must drink or die.

  She didn’t know how long the drugged water had kept her unconscious. Tomorrow, with the fabulous watch, she would know. Then she could imagine all the things that might have been done to her while she was out. More fun to be had with her brain. Unless she didn’t have a tomorrow in her future.

  How much time did she have?

  How should she spend it?

  If you were going to die tomorrow—or tonight—what would you do? That question was a fairly standard party icebreaker. Anna had never had an answer for it. Everything and nothing. Now that she was faced with it, without a drink in her hand and a belief she had all the time in the world, she knew what she wanted most right at this minute. She wanted to get dressed.

  Awkwardly, but with significantly less discomfort than she’d suffered before she’d fashioned her sling, Anna finished getting Kay’s shorts off, dragged up her own legs, and snapped around her middle. The cutoffs were too big. Without the leather belt they hung dangerously low on her narrow hips. Still inspired by success, she laid the bra on the sand and tied the strings in square knots, then eased the loops over her head.

  The bikini top hung more like a bib than a bathing suit. Anna didn’t care. She had clothes on, just like a real person. It would have been nicer if they hadn’t been encrusted with sand and skinned off a dead woman, but being grateful for what she had was getting easier every minute.

  The next hour was spent reinterring the corpse. Anna wanted it buried deep enough that the flies and the stink would leave her jar. Every fifteen minutes—Anna knew the time because, in an ecstasy of knowledge, she checked the watch every few minutes—she allowed herself a careful mouthful of water. These dribs and drabs did nothing to quiet the grate of thirst, but she was afraid to take in any more.

  At 4:49 P.M. on Wednesday, July 12, 1995, the reburial of the murdered woman known as Kay was successfully completed. The flies left as they had arrived, first a scout or two, then the lot of them. The small part of the day when a globule of sunlight made it down into the bottom of the jar had come and was nearly gone. The golden lozenge was high on the curving wall, below where the neck crooked.

  Anna watched it move incrementally up, striking beautiful tones of color from the striated layers. In New York, in the theater, she’d given the natural world little thought beyond the rats in the subway, the fall colors on the trees in Central Park, and the fresh flowers in the corner grocery stores.

  The mean streets, she thought idly, feeling the drug in her, strong, but not yet strong enough to take her away. Streets could be mean, cities romantic or dangerous, deadly or ugly. That which people made with their hands absorbed human emotions, radiated them back.

  Nature, she realized, was indifferent.

  Anna thought of Shakespeare and Johnson, Edna and Emily, Jane and Anne, Ibsen and Albee, Simon and Molière, writers and poets whose winds raged, seas grew sullen, and a thousand other emotions rode in on the tides of their imaginations.

  The truth was, humans needed the forces of nature to be invested with emotion because they could not bear the fact that there was something that did not give a flying fuck about them. Anna found this idea comforting. Indifference was clean and honest. Having been begrimed by that which was human, she felt safety in that which was not.

  The last sliver of light slipped away, the final beam disappearing over the lip like the tail of a lizard. Anna’s thoughts tumbled down into the shadows where her body remained.

  Night was coming and, with it, Monster Man with his thigh-carving equipment.

  She decided she would take the chance and eat the other sandwich he’d left. If, indeed, the second waxed-paper package was a sandwich and not the fingers of children or dog turds. Keeping up her strength was important.

  She would eat, then drink what she had to, but she swore to herself that she would do whatever it took to stay awake.

  TWELVE

  As Jenny hacked haphazardly through three stalks of celery, it occurred to her that she liked being alone, but only in small increments. Having a house to herself for a few hours was a luxury. Having to rattle around by herself twenty-four hours a day was a drag.

  Anna Pigeon couldn’t cook, and she wasn’t a good trencherman—or was it trencherwoman?—but she was great with a knife, didn’t mind dicing and slicing, and, when she could be lured out of her room and into conversation, was good company. Like a soldier in an old movie, Anna wanted to stick with name, rank, and serial number. Jenny’d had to work at it even to get her curriculum vitae.

  Anna had a BA in theater arts, did not sing, dance, or act, and had no interest in doing so. After college, she’d started out as a set carpenter. In her late twenties, she moved to assistant stage manager at an Off-Broadway theater she seemed to think Jenny should have heard of. Jenny assumed, but was not sure, this was a promotion. Several years before Anna came to Lake Powell she’d been promoted to stage manager. The money wasn’t bad, she said. That surprised Jenny. She’d been under the impression that everybody in theater who wasn’t on Broadway or the West End was starving.

  Other than the job litany, Anna didn’t open up.

  “Open up,” Jenny mocked herself. “I am becoming a moron,” she announced to the celery as she swept it from the cutting board into a pale green Melmac bowl with a burn trough on the edge where some jerk had used it as an ashtray.

  “Open up” was one of a plethora of canned phrases that had flopped into Jenny’s vocabulary like a smelly old sardine to keep company with “closure” and “r
ebirth,” getting in touch with inner children, and the rest of the language of self-absorption. Jenny was fluent in psychobabble. Psychologists had made large sums of money trying to help her pin down the precise abuse she had suffered as a very small child—too small to remember it, or so traumatized she blocked it, naturally—that could explain why she didn’t like men.

  It was all on her own, without a shrink in attendance or a self-help book in sight, that she’d realized she did like men. She just liked women better. Men were best in a bar fight or when heavy objects needed to be moved from point A to point B. Should she ever become a choir director she would want men to sing the bass parts, and maybe the tenor, though she supposed women could be found for that if one looked hard enough.

  Men looked better than women in business suits. She’d gotten a lot of argument on that issue but held to her beliefs. Business suits were designed to make the wearer look important, imposing, rather like a powerful block of pin-striped cement with a stick up its ass.

  This was not a good look for women.

  Men won in contests of strength, in business-suit modeling, and when auditioning for Philip II in Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos. For nearly everything else, Jenny preferred women.

  Women, plural. Sighing, she glopped peanut butter onto the celery, silently declaring it a salad. In her experience lesbians, more than most people, were good and true and honest. They wanted partners, trust, cats, turkey-baster babies, and mortgages.

  Grabbing the big spoon from the peanut butter jar, she walked toward the front door and the porch picnic table. Womanizer, Romeo, Casanova, tomcat, playboy, ladies’ man, lady-killer, swinging dick—there were a lot of roguish, obliquely charming terms for men who just loved the chase and the sex.

  There were only a couple she could think of for women of that ilk. Nymphomaniac, the implied insanity right there in the title. Whore, everything implied in the title and none of it vaguely charming or flattering.

  Jenny spooned a crunchy, creamy gob into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Maybe not “swinging dick.” That was more a military thing and, now that she was considering it, made no sense. It had to be a size thing, she decided. To suggest a pendant was swinging was to suggest it had length and heft. “Bobbing dicks,” for instance, would put one in mind of short silly things like Ping-Pong balls bobbing about in a bucket. “Dangling” dicks also lacked the seriousness men felt their penises deserved. Hanging dicks suggested a lack of life or movement.

  At one time Dangling Rope was called Hanging Rope because, early on, boaters had seen a rope hanging down a cliff near some possibly prehistoric steps pecked into the rock. The NPS did not have size or heft issues. Hanging Rope was too like a lynching party. They’d changed it to Dangling. Dangling was happy-go-lucky.

  Leaning back against the window of her apartment, the table snugged against the wall so a backless bench might be made tolerable, she crunched her dinner and enjoyed the pellucid light sifting from green to gray to blue over the far rim of the canyon. The first star—not the first to show itself, but the first to greet Jenny—did not so much pierce the sky as gently enhance it; no twinkle, all glow.

  The second week Anna Pigeon had been in Dangling Rope, Jenny decided to see if she was seducible. She hadn’t decided whether she wanted to seduce her or not, but, as a person of gay consequences, she had learned it was politic to test the waters before bringing flowers and candy. Regardless of how lush and tempting the meadow, a girl had to tread carefully. Land mines were everywhere.

  Some gay women gave off a vibe. Lots didn’t. More “straight” women than anyone not a sexual adventuress would guess wanted to be seduced now and again. Sort of like taking Russian folklore as an elective, Jenny surmised; a breadth class, a taste of another culture.

  Jenny had plied Anna with red wine and rapt attention and, at the end of the evening, still hadn’t a clue as to which way the woman’s gate swung.

  The salad was gone. Jenny wriggled from behind the table and, bowl in hand, looked over the edge of the porch and hissed.

  “Hey Pinky Winky, I know you’re there,” she called into the greater darkness between her porch and that of Regis and Bethy. There was no answering stir from their resident rattlesnake.

  Anna had been captivated by the snake. At first she’d been taken aback that there were five different species of rattlesnakes in the lake’s environs. Pinky was special; she was a midget rattlesnake, her body smaller than that of most rattlesnakes and of a lovely rose pink color, perfect for blending into the desert floor.

  “Won’t even rattle for me?” Jenny asked. After a breath of silence she took her bowl into the kitchen, exchanged it for a bottle of Buckeye, and returned to the velvet of the night. This time she perched on the table, her feet on the bench.

  Days in the desert were grand, but nothing compared to the nights. Had the brass been amenable, and the poop visible, Jenny would have started her day at sunset. Anna Pigeon loved the dark—that, at least, Jenny learned the night of her sexual reconnaissance. Jenny supposed a theater person would have to. After the third glass of wine—and given Anna’s size, Jenny half expected her to pass out on the couch at any moment—Anna volunteered that one of the things she loved about theater was that during rehearsal or a performance, she knew precisely where she, and everyone else, belonged, knew what each person’s job was and where they would, or should, be at any given moment. Glen Canyon, she said, made her feel like she’d fallen out of bed and woken up on Mars. Evidently finding this a breach of her personal code of nothing personal, Anna had then bowed like an arthritic old earl and took herself off to bed.

  “Shoot,” Jenny whispered, shaking her head. She was obsessing. Not just thinking about another woman, obsessing. Having done both, she knew the difference. A hollow creeping fog of addictive excitement was rising. The Adafaire Mason disaster had been years ago, but Jenny never forgot the symptoms: hyperawareness, overweening curiosity, and constant speculation about anything concerning, or any aspect of, the Subject. That was the court-appointed shrink’s list, anyway.

  At the time she’d thought it absurd. Maybe these many years later those visits were paying off. Since she recognized the symptoms, theoretically, she could avert the disaster. Theoretically. She drained the beer. Anna was gone. Surely obsessing on a missing person couldn’t end badly.

  “Hsst. Pinky,” she tried again, but the snake said nothing.

  She managed an entire shower and had nearly completed brushing her teeth without once thinking of the Subject. Mostly, she managed it by worrying obsessively about the possibility her obsessive tendencies had returned, then excusing them due to the Subject’s departure for parts unknown.

  “Mea culpa, mea culpa, let’s blame me, let’s blame me,” she sang to the tune of “Frère Jacques” as she knelt naked on the rug in front of the cabinet beneath the sink. Singing, she’d discovered, was the only effective measure one could take to shut out unwanted thoughts.

  Over the course of the evening she’d swilled sufficient amounts of beer that if she didn’t find some aspirin and wash two or three down with a quart of water, she was sure to wake up in the middle of the night with a headache. Her hangovers were precocious things and could seldom wait till morning. She opened the cupboard door and started to reach in.

  Anna Pigeon’s stuff was still there. Jenny’s belongings were neatly arrayed on the top shelf. Anna, as the late arrival, had been relegated to the bottom.

  The unhealthy excitement built. This was a treasure trove for a woman who was obsessing. Anna is gone, she told herself. No harm, no foul. Getting comfortable, she crossed her legs, feet soles up on opposite thighs. Full lotus had been easy for her since she was teeny tiny.

  The thrill was coursing through her, making her feel half scared, half excited; the way she felt when she met a new woman or nearly got run off the road by a Mack truck. Instead of leaning down and looking into the floor-level shelf, as she’d done when she’d first noticed it wasn’t cleared out, Jen
ny reached in blind, like a child putting its hand into a grab box at a county fair.

  She knew it would serve her right if there was a nest of black widow spiders in the cupboard, but she didn’t stop. The first prize she grabbed and pulled into the light of the bathroom bulb was a blue plastic Secret solid deodorant dispenser. Jenny set it carefully to the side of the frayed bath mat that served as her bathroom rug. Next was a box of tampons, three-quarters full, then a bottle of Xanax, dental floss, a hairbrush with rubber bands secured around the plastic handle, a tube of ChapStick, a box of Q-tips, toothpaste, hand lotion, shampoo, crème rinse, nail clippers, birth control pills, and an emery board.

  Jenny ran her hands over the aged wood of the shelf but found nothing else.

  The Subject’s items were lined up like soldiers along the edge of the rug.

  Tampons.

  Xanax.

  Hairbrush.

  Birth control pills.

  These were not things a woman forgot, not things she would leave behind.

  Jenny’s illicit frisson of excitement took on a sharper edge.

  THIRTEEN

  The 747 landed without a bump. Anna stood in the aisle with the solid clot of humanity clutching bags to their chests or jostling to drag luggage down from the overhead bins so as not to spend a moment more than necessary on board.

  The flight was a blur, as was the Martian landscape of Glen Canyon, and the beautiful deadly jar. All she knew or wanted to know was that she was free and safe and almost home.

  The clot began to break up, people bleeding out of the plane’s hatch. Anna had no luggage, no purse, no glossy magazine. Her hands were empty, and she felt she flowed rather than shuffled as row after row of blue upholstered seats passed in her peripheral vision. The tube connecting the airplane to the terminal was round, jointed like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, and, like a vacuum, it hoovered Anna up. She was almost flying. Molly would be waiting for her.