The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel Read online

  Bodies were everywhere. The top deck of the houseboat was roasting them in the sun. Bare legs, feet, and a tangle of arms and heads were visible through the glass patio doors on the rear deck. Most of the fallen were on the beach. A naked couple lay curled back to back on an old square sleeping bag. A faded motif of cowboys spinning lariats telegraphed the loss of innocence. A boy in a Broncos T-shirt and tennis shoes without socks was spread-eagled on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, shorts missing, shortcomings visible.

  Amid the carnage was a platoon of dead soldiers: beer bottles, wine bottles, and whiskey bottles. Paper cups, bits of cellophane, chip bags, cigarette butts, and other festive effluvia had been strewn across the sand like confetti. A plastic Gatorade bottle, an inch of creepy orange liquid inside, bobbed in the water near the shore.

  At the far end of the grotto, near the wall, was an area devoid of bodies or blankets. Wine bottles, shoved neck down several feet apart, marked off a space about twenty feet long and half that wide. Two poles were jabbed upright into the sand with a bedsheet draped over them.

  Jenny beached her boat a dozen yards from the barge and got out her anchor. Having heaved anchor and line over the bow, she jumped after, landing lightly on her feet. This far from the washing-machine motion of the main lake the water was calm. Wave action wouldn’t lure her boat back into the channel. Barbarians might.

  “Uhnnn?”

  The bovine grunt alerted her that at least one student body was awake enough to register that an army of one had landed.

  “Whathefuh?” came another lowing sound. “Izza fucking ranger.”

  Taking no notice of these promising signs of intelligent life, Jenny carried on with the task of setting the anchor as deep in the sand as she could manage without a sledgehammer. Rumbles percolated from behind her as she made more work of her anchorage than was needed, giving them time to wake up and pull themselves together. Two bare bottoms and a shriveled male member before lunch had her hoping that they would be not only waking but snatching up wearing apparel and covering the bits of themselves that shouldn’t be allowed to flop about in the breeze.

  When the stirring became ubiquitous, Jenny dusted the sand from her hands. Mentally girding her loins for battle, she turned to face the unwashed masses yearning to be educated. Hands on hips, she took in the mangy lot of them. Many didn’t look to be of drinking age, let alone old enough to be wilderness potty-trained. A few looked properly cowed by, and respectful of, the NPS uniform and gunmetal gray government boat. None seemed overtly hostile. That was a plus. Without the color of law behind her, the only power Jenny had was the power of persuasion.

  As she genially surveyed the group, there was one boy who called attention to himself. In this barely undulating sea of lethargy, a kid in iridescent blue swim trunks and a blue T-shirt with the words SHUCK ME, SUCK ME, EAT ME RAW in white under a picture of an oyster was sitting bolt upright on a nest of towels. His sharp quick movements reminded Jenny of a trapped bird flying into windows or the ceiling, looking for a way out. She’d have been hard-pressed to describe this boy as anything but average: average height, weight, eye and hair color. Though, if such averages ever existed, fast food and immigration had altered them in the United States.

  Suddenly he met her gaze. Fidgeting stopped; like a rabbit hoping the coyote will mistake him for a rock, he froze.

  He was scared, Jenny realized. Drugs were always a good guess—a lid of marijuana? X hidden in his clothes? Heroin, coke? He didn’t look like he’d matriculated from misdemeanor to felony yet. Poor lad couldn’t know she didn’t give a rodent’s posterior about drugs.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she said in her teaching voice, an impressive mix of Miss Jean Brodie and Kathleen Turner. “My name is Jenny Gorman. Welcome to my favorite place in all of Lake Powell.”

  Red rabbitty eyes blinked blearily at her. The creatures had managed to crawl from the sea onto land but had yet to evolve from dumb beasts to humanoids.

  “Last summer you would not have been able to enjoy this magnificent place. It was closed most of the season because there were three hundred fifty FC colonies—fecal material—per one hundred milliliters of water in the lake. It was too contaminated for our valued visitors to immerse themselves off this beach.”

  Her students began stretching, rummaging through bags, scratching. One girl, the one who’d been naked on the rope-twirling cowpokes, had wrapped a big towel decorated with a fat striped Kliban cat around her and was heading toward the sheet-draped poles.

  “In short,” Jenny continued, smiling graciously on her audience, “our visitors would have been swimming in shit. Bathing in crap. Diving into poop. Wallowing in human manure. It was, in a word, caca.”

  “That’s two words,” a boy hollered. There was general laughter, low-key, as if real hilarity would jar their hangovers.

  “Ah, rapport has been achieved,” Jenny said delightedly. She pointed at the heckler. “You, my astute friend, where does a bear shit in the woods?” Jenny was not overfond of the scatological, but she’d found that a good way to bridge the age gap with males was the use of third-grade toilet humor. Girls ceased finding farts and belches humorous before they went to high school. Boys found them hilarious all the way through senile dementia.

  “Anywhere he wants.” The kid shouted the punch line to the old joke.

  “Correct again,” Jenny said, looking appropriately impressed. “Now, tell me, do you see any forest around here?” Lifting both hands, she made a sweeping gesture toward the bare bones of Lake Powell’s shoreline.

  As she opened her mouth to get into the meat of the lesson, the whine of a high-powered engine burned through the still morning air. She turned to see who had the gall to speed in a blind canyon so narrow two boats couldn’t pass without fighting each other’s wake.

  A wave crashed into the outside of the final curve and splintered into wavelets that came begging across the channel to throw themselves at her feet. They were followed by a sleek red cigarette boat Jenny could have identified in a fleet of speedboats.

  Regis owned it, and no one but Regis piloted it. Regis was in personnel, an hour away in Page. He’d come to Panther Canyon at breakneck speed. Fear sent cold prickles over Jenny’s scalp. One of her sisters had died or been badly injured. No one but her sisters was close enough to merit personal attention from personnel.

  Jenna was the youngest but also the most reckless. Car crash?

  Jessie was pregnant with her second son. Ectopic pregnancy? Eclampsia?

  Jean was a pharmacist in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Surely nothing bad could happen to a pharmacist in Ann Arbor.

  Jodie was married to a moron that the other sisters suspected abused her.

  Jenny would beat the son-of-a-bitch to death with a tire iron.

  Regis beached his precious boat gently, then leaped gracefully to dry ground. Jenny had frozen her face and body lest the barbarians see weakness. Regis was walking in her direction. She couldn’t unfreeze to say, “Hello.”

  He wasn’t smiling.

  “Good morning,” he said with a curt nod at Jenny’s erstwhile students. He turned his back to the now scattering class. “Are you okay, Jenny?” he asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” she managed. “Am I?”

  Regis took her words as either a joke or a brush-off. Aping her arms-akimbo stance, he turned and surveyed the milling kids. “They give you any trouble?”

  “No.” Jenny waited for Regis to drop the bomb.

  “I talked to a few of them the other day. They’re an ugly bunch.”

  They weren’t an ugly bunch—or no uglier than any bunch of campers who hadn’t been housebroken. They were just younger and running in a pack. Tense, Jenny waited. And waited. Regis had no bomb to drop, she realized. Fear for her family leached away. Anger at Regis flowed in where it had been.

  “Thanks for disrupting my class,” she said acidly. The teaching moment was gone. She’d be lucky if she could get even a handfu
l to pay attention at this point. “What are you doing out here, anyway? Don’t you have important papers to push?” she asked irritably.

  Regis stared at her coldly. Jenny didn’t apologize. Among themselves, field rangers had a tacit understanding that headquarters brass should not venture out of their cubicles and interfere with the real work of the park. Jenny would never waltz into the personnel office and rearrange Regis’s desk. On an irrational level, she expected the same courtesy.

  He combed the beach with his eyes, ignoring or, worse, not noticing her ill humor. “That’s him, I think. Bastard.” With that, he strode across the sand, a man on a mission. Jenny watched him beeline through the groggy campers toward a boy on the upper part of the beach where the cliff of sand bisected the grotto floor, separating those who could still scramble up a soft embankment before they passed out from those who collapsed where they stood, drink in hand.

  The “bastard” Regis stalked toward was the antsy kid with the pimples in the oyster shirt. He was drinking from a water bottle when he noticed Regis bearing down on him. His body jerked, seeming to spasm from head to heel. Water spilled over his chin. Then Regis was upon him, hands held in his standard conversational gesture: right hand slightly above shoulder height, index finger pointing heavenward, left cupped near his belt buckle, fingers curved as if holding a tiny world in his palm. It was eerily reminiscent of a whole lot of statues of Jesus Jenny’d seen in the cathedrals of Europe. She hoped the gesture was unconscious. It would be too weird if he’d practiced it in a dusty old mirror in a dank church basement when he was little.

  Reading the poor boy the riot act, Jenny guessed, but she hadn’t a clue why.

  A girl rose from her blanket and headed toward the sheet-draped poles the woman in the Kliban-cat towel had visited. Heaving a sigh, Jenny went to intercept her. The area marked off with upended bottles and furnished with a privacy screen had to be a dedicated privy area. The partiers would undoubtedly be offended that sequestering their fecal deposits was not considered the height of ecological awareness.

  Jenny had taken down the sheet and was nudging stragglers toward the houseboat in hopes of forging another interpretive moment from the wreckage. Regis, evidently finished with Joe Average, crossed her path on his way back to his boat. The cigarette boat had acquired a fan club of admiring boys. Fleetingly, Jenny thought of relocating her movable classroom to the beach.

  “What was that all about?” she asked as Regis passed her.

  He stopped and turned. “What was what about?” he asked blankly.

  “Storming the beach, invoking the ‘bastard,’ cornering the boy in the blue T-shirt: What was that about?”

  “I had a bit of a run-in with him and his pals when they were refueling at Dangling Rope. He says he doesn’t know where his buddies are.”

  “Why are you trying to track them down?”

  Regis ignored the question.

  “What was the run-in about?” she tried when it was clear he wasn’t going to volunteer any information.

  “It’s not something you should have to deal with,” he said.

  “I deal with shit all day every day,” she countered, beginning to go from annoyed to seriously annoyed.

  “I’ll talk to the chief ranger today. In the meantime, stay as far away from that punk as you can get.” Regis started walking.

  “What did he do?” Jenny insisted.

  Regis raised a hand in dismissal. “I’ll get law enforcement on it,” he said and strode purposefully toward the throbbing red phallic symbol he loved to ram through the waters of the lake.

  Isn’t that just the prick calling the bastard rude, Jenny thought and returned to herding hungover visitors in the general direction of the boat, where she might get a hearing. As reigning Fecal Queen, she feared this battle had been lost the moment Regis inserted himself into the equation. But for a horse’s ass the battle was lost, she thought. Even butchered, the wisdom of the bard was ageless.

  The kid Regis had called “bastard” was on the foredeck laughing and trying to snap another guy’s butt with his towel—a hopeless task given that the towel was the size of a volleyball court. Gone were the furtiveness and the twitchy fear. Whatever Regis had hunted him down to impart hadn’t cowed him, but had relieved him to the point of goofiness.

  The kid caught her studying him. This time he grinned and waved as if she were his dear old auntie come to see him win the three-legged race.

  “Stay away from him,” Regis had said.

  “Law enforcement will deal with it,” Regis had said.

  The kid struck Jenny as about as scary as a St. Bernard puppy. Still, she decided to do as the personnel officer suggested. Some St. Bernard puppies grew up to be Cujo.

  That image in mind, she abandoned the idea of a two-way conversation with her soggy-brained pupils and decided to teach by example. Walking to her boat to gather bucket, rake, shovel, gloves, tongs, and plastic bags, she missed Anna Pigeon dearly. There was, literally and most graphically, a shitload of work to be done.

  ELEVEN

  Buzzing sounded in Anna’s ears. Flies. Kay had been unearthed no more than a quarter of an hour and the flies had arrived. A lousy bug could find a person in the bottom of a solution hole inside of fifteen minutes, and a zillion rangers had let Anna rot for a day and a half.

  The smell from the body, faint when it was beneath a foot of bone-dry sand, had increased exponentially since it had been dragged into the light of day.

  Anna’s arm ached from the tips of her fingers up through her shoulder joint; she was close to exhaustion and had developed a vicious thirst. It didn’t matter. After all of the digging up, she was going to have to rebury the woman. Unsettling as it was, Anna was going to strip her clothes off first. Naked and helpless for however long it had been, Anna craved Kay’s clothes, craved being dressed. Even a bathing suit top seemed like a suit of armor. Cutoff jeans promised a return to normalcy, a deformed twisted normalcy certainly, but Anna was quickly learning to take what she could get. The sandals, with their thick rubber soles and sturdy Velcroed straps, were the very embodiment of hope. If Anna did manage to crawl out of this pustule, she would need shoes to run away. Desert pavement was not as benign as it might sound.

  The anklet with the sparkly KAY on it was the first thing she removed from the corpse. Should the murder ever come to light, Kay’s mother and dad might recognize it. The second was the bikini bra. It was a string bikini, two triangles of printed fabric to cover the breasts held up with strings tied behind the neck and down with strings tied behind the back. Kay’s breasts were considerably the larger, and where it had been revealing on the college girl, it would be almost modest on Anna.

  She laid it out on the sand before she realized that she couldn’t put it on properly. She didn’t trust her arm not to pop out of its socket if she twisted behind her back to tie the strings. Paralyzing disappointment joined fatigue and raging thirst. Anna groaned long and low, sounding like a dungeon door opening into a B-movie chamber of horrors. Then and there she might have given in and given up had not the flies been landing on her, crawling about with their nasty little fly feet, wading through the sweat and the dust.

  Flies were said to be subjects of Satan, the Lord of the Flies, but now Anna thought not. Evil, true evil, in her—and, more scientifically, her psychiatrist sister’s—belief, fed on despair, the kind that suffocates every glimmer of light and life beneath a cold so intense it becomes darkness. Flies, on the other hand, simply pissed one off. They set about pestering Anna back to life, annoying her back into her body and inspiring her to fight back. “God damn it!” she hissed, swatting at the nearest offenders. For all their apparent loathsome sloth, the flies easily dodged her blows. “Okay, okay, I’m burying her, as soon as she’s stripped. For God’s sake, buzz off !”

  Anger brought energy, and energy focused her mind. With Kay’s unwitting contributions, Anna’s material estate had been much improved. Despite everything, she experienced a genui
ne sensation of wealth on becoming the heiress to a pair of old shorts, a bra, and beat-up sandals.

  She crawled over to where the corpse lay on its side, rudely booted from its burial trough.

  Kay’s low-slung cutoff jeans were held up by a worn man’s belt, leather, with a simple square brass buckle. Anna unbuckled it, slipped the leather from the belt loops, rebuckled it in the last hole, and put it around her neck. That done, she rested her left arm in the sling. Immobilizing the arm brought instant relief.

  Deep in her trap, hungry and thirsty and afraid, Anna actually smiled. She was inordinately pleased with her crude sling. In her thirty-odd years she had had her share of triumphs, but at that moment they all paled in comparison to her satisfaction at having thought to use a belt as a sling, having executed that thought, and having found it worked. A tiny shard of her overweening sense of helplessness fell away.

  Much as she might have enjoyed simply sitting in smug self-satisfaction, the flies again goaded her to action. The constant pain from her shoulder dulled, Anna’s mind began to work better.

  Work had increased her thirst to the level of incipient madness. She allowed herself one swallow from the poisoned canteen, rinsing her mouth and gargling before she swallowed in the hope of maximizing the wet of the water.

  Pretending she was refreshed, she set about unsnapping and unzipping the jeans, then working them off the corpse’s hips. As she jerked first one side then the other, lowering them by rude gritty inches, the top of Kay’s panties was exposed. They weren’t cute or sexy, no black lace, no thong, not even the day of the week embroidered on them.

  “Oh jeez,” Anna breathed, her eyes filling with sudden tears. “I’m a fucking grave robber. Your last, best ghoulfriend.”

  It would have been easier had they bespoken some debauchery, a hint of promiscuity. Anna would have settled for an indicator of vanity. There were none of these. Kay wore plain white Hanes underpants. They weren’t even bikinis, but the next step up on the modesty scale, hipsters. Simple white cotton panties symbolized innocence and purity. Absurd as that was, Anna felt its truth, and it jarred her humanity.