Nevada Barr - The Rope

Jenny stripped off shirt, shorts, and sandals. Just in case, she had forgone her old-lady panties that protected her skin from her uniform shorts and tossed aside her workmanlike brassiere. For Anna—just in case—she’d donned matching red bikini and bra with oodles of lace and industrial-strength underwire. She hoped Anna was appreciating the view.

“I’m going to check it out,” she said. “Wait here.” She didn’t inform her that this might turn into a body recovery. The poor thing had enough grisly images, without her adding to them. Maybe it was just a T-shirt or a plastic bag.

Catching up the rope near the frayed knots where it was tied around the boulder, Jenny lowered herself the few yards down the sheer rock face and into the water.

“Yikes,” she squeaked, hanging on to the rope.

“What?” Hands on knees, pigtail swinging, Anna looked over the edge.

“I forgot how cold the water can be in these slot canyons,” she admitted. “It’s so deep and gets zero sunlight.”

Needing to generate body heat, she let go of the rope and swam toward the unidentified floating object. From where she’d entered the water to the body—and it was a body—was no more than forty feet, not enough to get the blood flowing. Six inches beneath the surface of the water was a back and a head covered in dark hair long enough to halo out around the skull like seaweed. The drowned man added to Jenny’s chill.

Kicking powerfully with her legs and sculling with her right arm, Jenny grasped a handful of T-shirt. The wet cloth rucked up and her knuckles brushed bare skin. She emitted a horrid little gulping sound she hoped Anna didn’t hear. What the backs of her fingers brushed didn’t feel like skin. Eight seasons on the lake, Jenny had seen her share of drowned people; two were little kids. This was the first time she had ever touched one. She didn’t know what she’d expected a dead body would feel like, rubber maybe, or cold skin, maybe like a chicken breast out of the refrigerator. She hadn’t expected it would feel exactly like a dead body, a body a thousand times deader than a cold dead chicken.

“Someone’s drowned,” she called to Anna. “A man, I think. The water is so cold I’m afraid to leave him. He might sink or something.” Holding the corpse out to one side, she swam back toward Anna with a one-armed frog stroke. Jenny had her lifeguard’s license. High school summers were spent on a white wooden tower blowing a silver whistle at obnoxious children. She knew how to rescue a swimmer: arm under the shoulder, backstroke, the swimmer towed along, nose and mouth clear of the water, but there was no way in hell she was going to hug a dead body snuggled up to her best red lingerie.

The corpse tugged back. Again Jenny squeaked. Above, the light had gone gray; below was liquid darkness. The air in between was thick with permanent shadows. Given the setting, the cold, and the corpse, Jenny was beginning to believe in things she would have mocked when she was high and dry with Anna. It was in her mind to leave the dead to care for the dead and let go when Anna called, “Are you okay?”

Jenny looked to where she stood, rope in one hand, all one hundred and ten pounds of her ready to come to the rescue.

“I’m okay,” Jenny assured her quickly, hoping the fact she was becoming less okay by the minute didn’t bleed into her tone. “I think the—it—got caught on something.”

“What could it possibly catch on?” Anna asked. “This is a slither slot in a rock.”

Pointy bones, Jenny thought, lake zombies wanting to feed on warm human flesh, soggy vampires. What she said was “Could be anything. Flash floods wash entire trees down. Rusted-out truck bodies, shed roofs. You name it.”

Kicking and tugging jostled the corpse a foot or two farther. Something from below touched her foot. The corpse began a slow roll; a shoulder, an ear, the bloated face came free of the water, gray eyes open and glassy, followed by an arm that slid across the chest to flop in the water, splashing like a fish. The second arm loomed up from the dark and a hand drifted palm up and jellyfish-like. Then a third arm floated up beside it.

“God damn!” Jenny yelled, let go of the body, and put a couple of yards between herself and it.

“Holy moly,” Anna called from her elevated vantage point. “It’s two people stuck together. Maybe one was trying to save the other and they both drowned.”

More likely one was trying to climb out over the other and they both drowned, Jenny thought. There came a splash. Jenny turned back to see Anna, fully clothed, in long pants and long-sleeved shirt, disappear under the water at the base of the sheer wall that blocked this side of the canyon from where the boat was moored. The rope was still swinging when Anna resurfaced, sputtering, and began swimming toward her and the corpses.

“The water’s too cold,” Jenny cried. “Go back. I can do this.”

“Many hands make light work,” Anna said as she stopped to tread water near Jenny.

Despite the cold and the dead, Jenny laughed. Or, more likely, because of the cold and the dead she needed to laugh. “One day you must introduce me to whoever taught you to talk.” Before she could lose her courage in front of Anna, she said, “Grab a handful of something on your corpse and I’ll grab mine. They’re too heavy to try to hoist out of here, and it’s not like they’re going to get any deader. We can tow them back and slip the rope through their belts or whatever. That should keep them afloat until the rangers get here. Law enforcement gets all the good assignments: domestic violence, knife fights, body recoveries.”

Anna maneuvered through the water with a dexterity and confidence that encouraged Jenny. The woman could swim. Her long braid seemed to swim as well, coiling like a copperhead snake beneath the water. Near the corpses’ heads, Anna stopped, treading water. Jenny watched her lips firm up and her eyes narrow. Then she quickly reached out and took a handful of hair in her left hand.

“Bravo!” Jenny said. Grabbing “her” corpse by the wrist—the part of its anatomy that was closest—she said, “Take it slow. We don’t want to get tangled up with one of these unfortunate citizens and pulled under.”

Anna said nothing but swam behind and to the left of Jenny, combining the sidestroke and frog stroke so she could pull her burden and stay afloat.

Jenny arrived at the sandstone wall first. Though she hadn’t exerted herself unduly, cold water and the touch of the dead sapped her strength. She turned to grab the rope they’d descended to hang on to until Anna reached her.

There was no rope.

Jenny pushed back from the wall, treading water. It had to be there. The rope must have caught on something when Anna let go of it. Sheer, clean, the rock face kept no secrets, no cracks where a rope could hide, no knobs where it could hang up, no fingernail grip for hope. The rope had been there and now the rope was gone.

Old, worn, the knots frayed: They must have given way. The rope fell into the water and sank.

Anna gasped up beside her. Pushing the corpse, she wrangled it past Jenny toward where its companion bobbed just below the water surface at the base of the wall.

“The rope’s gone,” Jenny said evenly, her arms making pale fishy sweeps as she stayed afloat. In the seconds it had taken to search the rock face, the seriousness of their situation settled into her brain. If they did not find a way to get out of the water, hypothermia would set in. Their bodies would start to shut down from the cold. Soon, they would be unable to swim.

That must have been how the two men had died. Probably they had braced themselves up in the rocks until they were too exhausted to maintain the necessary tension. Then they fell into the water, the cold shut them down, and they drowned.