The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (32 page)

Breath recovered, she began to run again. Twice more she stopped and walked, but by the time she made it back up the incline to the duplexes, she guessed she’d run easily a third of the one-mile circuit.

Bethy was sitting in a lawn chair on her porch when Anna came puffing into the square. Anna didn’t know whether it would be better to ignore her or greet her as if nothing had passed between them. Either way, she figured she was going to get a black eye out of the deal.

Bethy spared her the choice.

“Your face is the color of Rudolph’s nose,” she said, looking up from the magazine opened across her knees. The comment wasn’t particularly complimentary, but the tone of voice didn’t seem malicious. Not that Anna could discern.

“I’m not used to the altitude,” Anna said, having no idea what the altitude of Glen Canyon was.

“I saw you go running,” Bethy said and pointed at the side of her duplex. “Through the kitchen window. I’ve been waiting for you to come back.”

Anna looked at her warily. “Okay,” she said, carefully neutral. “I’m back.”

“I wanted to talk to you.” Anna couldn’t tell if the slight reticence in Bethy’s voice was from shyness or because she was about to launch a particularly nasty verbal assault and was saving her strength.

“Okay,” Anna said again. “So talk.” Turning her back on the other woman, she went to her and Jenny’s porch. Putting her left heel on the raised platform, she began stretching the way she’d seen dancers do after rehearsal.

“I guess I kind of wanted to say I was sorry for, you know, like, waking you up the other morning.”

“Sorry I laughed,” Anna said in payment for the apology, though she wasn’t in the least sorry.

“I know you aren’t after my husband,” Bethy said. She said “husband” as if it were a unique and grand acquisition.

Anna lifted the other heel and stretched down over her leg, her hands folded around the instep of her foot. The black leather of the Reebok was hot both inside and out. The thin soles wouldn’t last long in country as rough as she’d traversed today.

To Bethy’s comment, she said nothing. There was no response to it that wouldn’t be more damaging than silence. It was clear Bethy thought her husband irresistible to women. If Anna said he was, Bethy would assume she was after him. If she said he wasn’t, they’d be back into carpet sweeper territory.

“I mean, you’re a lesbian. Lesbians don’t like men.”

The silence that followed was as tense as a mousetrap waiting to be sprung.

Anna straightened up and, hands on hips, turned to face Regis’s wife. “My sexual orientation is not up for public discussion,” she said evenly.

“So you are?”

Anna just looked at her.

“I mean, I don’t care. I’m not like a lot of these people. It’s not like a man being gay or anything. You don’t have to stick anything anyplace or anything. Ugh! Anyway.” Bethy gusted out the last word. “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Anna said acidly.

Bethy didn’t feel the sting or, if she did, hid it admirably. “What I wanted to talk about was that other thing. What I said. I was jealous. But only because you’re so pretty and small and delicate and I was like that, but now I’m not and Regis loved me like that. I mean, like, I had bigger tits than you. I always did even when I was thin, way bigger, and he didn’t mind that, but now the rest of me is like, you know,
porky
and you’re still thin and that long hair. Regis really needs me, but, I don’t know,” Bethy ran down. “You know what I mean.”

Anna had a few vague notions of what Bethy Candor might mean, but she was not fool enough to put voice to them.

“Anyway, could I work out with you? You know, run, and there’s some machines maintenance has, like a kind of weight room, and we could do that.”

“Sure,” Anna said because it was the only thing she could say. The fact that Bethy probably wouldn’t follow up for a single run made it almost easy.

“Want to go now?” Bethy asked, surprising her. “Or are you all tired out from running?”

That pricked Anna’s ego. “Now would be fine,” she said.

The weight room was tucked behind a row of generators in the long low-roofed maintenance building. It was built on a concrete slab and had thick cinder-block walls. Anna guessed it had been designed to house some volatile piece of electricity-generating machinery that was never installed. The space was small, eight by eight feet, and dim. The only light coming from a high slit of a window made for ventilation. The weight-room gear was as basic as its housing: a bench with a weight rack, round weights of various sizes scattered near the bar, and a metal unit holding barbells.

“Do you want me to spot you first?” Bethy asked.

Anna didn’t know what that was and didn’t want to admit it.

“Back when I was me, I used to work out with my housemate. She was really into it. Here, I’ll show you like she showed me.”

Back when I was me.
The phrase unsettled Anna. She must remember to ask Molly about it when next they talked. Pleased that Bethy had chosen not to notice her ignorance, Anna followed her instructions and lay down on the bench.

“Okay.” Bethy picked a silver bar off the floor and fitted it into the two Y-shaped holders. “Lift it off the stand.” Anna pushed it up. “Now bring it down to your chest.” The bar felt heavy, but it triggered no new pain in her healing shoulder, so she lowered it to her chest. Bethy put her hands to either side of Anna’s and pressed down; the bar slid from chest to neck, the weight on Anna’s throat.

Panic ripped up from her gut.
Rocky
and
The Karate Kid
were a dim future. Running in the heat had sapped her strength. Insects pinned to corkboard were more powerful than she. The shoulder had not healed. Hypothermia had weakened her in ways she wasn’t aware of. Helplessness flowed like poison through her body. Tears filled the corners of her eyes. The room wavered and shrank until finally all that remained was Bethy’s round face floating above her like a birthday balloon.

She would not cry. She would not beg. She would not
.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Absurd as it was, Jenny missed Anna, and she’d only been out on the lake without her for three hours. Before Anna Pigeon flapped her little bird body into Jenny’s nest, Jenny loved her hours alone on the water, loved having to please no one but herself, loved being alone with the world and her thoughts.

Being solo for less than a half a day, she was beside herself with joy at having been given even such a grim excuse to go back to Dangling Rope before lunch. Having docked the Almar, she climbed the hill toward housing. Because of the steep grade, she walked on metal grid steps built alongside the reinforced concrete of the road.

Maybe they should have a picnic. Jenny wished she had something worth eating in her refrigerator to offer Anna. During the summer, Jenny pretty much lived on beer, wine, and peanut butter. Anna deserved better. Day after tomorrow
,
Jenny promised herself, when she was off duty she’d make a shopping trip to Page. Not that the little town had anything in the way of gourmet delicatessens. Still, it would suffice.

Flinging open the door to the duplex, Jenny had an urge to call, “Honey, I’m home!” Whimsy died a sudden death. The swamp cooler was off and the front room empty. “Anna?” she said.

No response. She poked her head into Anna’s room, then the bathroom, then her own room. No Anna. Jenny was so crushingly disappointed she frightened herself. Sure she was besotted with Ms. Pigeon. Sure she kidded herself she was “young and in love.” If it turned out she genuinely was
in love,
that would be truly scary. Playing with the idea of pure and chaste from afar, flirting with possibilities—even trying them on for size—was one thing. Breaking her heart against a heterosexual rock was something else altogether. That could seriously scar a girl.

Jenny stepped out onto the deck. There weren’t a lot of places Anna could be. She didn’t have access to a boat. Jenny knew for a fact neither Steve nor Jim had given her a lift anywhere. Regis was supposed to be at his office at headquarters between Wahweap and Page. Was supposed to be. Lately Regis had been turning up mysteriously in unexpected places and in the nick of time, sort of like the Green Lantern.

Would Anna try the climb out of the Rope a second time? After the hard work the woman had put in, Jenny would have thought she’d want a day off to do whatever passed for lying on the sofa, eating bon-bons, and watching the soaps in Anna’s hierarchy of relaxation, but she was a freakishly determined little creature. Returning to the scene of the crime and facing her fears might appeal to her.

Jenny didn’t like that at all. Certain fears needed to be faced. The majority needed to be run away from. That’s why feet and denial had been invented.

She went inside, took the binoculars from her daypack, and ventured back out into the hard-baked glare of afternoon. Ninety-six degrees, virtually no humidity, stiff breeze out of the southwest; Jenny doubted Anna had the strength to carry enough water for a sentimental journey to the jar. In the high desert there were days that sucked the moisture from a human body almost faster than it could be replaced.

Having walked a ways up the gentle rise behind the housing area, she put the binoculars to her eyes and scanned the faint tracking of the trail up the rubble in the side canyon and back across the broken cliff.

No Anna. She couldn’t have made it to the top in the three hours Jenny had been gone.

Gil and Dennis in dust-covered green-and-gray uniforms—good camouflage for this part of the country—walked into her line of sight from the direction of the sewage treatment plant.

“You guys see Anna around?” Jenny asked when they were within hailing distance.

“What’s it worth to you?” Dennis grinned and waggled his eyebrows.

Jenny was not in the mood. “Have you?” she demanded.

“Guess you don’t rate, Dennis,” Gil said and whacked his pal’s shoulder with his ball cap.

Jenny waited, and not patiently.

“Yeah,” Dennis said, “a while back. She and Bethy were headed into the maintenance barn. If they’re not still there, I don’t know where they are.”

“Thanks,” Jenny said and brushed by them.

“Whoo!” she heard Gil stage-whisper, “wonder what blew up her skirt?”

Though it was bright and sunny with no dark alleys in sight, dread built as Jenny headed to the maintenance building. She had never felt fear on the lake. Physical fear, yes, of a near miss with a boat or a hostile drunk, but not haunted-house-graveyard-fog-goose-prickles-down-the-spine dread. Of course, nothing more malevolent than snotty über-rich kids had crossed her path until this summer. This summer there were redheads carved with the word WHORE, crucified pink pygmy rattlesnakes, ropes that vanished, and water that killed.

The maintenance building was seldom quiet. Four big generators gutted the silence most of the time. Today was no exception. Jenny walked in the open garagelike front and stopped. There was only one reason for Anna to come here; the old weight room. No one but Jim ever used it. Threading her way behind the generators, she stepped into the concrete doorway.

Bethy was hunched over Anna like a Kewpie doll intent on drinking human blood. Pale and looking scared, Anna lay on the weight bench, the bar pressing down on the soft flesh of her neck. Her braid fell to the floor and coiled like a line waiting to be tied off.

Bethy lifted the bar.

“That’s what a spotter is for,” she said matter-of-factly. “You get to doing reps and the point is to push yourself to muscle exhaustion, but then, like, well, your muscles are
exhausted,
and somebody’s got to be there so the weight bar doesn’t strangle you to death.”

The bar settled back into the metal stand with a clank, and Jenny’s heart began beating again. Relief made her dizzy. Slouching a shoulder against the concrete, she gathered herself together. For a moment she had thought Bethy Candor was choking the life out of Anna. Love was said to make one blind, but paranoid? That was a bit beyond the pale. Jenny never trusted herself to travel beyond the pale, not by herself.

Anna and Bethy were so wrapped up in what they were doing, neither noticed her. “Wanna try it with five pounds on it?” Bethy asked. “That’d be ten, five on each side. The bar I think is thirty-five or maybe forty-five. I don’t really remember.”

Anna didn’t look like she wanted to try it again. She looked as if her organs and viscera were still quivering from having the bar pressed on her trachea. Or maybe Jenny was projecting and it was her own innards still aquiver.

“Okay,” Anna said. “Five pounds.”

Jenny shook her head and smiled. Got to love a woman with pluck.

Anna managed to lift the bar six times with Bethy helping a little on the final one.

“Pathetic,” Anna murmured disgustedly as she sat up.

“Sort of,” Bethy said.

“Yeah,” Anna said and laughed. “I coulda been a contender.”

The laugh jarred Jenny. An unpleasant tentacle coiled around her esophagus. The green-eyed monster, she thought and poured self-mockery on it to loosen its grip.

“Marlon Brando,
On the Waterfront,
” she said and stepped into the room.

Anna’s face lit up with pleasure. So very good.

Bethy’s did not. That, too, was good.

“Both bodies were recovered,” Jenny said. “Steve wants me to take you over to Bullfrog and see if you can positively identify them before they’re flown out to the morgue.”

THIRTY-NINE

“Are you freaked at having to look at the bodies?” Jenny asked.

Anna and Jenny were perched on the high white vinyl cabin chairs in Jenny’s gunmetal gray boat. Jenny let Anna drive. Anna tried to resist the impulse to yell “Whee!” when the little boat came up on plane.

“Nope,” Anna answered. “Not to seem callous or anything, but once you’ve had the opportunity to really get to know some dead people, you find out they’re not half bad.”

“That night in the slot canyon they did prove to be quiet and well behaved, particularly for men of that age,” Jenny concurred.