The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel Read online

  The terminal lived up to its name. Anna felt the thud as she slammed into the waiting area and movement stopped. Platinum blond hair, cut fashionably short, jewel-tone suits, posture one salute shy of military, Molly always stood out in a crowd.

  Anna’s eyes refused to find her.

  Molly hadn’t come. The Jetway reversed its suction. Anna was being pulled backward toward the plane. Then she saw him, leaning against a wall with angular grace, silky hair curling at his collar, glasses crooked on his fine long nose.

  “Zach!” she cried and started to run to him. From behind her came the sound of static, and her legs went numb. “Zach!” She was screaming now.

  He looked into her eyes. With his forefingers he traced a heart on his chest and let it fall into his cupped palms. He blew it to her like a kiss, then turned and walked away.

  Again she screamed his name, but the static was so loud it drowned her out. He didn’t look back.

  Static. Scratching. A cry like that of a small animal being slaughtered.

  Anna opened her eyes. She had broken her vow to stay awake. Crumpled, as if she’d collapsed midpace, she was on her side in the soft sand a yard from Kay’s grave. The only hint of light was a faint oblong, slightly less black, on the floor of the jar, moonlight sifting through hundreds of thousands of miles of outer space to the earth’s atmosphere, only to fall into inner space as dark as that from whence it had come.

  Scratching.

  Confused, Anna rolled onto her back. Her left arm fell from its resting place on her upthrust hip and sharpened her mind with a jolt of pain. Somebody was coming. Rocks were being moved, tiny pebbles, a stealthy coming, but erratic. Monster was coming. Anna tried to get to her feet, but the drug, like the dream, crippled her, and she floundered beetle-like on her back. Finally she made it to her knees. In the pose of a drunken penitent, she swayed and stared upward. If she tried to stand, she would fall. If she tried to struggle against whatever was coming, she’d lose. Thirst had undone her. Despite her promises, she had consumed more from the poisonous canteen than she should have. Unless it was in the second sandwich. It didn’t matter. The monster was coming and she was helpless.

  He—it—had already manipulated her body, carved WHORE on her thigh and very possibly done things she refused to let herself imagine, but he hadn’t killed her.

  Better to play dead than be dead. Anna rearranged herself into a fetal position on the sand and waited.

  For a minute or so, no more sounds emanated from the upper realms, and she dared hope that she had been left to enjoy her personal Hades unmolested, at least for the night. Then the disturbance renewed, frenzied, as if the monster were scrabbling around, raking up gravel or rolling in something.

  Fear loosened Anna’s bowels, but she would not lose control of her bladder again. Now that she had clothes, it was unthinkable.

  Now that she had clothes, the monster would take them away from her.

  The thought terrified her more than the coming of her captor. Knowing it was irrational didn’t ratchet down the horror one notch. He would take her shorts and bra, the belt sling.

  He would take the watch.

  Making so much noise she could no longer monitor sounds from overhead, she squirmed out of the stolen clothing, ripped the Velcro loose and kicked off the sandals, then lifted the belt and the bikini bra from around her neck. The watch she put in the pocket of the denim shorts where she had stowed Kay’s anklet for safekeeping.

  When she’d finished piling up her worldly goods, she heaped sand over them. Without light she couldn’t tell if she’d buried them completely or not. Running her hands over the sand, she checked for bits of exposed fabric or leather. The motion gave her the sensation of swimming through thick black waters so far beneath the surface of the ocean that not a glimmer of sunlight penetrated.

  The monster would have a flashlight; Anna knew that. Carving WHORE into her thigh had taken time and a decent light to work by.

  Scootching backward on her newly bare behind, pushing with her heels and the palms of her hands, she crossed the whisper of moonlight and reached the wall of the jar. There she lay down on her right hip, the questionable left arm on the sand in front of her face. Pulling her knees up in the futile hope of protecting her vulnerable belly and breasts, she waited.

  The noise, light and irregular, was joined by the sound of panting. Anna squeezed her eyes shut. A high-pitched strangled cry jolted them open again. A small black object, like the head of a doll—or a cat—fell into the crescent of waning light on the sand. It bounced into the impenetrable black of the datura patch near the grave.

  Then nothing. Silence, so complete Anna could feel its weight on her skin, filled the solution hole. Staring up at the narrow mouth, she couldn’t see anything but the prick of a single star.

  Whatever was there was gone.

  Whatever was here was here.

  FOURTEEN

  Opening the throttles, Regis reveled in the rush of speed as the powerful engine dug in and the hull climbed to the lake’s surface. Three, four, five hundred feet below the keel were the rotting remains of dozens—if not hundreds—of boats. No one knew the precise number. Boats sunk too deep to be salvaged. In more wrecks than the NPS liked to admit, corpses, preserved by the cold, floated in dark cabins.

  Lake Powell covered over two hundred fifty square miles of what had once been dry land. The ruins of ancient civilizations were drowned. Derelict machinery, trailer houses, sheep pens, watering troughs, windmills, broken-down vehicles, propane tanks, rubber tires—any junk that was not cost-effective to haul away was fed to the rising water.

  The living danced, drank, partied, and water-skied over the dead.

  As it should be, Regis thought. The pure joy of being one of the living caught him by surprise as it sometimes did when he was flying. Delicately he probed the phenomenon. Like a majority of the human race, he was accustomed to living in a psychic brownout: Barely There, walking dim pathways, hearing muted voices. The difference was, he was aware of the muffling. Others seemed contented with somnambulism. Whether he envied or scorned them depended on his mood.

  Today, on this murderous playground of a lake, he was suddenly totally and completely alive. His veins and arteries hummed like high-voltage wires, electrifying every part of him. Maybe it was the speed of the boat cutting clean and fast through dark water. Speed sometimes affected him like a drug. No. This was new. This was speed and fear combined, a kind of wild, teetering high that pulled him from the shadows.

  A single day of this high-octane life was worth years of reviewing seasonal applications, sitting through endless meetings, eating hash brown casseroles, and watching Bethy’s bottom spread. A single day of this made going back wretched to consider. It wasn’t that Regis had never felt good before. He’d thought he’d been happy enough, often enough. In early lust for Bethy he’d had his moments. Climbing with her up canyon walls so sheer even sunlight couldn’t stay on them, he’d felt totally awake.

  Risk. It came to him and he felt God’s own fool. It hadn’t been the young, and then nubile, Bethy who’d turned his life from black-and-white to living color those few months. It was risk, the risk of falling, being killed, of her falling, being killed or crippled. Risk and the promise of wealth; that was the combination that had him down on one knee, diamond solitaire in hand.

  “Holy smoke.” The wind snatched the words away from his lips as they formed. Falling in love. Bethy was necessary, but it was the thrill of the fall he was in love with.

  For the first time, he got why people chose to be firefighters, track down lions, arrest felons—type A’s. Cops, rangers, sheriffs were always telling people to stand back, let the professionals handle it, call for help. They’d done a fabulous job of convincing the sheepish public that taking matters into their own hands would just make those matters worse.

  They didn’t care about the sheep; they wanted to keep the fun for themselves. Risk, that was what made the blood sing high and fine.
Two hours ago he’d been afraid of the risk he’d taken calling in sick. Regis bleated, then smiled. When had the wool been pulled over his eyes? When had he donned sheep’s clothing?

  Cutting a sharp right into the mouth of Dangling Rope, head back, hair wild in the wind, he realized he was laughing.

  “Slow down!” somebody yelled as he waked the marina, slamming boats into their bumpers. Regis waved. He wasn’t going to slow down. He might not ever slow down again.

  Unerringly, he speared the cigarette boat into the mooring slot nearest the marina store. The slot was reserved for NPS boats. Risk. Having leaped to the dock, he whipped his lines over the cleats. Mad dogs and Englishmen: In the noonday sun he jogged up the incline from the dock toward the gray duplexes hugging the square of green like elephants guarding an oasis. He’d resented spending the summer out here rather than in their house in Page. No more. Life was edgier at the Rope. People were more open. Gory memories of Kippa dulled. Sun blessed his bare head; the air was cut to fit his lungs. The desert was limned with gold and red, every dry blade of grass, every stone as clear-cut as a new diamond.

  Sweat ran down his spine. Glen Canyon in July was so hot even Superman would sweat through his tights. Regis smiled at the thought and broke into a run for the last fifteen yards. Heart attack, heatstroke: risk.

  Jenny would scream like a banshee when she found out he’d gotten her a new roommate and he was a person of the male persuasion. Jenny insisted her preference for women was not sexism but sanitation, citing the fact that women seldom, if ever, pissed on the floor and that, given her job, she should at least be allowed to eat in an environment free of human waste.

  Barry Mack—aptly named “Mackerel” by his co-workers in honor of his body odor—the toilet scrubber, would be out to the Rope as soon as the paperwork to up-jump him from a GS-3 maintenance man to a GS-5 interpretive ranger was finished. Risk. Regis would definitely be on hand when Jenny was introduced to Barry and his grime-encrusted fingernails.

  Panting, he let himself in through Jenny’s battered screen door. He paused and looked back into a glare the honey locusts were too small to filter out. No one was watching him. Again he laughed. Risk bred paranoia. Who cared if anybody saw him entering Jenny’s duplex? He was here on business, here to check the room the Mackerel was assigned. The room Anna Pigeon had occupied.

  Bed stripped, closet doors partly open, window blind at a drunken angle in one window, air-conditioning unit in the other: The room was as he’d last seen it. Footsteps noiseless on the drab carpet, he crossed the room and turned on the swamp cooler. The fan thumped and clanked as if it were cutting carrots instead of air but, after a minute, blew cold.

  He switched it off and stepped back into the hallway. The door to Jenny’s room was closed, leaving the hall in semidarkness. What light there was leaked from the bathroom at the end of the hall. Feeling for the ghosts, Regis stood in silence and stillness. The Not There were not there for him in his present heightened state. He didn’t miss their nonexistent emanations. No self-respecting ghost should be forced to haunt the likes of Barry the Mackerel.

  Regis was turning to leave when the dim light from the bath caught his attention. On the bath mat in front of the sink cabinet somebody—Jenny, who else?—had arranged two lines of irregularly shaped objects. Backlit, they looked like men in a futuristic game of chess. Jenny Gorman was an interesting woman. Her sexual preferences never made her any more or less interesting to Regis. Playing peculiar games on the bathroom floor was another matter entirely.

  Moving quietly out of habit, Regis closed the distance between Barry Mack’s new room and whatever Jenny had set to guard her bathroom sink. At the door, he flipped the light switch. Along the ratty edge of a faded pink terry-cloth mat, Jenny had lined up two rows of feminine detritus, tampons, birth control pills, the usual stuff women keep in the bathroom. “Riddle me a riddle: Why did the lesbian line up her girl things?” he asked the ether as he squatted on his heels.

  “To convince herself she is a girl.”

  That wouldn’t fly. Jenny was all girl all the time, so much so she’d fallen in love with her own gender.

  Hairbrush, Xanax … Jenny didn’t strike Regis as the Xanax type. She loved the classics: nicotine and alcohol. Anna Pigeon, tranquilizers fit her.

  “Damn it,” Regis hissed and snatched open the door of the cupboard. Like items lined the top shelf. The shelf near floor level was bare. When Anna Pigeon’s things were packed, these were forgotten.

  Regis stood and switched the light off. People left things behind in the units all the time. Every fall, after the seasonal nomads moved on, maintenance collected the forgotten or abandoned bits and bites of them and tossed them in the trash.

  These must have felt different than the usual leftovers to Jenny. Why else would she line them up as neat as soldiers on parade? Evidently, to her, these meaningless items had meaning. “When the Pigeon flies the coop, why does Jenny arrange her toiletries in two lines?” Regis muttered.

  Playtex tampons, Secret deodorant—regular scent—Xanax, birth control pills in a flat round dispenser.

  What they had in common was that these weren’t things women could take or leave, these were things women needed. It was unlikely they would be forgotten or purposely left behind.

  If they were not purposely left behind, it suggested Anna Pigeon did not leave on purpose either. She’d been planning to come back, shower, put on deodorant, maybe change a tampon, take a birth control pill and a Xanax and go to bed.

  Fear welled up, curdling the exhilaration of risk. The downside of being fully alive was that even that which was bad was felt more keenly. Fear clenched Regis’s stomach. Sweat broke out at his hairline.

  What had Jenny Gorman done?

  More to the point, what was she doing now?

  He walked down the hall and let himself out into the sunlight. In three steps he crossed the barren ground between her porch and his own. Ignoring the heat and the glare, he collapsed into one of Bethy’s pink-and-green Walmart lawn chairs. What, exactly, had he seen? Did Jenny leave Anna’s things out knowing he would see them, knowing Anna’s position needed to be filled and Regis would come check the room? That seemed a bit far-fetched. Yet there they were, basically on display.

  Television—the movies—suggested some criminals, especially the serial murderers, wanted to get caught. The Zodiac and his letters. BTK and his hints. Until this moment on the porch, searing light making his shadow hard and black as it struggled to crawl from beneath his chair, Regis had thought that was absurd.

  Anna Pigeon’s belongings had been cleared out of her room. Everything except the things in that one cupboard. Regis wanted it to be simple oversight, but nothing was that simple, just like nothing was perfect. Maybe that was the catch with the perfect crime; it was impossible because the criminal would betray himself if nobody else did.

  Feeble rattling trickled up from beneath the porch boards, faint as the ticking of a buried clock. Distracted from questions to which he had no answers, Regis rose from the chair and stomped once on the porch floor. Rattling came back stronger. He jumped off the porch and, in one fluid move, knelt on the dry earth. Palms on burning soil, he peered into the shadows beneath the duplex.

  Pinky Winky, the midget faded rattlesnake, was pulled out to its full length. A nail behind its head and one at the base of the rattles pinned it to the ground where it was rattling out the last painful hours of its life.

  FIFTEEN

  As was beginning to be the norm, Anna woke with a drug hangover, a spotty memory, sand in every orifice, and thirst and pain her old familiars. Curled in a tight ball, spine against the reassuring curve of sandstone, she lay with her cheek pillowed on the sand. Night terrors, real or imagined, had settled to the bottom of the solution hole and weighed on her bare skin like chills following fever. Thirst was already clawing at her with scratchy panicked fingers. She knew she couldn’t deny herself water long enough for the drug to clear from her system.
Thirst was too cruel an adversary. She would drink and, always, the monster would find her helpless, hazy, unconscious, or nearly so. Drugged until she could die without even noticing.

  For a time she lay unmoving, eyes closed, repositioning herself in the universe she had fallen into, much as Alice had fallen into the rabbit hole: the jar, the sounds of movement from above, the terror, the black thing thrown into the last whisper of moonlight.

  Doll’s head, she’d thought. Severed cat’s head, she’d thought.

  Tarantula, she thought now. Her eyes snapped open. Only in zoos and horror movies had Anna seen tarantulas. That had been sufficient. Though inferior in size to grizzly bears, muggers, vampires, and other assorted predators, they made up for it in sheer horridness.

  Tarantulas were native to Glen Canyon. That, along with the fact that there were five separate species of rattlesnakes, had been divulged during orientation by the park naturalist with what Anna thought was an inappropriate amount of glee. He had gone on to say that certain kinds of the humongous bugs made wonderful pets. He assured the assembly that the immense hairy ugly spiders were not aggressive or particularly poisonous.

  They had no need to be. One look and their prey dropped dead of a heart attack, to be dragged away at the creature’s leisure.

  The instant the thought scuttled into her mind on eight little feet, Anna was certain the fist-sized black fuzzy item tossed into her jar the previous night was a gigantic tarantula. Sitting up so suddenly her shoulder and head shrieked in protest, she quickly checked around her. In the meager colorless light of either dawn or dusk—depending on how long she’d been out this time—every ripple in the sand seemed the hunched back of a tarantula, ready to spring.