Nevada Barr - The Rope

The monster would shrivel up and die of exposure.

That was a cheerful train of thought, and she enjoyed riding it until it was derailed by the idea that if there were three monsters, monster-in-the-hole might have been fished out and be long gone or, worse, waiting for her behind a rock or a tree.

By the time the burr of the Cessna’s engine returned, Anna’s knees were drawn up and she was hugging the water bottle tightly to her chest. Before the Cessna rolled to a stop she was standing, shoulders squared. Never let ’em see you sweat was an old theater maxim. Or maybe it was Never let them see your ass. Either way, Anna had no intention of returning to the fetal position in public anytime soon. Not even when Jim Levitt and Jenny Gorman deplaned and ten eyeballs turned to her, demanding to know which way the jar was.

As the 180 taxied down the road for takeoff, the Bullfrog district ranger unfolded a map on the hood of the sheriff ’s truck.

“We’re here.” Steve tapped a blunt forefinger on the end of a broken black line that ran to the edge of a canyon. Hole-in-the-Rock Road, Anna guessed. “You crawled out of Glen Canyon here.” He moved his finger an inch on the map. “So I figure your solution hole is somewhere in here.” His finger drew a small circle on the map between the road and where Anna had come onto the mesa. “It’s about a two-mile trip from where we’re standing to where you came up the old trail. I figure what we’d best do—if it works for you, Frank—is to take the truck cross-country as far as we can. Get Anna to where she starts seeing familiar territory.”

Relief washed over her. The rangers were helping; they were being rangers and arranging things. Anna’s favorite colors shifted from black and black to green and gray as she began to recover her faith in her ability to lead them to the jar.

The truck had a double cab. Though Anna was the smallest, Jenny, Chief Ranger Madden, and Jim were condemned to the cramped rear seat. Sheriff Frank Patterson drove, Steve rode shotgun, and Anna sat uneasily between them trying to keep her knees out of the way of the gearshift knob.

As the truck jolted over rock and sand, trailing a plume of white dust, she scoured the land beyond the windshield trying to find a rock or bush she might have seen before. From a distance, the land along the rim appeared flat, nearly featureless. In reality, the weathered and broken chunks of sandstone were scattered like coins strewn across a floor: stones smaller than dimes, stones the size of basketball courts, of buildings, stones overlapping, piled up, falling down, scattered, clustered. They could hide ten thousand openings, ten thousand canted throats, ten thousand jars.

As she stared, they began to run together. Heat mirages melting the coins, melting the desert.

The truck lumbered up a slight incline, then down into a shallow swale on a low shining shoulder of stone. “Stop!” Anna cried.

Sheriff Patterson braked in a sudden cloud of dust, and everybody exited the truck. Patterson turned to Steve. “You want any tracking done, better keep at least eight of these big feet off my ground.”

Gluck said, “You heard the man.”

No one got back in the truck, but neither did they follow Anna and the sheriff as they walked the small depression. It was not the swale where Anna had witnessed the murder of Kay. The shining rock was not the rock she had come gasping over.

The next time she yelled, “Stop!” it still wasn’t.

As in all good fairy tales, the third time was the charm.

When Anna found the bloodstained rock, Jenny suppressed a sigh of relief. The sheriff, the chief ranger, Steve, and even Jim, though she thought she’d trained him better, had begun to exude the unmistakable air that suggested they were about three manly breaths from writing little Ms. Pigeon off as a hysterical woman. If Jenny squinted her psychic inner eye, she could almost see “that time of month” and “rape fantasy” and “cry for attention” flickering behind their eyes. Jenny could tell Anna felt it, too, and, because this was Eve’s Achilles’ heel, was beginning to believe that maybe the men were right, maybe she was crazy, maybe …

The bloody rock changed all that. The guys went on point like good hunting dogs. Cameras came out, as did little orange flags; measurements were taken; radios were held up to mouths as the machinery of however many law enforcement officials of however many jurisdictions were called.

Anna, chastised for picking up the bloodstained rock, as well as for walking across the crime scene to do so—though, until she had, none of them had known it was a crime scene—stood at the right front fender of the sheriff ’s truck, clutching her plastic water bottle and looking stunned. More than anything, Jenny wanted to wrap her arms around the poor bewildered little person, cradle her and tell her everything was all right, that Jenny was here and she needn’t ever be afraid of anything again. Instead, she wandered over and leaned against the hood next to her.

The metal was as hot as a branding iron. “Do you know where we are?” she asked gently.

Anna shook her head, one short jerk right, one short jerk left. She didn’t look at Jenny.

“About three hundred yards that way”—Jenny pointed south—“is the head of Panther Canyon. We went there the first day we worked together, taking water samples at the grotto.” Anna said nothing, gave no indication that she heard. Jenny wasn’t an EMT. She had no idea whether a person could go into shock this long after the traumatic event had occurred. Anna had been held prisoner, starved and dehydrated, then had wandered lost for twelve or thirteen hours before finding her way home. That would have put Jenny in shock, but Anna had seemed to cope well enough, playing with Buddy, tending to personal hygiene, relating her story to Steve and Andrew.

Until now she’d seemed, if not a pillar of strength, at least a reed, bent by the wind but unbroken. “Anna?” Jenny dropped her voice to the place women use to communicate heart-to-heart with children, injured souls, and small animals. “Are you sure you want to go through with this? We could wait here while the rangers go get the bad guy. I bet Steve would even radio the pilot to come back if you’d feel safer at Bullfrog or the Rope.”

Anna looked at her. The woman might be shocked into stillness and compliance with law enforcement, but her eyes were not blank and scared. They were determined and scared.

Unblinkingly she said, “What? And miss the eleven o’clock number?”

Jenny had no idea what that meant—something to do with the theatrical life, she guessed as she saw the ghost of a smile whisper over Anna’s lips.

Sheriff Frank Patterson was a tracker of local renown. Jenny and Jim Levitt had been informed of this by the NPS pilot who spent his lieu days on a piece of land near Escalante where he was building a house. As the men were going all Last of the Mohicans and testosteroning up for the big tracking event, their efforts were made moot by what sounded like distant shouting.

The six of them went utterly still. Had the others not reacted, Jenny might have thought her ears were playing tricks on her. The canyons played havoc with sound, muting noise nearby, carrying a laugh a mile before letting it go. Echoes had echoes, yet silence reigned. No one moved. Shadows black as crude oil puddled between their feet.

“I think—” Jim began. The sheriff, ahead and slightly above the rest of them, hushed him with a raised hand. Quiet as a stalking cat, Patterson began following tracks in the dirt, his head cocked at an odd angle as if sound would drop into his ears more efficiently that way.