Nevada Barr: The Rope

“Hey!” Gilbert said. “I almost know what that means. I think you’ve been insulted, Dennis. You going to take that lying down ?”

A cue line for the comedy to continue. Tired of the routine, Regis stared coldly at Dennis, finding his eyes in the fading dusk. If Dennis had planned on saying something, he thought better of it. Dennis was a coward. Regis could sniff out cowardice like a truffle hound sniffing out morels.

Dennis changed the subject. “I hear you drove that old black pigeon back to New York’s Great White Way,” he said to Jenny.

This interested Regis. The “old black pigeon” was Anna Pigeon, Jenny’s housemate and assistant pooper-scooper for the water quality program. Anna fascinated him. A woman of dark mystery, he mocked himself.

“Looks that way,” Jenny said, sounding a little sad. “By the by, Anna’s thirty-five. I asked. I’m thirty-three. If you think that’s old, get your sweet cheeks off my picnic table.”

“Thirty-five’s a lot older than thirty-three,” Dennis insisted, affronted that a woman with Jenny’s dual charms should put herself in the same boat with a skinny creature who dressed all in black and had eyes that let nothing in and very little out.

In the ten days Anna Pigeon had been at Dangling Rope, Regis had tried to get to know her. He doubted he’d have succeeded if they’d been stranded together on a desert island for twenty years. She didn’t join the evening potlucks, hang out on her porch, or do the usual socializing. When she wasn’t camped on a beach working with the Fecal Queen, she stayed in her room. With her inky clothes and slender silhouette, Ms. Pigeon was a flicker of darkness glimpsed from the corner of the eye. She scarcely disturbed the air when she moved, barely cast a shadow in the sun. Gone, her presence was greater than it had been when she’d glided soundlessly in and out of the housing compound.

Intrigued by her elusiveness, Regis turned on the charm—and, if he did say so himself, when he wanted to, he could charm the paint off a wall. Flattery bounced off of her. Kindly concern annoyed her. Banter bored her. His best trick, showing deep sincere interest, was met with a level stare that suggested sincerity wasn’t his best trick after all. When he’d tried plying Anna Pigeon with treats he told his wife to cook, Bethy decided to rise out of her rabbit skin and get nasty about his attentions to another woman.

“Couldn’t take it out here in the wide open and ran back to the city,” Gilbert said, stretching his arm along the table, perilously close to Jenny’s thigh. Regis watched her look at the large dirty paw, and for a gleeful second he thought she was going to tap her ash there. Evidently she was feeling generous. She tapped it on the grass.

“That woman was freaky. For the first week I thought she was a deaf mute. My folks’ Labrador retriever talks more than she did. It’s like a hundred and ten degrees and she’s dressed for a funeral. And what was with the pasty white face?”

“All New Yorkers wear black and have pasty white faces,” Jenny said.

“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.

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?