Nevada Barr - The Rope

Obediently Anna followed the men out onto the porch. The instant largesse of space and light allowed her to expand her lungs. Muscles she hadn’t been aware she was tensing relaxed. Her shoulders squared, her spine straightened, and her chin came up. For a second she wondered how she could ever have felt at home and safe in the dark confines of a stage manager’s booth.

“This is it,” Gluck said unnecessarily. The packing box dominated the picnic table.

Because he wanted her to look at it, Anna became afraid of it. A startling image of folding back the flaps to a mass of tarantulas flashed behind her eyes, and momentarily she felt the panic that had overtaken her in the pit when she’d believed the tickle of her braid had been one of the hairy-legged things. Bugs shouldn’t have hair.

“What of it?” Anna asked warily.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” the district ranger said.

Anna took a couple of steps closer to the box but didn’t touch it.

“Why is it covered with black smudges?” she asked. Another ludicrous vision darted past her mind’s eye, Wile E. Coyote, black with smudges of blasting powder.

“Fingerprint powder,” Gluck said. When he didn’t volunteer any more, irritation overcame caution. Grabbing the box, she pulled it to the edge of the table. It was heavy, but she could have lifted it by herself. The tape had been cut. The box had been opened, then closed again by folding the flaps together.

Bracing herself for the eight-legged hordes, Anna curled her fingers around the edges of the flaps and yanked them open. On one, hidden before she’d unfolded it, was an address, typed on plain white paper and taped down with clear tape.

Anna recognized the address. “This was being sent to my sister, Molly?”

“It turned up in the outgoing mail at Wahweap,” Steve said. Jim Levitt hovered at the opposite end of the table, noticing everything and saying nothing. Anna suspected he might be in the doghouse for relaying to Jenny—and so to her—the information that Anna was considered a suspect. Regis had retreated to his own porch and leaned against the wall in the shade, an audience of one watching the play.

Anna looked in the box: NPS uniform shirts and shorts, bedding, underwear, black Levi’s, black Reeboks, a picture of Zach on the beach at Cape Cod. “These are my belongings,” she said. Confusion boiled out of the box in the place of tarantulas. “The stuff from my room. Somebody was mailing it to my sister?”

“Looks that way,” Steve said.

He was waiting for her to say she didn’t send the box or admit she did. Instead she said, “You dusted it for fingerprints. Whose were on it?”

“There were a lot of prints. Mail here gets picked up and hauled down to Wahweap sometimes in one boat, sometimes handed off to two, even three. Loaded and unloaded, then, finally, Wahweap. There are a lot of prints.”

“Are mine on it?” Anna asked, afraid that in this surreal place, where Disney and Dali and T. S. Eliot fought over landscape design, the whorls and ridges of her fingers had made it to the cardboard.

“They are now,” Steve said. He took an efficient-looking folding knife from his belt and cut off one of the flaps she had handled. “Yours aren’t on record,” he explained. “We had nothing to compare. I ought to be able to lift them off this. If not, Jim here can use you for practice taking prints. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV.”

Anna felt as though Steve Gluck had stolen something from her. He could have asked. Was the tricky business to throw her off balance? “I wasn’t on balance,” she said waspishly.

Ignoring the apparent non sequitur, Steve said, “Give me a half hour or so, then meet me on the dock. Bring the skunk. I found him a home. Skunk paradise.”

With that he left. Jim gave Anna what she assumed was supposed to be an encouraging smile and trailed after his boss. Regis looked as if he were going to say something. Then Bethy called, and he went inside without speaking.

Buddy had a home. Sadness welled up, pricking Anna’s eyes with tears. Of course Buddy had to go. She knew that. She just wasn’t ready now, not today. Putting the thought from her, she lifted the smudged packing box and carried it into the duplex. In her bedroom, she set it on the floor.

Buddy stood on his hind legs, his tiny forepaws not quite reaching the edge of the drawer. “I’m sure going to miss you,” Anna told him. “Skunk paradise,” she told Buddy, “Ranger’s Honor. That’s got to be a step above Scout’s Honor.”

With the skunk kit as her sole companion, she removed the items from the box. Sheets went on the shelf in the closet. They were the cheapest kind Walmart carried and held no comfort. For a few more nights, Anna would sleep on the worn flannel Jenny had lent her. Towels she hung in the bathroom, uniform shirts in the closet. Socks she put into the top drawer of Buddy’s condo.

Next she pulled out the pair of black jeans, beneath which were a black T-shirt and her Reeboks. It was then that it registered.

They were the clothes she had worn the day she climbed up to the plateau. The day she disappeared. A jolt of panic twitched her as if a mad puppeteer had been entrusted with her strings. Muscles jerking, she flung the trousers from her.

“Uh, uh,” she heard herself grunting, the sounds of disgust she made when finding a revolting substance on her flesh.

Panting as if she’d run the quarter mile uphill from the dock, she crabbed around the box and the foot of the bed until her back was wedged in the corner of the room opposite the door where no one could come up behind her.

“You’re okay,” she told herself. “It’s okay, Buddy,” she said when she heard alarmed skritching from the bottom drawer. Two bead-black eyes appeared over the edge. “Don’t get scared and stink up anything, and I won’t either.”

Seeing and talking to her tiny friend centered Anna in a way nothing else could have. “What will I do without you, Buddy?” she whispered.

The Levi’s lay between them, crumpled like the legs of a person shot down while running. They repulsed Anna the way seeing her own skin flayed from her body, or her scalp hanging from a stranger’s belt, would have.

Shame drenched her. She didn’t want anyone to see them, ever. No one knew she’d been wearing them, that they had been stripped from her body. Even so, she wanted them hidden or gone, destroyed. Still with her back to the wall, her eyes moved to the items remaining in the box: black T-shirt, Reeboks. Panties. Panties peeked from beneath the running shoes, the bright candy colors she wore under her uniform.

Pushing away from the wall, she fell to her knees, looked beneath the bed, sprang up again and rolled open the closet door. Crazy as it was to be looking for the boogeyman, she didn’t care. Hidden places were threats. She needed to be able to see what was coming for her.

Satisfied she was alone, she stepped warily around the discarded trousers, leaned down, and, with thumb and forefinger, pinched up a corner of the neatly folded T-shirt and flung it over by the jeans. Using the same fingers, to keep the taint at a minimum, she plucked out first one Reebok, then the other.

The panties had been carefully displayed, fanned out like the petals of a flower, making a colorful circle on the bottom of the box. The center of the flower was a tangerine lace pair folded in a careful square. Anna wished she didn’t remember which pair she’d had on, didn’t remember pulling the soft nylon up her legs, zipping the black jeans over the bright lace, but she did.

This box had been prepared as carefully as a stage is dressed. The panties were the centerpiece. A joke, a mockery of Anna, being mailed to her sister, and Molly would never have known what it meant. Anna could almost see the monster’s self-satisfied smirk as he pictured Anna’s only living relative handling the last things her sister had worn when she was alive and, maybe, silently thanking whoever had been so kind as to take such pains in packing her things.