The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (2 page)

“Not the ones with houses in the Hamptons,” Dennis insisted.

“Every summer one or two seasonals go AWOL,” Regis said. “A bathtub full of Jet Skis doesn’t fit a tree hugger’s fantasy. They come thinking Ed Abbey and
Desert Solitaire
and find beer cans and party boats.”

“Maybe she was kidnapped,” Dennis said with a leer. “Kept for a sex slave.”

Regis inhaled a sip of beer and went into a fit of coughing. Gil came over to pound him on the back, thought better of it, and sat down again. “That’s a thought worthy of your moral rectitude,” Regis managed when he got enough air to speak.

“Dennis ain’t got no rectitude,” Gil said with a laugh.

“If she was kidnapped she took her stuff with her,” Jenny said. “One black bag with black clothes, one set of sheets, one towel, and one toothbrush. Ms. Pigeon traveled light.”

Kidnapping. Anna Pigeon didn’t have much in the way of concerned others, Regis knew. Under “next of kin” on her application form she’d listed a sister in New York. Under “address” she’d written “none.” Unless the sister was loaded, the posited kidnap was for something other than money.

Given the choice, Regis wouldn’t have hired Anna. A cursory background check showed no wants, no warrants, no living relatives but the sister. It also showed no driver’s license, no passport, and way too much education. Before he’d even met her, Regis guessed she was running from something: drug addiction, creditors, an abusive husband—something. Glen Canyon didn’t need any more action along those lines.

George Fetterman, Regis’s boss, wanted her because he had some half-baked notion of starting a living history program and wanted a theater type. The park had other plans and assigned her to Jenny to help with the water quality program. Shit detail, literally.

“Kidnapping a seasonal would be the perfect crime,” Gil said. “Seasonals are like Kleenex—one gets snotty, toss it out and grab another one. Out here in the boondocks, no phone, no nothing, who’d notice?”

“When the season was over and they didn’t show up for school somebody would,” Dennis said.

“Yeah, but what if you were too old for school, dickhead? Not everybody still goes to school in the fall.”

The perfect crime. Who hadn’t thought about that? The way for a crime to be perfect would be if nobody noticed, if nobody bothered to look for the criminal because nobody knew there had been a crime. Maybe Dennis wasn’t as stupid as Regis thought. Seasonal employees came from all over the country. Many were young, unattached, seldom called home even when they were stationed near a phone. Nobody but the rangers they worked with would notice they were AWOL for days, weeks, even months.

The perfect victims for the perfect crime. The crime had to be done alone and enjoyed alone, no telling, no boasting, no hinting. Once two people were involved in anything it ceased to be perfect. Two people couldn’t keep a secret. Two people would turn against each other.

Regis was willing to bet there wasn’t a soul alive who wouldn’t steal or rig the lottery, cheat on their taxes, or cheat on their wives if they knew, for a fact, no one would ever suspect. Husbands would kill wives. Kids would off rich parents. Billy the Kid wannabes would pop their neighbors just to see what it felt like. Dear old Dad would run over the family dog so he wouldn’t have to pick up its shit.

Mother Teresa would have committed the perfect crime if she’d had a chance.

The catch was, nothing is perfect.

TWO

A wild spin of pain forced the black drowning tide in Anna’s mind to recede. Either she was waking up or falling down. She wasn’t sure. Hot iron pressed against the soles of her feet, the burn cutting through the crud clogging her brain. The inside of her eyelid turned bleeding red. Shying from the glare, she turned her head, her cheek rasping against whatever she’d passed out on. Movement loosed a vicious wailing inside her skull: an unoiled hinge, nails on a blackboard, a dull Boy Scout knife scraping piano wire.

Blackout; she must have drunk herself into a blackout. Her sister told her every one of them cost her about four IQ points. Anna’d promised there wouldn’t be any more. This time she must have wiped out an entire circuit. Knives, drills, awls—anything mean and sharp she could think of—were grinding through bone and stirring gray matter into froth. Each tiny brain cell nailed to its own tiny cross was keening to die.

Molly was going to kill her.

Except Molly couldn’t; Anna wasn’t in New York City anymore.

Where the fuck was she?

Arizona, she remembered, or maybe Utah.

At the Port Authority she’d gotten on a Trailways bus with a suitcase and three paperback novels. She’d ridden this bus till all the blood in her body had vibrated down into her fanny and feet. A soldier lounging in the seats across the aisle—or a guy in khaki with a webbed belt—had pulled out his dick somewhere in one of those flat rectangular states and waved it at her. She remembered that.

“What am I supposed to do?” she’d asked. “Faint? Scream? What?”

He’d put it back in then. She remembered how sheepish he’d looked.

“Leave it out if it makes you feel better,” she’d told him. He’d gotten off the bus a while later, but she’d been asleep when he did.

She’d stayed on the bus until it reached a point a few miles south of the middle of nowhere: Page, Arizona; Lake Powell; Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

Passed out drunk in Dumb Fuck, Arizona. Or Utah.

“Shit,” she muttered. Grit coated her lips and tongue. Sand. She’d passed out facedown in the sand. Through the misery coagulating in her cerebrum she could vaguely see herself camping on a beach, one littered with toilet paper blooms and human feces she had to scoop out as if people were cats and she was the keeper of their litter box. Surely that was nightmare, not memory.

With an effort she raised one eyelid. The other eyelid remained shut, nailed in place by the daggers in her skull or the surface her face was mashed against. Through the slit between her eyelids she could see her left hand, the wedding band Zach had given her glinting dull gold, sparking with a glare so intense it threatened to slam her retina three inches into her brain.

The movie that played every morning when she awoke began unreeling.

The paper bag D’Agostino’s had packed her groceries in was limp, wet with drizzle that had been falling since noon, drizzle so stagnant with the heat of July it lost the ability to form real drops. Her hair was damp, braid trailing down her back, heavy as a hangman’s rope. The Levi’s that had fit when she’d put them on that morning stretched and drooped in the steam till they threatened to fall from her hip bones. Her pants legs trailed on the sidewalk. She was waiting to cross Ninth Avenue at Forty-first; one long block to Tenth and she was almost home.

“Pigeon!” came a shout. Across the avenue, Zach waved both arms over his head, making his six-foot-two scarecrow physique look even taller and narrower. The drizzle and the heat plastered his dark baby-fine hair to his neck and cheeks; his glasses were askew and his clothes loose and ill-fitting. Anna thought he was the most beautiful man in Manhattan. Seven years of marriage had done nothing to dull the thrill she felt when she saw him.

Fire on the soles of her feet banished the dream movie. She must have passed out with her feet in the sun. Sand, sun: outside. Was she a tourist attraction on a dung-infested beach? Turning from the glint of her wedding band, she tried to push herself up on her elbows. Sharp and grinding pain knifed through her left shoulder. The arm did not move. Her head threatened to explode, dimming the vision in her right eye. She fell to her side. The arm was broken or dislocated or badly sprained. Her head was broken or dislocated or badly hungover. Nausea, sudden and violent, spewed the contents of her stomach out. Dizziness, so bad she dug her fingers into the dirt to keep from being pitched off the surface of the earth, spun her.

Finally, vomiting stopped. Dizziness abated. Anna stared at the mess splattered over her bare breasts, the end of her braid trailing in the muck.

“I’m naked,” she whispered.

In front of her was a short stretch of sand, then a wall. Afraid to move, she rolled her eyes: wall and sand and sand and wall. She was nowhere. A beach in a box. She was naked in the bottom of a rock-lined hole and couldn’t remember how she got there. Poison flowed through her veins, making her eyes blurry and her thoughts sluggish, but she couldn’t remember getting drunk. She couldn’t remember anything. Either this wasn’t a hangover or it was the last hangover, the drunk that put her down like a sick animal. Or pushed her back over the edge into crazy. Crazy, she remembered. Crazy was an empty purgatory ten thousand masses couldn’t free her from.

Panic slammed into her viscera, vision tunneled, skin prickled.

Squeezing her eyes shut she murmured, “Shh, shh, shh, you’re okay. Naked in a box is better than dead in a box.” The butchered line from
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
brought her back to Zach. He was playing Rosencrantz in an Off-Broadway production she stage-managed. Now she and Guildenstern awaited him in purgatory. Tears of fear seeped from the corners of her eyes. A sane person would know why she was naked and broken, getting stranger and stranger in a strange land.

“No,” she whispered. “You’re not crazy anymore. This is real. Shh, shh, shh.”

Easing to a sitting position, she cradled her left arm across her stomach. Her shoulder was deformed. A rounded lump pushed out in a knob the size of her fist, skin pulled so tight it was shiny. Images of Sigourney Weaver, an alien bursting from her sternum, shot through her mind, making the dislocated shoulder surreal, terrifying.

Closing her eyes against this impossible existence, Anna began the catechism her sister teased her with. Molly was a psychiatrist; she knew crazy when it scratched at her door.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Molly asked.

That was an easy one. No fingers; Anna was alone with her own ten.

“What is today’s date?” Molly demanded.

“July 1995,” Anna whispered. “I don’t know what day.”

“Who is the president of the United States?”

“William Jefferson Clinton,” Anna murmured, proud of herself for remembering the Jefferson part. Molly would give her points for that.

“You’ll do,” Molly said with a wry smile and faded from Anna’s internal landscape.

“Don’t go,” Anna cried, but it was too late, her sister was gone.

Slowing her breathing and relaxing her muscles one by one the way Molly had taught her, Anna felt the panic back off. It wasn’t gone, but it was bearable. “This is not purgatory,” she assured herself. “They don’t let Protestants in.”

Encouraged, she opened her eyes again. No longer blind with fear and pain, she saw smooth stone curving up from the cushion of sand where she sat. Streaks of rose and buff and gold whirled upward nearly thirty feet as if sandstone had been twisted, pulled like taffy. The shape was as perfect as an earthenware bottle thrown by a master potter, the upper part flowing gracefully into a narrow throat that curved into a slanting tunnel. At the end of the tunnel an eye of blue was punched out of the sky. A single lozenge of sunshine, scarcely more than a yard across and a foot wide, reached the sand; the source of the sun on her bare feet. Spinning in the petrified tornado, her thoughts were as wild as wind-blown debris.

A solution hole; she was in a solution hole.

That thought was carved out of the chaos between her ears with difficulty. Around Lake Powell were hundreds of solution holes. She’d seen them from the boat. Jenny, her boss, said they were deposits in the sandstone made of softer stuff, and over the millennia they eroded away, leaving smooth, irregular holes. Jenny boasted Glen Canyon Recreation Area was home to one of the largest of these formations in the world.

Anna was not in the largest, not by a long shot. The bottom of the hole couldn’t be more than six or eight yards in diameter. How had a woman who’d never been closer than a boat ride to a solution hole ended up naked in the bottom of one? Had she suffered a psychotic break in the desert sun, thrown off her clothes, and fallen in? Had she gotten drunk and stumbled naked into a pit? Each thought came hard and slow, coated with a residue thicker than booze. Gingerly she touched her head where it hurt the worst. Behind her right ear was a lump radiating heat. The skin was broken; she could feel dried blood in her hair.

If she was sane, if she’d “do,” as Molly said, she hadn’t suffered a psychotic break. She sniffed her hand, cupped it to smell her breath, sniffed her hair. She stank, but she didn’t stink of wine. As crazy as she’d been the last months, she’d never blacked out without benefit of a couple of bottles, yet now she remembered nothing.

Had someone pushed her in? The tumbling fall could account for the knot on her head and her shoulder being out of its socket. Why would anyone steal her clothes and drop her in a pit?

Rape.

“God, God, God,” she moaned and spread her legs, pushing her feet back into the searing sunlight. No semen smeared on her thighs, no bruising.

She didn’t
feel
raped. A person would feel raped.

“Not raped,” she whispered. “Naked in a hole and not raped.” Pushing into the sand with her heels, she backed into the curving wall of her bizarre prison. No exits, no steps cut into the rock face, no rope, no ladder. No way out.

Slapping the stone with the palm of the hand on her uninjured arm, she screamed, “Help! Help me! Somebody help me, God damn it!” Words careened off the wall, echoed feebly, then were gone. She pounded and screamed until it seemed all sound was taken from her, poured out, pooling around her, not a single decibel making it up the sheer walls and out to …

To where?

Balling her hand into a fist, she struck the stone hard.

“Stop it!” Molly ordered.

Anna stopped, letting her bruised hand rest palm up on her thigh in an unconscious attitude of supplication.

“Breathe,” Molly said from somewhere behind her eyes.

Anna breathed.

Pulling her knees to her chest, she wrapped her good arm around her shins and, rock protecting her back, fought to push through the dense fog clogging her mind.