Nevada Barr - The Rope

She was rubbing the palms of her hands compulsively on the thighs of her borrowed khakis. “All the perfumes of Arabia,” she murmured, forcing herself to stop.

The monster had stripped her, packed the clothes she’d been wearing with those stolen from her room, then addressed the carton to Molly Pigeon in New York. This was very creepy; creepy, but not life-threatening. Yet Anna felt a sense of dread as deep as if her life—or something very like—could be snatched from her by scraps of cotton, leather, and latex.

The monster—or monsters—had touched everything in the box with scaly clawed fingers. Cleared out Anna’s room so it would look like she’d moved out, gone home. Monster claws touching her things was creepy, but those he had actually stripped from her body freaked her out, and the tangerine-colored panties terrified her.

The pants and underpants, could they tell her, in fact, that she had been raped? That she wasn’t lucky Anna, the girl who hadn’t been raped, but one of those “rape victims”? Fluids or bloodstains or tears that would indicate she had been penetrated by the monster or a stick or fingers or—“Stop it!” she commanded herself. “Just fucking stop it!”

Shame pooled cold and low in her abdomen, shame for wanting to distance herself—even if only mentally—from women who had suffered this special brand of degradation, from Jenny.

What if she had been sexually assaulted? Was that worse than having WHORE cut into her skin? Worse than days and nights of drugged nightmare? Worse than a dislocated shoulder and a battered skull? Than hunger and thirst and finding a dead body?

It was not. The shame attached to rape was men’s shame, shame they were too weak to carry: that their gender could do this, that they could do it, that they wanted to do it, that they could not protect their wives and sisters and daughters from it, that they could not stop it. That a thing they believed to be solely theirs could be taken by another man. That, should a child be born, the cuckold would be left to raise another man’s bastard.

Snatching up the tangerine panties, Anna brought them to her nose, determined to know if there was a scent, a signifier of anything.

They smelled of laundry detergent. Kneeling, she examined the shirt and jeans, sniffing and running her hands over the fabric. They, too, had been washed. The running shoes were wiped clean; even the soles were free of dirt.

Of course they had been washed. Anna sat back on her heels, a Reebok in her hand. Mr. Monster would wash them to get rid of any trace evidence. Now Anna had pawed and sniffed every item, rubbing them around on a carpet that undoubtedly had trace evidence from seasonal rangers that went back ten years.

She should have watched more NYPD Blue and less Molière.

Steve Gluck stood in the doorway to her bedroom, thumbs hooked in his belt, a pained expression on his face, as Anna explained about the black clothes, the shoes, and the panties.

When she’d finished, the district ranger said nothing. Pushing back his ball cap with a forefinger, he scratched his head. Anna wondered if he intentionally embodied the cliché or if his scalp itched.

“Okay,” he said finally, settling the cap firmly. “Jim and Jenny said when you came in you were wearing cutoff jeans, sandals, and a bathing suit top. We bagged everything but the shoes for possible trace evidence. Now you’re telling me you were wearing these.” He pointed accusingly at the pile Anna’d made as she’d tossed the offending items from her.

Guilt lapped around her ankles. She hadn’t told them the clothes she’d come back in didn’t belong to her, that she’d been stripped, and in turn stripped the corpse. What difference would it make? She gave them the clothes. Telling would have made her feel dirty, violated in their eyes; more men taking mental snapshots of her naked and helpless.

“I didn’t think it mattered,” she said truthfully. The words sounded lame. They sounded like a lie.

Gluck looked at her, a hard piercing stare. “Now you know it matters. You want to fill me in?”

Anna told him then of waking naked, of taking the dead woman’s things. Speaking of it made the wounds on her thigh burn. Still, she didn’t tell him about the cuts. He would ask to see. He would want to take pictures. That’s what they did with evidence. Even the thought was intolerable. It was personal, a secret that was hers to keep, it didn’t matter—at least not to anyone but her and the monster.

Steve let out an explosive sigh and shook his head the way a teacher might at an impossible child. “So the anklet you ‘found,’ did you find that in the sand or on the dead woman’s ankle?”

“It was on her right ankle.”

“The watch?”

“Left wrist.”

“Is there anything else you haven’t bothered to tell me?” he asked.

Guilt rose to knee level. Anna had been attacked and nearly killed, and yet it was she suffering the suspicions and accusations of law enforcement. It was she they interrogated. Fury rose. Guilt boiled away.

“No.”

Steve Gluck put the black trousers, T-shirt, sneakers, and the tangerine panties in a paper bag, leaving the rest of the box’s contents in Anna’s room. He didn’t give her any hope that these laundered artifacts would yield useful information. Not only because they had been sanitized but because testing for trace evidence was expensive and took time. The park didn’t have enough of either resource to throw down what appeared to be a rat hole.

Since there was no federal law against homicide, Kay’s murder fell under the jurisdiction of the state of Utah. Kane County had significantly less money and manpower than the park. Kay’s clothes would probably either rot in an evidence locker or be returned to her relatives when the corpse was identified.

Along with the clothes, Buddy was to go. Putting it off as long as possible, Anna took him insect hunting one last time, then made a wonderful nest for him in the bottom of the emptied packing box. For his water bowl, she cut a foam coffee cup in half and secured it to the side with duct tape borrowed from the maintenance barn. Finally there was nothing else to be done. She whispered her good-byes and gratitude. Buddy allowed her to kiss him on his little skunk head; then she carried him across the square of lawn to Jim Levitt’s porch, where Steve was drinking coffee.

Steve politely ignored her sniffling as he told her he was longtime friends with an old Navajo who ran a filling station outside of Fry Canyon on 95. Lawrence Yazzi had kept a pet skunk for eight years. A year or so back it died. He’d been on the lookout for another. Buddy would be de-stunk, Steve warned her. There was no help for that. He was too little to be let go on his own. “Lawrence is good people,” he finished as he took the box and Buddy from Anna’s arms. “Your pal here has got it made skunkwise.”

Anna nodded. She didn’t walk with them down to the dock but waited in the duplex until she was sure Steve would be headed back toward Bullfrog. A little after noon, she went down, bought a Dangling Dog, chips, and a Coke, and sat at one of the picnic tables wondering what to do with herself, where to go, who to be, what to feel, what to think.

It was a relief when Jenny’s Almar putted into the harbor, its blunt nose plowing through the blue-green water. Whoever Anna was, and whatever she felt, she suddenly knew what she wanted to do: work. Not with her mind but with her body: to walk, chop wood, dig ditches, lift heavy objects and carry them up steep hills, clean Westminster Cathedral with a toothbrush, load all the human manure on Lake Powell’s beaches into five-gallon cans.

She rose and went to meet Jenny as she leaped to the dock and began winding the bow line around a cleat.