The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (42 page)

Mental illness and evil were not the same. Molly, who dealt with all manner of nutcases on a daily basis, and knew mental illnesses for the diseases they were, also believed in evil, a darkness that transcended the malfunctioning of human brain chemistry. Crazy people, Molly insisted, were only dangerous the way abused dogs and frightened horses were dangerous. In their struggle for what they perceived as necessary for survival, other people occasionally got trampled or bitten.

Evil people hunted and hurt because they hated. Truly evil people did it because it was fun.

Poison washing over her, Anna felt a need to return to the pragmatic.

“How did you find me?” she asked. In the broken pocked landscape, riddled with basins and stones, Anna, with the help of a tracker and two rangers, had had a tough time finding the jar.

“Pizza Face said he didn’t know where you were dumped. I made him take me to his guy friends and they showed me,” Bethy said with satisfaction. “They couldn’t wait for me to see. Then they stripped you naked and raped you a bunch and I did it to you with a stick.” She smacked her lips as if the vile words tasted good to her.

Though Anna was about ninety-nine percent sure those things had not been done to her, the shame she’d worked so hard to overcome returned with a vengeance. She breathed through it. When all but the stink of it was gone, she said, “They. You said ‘they.’ All three of the boys came back with you?”

“Don’t you listen? I told you Jason Pizza Face said he hadn’t been with the other guys. He was like this big innocent, you know? Just watching and stuff.”

The rope wrapped around Bethy was loosening, not because Bethy struggled but because Anna hadn’t done a good job of tying her up. Like many other things, tying a person securely was a lot harder than it looked. Before Bethy got free, Anna was going to have to act. In a minute, she promised herself, too tired and hot and freaked out to move.

“Let me get this straight,” Anna said with a sigh. “These guys kill a woman and throw the dead and the living women in a hole and they’re all Johnny-on-the-spot, gung ho to tell the ranger all about it and lead her to the scene of the crime.” Anna pushed herself to her feet, picked up her daypack, and shoved Bethy’s half-full water bottle inside. “You’re so full of shit I can’t stand to be around you. When I get back to the Rope I’ll tell Jim Levitt where you are. If I happen to remember.” Shrugging into the pack, Anna started southwest toward where the trail led down to Dangling Rope Marina. It was longer and much farther than going by way of the slot canyon and Panther, but she had had her fill of hanging by a thread from high places.

“No!” Bethy shouted, finally sounding afraid. “No. I’ll tell you stuff. Real stuff. True and everything.”

The note of genuine panic—the first honest emotion Bethy had evinced other than fury and smugness—stopped Anna. She looked back at the filthy woman, trussed up like a cannibal’s catch, her skin beginning to burn thought the dust and the sunscreen, and felt a tickling of pity. Not for Bethy. In Anna’s opinion she deserved whatever came, as long as it was unpleasant. Pity for the person she would be if she allowed Bethy to die of thirst knowing firsthand what torture it was.

“Tell you what,” Anna relented. “I’ll split the water with you. You’ll be able to wriggle out of your ropes before you die and can drink it then. It will keep you going until somebody comes to get you.” She started to fulfill the promise by retrieving her own empty water bottle so she could share what she had.

“No! No,” Bethy cried. “Don’t leave me alone.” Her eyes, beseeching, held Anna’s. No sneaky smile. She genuinely was afraid of Anna leaving.

Anna stopped what she was doing, too rattled and weary to think and move simultaneously. Her previous adventures had taught her a little something. She’d left a note telling Jenny she was going canyoneering with Bethy Candor. Of course she hadn’t said where because she hadn’t known at the time.

Bethy’s Zodiac was moored at the sandstone blocks separating Panther from the slot. Jenny was working, due back at the Rope around six thirty. If she patrolled Panther today she might even see the Zodiac.

Anna also carried a few more practical things with her when she was going away from civilization. Besides the additional water, she had matches, a compass, a Swiss Army knife, a Maglite, granola bars, sunscreen, a ball cap, ChapStick, and a paperback book—
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Since last time she’d found herself on this plateau in the company of persons who meant her no good, she had become much stronger and more savvy in survival skills.

Still, unless she ignited a piñon tree with the matches and Anne Brontë’s work, she had no way to let anyone know where she was. Where they were.

“If I don’t leave you, nobody will come find you,” Anna said reasonably, “and I’m sure as hell not taking you with me.”

“Just stay a little longer,” Bethy begged. “Please? Please? Pretty please with a cherry on top?”

It was quarter past two. There would be enough light to hike out for another six hours. This time it would not take Anna twelve hours. Knowing the way, and being hydrated and fed, she could do it in four. Maybe less.

Bethy’s fear and pleading didn’t factor into her decision. Bethy’s willingness to tell her “real stuff, true and everything” did. It wasn’t in Anna’s nature to walk away before the final scene played out.

Feeling more saintly than she had a right to, Anna gave Bethy a good long drink of water before she sat down to finish interrogating her. She opened with “If I even think you’re lying to me, I’m gone.” With a small plane’s engine droning in the distance like the buzz of a bluebottle fly, she said, “Start with why those guys agreed to show you my jar.”

Had Molly not insisted there was no such thing as multiple personality disorder, Anna would have sworn Bethy Candor suffered from it. The childish talk stopped. The slyness abated. The smugness went into remission. She began to speak as if she sat in the witness box and the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth was the key to her salvation.

“Jason, the boy with the pimples, told me what he and the other two—Caleb and Adam—had done. He wanted me to be sure he hadn’t done anything wrong, only watched. He didn’t go with the other guys to dump you and that girl in the hole, he said. He didn’t know where it was or if you were dead, only that Caleb and Adam said both you and the girl were alive.

“I told Jason I would make things okay because he was a good kid, what with telling me all, and he hadn’t done anything wrong and he shouldn’t say anything to anybody because not all rangers were as nice as me. So he’s a happy camper. I wanted to see, so I made him bring me to his buddies.

“I told them I was a law enforcement ranger and I had got a statement from Jason What’s-his-name and they were in a lot of trouble. A
lot
of trouble. Then I said I knew it was an accident and they shouldn’t have to go to jail or anything, and if they would show me where you were, I could probably get them off with just a warning or something because they were helping and that showed they were good guys. So they showed me. Kay was dead and I made them help me bury her, and you were unconscious but sorta started to wake up, so I bonked you with a big rock and took the rock with me when we left. I took your clothes, too.”

Boys, scared, guilty, wanting to believe they were going to get off lightly; Anna could see it working the way Bethy said. Right up to the burying and bonking and stripping. “Didn’t your little buddies think it kind of un-rangerly when you made them hide the evidence? Lie to me and I’m gone,” Anna reminded her.

“I told ’em it would keep the body from rotting and the FBI could see their hitting her was a mistake.” Bethy was clearly proud of her abilities to manipulate and prevaricate.

“How about hitting and stripping me? Did you tell them that was standard operating procedure as well?”

“I didn’t tell ’em anything. They were stupid, but they kinda knew something was hinky. They just wanted it to be okay, so they pretended it was okay and I pretended it was okay, and we left.”

“How did they end up dead in the water?” Anna asked.

“By the time we got out of the slot it was dark. They—Caleb and Adam—were worn out. Doing the slot twice, killing that girl, and chasing you and everything. I knew they couldn’t go back up or anything. They were strong, but they didn’t know much about the canyoneering stuff.

“I got to thinking they were gonna talk. First time they got drunk they would blabber out everything. Weenies. That couldn’t happen. So when I climbed up the sandstone block there at the end, I took up the rope after.

“You found ’em frozen and drowned. I didn’t do anything to them. I wasn’t even there when they died.”

Anna was amazed at Bethy’s belief in her own innocence. The phrase “she had no shame” fit the bill. Bethy had no conscience. She did what she did because it was best for her, or she wanted to, or to avoid repercussions. Bethy had reasons for each and every horrific act. Since to Bethy, only Bethy was real, no one else factored into her rationale.

“Yeah,” Anna said. “We found them. Was it you who took up the rope and left Jenny and me to die the same way?”

“I’m not responsible for every stupid thing you and
Ms.
Gorman do,” she said, suddenly haughty.

In the distance the buzz of the small aircraft, one of the sightseeing concessions, Anna guessed, coughed and went silent. Another day, another time, she might have been concerned that it was going to crash. With her plate already full she didn’t give it a second’s thought.

“So you left the—Adam and Caleb to die, and the next night you came back up to the plateau and cut me?”

“Yup,” Bethy said.

“That’s a lot of up and down. Nobody can do the slot in the dark. That leaves four and a half miles from the Rope. Nine miles round-trip. I don’t believe you,” Anna said.

“Well, I did. Maybe I didn’t do your stupid nine miles. Maybe I flew up like Tinker Bell.”

Tinker Bell. Bethy was a pathological liar. Anna would get no answers she could trust, and the swift transitions from vicious to begging to sanity to snobbery had her mind reeling. Realizing her curiosity was tethering her to a person so toxic she poisoned the very air around her, Anna rose again.

“Got to go,” she said. “I’ll send somebody.”

Bethy startled her with a giggle. “Too late,” she singsonged.

FIFTY-ONE

Anna whipped around to see what Bethy was looking at with such unholy glee.

Regis Candor stood no more than fifty paces away, his face a mask of hatred, his eyes desperate. His hands, hanging limply by his thighs, twitched as if they yearned to be rending something—someone—into small gobbets of flesh.

The growl of the small-plane engine.

The engine cutting off.

The abrupt change in Bethy from cooperating to gloating.

Regis came from money. He owned a tiny airplane.

He’d landed on Hole-in-the-Rock Road the way Hank had.

What had Jenny said? That Bethy Candor had learned to fly—soloed—but never got her license.

Bethy had flown to the plateau to torment Anna in her jar. Just like Tinker Bell.

The thoughts crashed through Anna’s skull with the force of bricks knocked from a fifth-floor balcony.

Options dwindled. She didn’t have the reserves left to outrun or outfight Regis. He was fit, fresh, and forty pounds heavier than she was. Her only hope was to disable—or kill—him.

“Hey, Regis,” she said, those being the only words available to her at the moment. She hadn’t yet shouldered her pack. Clutching it over her stomach, she unzipped the side pocket surreptitiously when Regis looked away from her to where his wife, looking like a giant larva, wriggled in her rope chrysalis.

Bethy fell over on her side and glared at him. “Regis! Help me get out of this,” she whined.

His glance came back to Anna. Her fingers closed around the pathetically small Swiss Army knife.

“You didn’t tie her up all that well,” he said in a cold flat voice.

“Sorry,” Anna said. “It’s my first time.”

He crossed to kneel beside his wife. Anna let the pack fall away and quickly pried out the knife’s longest blade. Four inches. It wouldn’t cut him much. Not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, Anna thought, but it might serve.

Regis was unclipping the carabiner that held the rope noose around Bethy’s throat. His back was to Anna. Moving quietly and quickly she traversed the few yards between them, drawing the knife into striking position—or what she assumed, from watching Anthony Perkins in
Psycho,
was striking position—as she came.

“Are you all right, Anna?” Regis asked without looking back. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”

Anna stopped in her tracks. Would it be worse to be murdered or to murder an innocent man?

The ends of the rope loosed from her throat, Bethy began squirming out of the coils. “Make her give you the handcuff key, baby. She
handcuffed
me!”

Anna reached in the front pocket of her shorts, pinched up the handcuff key, and, with a flick of her wrist, snapped it over the cliff. From the corner of his eye, Regis saw her do it and smiled.

“In a minute,” he told his wife. “Let’s get you some water first. You just sit still, I mean it.”

Bethy kicked away the last bit of the rope and relaxed back against the rock, her legs straight out in front of her like a little girl or a doll. “It’s in Anna’s pack. Anna stole it. Anna tried to kill me,” she told her husband. Her voice quavered with shock and fear, but her lips smirked at Anna and her eyes danced.

Regis returned with the water and blocked Anna’s view of Bethy while he gave her a drink.

Regis was here to kill Anna.

Regis was worried sick about Anna.

Bethy had saved Anna for Regis to kill.

Colors got too bright. Rocks shifted and slid. Sunlight hot and hard as a shovel in a coal furnace pressed on the back of her neck. The glare of the sky met the glare of the sandstone, breaking the desert into prisms. Anna staggered.

Too close to the cliff. She turned back.