Nevada Barr - The Rope

Hundreds of zigzagging fingers of water reaching up jagged creek beds and drainages, snakes of blue curling around shattered rock piled as high as skyscrapers, cutting and poking into the desert, prying away secrets, creating more, hiding and revealing. Anna’s head swam trying to grasp the immensity and complexity of this thing man had done and the foolish belief that he was running the show. Given this bird’s-eye view of the world, she felt how very big it was and how infinitely tiny she was. She was both as indispensable and insignificant as any lizard.

“Aah,” she murmured.

“What?” Steve’s voice in her ear startled her. “Do you see the solution hole?” The four of them were wearing headsets with voice-activated mikes, and her exclamation turned everybody’s attention to her.

“No,” she said.

“That’s Dangling Rope,” came the pilot’s voice. He dropped the left wing a little as if making the airplane point.

Laid out below, neat as any map, was the hopscotch pattern of the dock, the two squares of housing above, the sewage treatment pond above that, then the canyon wall she had scrambled up.

“There’s where I came out.” She pointed for Steve. He leaned across her, his shoulder hard against hers, the faint scent of his aftershave tickling her nose.

“I figured,” Gluck said. “I doubt there’s any other way to walk out of the Rope.”

He stayed too close too long for Anna’s liking. “Breathe on your own side,” she commanded. Before the jar, she might have made room for him, might not have minded. She could have been polite or subtle. Maybe. She could hardly remember who she was back when she had her husband and not the monster as her constant companion.

Steve moved back, apparently unoffended. She didn’t care either way as long as he did as he was told.

“A road!” Anna cried out in dismay. Male chuckles filled the space between her ears.

“Hole-in-the-Rock Road out of Escalante,” Steve told her. “Look at the end there.” He pointed his finger, poking past her nose. “That’ll be the sheriff out of Kane County. Glen Canyon is in two states, several counties and an Indian reservation. You don’t even want to know about jurisdictions. We called Sheriff Patterson last night. He’s a good guy. You’ll like him.”

A car. A road. Anna felt betrayed. What had happened to her should not have happened anywhere near cars and roads. She comforted herself that the road scarcely deserved the name. From the air it looked like nothing more than a dirt track knifing away from the canyon to run parallel to the endless mesa that was Fiftymile Mountain.

The pilot flew beside the road for a while, then made a right-angle turn and another, until the airplane was lined up with the dirt track.

“Solution holes,” Steve said and leaned into her to look out her window. She looked where he pointed. The plateau had great islands of stone bubbling up from it and forming smooth domes and humps polished by the elements until they shone. Pocked into these bubbles were deep, round, smooth-sided holes like the one that had held Anna captive.

“That’s the biggest,” Steve said, indicating a neat circular mouth over a white sand bottom. The hole was so big a good-sized oak tree had grown up inside of it, and so deep the crown of the tree would never reach ground level.

The pilot did something that made the plane slide sickeningly sideways, and Anna realized they were going to land the rickety little airplane on the dirt road, a road strewn with rocks and other unforgiving substances. At what seemed the last minute, the airplane stabilized and the wheels met the earth with surprising smoothness.

“Sorry about that,” Hank said. “Bad crosswind.”

They taxied to where the truck Steve had pointed out was parked. Literally, the end of the road. Beyond was canyon. An angular man in a cowboy hat unfolded from the cab as they deplaned. Frank Patterson, sheriff of Kane County.

Anna did like the sheriff, if for no other reason than he looked like Buddy Ebsen, and she was a big fan.

After introductions were dispensed with, the men talked among themselves, a soft rumble in Anna’s ears. Sheriff Patterson took a pack of Marlboro Lights out of the pocket of his short-sleeved uniform shirt and lit one with a wooden match he struck on the sole of his cowboy boot. Chief Ranger Madden bummed a cigarette with the desperate relief of a man who had quit smoking and had been doing well until this. He struck the match on the side of the box. Two broke, the third one lit. His hands were shaking.

The wait while the pilot fetched Jenny and Jim was hard on Anna. She knew they waited for Jim with his muscle and the arsenal he carried on his belt. Andrew Madden didn’t look like he’d carried a gun in years. The sheriff was old—older than Steve—pushing seventy at a guess. Anna suspected all three were too canny to walk into anything that could turn out to be a fair fight. More firepower was undoubtedly wise; still, her monster was calling, and she needed to go to him, look on his face. With each passing minute her need to lay eyes on him grew more intense and more terrifying.

As did the thought that she would not be able to find him. Every rock and bulge in the landscape looked familiar and at the same time alien.

When she stumbled onto Kay and her attackers, Anna was exhausted and perishing of thirst—or so she believed until she was, indeed, perishing of thirst. She hadn’t noticed scenery or noted landmarks. When she’d been taken to the jar, either she was already unconscious or quickly became so by striking her head on the way down. She had no memories between turning to run and waking up in the bottom of the hole. She hadn’t a clue whether all three boys had stripped her and thrown her down along with Kay’s body, or only two, or just one. She didn’t know how many followed to bury Kay. She didn’t know if all the men returned to leave her drugged water and snacks, or if only one returned without his pals to continue the game. It was possible all three took turns visiting, and the last had drawn the unlucky night and gotten his monstrous self caught.

Her escape had been at night. Drugs fogged her thinking; she was scared, dehydrated, malnourished, in pain, and carrying a skunk in her brassiere. She had no clear recollection of where she’d wandered during the hours prior to reaching the edge of Glen Canyon and accidentally turning in the right direction. It wasn’t until she saw the housing compound that she’d known where she was.

Half a hundred times she told Steve and Chief Ranger Madden that she didn’t know where, exactly, the jar was. She doubted they believed in her ignorance any more the fiftieth time than they had the first. If she did not find the hole, and the man she’d left in it, the chief ranger would probably be only too glad to write the whole adventure off as the deplorable—if understandable—histrionics of a city girl gone wacko under the pressure of the wide-open spaces.

That she had spent the last decade working in the theater didn’t help her credibility. During the sixth or seventh rehash, Andrew had gotten the look of a man having an “aha” moment. Narrowing his eyes like a true-born gunslinger, he’d said pointedly, “You’re an actress, isn’t that right?”

The fact that she was not an actor but a stage manager had impressed him not in the least.

Sheriff Patterson, Steve, and Andrew seemed happy gossiping and ignoring her. Happy to be ignored, Anna took a water bottle from the cab of the truck, even though she had two full liters in her pack, and moved to the west side of the four-wheel drive to sit on the ground in the meager shade, her back against one of the big knobby tires.

The more she sat and sweated and thought, the more certain she became that there was no way in hell she could find the jar.