The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel

by Nevada Barr

“Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront,” she said and stepped into the room.

  Anna’s face lit up with pleasure. So very good.

  Bethy’s did not. That, too, was good.

  “Both bodies were recovered,” Jenny said. “Steve wants me to take you over to Bullfrog and see if you can positively identify them before they’re flown out to the morgue.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  “Are you freaked at having to look at the bodies?” Jenny asked.

  Anna and Jenny were perched on the high white vinyl cabin chairs in Jenny’s gunmetal gray boat. Jenny let Anna drive. Anna tried to resist the impulse to yell “Whee!” when the little boat came up on plane.

  “Nope,” Anna answered. “Not to seem callous or anything, but once you’ve had the opportunity to really get to know some dead people, you find out they’re not half bad.”

  “That night in the slot canyon they did prove to be quiet and well behaved, particularly for men of that age,” Jenny concurred.

  “What do you think it will mean if I can identify one or both of them as the guys who attacked Kay and me?” Anna asked.

  “I guess just that the slot at the end of Panther was how they got onto the plateau. It’s two more chances to get an ID. Maybe somebody reported one of them missing.”

  “I don’t get why nobody has reported Kay missing yet,” Anna said. “She had good teeth, hair, Tevas, the stuff of a well-raised girl with a family that loved her.”

  “If she was on vacation, maybe the vacation isn’t up yet and nobody knows she’s missing,” Jenny suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  Anna and Jenny talked a lot about what the bodies had to do with the jar, if anything, and what the bodies meant to the two of them specifically. Had the third man killed his two companions? More importantly, had the third man tried to do the same to them? Were these just two unlucky, inexperienced guys who got hypothermia and drowned?

  Jim and Steve had gone back in the daylight and tried to find what happened to the missing rope. So had Jenny and Anna. It was simply gone. There was no way to know if it had been pulled up and carried away or had fallen into the water and sunk.

  The divers who recovered the bodies said they didn’t see it. They said the corpses were only twenty-seven feet below the surface. Below that, the canyon walls pinched in too close together for anything as large as a full-grown man to pass. A rope could have slithered down without a hitch.

  Anna leaned back in her seat. By Lake Powell’s agitated standards the water was smooth. Aside from the psychotic predator stuff, Glen Canyon was the perfect park to take her virginity, she decided as they sped toward Bullfrog. The part of her soul that would always belong in the theater gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in a red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

  The dam and the lake did everything a good piece of art should: provoked, evoked, inspired, incensed, amazed. Lake Powell made visitors question their relationship to the earth. Was it a toy to be played with, broken, and cast off? Was it a tool to be used as Man saw fit? Could it be destroyed? Could it be remade?

  Desert formations rearing defiantly out of the water were so staggeringly out of place as to appear man-made or out of context, the way a stuffed grizzly bear in a glass case in a bank foyer is out of context. Anna could easily picture how the formations would look backstage, the supporting two-by-fours, and the unpainted backs of the papier-mâché rocks.

  When she was six and Molly twelve, their mother had gone to Southern California to visit her only sister. While there, Uncle Clarence had taken the children to Disneyland. They’d gone on a ride that was in a mine cart through Old West gold country. To Anna’s child-eyes the landscape seemed far more authentic than that of Lake Powell.

  Even the recreation area’s names had a theme park feel: Rainbow Bridge, Twilight Canyon, Anteater Arch, Pollywog Bench. The juxtaposition of this lighthearted romp of imagination with the stark and beautiful reality of the drowned river canyons moved Anna the way the finest offerings of the theater once had.

  One of the many differences between this grand play of Nature against Man and the plays she stage-managed was that, in this world, she was not running the show. She enjoyed watching a drama unfold never knowing if she would be part of the story or not. Should she be given a part, she did not enjoy never knowing if she was to be the windshield or the bug, but then no one in New York knew that either. One day you were the front end of the Yellow Cab. The next you were the jaywalker.

  Steve Gluck was on Bullfrog’s dock waiting for them. Arms crossed over his chest, he leaned against the side of the convenience store in a scrap of shade.

  “Nice job docking that pig-nosed little boat,” he said to Anna. The compliment delighted her. The slight to Jenny’s boat did not.

  “Meeting us in person. To what do we owe this honor?” Jenny asked.

  “Needed to air myself off,” Steve said. He fell in step as they walked up from the docks toward the employee housing area and the town of Bullfrog.

  “Where’s your vehicle?” Jenny asked. “Why walk when you can ride?”

  Steve patted his gut. “Need the exercise.” Then, “We got company. Andrew flew out this noon. The assistant superintendent is with him and, believe it or not, a state senator.”

  “That’s what drove you down here; the BS got too deep,” Jenny said.

  An audience. Anna didn’t like that and had to fight a wave of shame for what she’d suffered. Circumstances made her into a spectacle to be gawked at. Rock star, Bethy Candor had said. Bethy was an idiot. This was a small, cringing, nasty little fame. A physical sensation of shrinking crept through her, as if she could make herself smaller, more of a child. Small children were supposed to be protected from the ugly truths.

  Disgusted by her cowardice, Anna stacked her bones one on top of the other until she stood tall. Pulling back her shoulders, she shook the tension out of her hands. Anthony Heald did that every night before he went onstage. She’d watched it from her perch as assistant stage manager during the Off-Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie.

  Thinking of actors, she thought of Sir John Gielgud. Once upon a time she told him to pick up his cues. Facing NPS and state bureaucrats couldn’t be nearly as intimidating as facing a legend with a knighthood.

  Bullfrog’s clinic was a small white prefab building with a flat roof. Inside, it was spare but well appointed. There was a room for overnight patients and a small operating room—for sewing up gashes and cutting out fishhooks, Steve said. Anna hadn’t thought they did much open heart surgery in Bullfrog but was impressed nonetheless. The last room before a locked closet that Steve told them was the pharmacy was the examining room. The door was closed. From behind it came a low murmur of voices.

  “Holy smoke,” Steve muttered. “They’re all still in there. We’re probably going to have four more cases of hypothermia to deal with.”

  He pulled open the door and a blast of frigid air rolled out to meet them. “No morgue,” Steve said. “Just AC.”

  The district ranger stepped back to allow the women to precede him.

  “SRO,” Anna commented sourly. When Jenny looked a question, she added, “Standing room only.”

  There were two hospital beds in the room, each with a sheet-covered occupant. Beatrice, the nurse practitioner, stood by the head of the bed nearer the window, hands folded over her stomach as if her intestines might spill out if she let them.

  The assistant superintendent, who put Anna in mind of a jolly Boy Scout on steroids, loomed large and green and gray at the head of the nearer bed. Grinning amiably down the shrouded length he said, “Hey, Jenny,” and, “You must be Anna Pigeon.”

  He didn’t remember her from his brief visit to her orientation.

  “Yes,” Anna admitted.

  “This is State Senator Billy Wilson.”

>   The senator, a lean handsome man with a whiff of Iago about him, and dressed down for the event in gray linen trousers and a pale pink Izod shirt, stepped out from the wall, hand extended, canvassing for votes over the dead.

  Anna nodded politely but pretended not to notice the outstretched hand. Nothing in his behavior offended her; she just didn’t want to touch the man.

  “Let me see the corpses,” she said.

  “Are you sure you are okay with this?” Nurse Beatrice asked solicitously. The presence of important men evidently improved her bedside manner.

  “If it’s not, be it on my head,” Anna returned, remembering the phrase from when she’d refused to let the nurse ship her off to Page because she’d had a concussion. To her surprise Beatrice laughed.

  “I guess it’s not just your head that’s hard as a rock,” the nurse said good-naturedly. Reaching across the lump on the bed, she delicately pinched the top edge of the sheet between her thumbs and forefingers. Before she unveiled the dead man’s face she looked at Jenny. “Steve, Jenny doesn’t need to see this, does she?”

  “No. You want to wait outside, Jenny? Beats freezing to death.”

  Jenny shook her head, her eyes on Anna’s face. Anna appreciated the support.

  “Okay,” the nurse said and peeled back the sheet. A puffy, white, but surprisingly unaltered face was exposed. Fine, curling dark brown hair framed eyebrows that darted toward the aquiline nose like seabirds going into a wave. The eyes were closed.

  “I recognize him as one of the bodies we found in the slot canyon,” Anna said. “I don’t recognize him from the assault up on the plateau. Could I see his back?” She stepped closer and leaned in. Her braid fell against the sheet. She snatched it back and tucked it through her belt where it wouldn’t get tainted.

  None of the men stepped in to help Beatrice roll the corpse. Anna doubted she would have welcomed the assistance. Expertly, she rearranged the body without ever endangering the dignity of the dead man, if the dead had dignity, then tipped it up onto its side.

  On the back of the right shoulder was a tattoo of a sea turtle about six inches long from head to tail and five inches wide.

  “I recognize the tattoo from the attack,” Anna said. “The shape and placement of it anyway. I was right. It was a turtle.”

  “Tortoise,” Jenny corrected her automatically. “Sorry. Hazard of the profession.”

  “Show me the other guy,” Anna said.

  While Beatrice redraped the tattooed corpse, Steve stepped up and efficiently folded the sheet back from the face of the second body.

  The hair was the right color, and, judging by the form under the sheet, he was big enough to be the man who hit Kay. “Sorry,” Anna said. “I don’t know for sure that I’ve seen him before.”

  “I have,” Jenny said.

  FORTY

  The bodies in Panther Canyon’s end were recovered by the dive team, sans Jenny Gorman. Jenny was Lake Powell’s best diver, but Steve hadn’t wanted her back in the cold water after her bout with hypothermia. Regis guessed there were psychological reasons as well. Steve hadn’t said as much. Since anything that smacked of psychotherapy got Gorman’s hackles up, he wouldn’t have.

  Regis spun his office chair in a full circle just to feel he was moving. He’d played every angle he could think of to be in Panther during the recovery. He wasn’t law enforcement, or a diver, or high enough in the pecking order to stick his nose anywhere he wanted, so he’d failed. Pushing harder—or simply going AWOL from headquarters and showing up—would have looked peculiar. Since he and Bethy had stayed in Page on their lieu days, it was more difficult to keep abreast of things without calling attention to himself.

  Best scenario, they’d think he was a ghoul with poor work habits. Worst scenario? He didn’t want to think about that. The brief high he’d gotten from playing cat-and-mouse was burning out. Would they find telltale marks on the bodies? God, he hoped not.

  “It was an accident,” he said firmly. Not firmly enough. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself. Trying again, he said, “It was an accident.” Better. Accidents did happen. People died. It wasn’t that far-fetched. Canyoneering was a dangerous sport. Inexperienced—even experienced—climbers died every year. These two could very well have died by accident.

  The logic of this argument lowered his blood pressure a few points. In the parks, deaths were nearly always accidental. During the six years he’d been at Lake Powell he couldn’t remember a single homicide.

  “It was an accident,” he said for the third time. Perfect. It sounded true.

  God damn, but he hadn’t bargained for this. The thrill of feeling alive, of knowing he was fully in the world, that his life was not being measured away in meetings and memos and conversations that never changed, had gone into overdrive. Nerves accelerated from charged to jangling. Excitement became fear. He felt like a man flayed alive. Every word spoken, every movement made, crashing against raw flesh.

  Regis hadn’t been able to worm his way into the viewing of the bodies either. He knew Anna identified one of the bodies, more or less. Not as anybody specific but as one of the attack boys. Jenny’d recognized the other as a partier on the houseboat that defiled Panther’s grotto. College-age men accidentally dying in the slot canyon that led up to the plateau where, a few days before, college-age men had assaulted a woman was not a coincidence anybody would swallow. Poetic justice was even more rare than the ordinary prosaic justice occasionally available in the courts.

  Even the dullest law enforcement type—and neither Steve nor Jim was a dullard—would know these men had been murdered.

  Regis rose from his desk and closed his office door so he could pace without being observed. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn. The office was cramped, but pacing was better than sitting.

  He sensed killing could become an addiction. Having once taken a living creature that was There and changed it into a chunk of meat, rendering it Not There by an act of will, if one was not horrified by the act—or perhaps even if one was—the power of the act would eventually draw the killer back. A need to kill again would build, to see if it was the same, see if it was different, got better, harder, or easier.

  What had never crossed his mind, in all of the hours he’d spent thinking of Anna and the jar, Kay and the assault, was that killing could become an act of indifference. Taking a life should be a passionate interaction, not a whim or a matter of convenience. It chilled him to think death and life were no different, that There and Not There were equally insignificant, equally banal.

  The perfect crime.

  He remembered thinking of the ultimate seduction of a life without consequences. There was no such thing. Webs were woven and flies were caught in them. Threads snapped until everything was in ruins. A need to confess, pour everything out in a putrid flood before a priest or a ranger, was building. The need was so great, membranes in his mind grew thin with the desire to burst, let secrets spew like pus from a suppurating wound.

  Shaking his head, he paced three steps, turned, paced three, and turned.

  He was in too deep for confession. Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly. It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

  Too late for confession.

  Maybe not too late to end it.

  FORTY-ONE

  Steve and the chief ranger wasted no time. The senator was abandoned to amuse himself as best he could until Hank and the plane had time to come back for him. Chief Ranger Madden debated whether it should be he or Steve flying back to Wahweap with Anna and Jenny. The need to be in charge vied with the need to do what was best. At least that’s what Jenny thought as she watched inner shadows flit across his face while Hank walked around the plane doing a preflight check. Regardless of the fact he’d flown in only a few hours earlier, Hank erred on the side of caution. Once he’d told Jenny his goal in
life was to die a very old pilot.

  Madden chose to stay in Bullfrog. It had been a decade or more since he had practiced hands-on law enforcement, and Steve did it every day. Jenny was impressed by the decision. She’d thought his vanity greater than his intelligence.

  Steve took the right seat. Anna and Jenny buckled themselves in back.

  Nearly a week had passed since Jenny saw the man now cooling his heels—and the rest of his anatomy—in Beatrice’s examining room. Houseboats were allotted two weeks on the water with any given group. If she’d met up with the partiers during their second week, by now they would have dispersed, back to wherever home was. Conceivably, the boat could be cleaned and back on the lake with another group, but Jenny didn’t think so. From Anna’s description of Kay, someone, somewhere, was waiting for her to come home, and as yet there’d been no alarm raised. So, instead of enjoying the beauty of the landscape as seen from the air, Jenny searched the surface of the lake for the old-model houseboat. Judging by the cant of their heads and the concentration on their faces, Anna and Steve were doing the same.

  At a quarter of five they landed on the small strip the NPS maintained on the outskirts of Page. Awaiting them was a 1979 Jeep Cherokee, painted Park Service green, with the bison badge on its doors and the Wahweap district ranger behind the wheel. Doug Schneider was in his early fifties, well muscled, his iron gray hair worn in a brush cut that had been fashionable when Jenny was in grade school. The soothing gray and green of the NPS uniform did nothing to soften the military look he cultivated. Jenny was willing to bet his wife had to iron all his permanent-press uniform shirts. Simply plucking them from the dryer in a timely manner couldn’t create the crispness of Doug’s pleats and creases.

  As they climbed into the Jeep, Steve made introductions. Again Anna and Jenny took the rear seat. The moment the doors were closed the two rangers began to talk.

  “I think we’ve found your boat,” Doug said as he backed out of the gravel lot behind the hangar. “According to Dream Vacations—the outfit that rents it out—their last day on the lake is tomorrow. They have to be back in Wahweap by nine A.M. I sent out an APB. A boat that fit the description was spotted in Padre Bay around two thirty. With luck, it is headed in and will moor at Wahweap tonight. By now they’ve got to be running low on beer.”