The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (11 page)

“Won’t even rattle for me?” Jenny asked. After a breath of silence she took her bowl into the kitchen, exchanged it for a bottle of Buckeye, and returned to the velvet of the night. This time she perched on the table, her feet on the bench.

Days in the desert were grand, but nothing compared to the nights. Had the brass been amenable, and the poop visible, Jenny would have started her day at sunset. Anna Pigeon loved the dark—that, at least, Jenny learned the night of her sexual reconnaissance. Jenny supposed a theater person would have to. After the third glass of wine—and given Anna’s size, Jenny half expected her to pass out on the couch at any moment—Anna volunteered that one of the things she loved about theater was that during rehearsal or a performance, she knew precisely where she, and everyone else, belonged, knew what each person’s job was and where they would, or should, be at any given moment. Glen Canyon, she said, made her feel like she’d fallen out of bed and woken up on Mars. Evidently finding this a breach of her personal code of nothing personal, Anna had then bowed like an arthritic old earl and took herself off to bed.

“Shoot,” Jenny whispered, shaking her head. She was obsessing. Not just
thinking
about another woman, obsessing. Having done both, she knew the difference. A hollow creeping fog of addictive excitement was rising. The Adafaire Mason disaster had been years ago, but Jenny never forgot the symptoms: hyperawareness, overweening curiosity, and constant speculation about anything concerning, or any aspect of, the Subject. That was the court-appointed shrink’s list, anyway.

At the time she’d thought it absurd. Maybe these many years later those visits were paying off. Since she recognized the symptoms, theoretically, she could avert the disaster.
Theoretically.
She drained the beer. Anna was gone. Surely obsessing on a missing person couldn’t end badly.

“Hsst. Pinky,” she tried again, but the snake said nothing.

She managed an entire shower and had nearly completed brushing her teeth without once thinking of the Subject. Mostly, she managed it by worrying obsessively about the possibility her obsessive tendencies had returned, then excusing them due to the Subject’s departure for parts unknown.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, let’s blame me, let’s blame me,” she sang to the tune of “Frère Jacques” as she knelt naked on the rug in front of the cabinet beneath the sink. Singing, she’d discovered, was the only effective measure one could take to shut out unwanted thoughts.

Over the course of the evening she’d swilled sufficient amounts of beer that if she didn’t find some aspirin and wash two or three down with a quart of water, she was sure to wake up in the middle of the night with a headache. Her hangovers were precocious things and could seldom wait till morning. She opened the cupboard door and started to reach in.

Anna Pigeon’s stuff was still there. Jenny’s belongings were neatly arrayed on the top shelf. Anna, as the late arrival, had been relegated to the bottom.

The unhealthy excitement built. This was a treasure trove for a woman who was obsessing. Anna is gone, she told herself. No harm, no foul. Getting comfortable, she crossed her legs, feet soles up on opposite thighs. Full lotus had been easy for her since she was teeny tiny.

The thrill was coursing through her, making her feel half scared, half excited; the way she felt when she met a new woman or nearly got run off the road by a Mack truck. Instead of leaning down and looking into the floor-level shelf, as she’d done when she’d first noticed it wasn’t cleared out, Jenny reached in blind, like a child putting its hand into a grab box at a county fair.

She knew it would serve her right if there was a nest of black widow spiders in the cupboard, but she didn’t stop. The first prize she grabbed and pulled into the light of the bathroom bulb was a blue plastic Secret solid deodorant dispenser. Jenny set it carefully to the side of the frayed bath mat that served as her bathroom rug. Next was a box of tampons, three-quarters full, then a bottle of Xanax, dental floss, a hairbrush with rubber bands secured around the plastic handle, a tube of ChapStick, a box of Q-tips, toothpaste, hand lotion, shampoo, crème rinse, nail clippers, birth control pills, and an emery board.

Jenny ran her hands over the aged wood of the shelf but found nothing else.

The Subject’s items were lined up like soldiers along the edge of the rug.

Tampons.

Xanax.

Hairbrush.

Birth control pills.

These were not things a woman forgot, not things she would leave behind.

Jenny’s illicit frisson of excitement took on a sharper edge.

THIRTEEN

The 747 landed without a bump. Anna stood in the aisle with the solid clot of humanity clutching bags to their chests or jostling to drag luggage down from the overhead bins so as not to spend a moment more than necessary on board.

The flight was a blur, as was the Martian landscape of Glen Canyon, and the beautiful deadly jar. All she knew or wanted to know was that she was free and safe and almost home.

The clot began to break up, people bleeding out of the plane’s hatch. Anna had no luggage, no purse, no glossy magazine. Her hands were empty, and she felt she flowed rather than shuffled as row after row of blue upholstered seats passed in her peripheral vision. The tube connecting the airplane to the terminal was round, jointed like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, and, like a vacuum, it hoovered Anna up. She was almost flying. Molly would be waiting for her.

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.