Nevada Barr - The Rope

Anna thought trading posts became extinct when the Alamo fell. “I’ll talk to him,” she said, “and thanks.”

“If they decide not to throw you in the hoosegow, radio me and I’ll come get you when you’re finished.”

Anna nodded. The hoosegow was probably located at the nearest trading post.

After a while Regis’s wife came out of their duplex and sat on the steps. She wore shorts and a tank top, both of which were snug, as if she’d recently put on weight. She carried a can of diet soda with her, which she set on the step beside her feet, then covered with a saucer.

“Yellow jackets,” she said to Anna. “They crawl in, then sting you when you take a drink. I think it’s the sugar that attracts them. I’m Bethy,” she said, eyeing Anna narrowly. “Regis’s wife.”

Anna had not only met Bethy but shared a potluck picnic table with her more than once. Apparently Bethy thought decades had passed in the jar while only a handful of days passed on earth. Since Anna felt the same, she was kind. “I remember you, Bethy. You don’t seem to have aged more than a few days since last we met.”

Bethy giggled. “It’s so weird,” she said. “I’m, like, self-conscious to be talking to you. Like you became a big rock star or something.”

That surprised Anna. Focused on shame, shame she struggled with and shame others would see as hers one way or another, she hadn’t given a thought to the power of notoriety. Anna could star in a movie of the week about her exciting capture and escape. Except they’d never let Anna play the lead. The role of “Anna, Wilderness Sex Slave” would probably go to one of the Baywatch babes, an actor who had the talent to fill Kay’s bikini bra.

“It’s weird on this side of the lights, too,” Anna admitted.

“Aren’t you getting off on it just a little bit? I mean, one day you’re just this nobody and then, presto! Everybody’s All Anna All the Time,” Bethy said.

Either Bethy was staggeringly insensitive or there was a stream of malice running through her. “You all thought I’d packed up and gone back to New York?” Anna asked.

“Yeah.” Bethy removed the saucer from her soda can, took three neat little sips, then put the can down and replaced the saucer. “I mean, like, all your things were gone and you don’t—you know—exactly fit in.”

“Is that a fact?” The comment annoyed Anna, but it was true. She had not fit in. She had not tried to fit in. She had not worked and played well with others. She had not come to Glen Canyon for what it had but for what it lacked: memories.

Anna hadn’t left New York City, her job, and her sister to spend forty days and forty nights in the wilderness healing. She had come to suffer in silence, to wallow in grief where no one would pester her with good advice or helping hands. She had come to purgatory to work off her sins that the gods might relent and give Zach back.

Molly had hinted as much. Anna had chosen not to hear. Now she heard it in her own voice and knew, absurd and childish as it was, that was precisely what she’d been doing. Grief was not coin to purchase the beneficence of the gods, regardless of what self-flagellating hair-shirt-wearing religions might suggest.

Bereft of hope and free of despair, Anna tilted her head back and felt the clean desert heat on her skin.

“Regis said you’d gone,” Bethy said in the tone of a woman quoting the ultimate authority. Off came the saucer, up came the can, three tiny little sips. Can back on the planking, saucer on top, she said, “We all said you cut and ran. I mean, why wouldn’t you? All those stage-door Johnnys.”

Anna laughed. The only place she’d ever heard those words uttered was in old movies. Even there the stage manager never got a single Johnny.

Her laughter seemed to bother Bethy. Sounding almost accusing, she said, “Regis kept going to your place like he could find out why you’d left. None of us would have bothered. Lucky that old drunk told him you were in a hole.”

Saucer off, can up, three little sips; Bethy was getting on Anna’s nerves. The plump little interpretive ranger had a bobblehead-doll quality about her, as if her words and movements were caused by outside forces rather than any inner logic. Anna checked her watch. Naked skin.

She wished Gluck would show up. With Bethy’s help, she had come around to where she was actually looking forward to it.

“Lucky,” Anna said.

It was lucky, freakishly, unbelievably lucky. An old drunk overhears boys talk of putting a woman in a solution hole. Old drunk actually knows what a solution hole is; drunk finds a ranger and tells the ranger not only what the boys said but where that one solution hole is—in a zillion acres of solution holes—where the woman was put.

The last ten years of her adult life, Anna had watched many of the finest actors in the country blow their lines. Remembering dialogue was hard enough for trained sober people. That a chemically impaired amateur could get it so right bordered on the miraculous. Miracle number two was that Regis believes old drunk, climbs a ruin of a trail by moonlight, no less, onto a mesa that’s another zillion acres of holes and bumps, and, in the dark, finds the very one that Anna is in the bottom of.

“Very lucky, indeed,” Anna said. Had Regis invented the story of the vanishing inebriate? Anna hadn’t heard he’d been turned up by any of the rangers. Not surprising on a vast lake crowded with inebriates of various ages. The only reason she could think of for making up a story like that was to protect the person who did tell him where Anna was.

Regis wasn’t more than twenty-eight or thirty. He could have friends or brothers of college age. If he was covering for someone, then he knew more about the perpetrators than he was sharing, possibly even knew who they were.

He’d come alone and at night. All the better to tidy up any clues left by his murderous friends? Or his murderous brother’s murderous friends? “Clues” was the wrong word. Miss Marple, Inspector Clouseau, Sam Spade, Lord Peter Wimsey: They looked for clues. Tree cops looked for tracks, spoor, fire rings, toilet paper, and graffiti.

“Does Regis have any brothers or sisters?” Anna asked abruptly. Bethy’s head bobbled side to side as she reached for the saucer atop the soda can. Next time, Anna promised herself, she would try to be more subtle in her interrogation techniques.

Bethy concluded her beverage intake ritual, then said, “He’s an only,” with the air of admitting something she oughtn’t.

Anna heard an ATV engine and retrieved Buddy. She couldn’t keep him; it wouldn’t be fair to him, but she didn’t want Jim or Steve to take the decision away from her by snatching the little skunk. By the time she had him settled in his drawer, big feet were clomping up the porch steps.

“Jenny will take care of you if they haul me off to jail,” Anna whispered to Buddy, then went out to see what the next act in this unexpected drama held.

To her surprise Steve was accompanied not by the chief ranger but by Regis and Jim. Letting herself out the screen door, rather than inviting them in, she heard Bethy whine, “I thought you had to work today.”

“I am working,” Regis informed his wife coldly.

Bethy picked up her drinking paraphernalia and disappeared into the gloom of their side of the duplex.

Regis was carrying a cardboard box three feet long and two feet high, a packing box sealed with clear tape and covered with black smudges, as if a cat had walked through soot, then tracked it all over the box.

Steve Gluck sat down on the picnic bench. Everything about him was heavy: the drooping belly, the jowls, the bags under his eyes. He looked as if he carried the sins of mankind on his back and they were dragging him down.