Nevada Barr - The Rope

The high spirits, or imitation thereof, leached from the gathering by Steve Gluck’s plea for assistance, the milling kids looked more like kids, tired sunburned kids who’d eaten too much, drunk too much, and secretly wanted someone to order them to go to bed early. Their densely packed bodies mumbled and shifted or asked questions Jenny pretended not to know the answers to as she swam through the human pond. She saw kids fondling each other in a desultory way. She saw kids smoking dope and shooting her challenging glances as if she were DEA and not NPS. She saw one kid puking over the rail. She saw kids who looked vaguely familiar. She didn’t see anything that helped sort out the quagmire that had culminated in the deaths of three young people and the scarring of Anna Pigeon.

Having stared into every bleary-eyed face she could find, she stopped mingling at the stern end of the upper deck and rested her forearms on the rail, looking over the now dark water to the lights of Wahweap. Jim and Steve were no longer in sight. Undoubtedly working their way through the crowded cabin and foredeck.

After a few minutes, Anna came and leaned beside her. “Anything?” Jenny asked.

“No. You?”

“No.”

For a moment they stood without speaking. With what sounded like a contented sigh Anna said, “Dark is very dark out in the wilds. Dark is safe here. In the city, at night, if you find yourself alone in the dark—on an empty street or in the hall of a building—that’s when your antennae are out. There’s safety in light and crowds in a city. Out here, it’s just the opposite. Dark is good. Alone is safest.”

“Unless you’re in a solution hole,” Jenny said and immediately wished she’d bitten her tongue off. Why on earth had she felt the need to drag out Anna’s nightmare and shove it in her face? It was Anna saying, “Alone is safest,” she realized. The words had shut Jenny out.

Fortunately Anna seemed unfazed by her lack of sensitivity.

“Even in the jar. I was trapped, sure, but alone was safest. Darkness was my friend.”

Jenny bumped shoulders with Anna to let her know, safest or not, she was not alone. Anna returned the pressure, and they stood in the velvety night in companionable silence, looking over the water until Steve stepped out on the stern deck and waved them down.

Doug was in his boat by the time they squeezed and excused their way down the narrow stairs and through the main cabin.

“Any luck?” Steve asked as they came aft to meet him.

“Nothing,” Anna said.

“Nada,” Jenny added. “How’d you guys do?”

“Three positive I.Ds,” Steve said. “Not bad for an hour’s work. Get the lines, would you?” he asked, then stepped over the space between the two boats and jumped heavily on deck. Jenny made short work of loosing the bow and stern lines from where she’d secured them. This done she followed him, then turned to make sure Anna was coming.

She wasn’t. She was standing in the houseboat’s stern staring at the deck, a look of concern on her face.

Jenny held the boats together while Steve stowed the lines. “Anna?”

Anna shook her head as if answering a question she asked herself, then stepped over the gunwales and into the district ranger’s boat. He chugged away at little better than idle speed. Jenny pulled up the bumpers. Anna seemed distracted. Jenny fought down the desire to pester her with any more uninvited concern. Still, she watched her from the corners of her eyes, worried that the visit to the houseboat had upset her more than she was willing to admit.

Doug piloted the boat up and docked with military precision. A feat anyone could perform on still water, Jenny observed, but she kept her petty observation to herself. Anna was first off the boat. She didn’t stay to tie lines to cleats or even say where she was going. She trotted to the shore end of the NPS dock and stopped. Hand on hips, she appeared to be searching the beach. The grounds of the hotel and marina were well lit—tastefully, Jenny admitted, but up to OSHA standards.

Anna jumped from the end of the dock and jogged away from the marina toward the dark of a ravine that cut up from the lake toward the employee housing near the road.

“Where’s she running off to?” Steve asked.

“Beats me,” Jenny said, “but I’m going to find out.”

Jenny traversed the dock and was partway down the beach. Anna had stopped at the ravine. Hearing Jenny’s approach, she looked up.

“Jenny,” she called. “Come take a look at this.”

Hoping it wasn’t anything too grisly, Jenny broke into a jog. Anna was staring into a clump of sage bushes. As Jenny reached her she pointed into the shadows beneath.

“Is that the boogie board that caused the comic interlude during our entrance?” she asked.

It was—and there were tracks leading away from it up the ravine toward the highway.

“Damn,” Jenny whispered.

Unsub three had jumped ship.

The boy who escaped the houseboat on the boogie board was found two days later smashed at the bottom of an escarpment below Glen Canyon Dam. There were no signs of violence on the body that couldn’t be accounted for by a sixty-foot dive onto rocks.

Anna and Jenny were again called to look at a corpse. Anna recognized the boy as the sandy-haired kid with acne who had been watching the other two as they assaulted Kay. Jenny recognized him from the grotto when the party boat was anchored there. His death was ruled a suicide.

“Kay” was Katherine Nelson from Durango, Colorado, a sophomore at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. The tattooed boy was Caleb Fieldhouse. The body Jenny recognized from the slot canyon belonged to Adam Toleodano. The suicide was Jason Mannings. Fieldhouse and Mannings were juniors at Colorado State. Toleodano was a high school friend of Fieldhouse.

According to Steve, Kay and the suicide had not known the other two prior to the trip to Lake Powell. Fieldhouse and Toleodano had a history of being bad boys and getting away with it because they were college students, white boys from decent families.

Katherine Nelson died from blunt trauma to the head. Bruising suggested she was alive when she’d been tumbled into the solution hole and died shortly thereafter. Caleb and Adam died of drowning, probably brought on by hypothermia. There were no marks of violence on either of the bodies.

As all three of the perpetrators were dead, no charges were filed.

The predominant belief regarding the suicide was that, after participating in the murder of Katherine Nelson, and possibly the deaths of the other two boys, fear of exposure, guilt, or fear of prison had driven Jason Mannings to take his own life.

Radio traffic had alerted Regis and he had met them at the dock the night they’d visited the party boat in Wahweap. At the viewing of the suicide, he backed up Jenny’s statement that the dead boy was in the grotto and with the party on the houseboat. After overhearing Jason Mannings making vicious remarks to two of the college girls when the houseboat was tied up at Dangling Rope, Regis had followed the boat back to the grotto in Panther Canyon and spoken to the kid.

Anna had admitted to reburying Kay. It was suggested that perhaps it was she who buried her first in a state of confusion and thus knew precisely where the body was. As for the drugged water, there was no proof of that. No trace of the sandwiches was found. The clothes boxed and addressed to Molly? Well, everyone knew Anna had not been happy. Perhaps she had decided to go home, then changed her mind, and due to the ensuing trauma forgotten. Anna had never told law enforcement about the word WHORE carved on her thigh and was glad she hadn’t. It probably would have been passed off as the self-cutting of a neurotic woman.