The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel

by Nevada Barr

  The Rope was no longer going to enjoy the easy camaraderie it once had.

  At the far end of the housing area, soundless as an apparition, Anna appeared.

  Lost in thoughts of her, for an instant Jenny believed she had conjured her. Anna ghosted between the two duplexes forming the southwest corner of the square, walking as quietly as cats were supposed to. “Hey, Anna,” Jenny said lest she startle her. “It’s me.”

  “I saw you,” Anna replied. She came down the concrete walk and sat on the bench, leaning her back against the table’s edge, facing away from Jenny.

  Jenny wondered if it was a rebuff. No, she decided, if Anna didn’t want to be with her, she would have gone straight inside. “Did you get hold of your sister?” she asked.

  “She thinks I should come back to New York.”

  “You probably should,” Jenny said, proud of herself for putting Anna’s well-being before her desire for her company.

  “Yeah,” Anna said. Then, “Do you know who took my things? My uniforms, clothes, all that?”

  “Not a clue,” Jenny said, “but that’s why we didn’t do a search. It looked like you’d cleared out.”

  “Do you think that’s why they were taken? So nobody would come looking for me?”

  “That’s what I think.” Jenny put added stress on the I. Steve Gluck and the chief ranger didn’t buy that there was that much plot afoot. Kay’s corpse and the mishmash of tracks on the plateau convinced them that there were three attackers, as Anna had said. They accepted her statement that they were college-age boys. These facts made sense. That three criminal opportunists were connected to the disappearance of Anna’s belongings, miles away in distance and elevation, did not. Andrew Madden, at least, clung to the hope that Anna had cleared out her things, then coincidentally—or for personal reasons—met up with the men who’d killed Kay.

  Jim Levitt—it was he who had carried the law enforcement gossip from Andrew’s office to Jenny’s ears—said there was some disagreement between Andrew and Steve as to whether Anna had been visited in the hole or merely been dumped there to die. The canteen she’d insisted contained drugged water was empty, and there was no evidence of any waxed paper, pudding containers, or paper bags to back up her story about the food.

  Anna caught the emphasis on I. “You believe the monster took my things. Who doesn’t?”

  Jenny told her part of what Jim had said. “They aren’t discounting the possibility that you knew Kay and went to meet her that day.”

  Anna was silent so long Jenny worried she’d dropped back into that fugue state she’d suffered when Regis popped out of her own personal rabbit hole and began berating her for skunking him.

  “Want a beer?” Jenny asked helpfully.

  Anna didn’t reply. Jenny stubbed out her umpteenth cigarette, scooted off the table, and went inside. In less than three minutes she was back on the porch, two bottles of Tecate hanging by their necks from the fingers of her left hand. Buddy was tucked into the crook of her right arm.

  “Medicinal restoratives,” she said as she sat beside Anna on the bench and put the bottles between them.

  As Jenny settled the sleepy skunk kit on Anna’s lap, the back of her hand touched the other woman’s thigh. Anna flinched as if she’d been poked with a hot iron.

  Jenny didn’t know if it was her touch, the fact of being touched, or the cuts. She didn’t ask, just inched farther away on the bench as she pulled her hands back, in case Anna needed more space.

  “Then they think I also knew the boys that were getting ready to rape Kay?”

  Jenny didn’t have ready words to answer this question. According to Jim it had been posited that either both Anna and Kay knew the boys and a day of fun had gone bad, or possibly only Anna knew the boys and they had turned on her when Kay was killed. As Jenny was searching for a way to say it that would not destroy the hearer, Ms. Pigeon figured it out.

  “They think I killed Kay and made up the stuff about boys to cover up the murder?” The outrage in her voice was a balm to Jenny’s ears. In anger was strength. She realized she’d been bracing herself for hopeless despair.

  “They don’t think that,” Jenny said. “It’s just something they have to consider, Jim says.”

  “I was alive, Kay was dead,” Anna said after a time. “I hit Regis and left him—”

  “And didn’t mention that fact for quite some time,” Jenny added.

  “Right.”

  “For no apparent reason, you climbed a miserable dangerous trail in the heat of the day with no food or water to speak of.”

  “Right. Why would I do that if I wasn’t expecting to meet someone?” Anna asked.

  “Because you’re a greenhorn, a citified, ignorant fool,” Jenny suggested, a smile in her voice.

  “Right,” Anna agreed. “Start a list. We demand drinking fountains on backcountry trails. Any theories on how I ended up in the bottom of the hole with a dislocated shoulder and a ladder coiled up neatly beside the jar’s mouth where I couldn’t even see it?”

  “Actually there are,” Jenny admitted.

  “You’re kidding!” Anna exploded, rising half off the planks of the bench.

  “Don’t upset Buddy,” Jenny cautioned. “I don’t want to be washing in tomato juice for the next week.”

  Anna settled back. Night had come in earnest. Jenny could just see her housemate’s outline. Lack of vision honed her other senses, and she breathed in the faint plumeria smell of shampoo and a hint of childhood innocence from the Jergens lotion Anna used. Cotton, washed and worn for so many years it was as soft as old flannel, whispered against the rough wood when Anna moved. The scents and sounds were familiar, comforting. Not surprising, given the fact that most of it belonged to Jenny. A trip to La Boutique Target would be necessary as soon as possible.

  “And why, pray tell,” Anna asked icily, “do the Powers That Be think I was in the jar and the ladder was not?”

  Jenny took a breath to repeat what Jim had gleaned from the meeting in Andrew’s office and conversations to and from Wahweap on Steve’s boat.

  “No, wait, let me,” Anna said bitterly. “A life in the theater should make fiction my forte. Lying my second language. I kill Kay, bury her, climb out via the nifty boat ladders, coil the rope ladders up, and store them by the rock. Then I creep back to peek down the throat of the jar to admire my handiwork, slip, and fall in, banging my head and hurting my shoulder in the process.”

  Jenny was impressed. “In a nutshell,” she said and, “Stranger things have happened.”

  “They sure as hell did,” Anna grumbled.

  “College-age boys,” Jenny mused. “We’ve got Heckle and Jeckle on tap—Gil and Dennis, the maintenance seasonals,” she added for Anna’s benefit. “Three Hispanic guys about the right age work at the marina. There’s more up and down the lake working seasonal for us or concessions. Then of course there are a zillion party boats vomiting über-rich teens and twenty-somethings onto the beaches daily.”

  “I don’t suppose they bothered to wonder why I would choose a big flat rocky chunk of nowhere for a rendezvous with boys ten years my junior, or why any woman would agree to meet me there.”

  “Kay and or the boys might have driven out to Hole-in-the-Rock Road from Escalante. The quickest way for you would be up that trail. They’re hoping to get an ID on Kay’s body. That should clear up a lot of things—where she was from, why she was here, what vehicles she owned.”

  “If she drove out from Escalante, where was her car?” Anna asked.

  “Maybe the rapist boys drove it away. Or maybe you hid it.” Jenny said.

  “This is a pretty pickle,” Anna said.

  Jenny laughed.

  “Would you roll me a cigarette?” Anna asked suddenly.

  “You don’t smoke,” Jenny said, oddly appalled by the request.

  “I didn’t think I did,” Anna said, “but it’s beginning to look like there’s nothing I won’t stoop to.”

  Jenny
was stung. Because Anna was under a lot of stress, and because Jenny was enamored of her, she let it pass, but she didn’t roll the cigarette.

  “Somebody murdered Pinky,” she said suddenly, having no idea why the thought popped into her head or out of her mouth.

  “The little rattlesnake?” Anna asked.

  “I found him under Regis and Bethy’s porch. His body had been laid out in a line. A nail—big, maybe six-penny or ten-penny—was driven through each end of his snaky body and into the dirt.”

  “Somebody crucified a snake,” Anna said flatly. “There is something I wouldn’t stoop to after all.”

  “He was under Regis’s porch,” Jenny said.

  “Regis found me in the solution hole.”

  “If what you told me is true, he lied about hearing you crying.”

  “What I said is true.” Anna’s voice was flat and cold.

  Jenny shuddered inwardly. “Sorry,” she said. Other than food and clothes the greatest gift she could give Anna was faith, utter and complete belief in her every word: If Anna said she saw pixies or skin walkers or flying saucers Jenny must believe.

  “I know you’re telling the truth,” Jenny said.

  “No you don’t,” Anna said. “Even I’m not sure what my truth is.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The pygmy rattlesnake was on Regis’s mind. On his desk were background checks he needed to review and file. At present there were few job openings. Seasonals were in place. A full-time district ranger for Dangling Rope was the only job pending. Given that the federal bureaucracy ground slower than the wheels of justice, he didn’t feel any urgency.

  By choice Regis had never been hunting or fishing. Madison, Wisconsin, was not exactly Mecca for members of the NRA; still, hunting was seen as a noble tradition and bass fishing almost a devotional pastime. There had been plenty of invitations. None had tempted him, not even for the “bonding experience” with other males, or proving of himself in some outdated blood ritual.

  Even as a kid he couldn’t imagine a more miserable pastime than freezing in the snow, sputtering in the rain, or baking in the sun to acquire something that could be bought at Kroger’s already gutted, butchered, filleted, and wrapped.

  Some things did need killing. Pinky Winky the snake had to be killed. What was Jenny’s deal with naming the thing? It was a wild animal. Less than a wild animal, it was a venomous snake. Having a poisonous reptile under the porch wasn’t cute, it was stupid. Snow White—the Disney animated version—had warped the minds of an entire generation of women. They thought the creatures of the forest would frolic on their skirts, dance with them. Forest creatures were more apt to spit and bite, in Regis’s experience.

  He did like the way snakes moved, water snakes through water, land snakes across land. No legs, no arms, not so much as a fin or a finger, yet they moved rapidly and with grace. The pygmy rattlesnake was a little thick and short for true gracefulness, but it moved well enough. Yet he killed it. Its death was such a nonevent. No more than wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it into the trash.

  His mother and grandfather didn’t value life, not this life anyway. They were devout, not just in church on Sunday, but Saturday night. As an only child and an only grandchild, Regis had gotten the full attention of their God. Not a particularly nice deity. He would never have dared say so, that was blasphemy. His grandfather’s God, as manifest by his grandfather, was all about control. The old man had money, scads of it, and doled it out to his daughter-in-law and grandson only when he deemed them worthy in the eyes of the all-seeing.

  There were the Rules. Abortion was murder. At eleven or twelve, he remembered a night foray to a liberal church and putting tiny white crosses all over the lawn to protest the fact they had a doctor as a member who worked with Family Planning. Regis told that story once to the horror of his college girlfriend and her roommate, but, in truth, it had been a hoot. They had even blacked their faces commando style. Black ops. He’d loved it.

  When his dad died at forty of a massive coronary, family and friends stood in a half circle around the casket at the viewing. His mother in her ecru suit, his father laid out in gray pinstripe. He was so lifelike. Everybody said so. At least he was more lifelike than his mother, until she broke down and wept.

  Regis didn’t cry. Old Mrs. Burman, the pastor’s wife, nearly smothered him in a great fat hug, crooning, “Let it out, let it out, there’s no shame in crying for your poppa.” Regis never did “let it out.” For years he kept thinking that one day, boom, the dam would break and all that repressed emotion would flood the world. In his early twenties it dawned on him that wasn’t going to happen. There was no repressed emotion. He’d liked his dad, but it just wasn’t that big a deal. He was alive, then he was dead. So what?

  He should have felt something.

  He should have felt something—even just a glimmer of something—when he killed the damn snake. When his and Bethy’s dog, Kippa, was killed he’d felt plenty. In a way it was good just to feel. He wished he could blow off the afternoon, take the Cub up and catch thermals or—and this would get him fired in a heartbeat—fly through Rainbow Arch.

  Putting his heels on the edge of the open bottom drawer of his metal desk, he tilted back in his chair and stared out the window. Headquarters was surrounded by a narrow belt of greenery. In keeping with the park ethic, mostly indigenous plants had been used. Mostly: Whoever designed it could not resist a few nice patches of grass, real, suburban, green, watered grass.

  The juxtaposition of this lush chlorophyll belt against hills that looked as bleached as bone left too long in the sun suited his mood. Rampant life smacked up against near death. He wished he dared leave the office and find that risk that had given him such a lovely illusion of life that day on the boat, the kid in the grotto. He had that rush when he dropped that ladder down the solution hole.

  The rest of that incident was a bit of a buzz kill.

  The midnight black ops up the cliff behind the Rope, the desert at night, everyone asleep in their beds, little red-haired Anna Pigeon in the hole—that part he would gladly do over again. He’d felt alive that night. After she’d knocked him down with the canteen, the flashlight beam chasing her, the way it cut across her bare legs, her cutoffs low and loose on her hips threatening to slide off.

  The image of the writhing flailing rattlesnake recurred behind his eyes. Sunlight through the cracks in the porch floor, strobing as it thrashed. Fighting for life, both Anna and the snake were preternaturally vivid, as if they had walked and slithered through a black-and-white world in black-and-gray skins, then suddenly, suddenly were in full color, finally completely alive.

  The snake nailed to the ground, Anna’s bare legs on the ladder—

  He brought his chair back onto four legs with a bump.

  Anna Pigeon’s legs were bare, her bottom was not. Anna had been wearing shorts.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” Regis whispered. “Riddle me that.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Molly had begged Anna to come home. Knowing it would hurt her sister’s feelings, Anna didn’t say it: She had no home. Molly had the luxury of a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot apartment and there was always a room there for Anna, but, without Zach, she couldn’t face Manhattan, stages, theaters, or any of the places that were now only places where he wasn’t—small, enclosed spaces where he wasn’t. Small, enclosed, windowless spaces. Spaces like sandstone jars. Despite the heat and the monster, Anna had taken to sleeping with her windows open, bedroom door ajar, and was considering sleeping on the porch.

  Besides, she had a monster to catch. Molly had been right about fools rushing in. Anna didn’t know how she was going to go about this. What scraps of detective lore she had been exposed to—mostly through movies—only worked in cities. In the vast playground that was Lake Powell, cops couldn’t very well check license plates. The vehicles were largely aquatic and/or rented and in constant movement. They couldn’t question neighbors since they cha
nged daily and came and went without identifying themselves. For all Anna knew, sandstone and rope wouldn’t hold fingerprints. She doubted there was a local fence or informants. Catching a criminal in a wilderness recreation area would be like trying to catch a feather in a windstorm.

  Crime in the park was a dark version of Brigadoon. The monster appears, does his song and dance, then vanishes into the fog for another hundred years.

  Jenny banged out the front door of the duplex. In her NPS uniform short-sleeved shirt and shorts she looked more like an overgrown Girl Scout than a ranger. Anna had liked that at first—that rangers, even those bristling with weapons, looked gentle, like they were just pretending to be cops and were really only there to tell you the Latin names of plants. She still liked it on the interpreters. On the gun-toting rangers an edgier look would have been reassuring. Maybe an ensemble in black and red with tall boots like the Canadian Mounties wore.

  “Smokey the Bear doesn’t make a girl feel protected,” Anna said, voicing her thoughts.

  “That is because Smokey Bear—no middle name—is a Forest Service bear. A park bear, a grizzly or Kodiak or polar bear, would tear Smokey to pieces in a paw-to-paw match. Take Smokey’s shovel away and he might as well check into the nearest petting zoo.”

  Anna smiled. “Wish I was going with you.”

  Jenny put on a ball cap, then slung her daypack over her shoulder. “This isn’t one of your lieu days, is it?”

  Anna didn’t answer. She hadn’t the faintest idea what day it was. She wasn’t even sure what time it was. In the jar, Kay’s watch was a gift, found treasure. Out of the jar, it was the ill-gotten gains of a grave robber, and Anna wouldn’t use it. Along with her uniforms, Zach’s picture, and everything else, the mysterious moving man—or woman—had taken her purse and wallet containing her driver’s license, Visa, MasterCard, Equity card, library card, and ninety-seven dollars in cash. As soon as she got her new credit cards she would make a shopping trip to Page and buy shoes. Then Kay’s sandals would be released from duty.