The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (39 page)

Anna stayed where she was.

The water, black as squid ink, cold, and bottomless in her mind, was turquoise in the sunlight and unbelievably clear. Gold sandstone walls shimmered beneath the surface, water acting as a magnifying glass, until the drowned canyon seemed more real and inviting than that above the lake. Canyon walls, leaning, waiting to snap shut like the jaws of a hungry alligator on the edge of her dreams, soared in the varied hues of a sepia rainbow to a ribbon of achingly blue sky. At the far end of the crystalline pool, the crooked narrow slot Anna remembered as a torture chamber worthy of the Spanish Inquisition was a shadowed lane of water that drifted from turquoise to teal as it meandered deeper into the rock.

It was morning, not evening. They had the entire day before them. Anna’s shoulder was healed, and she was stronger than she’d ever been.

“I do want to get back on the horse,” she said to Bethy, who was standing below, near the bow of the Zodiac.

“Goody,” Bethy said. “It’ll be cool. You’ll see.” She snatched a bulky daypack and a coil of climbing rope with carabiners affixed to either end out of the inflatable boat and brought them along with Anna’s pack to the top of the sandstone blocks.

A rope had been looped over the stone to replace the one that had gone missing the night Anna and Jenny were stranded. It was new and the knot properly tied. Anna checked it anyway. Butterflies the size of bats were fluttering madly in her stomach. Fear, yes, but mostly excitement. This slot, this climb: It was what she needed to do. One day, someday, maybe even this day, she would go back to the jar and exorcise the demons that remained there.

Bethy pulled a green garbage bag from her pack, then put the pack and rope inside it. “Anything you wanna keep dry?” she asked. Anna put her daypack in with Bethy’s. The water bottle on her belt wouldn’t suffer from a dunking. Bethy closed the sack by tying a knot in its neck. That done, she attached the awkward bundle to a belt loop on the waistband of her shorts with another carabiner.

As Bethy descended the sheer eight feet of sandstone to the water, Anna again inspected the rope and the knot. Nothing short of human intervention would loosen it, and the men responsible for Kay’s death were dead. Anna had seen them. She reminded herself of this fact when the stomach butterflies threatened to rush up her esophagus along with coffee and a raisin cinnamon bagel.

“Don’t be such a slowpoke!” Bethy called back as she frog-stroked across the rectangular pool toward the slit in the stone.

Taking a deep breath, and bracing herself for the cold, Anna climbed down. In her mind this rock wall was a thousand feet high. In reality, by the time she was an arm’s length from the top, her toes were in the water.

The water wasn’t as cold as she remembered, nor the swim to the slot as long. Reality was going to go a long way toward defanging her nightmares. As they were passing through—as opposed to trying to defy gravity by suspending themselves between—the canyon walls, they made short work of the twenty yards of sinuous swimming to where the canyon closed down tightly.

At water level the crack was no more than six inches wide. Four feet up it opened to where a human being of average size could fit in sideways. Fifteen feet higher and the walls bulged away from the crevice as if an enormous balloon had pushed them out. High in the shadows, they flowed back together, leaning in like dancers and shutting out the thread of blue sky.

Bethy tossed the line with the carabiners over an anchor of bleached driftwood a couple of yards above water level and began climbing.

“This isn’t the best for climbing,” Bethy said, “but use the rope and be sure and test every hand- or foothold, like, twice before you trust it. Some stuff is stuck real tight and that’s okay. Some tries to get you.” She made it up, the dead tree, her feet out of sight beyond the branch. Braced against the east wall of the crevice, she began unclipping the garbage bag with their daypacks from her waistband.

Anna climbed up easily.

“Looks pretty bitey, huh?” Bethy asked happily, glancing over her shoulder into the gloom.

“Exceedingly bitey,” Anna agreed. In the surreal passage debris had collected, some half submerged in the water-filled six-inch crack at the bottom, others wedged at varying levels: entire trees, mangled and dry as bone; rocks; what appeared to be part of an ancient rusted cookstove; the bones of a raccoon or bobcat scattered like caltrops. The crack was not full, not like a junkyard or a garbage can. It was like a gauntlet devised by a particularly malicious child. It was not a place a barefoot woman in bra and panties would want to travel alone in the dark, even if she could have attained the crack without a rope.

Since their bonding in the cold water and colder prospects, Anna had suffered a sneaking suspicion that Jenny could have climbed out but stayed because of her. Knowing Jenny told the truth when she insisted she couldn’t freed Anna of a load of gratitude too heavy to comfortably bear.

Bethy gave Anna her pack, shouldered her own, and led off down the crevice. Following, Anna marveled at the human body, at her own body, the way ankles and feet moved to catch an angled stone, knees braced against walls, hands and fingers clutched and spread catching the weight of an ever-changing center of gravity. In a more sedentary life it had been easy to forget a body’s miraculous engineering and notice only its small uncomfortable failures.

Within two hours they had traversed the slot with no more mishaps than a bit of flesh peeled off the inside of Anna’s ankle by a deer antler wedged with a single prong above the strangled line of water.

For several yards near the end, the slot opened up to the width of two midsized sedans parked side by side, then dead-ended. In that dead end was a three-sided cavity running straight up for fifty or sixty feet. The wide area where they stood was dry and littered with stones and broken branches smashed when the rains carried them over the fall to shatter at the bottom.

The three-sided cavity, a chimney twenty yards high, and the circumfrance of a phone booth but had formed when a vein of weaker stone broke from the rest of the rock face.

“It’s good to see the sky,” Anna said, tilting her head back to admire the patch of blue the wider section allowed.

“You wanna eat lunch down here or up there?” Bethy asked.

“Up there,” Anna said immediately. Much as she had enjoyed the journey through the center of the earth, she was looking forward to having room to fill her lungs completely and focus her eyes more than a foot or two from the tip of her nose.

“This chimney is super high, like, one of the longest ones here,” Bethy told her, “but it’s pretty easy. It’s easier than the first one we did. That one was just shorter. Once you get going there’ll be lots of good places for your feet and hands to be at.” She pointed nearly straight up. “See that poke-outance there at the top where the chimney becomes like a weensy crack?”

Anna followed where Bethy pointed and saw a thin blue line on the rock. From where they stood it looked no more substantial than a thread.

“That rope is tied on the top and falls into where the chimney ends there. See? That’s how we go the last ten feet. Last one up is a sore loser,” Bethy said and, stepping into the bottom of the chimney like Clark Kent into a phone booth, began to ascend rapidly.

For several minutes Anna just watched. To watch anyone perform with such confidence and grace was a pleasure. In these narrow stone canyons Bethy was at her best. A vision of hippopotamuses, lumbering on land, rotund ballerinas beneath the water, made Anna smile.

When Bethy was about halfway up, Anna stepped in the chute and began to climb, albeit more slowly. As Bethy had promised, there were lots of good foot- and handholds and the regularity of the chimney’s size and shape lent a sense of security, which, climbing sixty feet with no belay, Anna deeply appreciated.

As she ascended, the view of the slot canyon changed. By the time she neared the top of the chimney she was looking down on the torturous route they’d just traversed: A dark crack in the pale stone that snaked, curling almost back on itself in one place, slithered out, then ended abruptly in hard blue sky. That would be the top of the rectangular pool, Anna guessed, where the true skinny slot began. Beyond, hidden from view, would be the block of stone that dammed the canyon and nearly damned Anna and Jenny.

From above, the distances appeared paltry, Panther Canyon, with its beautiful grotto, so close it was hard to imagine how two people had died and two more had almost died, so near civilization.

“I’m going to eat your half of the potato chips if you don’t hurry up,” Bethy called.

Anna looked up. Bethy had vanished from sight over the rim of the plateau. The rope was still twitching like a cat’s tail. As Anna watched, it began to snake upward, the end of it flipping as it was hauled up. “Very funny,” Anna shouted. A shiver welled up from the depths of the jar that still existed within her. It wasn’t funny, not at all. Anna climbed, fear giving her tired muscles added power.

“Just kidding,” Bethy laughed. The rope dropped again. Within seconds Anna had grabbed it, relief palpable in the tremor that took her when her fist closed around it.

Some kindly soul had knotted it every foot or so to make climbing it less hazardous. Deciding that looking down would be foolhardy, Anna turned her back on the void and grasped the first knot.

From above she heard the unmistakable rattle of a bag of potato chips being torn open; then came Bethy’s voice. “I’m eating ’em!”

Bethy sounded like a little kid. “Don’t you dare,” Anna called back. Hands moving from knot to knot, feet scrabbling on the last of the chimney, she began the short ascent. Once she’d cleared the rectangular chimney she used feet and thighs on the rope as well. The distance wasn’t great, no more than a few yards. Within minutes she’d reached the rim.

“That was quick,” Bethy said and smiled. “You got to kind of kick and crawl over the edge on your elbows. Here, lemme help.” She dropped to her knees and took a firm grip on Anna’s wrist.

Before Anna could say, “Thank you,” Bethy’s free hand flipped a clink of glittering silver metal from the backpack at her side. Handcuffs. In less time than it took Anna to realize what they were, Bethy had snapped them on her wrists.

“What are you doing?” Anna asked, dumbfounded. Fear followed on the heels of shock, and Anna pulled hard on the rope, dragging one elbow over the sharp lip of stone topping the cliff. Bethy, face intent, movements sure, snatched the rope with the carabiners tied to either end from beside her, threaded it between Anna’s cuffed wrists, and clicked the carabiners together, making a loop. That done, she removed herself from Anna’s limited field of vision.

Saving her breath for the work, Anna pushed on a knot with her feet and got her other elbow over the top. With a strength that surprised her, she closed her manacled hands around the next knot and yanked hard enough that she landed herself like a fish, belly-down on the plateau.

“God damn it, Bethy,” she grunted as she pushed herself to her knees.

She looked up in time to see Bethy’s foot coming at her face. Her nose exploded in pain and blood and she toppled backward.

Her hands slipped on the knots and she couldn’t close them tightly enough to stop the rope from paying out through her hands.

Then the rope was gone and she was falling.

FORTY-EIGHT

Anna shouted what she believed was her last soliloquy on earth: “Shiiiit!” Not even fit to carve on a tombstone. Scarcely had the word passed her lips than her fall was stopped with bone-snapping abruptness. Again Anna screamed, wordlessly this time, as pain seared from her broken nose and shoulder sockets through every cellular matrix in her body.

She thought she’d surely die of it, but, like a whack to the crazy bone or a little toe jammed into a table leg, intense as it was, the agony passed through her and was gone. More or less gone. Her nose still throbbed, blood dripped salty onto her lips, and her wrists ached furiously where the handcuffs cut into them.

Deadweight, her body bumped gently against the sandstone, breasts, belly, and knees, as gravity settled her. Tilting her head back, she tried to make sense of the last few seconds. Her wrists were cuffed, a rope looped through them that ran in two lines toward the lip of the canyon, no more than five feet from the tips of her fingers. Bethy had made a loop of the rope with the carabiners and thrown it over a rock to anchor it before she kicked Anna back into the void.

Hung out to dry, Anna thought idiotically.

Bethy’s face popped over the horizon of Anna’s world, round and peering down, giving Anna the view babies in bassinet have of their mothers.

“You’re stupid,” Bethy said cheerfully. “You think you’re so smart, but you’re stupid. Stupider than stupid.”

Anna looked down past her toes, dangling fifty feet above a litter of shattered wood and stone. “I can’t disagree with you there,” she said.

The worst of the shock passed. The worst of the pain, Anna suspected, yet to come, fear and fury and confusion had space to explode through her with such force she jerked on the line like a landed fish. Bethy giggled.

The Perils of Pauline,
Anna thought, and for a moment sheer embarrassment at her predicament stopped the avalanche of more logical miseries.

She breathed in through her nose slowly and out through her mouth more slowly still, trying to quiet the shrieking in her skull. A pathetic semblance of calm regained, she tried to think of her options.

“Are you passed out or something?” Bethy asked from above. She sounded annoyed and, maybe, a little concerned.

Anna ignored her and began her list. She could beg. Begging never worked in the movies, but in real life it was occasionally efficacious.

“Hey!” Bethy snapped. “Talk to me. No naps! No naps!”

Anna gave no sign she heard. Playing possum was an option, but only if the possum wasn’t strung over a chasm by her little possum paws.

“Stop it,” Bethy shouted and plucked the rope looped through the chain between Anna’s handcuffs. “You better not’ve had a heart attack and died.” Bethy’s voice was graveled with fury.