The Rope ap-17 Page 5

  No pinpricks; nothing had been injected into the pudding.

  Anna pulled off the foil top. Chocolate. Again saliva flowed from some mysterious moisture source the rest of her body didn’t have access to. She licked the underside of the foil, then squeezed the little plastic cup, gushing the pudding into her mouth and over her tongue, and went again to the place where all was good and even better this time because all was chocolate. The last remnants she scraped out with her index finger and sucked into her mouth.

  The monster hadn’t left her a spoon. Probably afraid she’d tap him to death with it if she got a chance. Which she would. Anna’d never been much on hate, but she hated this guy. Mentally ill or not, she hated him so much that to think of him filled her with an intense anger she could feel to the tip of her braid. Surely this kind of hate would cause one of them to spontaneously combust. Probably her.

  Taking deep slow breaths, she blew some of the toxic emotions out of her body and brain. A semblance of calm restored, she folded the lunch sack closed. At the moment she didn’t want to know what was in the other package. Supper maybe, should she live that long. The canteen beckoned, and she knew she would have to drink sooner or later. Later was better.

  Food had revived her to an extent that surprised her. A sense of optimism came with a full stomach and a shot of sucrose. The downside was now she had to go to the bathroom.

  In New York she’d lived in many one-bedroom and studio apartments, some not as spacious as the bottom of her jar. Living small had taught her the necessity of living neat. The thought of fouling where she would be eating, maybe, and sleeping, druggily, was abhorrent, but life apparently was going to go on at least for a while.

  Getting awkwardly to her feet, she chose to put her privy to one side of the datura garden. In the old days Chinese farmers used night soil to fertilize their fields. The scraggly plants couldn’t be getting much in the way of nutrients from the sand. Hoping the datura would be grateful for her donation, she carefully dug a hole a foot or so deep.

  The business of living attended to, she began scooping sand in to cover it up in good cat fashion. Her fingers tangled in a web in the dirt, and hope flickered: Hemp to weave a rope? Old fishing nets to macramé into a ladder? Even if she could have done those things, there was no way to get it hooked to the outside world.

  A bit of line with which to garrote a monster?

  That was a cheering thought. She tightened her fingers and dragged out the nest of fibers she’d pawed up.

  Brown and fine. It looked like human hair. Anna shook her hand free in sudden panic and fell back onto her hind end. The jarring loosed fire-bolts of pain in both arm and head. She almost welcomed them. They made it hard to think.

  Nothing much looked like human hair but human hair.

  “Help! Help me!” Anna screamed.

  EIGHT

  Regis was sitting in the bedroom of Jenny’s duplex, the one that Anna Pigeon had used for such a short time. It wasn’t his lieu day—like a lot of HQ employees, he had Saturdays and Sundays off just like normal people. He had called in sick. The parks frowned on permanents calling in sick or going on vacation at the height of the season, but he’d done it anyway. Seasonals never called in sick. At least he’d never heard of one doing it. They just didn’t.

  Was it possible they never got sick? he wondered.

  He never got sick. There wasn’t a day in his childhood he could remember staying home sick. He wasn’t sick now. He was—agitated. It wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, he liked a change from the neutral nothing he felt most days. A life lived in ecru, he thought wryly. Ecru. That was his mother’s favorite color. Half his genes were from a woman whose favorite color wasn’t a color at all. “Everything goes with ecru,” she liked to say.

  She would have approved of the employee housing color scheme at the Rope: outsides gray with no adornment, insides varying shades of ecru. Possibly the original decorators—buyers was probably the more accurate term—who’d chosen the carpets and furnishings had dared a splash of color, but over the years time and use had sucked it out. Dust and the neglect of serial renters had done the rest.

  The room Anna Pigeon slept in was no different: a double bed, stripped now, a dresser and bed stand of the processed woodlike substance that looks battered and old a week after it’s brought home from the store and limps on in that shabby state for the next hundred years. Opposite the bed were a shallow closet with sliding doors, the wood warping slightly, and a single window, blinds down, three of the bottom slats broken.

  Anna Pigeon’s things had been taken, but Regis wanted to sit in the room where she’d stayed without people butting in and asking him what he was doing or why he was there. He was in personnel; as far as he was concerned he had a right to be anywhere he wanted. And, in the park, nobody bothered to lock their houses, especially not at Dangling Rope, Bullfrog, Hite, or Halls Crossing. They were too remote by road to attract thieves, and people who came by boat were too rich to covet the trash that could be bought on a government salary.

  Regis sat on the bed and listened to his pulse racing in his ears. The emptiness of the shabby space was more than just the lack of a tenant. Too many people who cared too little about the room filled it with ghosts. Not the ectoplasmic phantoms fools pretended to see when they wanted to feel special. Real ghosts, the kind that don’t exist, the kind that are made up of dead air, the kind you see in the eyes of an animal when the vet puts it to sleep. The kind that are Not There.

  Growing up he hadn’t been allowed pets. The first time he’d seen the Not There of death was the previous winter when Kippa died. Kippa was their six-month-old French bulldog. A golden bowling ball of love. Regis smiled, remembering. The image shifted into another, the wide grin red with blood, blood where his ears had flopped, screams that came out through his mashed nose. Regis had been holding him like a baby, looking deep into his brown eyes, when all of a sudden there was no dog, just dog meat, carrion. There, then Not There.

  The living are There. Ghosts are the Not There, the blank, the dead, the ecru.

  That his mind had come full circle to his mother’s favorite color startled Regis out of his self-induced trance.

  He’d never seen a human being die. He’d been there when his mother passed, but she was so doped up on morphine it had been a seamless transition. Anyway, her eyes were closed. He imagined it would be the same, though. The person would be There, then simply Not There. The eyes might not be the windows to the soul, but when life left, that was where the falling shutters could be seen.

  Anna Pigeon’s room felt like that, like the Not There had taken up residence. Regis had wanted to feel the room, and it felt like nothing. Standing, he looked around at the tawdry space. He wouldn’t come back. Sooner or later another seasonal There would move in and give it the illusion of life for a few months. Nothing would be different.

  Agitation was still making his insides quiver. Being still was impossible. He probably should have gone in to work just to be moving, be distracted by the nonsense of the day-to-day world of the Barely There. Leaving Anna’s room, he walked down the hall to the room where Jenny stayed. Jenny Gorman had been an interpretive ranger at the park for nearly a decade, coming back every summer. As he’d anticipated, her room looked and felt as if someone were there. Jenny showed up every season with a huge old hard-sided Samsonite suitcase that she joked was her life in a box.

  Regis had never been in her room before, but he expected this was her box-life unfolded. A coverlet with a cabbage rose print, and matching shams, was on the bed; sheets, folded neatly over the bedspread, were printed with sheep in complementary colors. On the bureau a dresser scarf in pale yellows hid the scarred surface. There were two small framed pictures of children—nieces, Regis guessed. Beside them sat an old-fashioned silver-backed brush-and-comb set. He picked up the brush and examined it. Long curling brown hairs were caught in the bristles.

  It wasn’t just for show, Jenny used it. That made it real. Regis ra
n the tips of his fingers over the ornate silver casting. Fine things, quality, endurance, he craved those. His boat and his ancient but perfect Super Cub, made life livable. He looked forward to when he could surround himself with tangible proofs human life wasn’t all shoddy construction and tedious noise.

  An oval mirror, cheap but decorative, was hung over the dresser, one she had bought in Page probably. It didn’t look worth enough to haul from wherever she spent her winters. Regis could find out if he wanted. Personnel was where the skeletons of background checks, pay grades, and reviews were buried. Until Anna Pigeon disappeared, Jenny had never interested him enough to bother.

  Today Jenny was going up Panther Canyon to check on a party boat full of college kids. Levitt was in court, so she’d be working without law enforcement backup. Regis didn’t like it. That might have been part of why he felt shaken, agitated. The party boat had some bad people on it; he knew that for a fact. Dangerously bad people.

  Holding the brush, he looked at his reflection in the glass. Bethy told him he was handsome. When he looked at himself, all he saw was that he was There. Replacing the brush precisely where it had been before he disturbed it, he realized calling in sick had been a mistake. Getting caught in the lie was going to count against him, but he had to go out to Panther Canyon and make sure Jenny didn’t stir up a hornet’s nest.

  NINE

  Mad as Lady Macbeth, Anna scrubbed her hands together lest any of the long and human hairs buried in the sand should cling to them. Retreating to the far side of the jar, she felt her panic worsening. There was nowhere to be, nowhere to run but in circles like a crazed hamster. Slumping down, she leaned back against the sandstone, hands held before her, too unclean to touch any other part of her body, and stared at the mess of delicate brown strands near her cat hole. “My life is a Stephen King novel,” she whispered. “Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can’t get any worse, everybody dies.”

  Everybody dies.

  Had she been thrown into a charnel pit?

  The monster might have been using this hole for years. Dropping his human garbage into it, playing his games with drugs and cutting and chocolate pudding; watching his victims, sans clothes, sans dignity, sans freedom until, finally, he got tired of them or broke them.

  Sans life.

  How many women were buried in her sandbox? Into her mind’s eye came rotting arms, skeletal fingers, reaching up through the dirt to drag her down.

  “Still breathing here,” Anna said loudly. “Breathing in. Breathing out.”

  Bit by bit, a determination that could be mistaken for courage returned.

  Gingerly, she made her way across to the tangled strands, aware that she might be treading on the corpses of hastily buried women. A book she’d read came unbidden into her mind, Chiefs. The killer had a long and successful career, sowing his land with dozens of his victims before he was caught. Halfway across her prison floor a noise from the other world stopped her.

  Something was coming, an engine, tiny and distant. Humming down through the bottle’s neck was a comforting burr of sound, a small-engine aircraft, one of the little ones that took sightseers on flights over the lake. The sound grew louder. The little plane was close to the ground, close to Anna. Tilting her head back, she squinted at the impossibly blue eye above. The neck of her jar was canted like the slightly twisted dual necks on the old vinegar-and-oil carafe her mother kept on the kitchen counter. The carafe was for show. The only salad dressing they ate was homemade Thousand Island: ketchup, mayonnaise, and sweet pickle relish.

  “Down here!” she yelled. “Help me! I’m down here!”

  They were looking for her. They had to be. Over her lieu days Jenny probably thought she’d hitched a ride on a boat headed for Wahweap to spend time in town. By now her lieu days must be over. She’d been in the pit at least a night and a day and a night, thirty-six hours. If her weekend wasn’t over now, it would be tomorrow. Without a watch, without knowing how long she had slept or what day it was, time got tricky. Knowing the time kept people from going adrift.

  When she didn’t show up for work—whenever that was, today, tomorrow—when she didn’t show up on her “Monday,” Jenny would raise the alarm and the Park Service would come find her. Search and rescue. The rangers were big on that. Visitors, fools like her, were always getting lost, falling into holes, being eaten by wolves, that sort of thing.

  Rangers and EMTs. Law enforcement rangers had to be EMTs; she remembered that from the information the NPS sent after she’d gotten the job. They had to take courses every year. Search-and-rescue rangers would search for her and rescue her; EMT rangers would give her aspirin for her head, maybe Valium for her shoulder.

  The airplane, it was them.

  “Down here!” she yelled again. “Help me!” The plane droned louder. “Down here, goddammit! Help, help!” The engine whined overhead. “Down here, you stupid fucks!” she screamed, leaping to her feet. The plane murmured away. Anna fell to her knees.

  The bottom of the jar, down here where the bodies were buried, wasn’t visible from airplanes. Nobody would be peeking into the hundreds of holes. First, they’d think of the water. Lake Powell was so deep, in the main channel there was no dragging the bottom. Deep meant cold and dark. Bodies didn’t always float up. In the cold and dark, they sank. The rescuers and EMTs, did they think she had gone down to the world of the dead, joined the army of the drowned? Had they stopped looking? Or never started?

  She wished she’d told somebody where she was going. Jenny might remember their conversation about the trail out of Dangling Rope.

  Not bloody likely. Jenny was all about the fecal materials.

  God damn stupid fucking green-and-gray Smokey Bears. Rangers. Telling John Q. Public not to litter and to be sure and hold hands with your buddy on the scary paths.

  “Fuck!” she yelled. What she wouldn’t give to have the NYPD looking for her, real cops with guns, batons, Mace, handcuffs, bad attitudes, and ambulances that whisked the injured to big shiny hospitals where doctors—“Doctors who’ve actually gone to medical school,” she ranted at the eye—fixed injured arms and broken heads.

  Shouting at the fragment of empty sky, Anna realized the jar wasn’t as deep as she’d first believed. The way the neck curved and narrowed created a false perspective. The opening wasn’t more than twenty feet from where she stood, smooth vertical walls rising for fifteen feet or so, then a steep slope from that to the eye.

  Twenty or two hundred, there was no way to climb out.

  “I screwed up,” Anna croaked, her throat raw and dry from shouting. Her head was aching again and her arm throbbing. “I hoped.”

  Getting into the solution hole would be easy. A strong person could easily climb down a twenty-foot rope. All he’d have to do was tie it to a big rock and drop it into the throat of the jar. When he left, he could just pull it up after him, no muss no fuss. Unless he drove or walked in from the miles of bleak and rocky desert she’d seen to the north, he’d have to climb up from the lake. That would be hard, harder than the short hop out of this hole. The monster had to be strong.

  Strong enough to carry her down into the hole? Maybe not. Her shoulder and head suggested he’d just tossed her over the lip to survive the fall or not.

  That was annoying. He wasn’t even sure she was a high enough grade of garbage to be monster meat.

  “Bite me, you prick!” she yelled at the eye. “I hope you choke to death on my bones.”

  He would be strong. Strong and young. Movies insisted serial killers were twenty to thirty years old. Anna hoped they were right and he was young; it limited the number of dead people with whom she might be sharing space.

  Though the lake was only a small part of Glen Canyon Recreation Area, nobody much hiked. There were a couple of trails used by backpackers, one down from the Navajo Reservation to Rainbow Bridge and another somewhere uplake. A trail led into Bullfrog, but it was long and came from nowhere to dead-end at the
lake’s edge.

  People didn’t hike along the shoreline. Lake Powell didn’t have shores, not like a real lake. Powell lived in canyon bottoms, cliffs rising vertically two hundred, six hundred, as much as a thousand feet in some places. From what she’d seen of the plateau, there weren’t any roads.

  Other than on the water, or the few small beaches carved out from the sandstone, there wasn’t anywhere to be. Anything farther from the lake than a man could throw a beer can was dry rock and hot dirt, wilderness.

  Half a mile as the crow flies from this burial pit, boaters were catching fish, children were splashing in the shallows, and girls in bikinis were flirting with boys in cutoffs. A half mile and a half million light-years.

  At least that’s what it felt like to anybody but lunatics and coyotes, Anna thought sourly. She would not screw up again. Like praying to a nonexistent god, it was demoralizing to hope for help when none was coming.

  No, Anna wouldn’t hope.

  Turning, she studied her jar looking for anything new, anything she hadn’t noticed before—besides the nest of human hair under the sand. Silent walls swirled upward; smooth, beautiful in their way—a perfect palette for an artist.

  A perfect lair for a monster; utter privacy within commuting distance of home.

  Where was a monster when he was at home?

  Houseboats, even those moored in the marinas year-round, were allowed only two weeks on the water. It kept homesteaders from living on the lake full-time. Was the monster a boater who used his two weeks a year to pursue his hobby?

  That would work, Anna thought. That would be ideal. Spend two weeks on a houseboat—time enough for a bit of sport—kick sand over the remains, then go home to Oregon or New Hampshire or North Dakota, tanned and rested, plenty of holiday memories to enjoy over the winter, show one’s pals slides of the vacation.