The Rope ap-17 Page 15

  Her escape had been at night. Drugs fogged her thinking; she was scared, dehydrated, malnourished, in pain, and carrying a skunk in her brassiere. She had no clear recollection of where she’d wandered during the hours prior to reaching the edge of Glen Canyon and accidentally turning in the right direction. It wasn’t until she saw the housing compound that she’d known where she was.

  Half a hundred times she told Steve and Chief Ranger Madden that she didn’t know where, exactly, the jar was. She doubted they believed in her ignorance any more the fiftieth time than they had the first. If she did not find the hole, and the man she’d left in it, the chief ranger would probably be only too glad to write the whole adventure off as the deplorable—if understandable—histrionics of a city girl gone wacko under the pressure of the wide-open spaces.

  That she had spent the last decade working in the theater didn’t help her credibility. During the sixth or seventh rehash, Andrew had gotten the look of a man having an “aha” moment. Narrowing his eyes like a true-born gunslinger, he’d said pointedly, “You’re an actress, isn’t that right?”

  The fact that she was not an actor but a stage manager had impressed him not in the least.

  Sheriff Patterson, Steve, and Andrew seemed happy gossiping and ignoring her. Happy to be ignored, Anna took a water bottle from the cab of the truck, even though she had two full liters in her pack, and moved to the west side of the four-wheel drive to sit on the ground in the meager shade, her back against one of the big knobby tires.

  The more she sat and sweated and thought, the more certain she became that there was no way in hell she could find the jar.

  The monster would shrivel up and die of exposure.

  That was a cheerful train of thought, and she enjoyed riding it until it was derailed by the idea that if there were three monsters, monster-in-the-hole might have been fished out and be long gone or, worse, waiting for her behind a rock or a tree.

  By the time the burr of the Cessna’s engine returned, Anna’s knees were drawn up and she was hugging the water bottle tightly to her chest. Before the Cessna rolled to a stop she was standing, shoulders squared. Never let ’em see you sweat was an old theater maxim. Or maybe it was Never let them see your ass. Either way, Anna had no intention of returning to the fetal position in public anytime soon. Not even when Jim Levitt and Jenny Gorman deplaned and ten eyeballs turned to her, demanding to know which way the jar was.

  As the 180 taxied down the road for takeoff, the Bullfrog district ranger unfolded a map on the hood of the sheriff ’s truck.

  “We’re here.” Steve tapped a blunt forefinger on the end of a broken black line that ran to the edge of a canyon. Hole-in-the-Rock Road, Anna guessed. “You crawled out of Glen Canyon here.” He moved his finger an inch on the map. “So I figure your solution hole is somewhere in here.” His finger drew a small circle on the map between the road and where Anna had come onto the mesa. “It’s about a two-mile trip from where we’re standing to where you came up the old trail. I figure what we’d best do—if it works for you, Frank—is to take the truck cross-country as far as we can. Get Anna to where she starts seeing familiar territory.”

  Relief washed over her. The rangers were helping; they were being rangers and arranging things. Anna’s favorite colors shifted from black and black to green and gray as she began to recover her faith in her ability to lead them to the jar.

  The truck had a double cab. Though Anna was the smallest, Jenny, Chief Ranger Madden, and Jim were condemned to the cramped rear seat. Sheriff Frank Patterson drove, Steve rode shotgun, and Anna sat uneasily between them trying to keep her knees out of the way of the gearshift knob.

  As the truck jolted over rock and sand, trailing a plume of white dust, she scoured the land beyond the windshield trying to find a rock or bush she might have seen before. From a distance, the land along the rim appeared flat, nearly featureless. In reality, the weathered and broken chunks of sandstone were scattered like coins strewn across a floor: stones smaller than dimes, stones the size of basketball courts, of buildings, stones overlapping, piled up, falling down, scattered, clustered. They could hide ten thousand openings, ten thousand canted throats, ten thousand jars.

  As she stared, they began to run together. Heat mirages melting the coins, melting the desert.

  The truck lumbered up a slight incline, then down into a shallow swale on a low shining shoulder of stone. “Stop!” Anna cried.

  Sheriff Patterson braked in a sudden cloud of dust, and everybody exited the truck. Patterson turned to Steve. “You want any tracking done, better keep at least eight of these big feet off my ground.”

  Gluck said, “You heard the man.”

  No one got back in the truck, but neither did they follow Anna and the sheriff as they walked the small depression. It was not the swale where Anna had witnessed the murder of Kay. The shining rock was not the rock she had come gasping over.

  The next time she yelled, “Stop!” it still wasn’t.

  As in all good fairy tales, the third time was the charm.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When Anna found the bloodstained rock, Jenny suppressed a sigh of relief. The sheriff, the chief ranger, Steve, and even Jim, though she thought she’d trained him better, had begun to exude the unmistakable air that suggested they were about three manly breaths from writing little Ms. Pigeon off as a hysterical woman. If Jenny squinted her psychic inner eye, she could almost see “that time of month” and “rape fantasy” and “cry for attention” flickering behind their eyes. Jenny could tell Anna felt it, too, and, because this was Eve’s Achilles’ heel, was beginning to believe that maybe the men were right, maybe she was crazy, maybe …

  The bloody rock changed all that. The guys went on point like good hunting dogs. Cameras came out, as did little orange flags; measurements were taken; radios were held up to mouths as the machinery of however many law enforcement officials of however many jurisdictions were called.

  Anna, chastised for picking up the bloodstained rock, as well as for walking across the crime scene to do so—though, until she had, none of them had known it was a crime scene—stood at the right front fender of the sheriff ’s truck, clutching her plastic water bottle and looking stunned. More than anything, Jenny wanted to wrap her arms around the poor bewildered little person, cradle her and tell her everything was all right, that Jenny was here and she needn’t ever be afraid of anything again. Instead, she wandered over and leaned against the hood next to her.

  The metal was as hot as a branding iron. “Do you know where we are?” she asked gently.

  Anna shook her head, one short jerk right, one short jerk left. She didn’t look at Jenny.

  “About three hundred yards that way”—Jenny pointed south—“is the head of Panther Canyon. We went there the first day we worked together, taking water samples at the grotto.” Anna said nothing, gave no indication that she heard. Jenny wasn’t an EMT. She had no idea whether a person could go into shock this long after the traumatic event had occurred. Anna had been held prisoner, starved and dehydrated, then had wandered lost for twelve or thirteen hours before finding her way home. That would have put Jenny in shock, but Anna had seemed to cope well enough, playing with Buddy, tending to personal hygiene, relating her story to Steve and Andrew.

  Until now she’d seemed, if not a pillar of strength, at least a reed, bent by the wind but unbroken. “Anna?” Jenny dropped her voice to the place women use to communicate heart-to-heart with children, injured souls, and small animals. “Are you sure you want to go through with this? We could wait here while the rangers go get the bad guy. I bet Steve would even radio the pilot to come back if you’d feel safer at Bullfrog or the Rope.”

  Anna looked at her. The woman might be shocked into stillness and compliance with law enforcement, but her eyes were not blank and scared. They were determined and scared.

  Unblinkingly she said, “What? And miss the eleven o’clock number?”

  Jenny had no idea what t
hat meant—something to do with the theatrical life, she guessed as she saw the ghost of a smile whisper over Anna’s lips.

  Sheriff Frank Patterson was a tracker of local renown. Jenny and Jim Levitt had been informed of this by the NPS pilot who spent his lieu days on a piece of land near Escalante where he was building a house. As the men were going all Last of the Mohicans and testosteroning up for the big tracking event, their efforts were made moot by what sounded like distant shouting.

  The six of them went utterly still. Had the others not reacted, Jenny might have thought her ears were playing tricks on her. The canyons played havoc with sound, muting noise nearby, carrying a laugh a mile before letting it go. Echoes had echoes, yet silence reigned. No one moved. Shadows black as crude oil puddled between their feet.

  “I think—” Jim began. The sheriff, ahead and slightly above the rest of them, hushed him with a raised hand. Quiet as a stalking cat, Patterson began following tracks in the dirt, his head cocked at an odd angle as if sound would drop into his ears more efficiently that way.

  Thin and small, the shout came again. A faint dying “Heeeeeeeeeelp.”

  The eternal winds, breath of the canyons, sawed across the ears, and the voice sounded as if it emanated from the bottom of a well.

  “Hello!” Steve Gluck shouted, hands around his mouth to form a megaphone.

  Patterson pointed. “This way,” he said. He’d found the tracks. “Stay off to the side. Don’t foul the trail. It’s got a story to tell.”

  Jenny was impressed with the display of woodsmanship until she topped the low rise where he stood. The trail wasn’t exactly as challenging as tracking ducks across a pond. It was more of a scrimmage line where several heavy-footed individuals had stampeded across the desert’s skin.

  Anna started to trot. “Wait,” the chief ranger shouted.

  Steve Gluck yelled, “Hold up there.”

  Anna broke into a run.

  “Damn the torpedoes,” Jenny muttered and ran with her.

  Anna came to an abrupt stop. “There,” she said.

  Jenny barreled into her and had to grab her lest the smaller woman fall to the ground. The feel of the bird-boned body and the clean smell of her sun-warmed hair robbed Jenny’s apology of much of its sincerity. She steadied Anna, in no rush to take her hands off her. Jenny would never, as the boys called it, “cop a feel,” or force her attentions where they were not invited, but a gift was a gift and she enjoyed it.

  “That’s it.” Anna pointed to a black hole gaping at the sky from a flat stretch of ground. The slit in the earth was no more than two feet wide at the center and about five feet long, both ends tapering to a point like the lids of a half-closed eye. Beyond it were two sentinel boulders, taller than Jenny, and squared off as if machined that way. Their shadows fell across the opening. Coupled with low scrub brush and a scattering of rocks, the twin shadows effectively camouflaged the opening of the solution hole.

  “That’s the mouth of my jar,” Anna said. She sounded proprietary. Had Jenny been stuck in a jar like strawberry preserves put up for winter, she’d have wanted sticks of dynamite tossed in and her name severed from the ruin evermore. Anna sounded almost fond.

  “Are you there?” The frantic cry warbled up from the opening.

  Footfalls were thumping up from behind as the men caught up. Anna stepped closer to the hole.

  “Stay back,” Steve cautioned. He took hold of her arm. Anna shook him off.

  “I hear you out there,” came the voice. “For God’s sake, get me out of here.”

  Jenny looked from Anna to Steve. Neither seemed to know what to do next.

  “Talk to me,” the voice begged.

  Jenny walked past Anna, nearer the hole, and leaned down, hands on her knees.

  “Regis?” she called down the stone throat of Anna’s jar. “Regis, is that you?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Like great wings the sky flapped and the desert heaved beneath Anna’s feet. Abruptly she sat, her butt smacking the ground hard as her knees gave way. Darkness gathered, the ghosts of crows flocking at the edges of her vision, until she saw only a long tunnel, at the end of which was the mouth of the jar. Jenny, Steve, Jim, Andrew, the sheriff, entered and exited from this circular stage, four actors talking at once; none making sense.

  The jar interacted with the human cast, chattering as if it were the star, its voice rising hollow from beneath the ground. A rope was thrown. Brown gnarled hands flashed into the spotlight, and Anna watched the hemp snake down into its lair.

  “Okay,” the jar shouted. Anna heard scraping up the throat of sandstone, felt scratching in her own throat, a fishbone dragged up her gullet with a bit of thread as Sheriff Patterson pulled on the rope. Hooks of the boat ladder hobbled in jerks from the hole in the ground followed by bright blue line and plastic treads.

  The hooks were whisked offstage; the ladder remained.

  “We’re set,” Steve Gluck called and, “Come on up, Regis.”

  Regis, the neighbor guy, the personnel guy, the guy with the plump wife, the guy who sat with the others in the evening and drank beer from long-necked bottles, the guy who’d tried to lure her out of her shell, Regis crawled out of the ellipses, a worm from the eye socket of a skull.

  “Water,” he croaked like a desert rat in a cowboy film. Anna watched him gulp from a white plastic government-issue water bottle. The crows took flight; lights came up; the stage grew to encompass all the characters in this surrealist drama. A dun-colored set of Styrofoam rocks and artfully placed shrubs appeared against a scrim of deep blue sky.

  Each and every one of the players was staring at her. It was opening night, and Anna didn’t know her lines. Why would she? She was the stage manager. Zach was the star.

  “Why did you attack me?” Regis demanded. “I nearly died in that hole.”

  Anna could not think of a single thing to say.

  “Christ on a crutch, I should have you brought up on charges of attempted murder.”

  “Easy, Reg,” Steve Gluck said.

  “Leave her alone,” Jenny snarled.

  The chief ranger and the sheriff had no more to say than Anna. Jim Levitt radiated unasked questions.

  “I was trying to save you, God damn it!” Regis sputtered—sputtered because he kept pouring water down his throat even while he was trying to talk.

  “You’re going to throw up.” Anna’s voice was flat and cold and sounded as if it came from some other place in time.

  Like a good actor, Regis vomited on cue.

  Behind him, Sheriff Patterson was backing into the mouth of the jar, using the plastic rungs on the slope to ease himself farther into the solution hole.

  “Anna didn’t know it was you,” somebody said.

  “I frigging told her it was me.” Regis was wiping his mouth on a red rag, the kind car mechanics buy by the bushel. Someone must have brought it from the truck.

  “I fucking told her it was me,” Anna said. “‘Frigging’ is not a word.” She wondered why she said this, why the cold flat voice came out of her mouth. Anna, what have you done? She remembered that.

  “Back off,” Jenny snapped at Regis. “Anna’s been through a lot. She was stuck down there a whole lot longer than you were.”

  Regis blinked, seeming to consider her words. Anna watched him change: His shoulders relaxed, losing their proximity to his ears; his head rose up and settled on his spine.

  “Yeah,” he said. He pinched his nose and squinted past Anna. “Yeah. Okay. It was dark as the inside of a cow, Jesus.” He shook his head and unclenched his hands from around the water bottle. “Sorry,” he said to Anna. She watched his lips form the word. He smiled ruefully. “The damsel in distress isn’t supposed to cold-conk and Mace the white knight.”

  “Not Mace,” Anna said. “Buddy.”

  Without invitation, Jenny came over and lifted Anna to her feet by the arm, one hand on the bicep, the other cupping her elbow. Lifted, not helped up; Anna was amazed a woman cou
ld be so strong. Since Anna didn’t care if she sat, stood, or was laid down on a slab in a butcher shop window, she didn’t fight her housemate.

  Jenny put her arm around Anna’s shoulders and, still cupping her elbow, steered her away from the men, back in the direction they had come.

  Walking away from a stage where the fourth wall had been summarily shattered and the make-believe world poured out into the real world, Anna began to gather herself together, reeling herself in as if she were a ball of string that had become unwound. At the pace of invalids, she let Jenny lead her over the broken ground. Mindful of tracks, they skirted the flagged area where Kay had fought for her life and lost.

  Anna waited while Jenny opened the passenger door of the sheriff ’s truck and dumbly obeyed when she told her to get in. She watched Jenny walk around the hood of the truck and let herself in the driver’s door, lower the sun flap, catch the keys the sheriff had put there, start the engine, and crank the air conditioner to high.

  They sat facing front, not talking. An awkward date at the drive-in movies. Anna finished winding up the raveled string. When she could again speak, she said, “Well, that was an unforeseen turn of events,” and was startled when Jenny laughed.

  “Poor Regis,” Jenny said when she’d recovered. “Clubbed and skunked and left in a pit.”

  “Yeah,” Anna murmured. “The monsters got away, didn’t they?”

  “They’ll get them,” Jenny said. To Anna’s ears it sounded as if she spoke without conviction.

  “Your monsters got away,” Anna said.