The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (21 page)

By the time she’d gotten a boat ride back to Dangling Rope it had been after five. She had forgotten to eat. Now she was out of fuel, running on empty, and not running very fast. A few glasses of wine backed by a Xanax and sixteen hours in bed looked like her very own Eden. Still, she picked up the phone and dialed the many numbers needed to make a credit card call to New York.

“It’s me, Anna,” she said when she heard Molly’s “hello.” At the sound of her sister’s voice, tears she had no idea were waiting gushed from her eyes. With an effort, Anna kept them from her voice.

“Well, well,” her sister said. “Did you have to ride a yak to the nearest village where they had running water and AT&T?”

As was Molly’s habit—both by training and inclination—she listened without interrupting while Anna told her tale of abduction, assault, and imprisonment. Trusting her sister absolutely, as she had done since she could remember and probably from the moment her mother brought her home from the hospital and laid her in six-year-old Molly’s arms, Anna left nothing out: the drugged water, the carving on her thigh, being stripped, her nude body posed—all of it. Twice she heard the familiar metallic rasp followed by a short sharp intake of breath as her sister lit and smoked two Camel unfiltered cigarettes.

Anna was glad she could end the story with the odiferous heroics of Buddy. Neither she nor the little skunk knew the man in the dark was Regis Candor and not one of the young murderers and would-be rapists, so Buddy got full credit for saving her life.

That he had saved her in other ways she didn’t bother to voice—not at twenty-five cents a minute. Molly would know. The healing power of friendship, the value of having someone to care for, to give and receive love, were things her sister often said she wished she could dole out in pill form.

The only part of the story Anna kept back was that not only had Molly’s voice been with her in the jar, but it had pulled her back from the edge. Much as Anna loved and trusted her older sister, there was no sense giving her a big head. As a doctor and a New Yorker, Molly had sufficient arrogance to get her through the day.

Finishing her story, Anna brought Molly to the present moment: sitting in a small dusty ranger station, sun relinquishing its light to the first stars, absolute quiet a palpable thing. Over the phone line, from three stories above Seventy-seventh, off Fifth Avenue, Anna listened to the ululations of sirens, the sound track of cities.

For a long intake of breath Molly said nothing. Then she gave her professional summing up: “Yikes.” Another long breath came and went. The slow response to a story full of danger and drama didn’t offend Anna. This was how Molly designated levels of importance. Shallow thoughts brought quick rejoinders; serious matters deserved serious attention.

“This Regis guy stinks to high heaven,” Molly said finally.

“Even without Buddy’s ministrations,” Anna agreed.

“But it was not he who struck the girl you unburied, or chased you and, presumably, knocked you unconscious, stripped you, and rolled you into the pit.”

“Right,” Anna said. “As far as I know, Regis wasn’t within miles of me that afternoon.”

“Easy enough to check,” Molly said.

It was easy to check. Anna could find out. Until that moment, pursuing justice on her own behalf hadn’t crossed her mind. There were professionals for that. Vigilante justice had struck Anna as an oxymoron. Until now.

“You’re right,” Anna said firmly.

“What? No you don’t. I am most assuredly
not
right if you’re thinking two of my rights are your permission to do a big fat wrong. What are you thinking, Anna?” Molly demanded. “Your voice has that terrifying ‘fools rush in’ ring to it.”

“It’s better than feeling helpless,” Anna countered.

“It’s not better than feeling dead,” her sister snapped.

“Living, knowing the monster is out there, might not be better than dead,” Anna said.

“Don’t be such a melodramatic little ass,” Molly said. “There are always monsters out there. Many of them in high places and respected professions. Do you think I just listen to bored housewives and neurotic rich people forty hours a week? I see monsters every day: men who batter wives, women who are cruel to their children, grown-up little boys who were used by fathers and uncles and cousins, grown-up little girls who were raped by their dentist or pastor or Daddy’s best friend or Daddy himself. On Fridays, when I do pro bono work at Pelican Bay, I meet the batterers and child abusers and murderers. I know they are the tip of the iceberg, the small percentage that get caught and their lawyers don’t get them a deal and the judge doesn’t throw out their case on a technicality and the victim doesn’t withdraw her accusation and the witnesses actually show up in court.

“Of course we’re scared sometimes. Of course we sometimes feel helpless. Of course we all live knowing the monster is out there.

“You are not a monster hunter, Anna.” Molly ran down, the heat leaking out of her tirade. “Leave this to the cops,” she finished. “You are not John Wayne. You are just a stage manager.”

Anna clenched the fingers of her left hand, making the tendons in her shoulder ache.

“John Wayne wasn’t John Wayne,” she said. “He was just an actor.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

By gray-green fingernails dusk hung on to the edge of a star-studded sky. Chain-smoking and thinking and trying not to think, Jenny sat with her back against the wall of the duplex, legs stretched out on the picnic table, waiting for Anna.

Party boaters had defiled the grotto. She and Anna would need to sample the water there again, see if it was fit for human visitation. There was the beautiful little beach in Gunsight Bay, a prime spot for toilet paper blooms and graffiti, that she hadn’t visited in a while. Interpretive opportunities would abound in Gunsight. It would be a good place to get Anna started on the higher education aspects of her job.

That was if Anna didn’t bolt. Jenny wouldn’t blame her if she did pack up her toiletries and head east on the first train, plane, or bus. Jenny hoped Anna would stay, figured she would run, and, in honesty, thought she probably should put as many miles between herself and the “jar,” as she called it, as possible. Ms. Pigeon was incredibly ignorant of reality not created on stages in the Big Apple.

Too many questions about her abduction and imprisonment remained unanswered for her to feel safe anywhere near Lake Powell. Regis was not in jail. Anna wasn’t pressing charges. Eyewitness to her own attack, Anna knew he had not been one of the three boys who dumped her in the hole. For tonight, Steve had asked Regis to remain in Wahweap so Andrew could take his statement at headquarters. Tomorrow night, he would be back at the Rope, sitting a few yards from Anna’s bedroom window drinking beer.

Regis’s intervention had rescued Anna from a very real hell. Anna didn’t dispute that, but Jenny saw how she’d watched him, chin up, eyes hooded. Jenny’d seen an owlet looking at a snake that way once, waiting for it to strike. Come to think of it, Jenny had seen Bethy Candor looking at Anna that way. That her husband had left her bed to find another woman wasn’t lost on Bethy. Before Anna disappeared, Regis’s attentions to Anna hadn’t been lost on anybody, with the exception, perhaps, of Anna herself.

The Rope was no longer going to enjoy the easy camaraderie it once had.

At the far end of the housing area, soundless as an apparition, Anna appeared.

Lost in thoughts of her, for an instant Jenny believed she had conjured her. Anna ghosted between the two duplexes forming the southwest corner of the square, walking as quietly as cats were supposed to. “Hey, Anna,” Jenny said lest she startle her. “It’s me.”

“I saw you,” Anna replied. She came down the concrete walk and sat on the bench, leaning her back against the table’s edge, facing away from Jenny.

Jenny wondered if it was a rebuff. No, she decided, if Anna didn’t want to be with her, she would have gone straight inside. “Did you get hold of your sister?” she asked.

“She thinks I should come back to New York.”

“You probably should,” Jenny said, proud of herself for putting Anna’s well-being before her desire for her company.

“Yeah,” Anna said. Then, “Do you know who took my things? My uniforms, clothes, all that?”

“Not a clue,” Jenny said, “but that’s why we didn’t do a search. It looked like you’d cleared out.”

“Do you think that’s why they were taken? So nobody would come looking for me?”

“That’s what I think.” Jenny put added stress on the
I
. Steve Gluck and the chief ranger didn’t buy that there was that much plot afoot. Kay’s corpse and the mishmash of tracks on the plateau convinced them that there were three attackers, as Anna had said. They accepted her statement that they were college-age boys. These facts made sense. That three criminal opportunists were connected to the disappearance of Anna’s belongings, miles away in distance and elevation, did not. Andrew Madden, at least, clung to the hope that Anna had cleared out her things, then coincidentally—or for personal reasons—met up with the men who’d killed Kay.

Jim Levitt—it was he who had carried the law enforcement gossip from Andrew’s office to Jenny’s ears—said there was some disagreement between Andrew and Steve as to whether Anna had been visited in the hole or merely been dumped there to die. The canteen she’d insisted contained drugged water was empty, and there was no evidence of any waxed paper, pudding containers, or paper bags to back up her story about the food.

Anna caught the emphasis on
I.
“You believe the monster took my things. Who doesn’t?”

Jenny told her part of what Jim had said. “They aren’t discounting the possibility that you knew Kay and went to meet her that day.”

Anna was silent so long Jenny worried she’d dropped back into that fugue state she’d suffered when Regis popped out of her own personal rabbit hole and began berating her for skunking him.

“Want a beer?” Jenny asked helpfully.

Anna didn’t reply. Jenny stubbed out her umpteenth cigarette, scooted off the table, and went inside. In less than three minutes she was back on the porch, two bottles of Tecate hanging by their necks from the fingers of her left hand. Buddy was tucked into the crook of her right arm.

“Medicinal restoratives,” she said as she sat beside Anna on the bench and put the bottles between them.

As Jenny settled the sleepy skunk kit on Anna’s lap, the back of her hand touched the other woman’s thigh. Anna flinched as if she’d been poked with a hot iron.

Jenny didn’t know if it was her touch, the fact of being touched, or the cuts. She didn’t ask, just inched farther away on the bench as she pulled her hands back, in case Anna needed more space.

“Then they think I also knew the boys that were getting ready to rape Kay?”

Jenny didn’t have ready words to answer this question. According to Jim it had been posited that either both Anna and Kay knew the boys and a day of fun had gone bad, or possibly only Anna knew the boys and they had turned on her when Kay was killed. As Jenny was searching for a way to say it that would not destroy the hearer, Ms. Pigeon figured it out.

“They think I killed Kay and made up the stuff about boys to cover up the murder?” The outrage in her voice was a balm to Jenny’s ears. In anger was strength. She realized she’d been bracing herself for hopeless despair.

“They don’t think that,” Jenny said. “It’s just something they have to consider, Jim says.”

“I was alive, Kay was dead,” Anna said after a time. “I hit Regis and left him—”

“And didn’t mention that fact for quite some time,” Jenny added.

“Right.”

“For no apparent reason, you climbed a miserable dangerous trail in the heat of the day with no food or water to speak of.”

“Right. Why would I do that if I wasn’t expecting to meet someone?” Anna asked.

“Because you’re a greenhorn, a citified, ignorant fool,” Jenny suggested, a smile in her voice.

“Right,” Anna agreed. “Start a list. We demand drinking fountains on backcountry trails. Any theories on how I ended up in the bottom of the hole with a dislocated shoulder and a ladder coiled up neatly beside the jar’s mouth where I couldn’t even see it?”

“Actually there are,” Jenny admitted.

“You’re kidding!” Anna exploded, rising half off the planks of the bench.

“Don’t upset Buddy,” Jenny cautioned. “I don’t want to be washing in tomato juice for the next week.”

Anna settled back. Night had come in earnest. Jenny could just see her housemate’s outline. Lack of vision honed her other senses, and she breathed in the faint plumeria smell of shampoo and a hint of childhood innocence from the Jergens lotion Anna used. Cotton, washed and worn for so many years it was as soft as old flannel, whispered against the rough wood when Anna moved. The scents and sounds were familiar, comforting. Not surprising, given the fact that most of it belonged to Jenny. A trip to La Boutique Target would be necessary as soon as possible.

“And why, pray tell,” Anna asked icily, “do the Powers That Be think I was in the jar and the ladder was not?”

Jenny took a breath to repeat what Jim had gleaned from the meeting in Andrew’s office and conversations to and from Wahweap on Steve’s boat.

“No, wait, let me,” Anna said bitterly. “A life in the theater should make fiction my forte. Lying my second language. I kill Kay, bury her, climb out via the nifty boat ladders, coil the rope ladders up, and store them by the rock. Then I creep back to peek down the throat of the jar to admire my handiwork, slip, and fall in, banging my head and hurting my shoulder in the process.”

Jenny was impressed. “In a nutshell,” she said and, “Stranger things have happened.”

“They sure as hell did,” Anna grumbled.

“College-age boys,” Jenny mused. “We’ve got Heckle and Jeckle on tap—Gil and Dennis, the maintenance seasonals,” she added for Anna’s benefit. “Three Hispanic guys about the right age work at the marina. There’s more up and down the lake working seasonal for us or concessions. Then of course there are a zillion party boats vomiting über-rich teens and twenty-somethings onto the beaches daily.”