Nevada Barr - The Rope

“I was seventeen. Since I’d skipped a grade, I went to college a year early.”

“Smart cookie,” Anna said with difficulty. Her brain did not seem to be in earnest about sending messages to her lips. That or her lips had become anarchists and no longer took orders from her brain.

“Book smart, life stupid,” Jenny said. “I grew up in a podunk town, one of five daughters of parents who went out to a movie one night and didn’t come home for years. Grandma was strict because, without order, there was no way she could have kept all of us fed and clothed. Not mean, though. We all worked. Little jobs when we were little, bigger jobs as we got bigger.

“Socially my sisters and I were functionally illiterate. No time for that sort of thing in our formative years.

“So I get to college in the big city and lay eyes on Adafaire. She was wearing tennis whites, can you believe that? Talk about a cliché. I loved her instantly, madly, passionately.”

Memory ticked at the edges of Anna’s hibernating mind. “The girl at the rape, one of the ones who watched.”

“One and the same. Adafaire had taken me to the frat party; Kappa Kappa Damn girls were the frat boys’ “little sisters.” A misnomer if there ever was one.”

“Did she want you to be raped?” Stringing seven words together took an effort, but Anna needed to know the answer for some reason.

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Jenny said. “I don’t think she did, consciously. Unconsciously? Maybe. Adafaire hated me because I was the one who made her realize she was gay. Lesbian. Once she knew why she had all those feelings all those years, she couldn’t unknow it and go on pretending.”

“Sad story,” Anna managed.

“Ah, but it has a happy ending,” Jenny murmured. The breeze in Anna’s ear felt as if it blew from the north this time. “Revenge.”

“ Count of Monte Cristo, ” Anna put the words together carefully. Still, they more spilled from her tongue than were spoken. She wasn’t cold anymore.

“I didn’t drop out of college,” Jenny said, “though I think anybody who was there that night expected me to. I wanted them to have to see me every day, look me in the eye and see my hatred. That worked for about a day and a half. Then it was like collective amnesia, like nobody but me remembered.”

“P’leece?” Anna asked.

“I didn’t report it to the police,” Jenny said, and Anna marveled that her words were so neat and well formed. One day, she promised herself, if I’m not dead, I will be as strong as Jenny Gorman.

“I had a plan, and I didn’t want to be the prime suspect. I knew two of the frat boys who’d benched me by sight. The others … I think two but I don’t really know how many. The two I’d seen were seniors, roommates, BMOC. One had been accepted to Stanford for law and one to Cornell. I can’t remember in what, but I knew then. I made it my business to know. Adafaire, Leo, and Phillip never saw me after those first two days. I saw them constantly, learned everything, watched and timed everything.”

“Kill them all?” Anna pushed out the question.

“No. But there were a lot of thefts after the incident at the frat picnic. Jewelry from the sororities, watches and cash from four frat houses. Three professors’ cars were broken into, the stereos stolen. Handheld calculators were taken—and in the eighties, a Hewlett-Packard ran four hundred dollars. A regular crime spree. Thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth. Acting on an anonymous tip, the police found the bulk of it in Leo and Phillip’s storage area in the basement of their frat house. The police also found stolen items in their apartment and cars, along with a very expensive Rolex that had gone missing from the home of the president of the university.

“Leo and Phillip were rich; their daddies got them off with community service. Cornell and Stanford were not that forgiving. They unaccepted them. Not what they deserved, but the best I could do short of killing them.”

Anna didn’t know if she’d asked about what happened to Adafaire out loud, or if Jenny chose to go on with the story without urging.

“Adafaire never admitted she was a lesbian, though she was one of the most enthusiastic and passionate ‘experimenters’ I have ever known. Beautiful and sexual and vain, Adafaire loved posing for pictures. For three or four years, every time Adafaire got close to a longed-for goal—marriage, a job, a membership—darned if one of those old pictures didn’t show up in the wrong person’s mailbox. Petty, but satisfying.

“Until it wasn’t. Now even the memory isn’t satisfying. More like the taste of ashes. She knew it was me. I wanted her to know it was me. Finally, she took me to court. Since she didn’t want publicity, I got off easy. A restraining order and court-ordered therapy.”

“Did you fall in love again?” Anna asked or thought she did. She must have, because Jenny answered softly.

“I did. Shall I tell you about her?”

Anna did her best to nod. Jenny’s arm had fallen from her curled fingers, and Jenny’s words were slurring much as Anna’s.

“She had hair the color of an autumn leaf,” Jenny’s love story began. “She wandered in one day reminding me of a scared, starving, stray kitten.”

The words might have gone on, Anna wasn’t sure. The next thing she was sure of was the water closing over her and she couldn’t raise her arms to swim.

God damn that woman.

When Anna Pigeon had first slunk, catlike and all in black, from the shadows of Jenny’s duplex to sit as a shadow in the evenings, the long dusky red hair roped down her back in a sailor’s queue, Regis had thought she might prove a pleasant diversion, an entertainment to get him through the summer exiled in Dangling Rope with the ever-clinging Bethy. Bethy, who was too insecure to trust him alone for five days a week in their perfectly respectable house in Page.

Anna Pigeon had proven more than an entertainment; she had turned into a nightmare.

“God damn that woman!” Regis shouted as he pulled back on the throttles. The red speedboat sloshed around the final curve and waked the beach of the grotto where Jenny was camping. Two tents were pitched, one at either end of the grotto. The visitors were out on the lake, Regis knew that. Riding Jet Skis with the kiddies.

Anna and Jenny were bobbing around like icebergs in the slot canyon beyond the rock fall. If they were still bobbing and not yet drifting lifelessly toward the bottom. Adjusting the spotlight to the left of the boat’s windscreen, he idled past the grotto and into the narrowing crack. Jenny’s boat, its fat gray stern reminding him of his wife in sweatpants, was moored at the bottom of the rock fall. He cut the engines, shoved a six-cell battery in his belt, snatched up two personal flotation devices, and draped two coils of yellow nylon line over his shoulder.

Having thrown out a bumper, he jumped agilely from the bow of his boat to the Almar and rafted the red cigarette boat of the NPS patrol boat. In seconds he was climbing the rock fall. Seconds after that, he was on the top of the rock pile.

The flashlight yanked free of his belt, he played the beam over the water. Beneath the blockage, the rectangular pool was flat and black. From the far end, where the narrowest portion of the slot cut up in a blacker shadow toward the plateau, crescents of silver were fanning out, ripples catching the last of the moonlight. Movement.

Damn that woman, he thought again.

“Hey.” The voice was so close it made Regis twitch. Had he not spent years controlling his body and face, he would have jumped a foot in the air.

“You need help? We were behind you. There’s a gray boat. Is somebody in trouble?”