Nevada Barr - The Rope

They sat facing front, not talking. An awkward date at the drive-in movies. Anna finished winding up the raveled string. When she could again speak, she said, “Well, that was an unforeseen turn of events,” and was startled when Jenny laughed.

“Poor Regis,” Jenny said when she’d recovered. “Clubbed and skunked and left in a pit.”

“Yeah,” Anna murmured. “The monsters got away, didn’t they?”

“They’ll get them,” Jenny said. To Anna’s ears it sounded as if she spoke without conviction.

“Your monsters got away,” Anna said.

“Not from me, they didn’t.”

There was nothing to say after that until the men reappeared walking five abreast. Their faces set and grim, the sheriff with his cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes.

“The Earps,” Anna said.

“The OK Corral,” Jenny said.

If Anna remembered her film history correctly, that hadn’t ended well for anybody.

Gluck carried the canteen Anna had become so familiar with during her time in the jar. Looped over one shoulder, Levitt carried the two boat ladders. Regis hugged a water bottle much as Anna was prone to do after suffering so much from thirst.

“That canteen the sheriff is carrying was the one with the drugged water in it,” Anna commented with about as much emotion as she might have said, “That’s the T-shirt with the stripes on it.”

Because she felt vulnerable and marginalized sitting in the front seat of the cab as the men approached, Anna reached for the door handle.

“Wait?” Jenny cried, sounding alarmed. “Don’t go out there.”

“Why not?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know,” Jenny admitted. “I just had a weird bad feeling.”

“A lot of that going around,” Anna said and got out to stand on her own two feet. Regis saw her and waved and smiled.

“Hey, Anna,” he said as he broke the line and moved rapidly toward her.

It took all of Anna’s resolve to keep her face unreadable and resist the need to leap back into the truck and slam and lock the doors.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. For a moment it looked as if he intended to give her a hug. Anna held up one hand, the way the Indians in those same Westerns had done while bizarrely uttering, “How.”

Regis stopped. “I was just so blown away. I forgot how scared you must have been when I climbed down. You went through far worse than anything I did. I’m sorry I took my own fear out on you, that’s all.”

Anna said nothing. Bits of things she might have said skittered around in her skull, but making conversation was too pointless to bother dragging any one of them down to where her tongue could get around it. Lowering her hand was the best she could do. Unnerved, Regis looked over his shoulder at the other men. They had stopped several yards out from the truck and stood in a neat semicircle, a manly tableau against the canvas of the desert.

“You’re lucky she didn’t kill you,” Steve said without a trace of humor. Broken by his words, the tableau came to life again.

“Where’s Kay?” Anna asked Steve. He didn’t answer right away, and Anna was afraid there was no body, the body was gone or had never existed. “Did you find Kay?” she insisted, louder this time.

“We just dug enough to assure ourselves she was there,” Steve said. He hadn’t wanted to speak, Anna realized, because he knew it would be hard for her to hear. She didn’t like him for the kindness. She didn’t like or dislike any of them. She didn’t care because they didn’t care, not in any way it mattered. Not in any way that would ever make anything right.

“Frank’s going to have the county coroner out here. They’ll recover the body and take it back to Escalante. He’s going to work with us to identify her. If we’re lucky she’s been reported missing.”

They didn’t know she was wearing nothing but underpants. Anna hadn’t told that part of the story. It was ugly and it was hers and she would keep it. For now at least.

“We’ll take good care of her,” Sheriff Frank assured her.

“She’s dead, and I didn’t know her,” Anna said, but she remembered how important it had been to her that Kay’s hair be combed from the sand, not yanked, and she remembered sacrificing the tempting panties so Kay could retain a scrap of dignity.

Regis unscrewed the cap of his water bottle as the sheriff and Jim loaded the ladder and canteen into the bed of the pickup.

“I’ll never take water for granted again,” Regis said, offering a tentative smile to Anna. “I nearly thirsted to death.”

“There was a canteen of water,” she said.

“Empty,” the sheriff told her as he dropped it onto the bed of the truck with a clang.

Anna said nothing. It had been over half full when she hit Regis in the head with it, heavy enough to stun. He couldn’t have drunk it all. If he had, he’d be in a stupor. Instead he was hyperactive, the way a person is after a narrow escape. He could have dumped it, or, when it struck him, the cap might have come loose and the water drained out.

Anna saw no value in voicing these thoughts. She saw no value in speaking anymore.

Jenny and Jim were consigned to the bed of the pickup. Anna tried to follow. Steve cut her off and herded her back into the cab the way a good sheepdog would herd a stray lamb back to the fold.

The sheriff slid behind the wheel. Chief Ranger Madden started to climb into the front passenger side.

“Andrew, take the back again, if you wouldn’t mind,” Steve said. “Anna could probably use the air.” Steve Gluck jammed himself in beside Madden and put Regis behind the driver, as far from Anna as he could be in the truck’s cab. Anna didn’t like him for that, either. “Air” was not what she needed. She needed her own planet.

With two people in the truck bed, the sheriff drove toward Hole-in-the-Rock Road more slowly than he had driven out. Regis couldn’t stop talking.

An older man who wouldn’t give his name had hailed him on the dock at Dangling Rope Marina, he told them as the cab jounced and swayed. The old man stank of beer, Regis said, and was none too steady on his feet. The guy told him a bizarre tale about a girl trapped in a solution hole up around Hole-in-the-Rock Road. He said he’d heard some kids bragging about it like they’d caught a bear cub or a cougar and were keeping it a secret from their parents. He wasn’t clear as to how many kids there were, or how tall or short, and was pretty vague about where he had chanced to overhear the boasts.

Regis said he figured the guy imagined it, or half heard something in a drunken stupor and, when he sobered up somewhat, thought it was real and reported it to the first person in uniform he’d laid his bleary eyes on.

This had transpired around seven thirty or eight o’clock the evening before Anna attacked him, Regis said. Though he figured the guy was crazy, Regis had checked to see if anyone had gone missing. No one had but Anna. Since Anna’d packed up her things, he never thought it could be her, so he let it go.

Then, in the middle of the night, he woke up worrying about it. What if a woman were trapped, suffering in some way, crying for help? He couldn’t stand it, he said, and got up and dressed and started up the unmaintained trail that scrambled and clawed up the escarpment behind the housing area, the only way he knew to get from the Rope to the area the drunk had mentioned.

He’d wandered around until nearly dawn and was about to give it up when he heard a woman crying. He’d found the hole where the weeping came from. Beside it, half hidden under the overhang of a rock, were the boat ladders.

All this poured out with no encouragement but the occasional grunt from law enforcement. As the sheriff turned the ignition off, the truck parked neatly parallel to the dirt track as if meter maids were watching, Regis finished his story.