Nevada Barr - The Rope

There was a collective sigh of relief when the nasty little mysteries were put in the box labeled THINGS DONE WHILE ANNA WAS NOT IN HER RIGHT MIND.

Everything tied up neatly. Crime didn’t pay. There was no honor among thieves. God was back in his heaven and all was again right in the world.

The questions bothered Anna, as they did Jenny, but the need for answers was subsumed by relief that the bad guys were dead and the desire to put the horror in the past. Anna’s view of life, the shattered kaleidoscope with cutting edges and chasing colors, that had formed after Zach’s death, and re-formed as the fragile nature of her physical self was repeatedly challenged, began to change yet again.

Each day she rose early and ran the mile circuit around the upthrust of rock. To her amazement, most mornings Bethy Candor ran with her. Evenings she was not on the lake with Jenny, she worked out on the weights in the maintenance shed. When Jim wasn’t on duty, he worked with her. As often as not, Bethy joined them.

Within a couple of weeks, despite the temperature having ratcheted up from a cool ninety-two in July to a hundred degrees in the heat of August, if she took it at a slow jog, Anna could run the circuit twice without stopping to walk. Her arms built strength and muscle. A day of pounding over rough water or hauling heavy cans of human dung no longer left her exhausted.

Bethy began to lose weight. It melted away as if she were made of butter and dared run in the sunlight. Anna took pleasure and pride in that as well, though she knew it was not her doing.

As she grew thinner, Bethy grew bolder. When Anna first arrived at Dangling Rope, Bethy had seemed little more than a scuttling waitress, painfully shy, afraid of her own shadow and terrified of the two maintenance seasonals, Gil and Dennis. Anna guessed she’d been neither; she’d been ashamed of how she looked. Regis had exacerbated the situation with barbed remarks about the size of her derriere.

Anna’d forgotten that. Her first weeks at Lake Powell she’d been self-involved to the point of being deaf, dumb, and blind. Compared to her personal drama, those around her seemed staggeringly unimportant. With food, strength, and freedom from the fear a monster waited around the next bend, Anna came out of her self-imposed isolation.

A newness highlighted the people she watched and the landscape she traveled through. There were times Jenny glittered as much as the wind-scattered lake surface. Even Bethy was growing on her. The woman’s butchery of the English language grated on ears trained to the Bard, but Bethy had mettle. Beneath her vague babbling exterior was a vein of something strong. Anna’d seen flashes of it when she’d pushed her maximum weight up from the bench into Anna’s waiting hands and, once, when Regis had made a deprecatory remark that managed to simultaneously flatter Anna and disparage his wife.

It seemed to both Anna and Jenny that the more Bethy slimmed down and firmed up, the more cutting Regis’s remarks became. Sly and cutting, the kind that are tricky to confront, but felt all the more sharply for being served with that spice of helplessness. It was almost as if he hated seeing his wife becoming what she thought he wanted.

Disturbingly, Regis became Anna’s cheerleader in the fitness game, remarking—always politely and never with an underlying leer that either Anna or Jenny could detect—on how much stronger she looked, how much faster she ran. It was annoying to the point Anna avoided him when she could. If he had the itch to be a personal trainer, he should scratch it with his wife. Even Gil and Dennis, as obtuse as they seemed to be, noticed how Bethy hungered for Regis’s approval. They would flirt with her a little after a rebuff, their inherent good natures wanting to bolster her up.

The night Regis offered to teach Anna canyoneering, Anna thought Bethy was going to burst into tears. Instead she’d stood up for herself for the first time in Anna’s acquaintance with her.

“I taught you,” she’d snapped at Regis. “If Anna wants to learn, she’d be better off coming to me.” The half-hangdog, half-hoping look she’d shot Anna was painful to see.

“I’d like that,” Anna replied firmly. Regis didn’t let the matter drop with any grace. His demeanor turned so cold Anna half expected icicles to form on the eaves of the duplexes. Shortly thereafter, he left the picnic benches for their apartment and didn’t return.

Since then, Bethy had taken Anna on two tiny canyoneering adventures in an old Zodiac she brought out from Page.

In the slot canyons, Anna suffered mentally. The sense that the walls were closing in and trapping her never entirely went away. Physically, she did herself proud, enjoying the playground-jungle-gym way she worked her body. Moving like a child awakened the spirit of a child in her as she bent and twisted, crawled and wriggled.

On their first adventure, Jenny was with them; on the second, Jim. The third time it was just Bethy and Anna. The canyon Bethy chose was off Rock Creek Bay, half an hour’s ride in the Zodiac from the Rope. The afternoon was still and hot, and after a day of trying to talk a string of uniquely unpleasant individuals into being better stewards of the land, Anna was glad to lounge in the bow of the puffy little boat and watch the unfailingly awesome grandeur of Glen Canyon fold into the secret jewels of the smaller side canyons.

“This is an easy one,” Bethy said as she expertly herded the fat little craft up a snaking waterway, dyed deep turquoise by the shadows. “A walk in the park,” she said and laughed.

Anna laughed with her. Bethy’s sense of humor was woefully undeveloped, and Anna felt duty bound to reward even the smallest glimmer of it. After years around actors, Anna had come to believe that people in general were witty and entertaining. That this was not so had been dawning on her over the past months. In general, people were plodding creatures. Occasionally, she missed the brighter-colored social butterflies, but only occasionally. Lack of repartee was conducive to honesty and solitude. Both of which she was coming to crave.

Bethy beached the Zodiac on a spill of sand on a flat stone outcropping no wider than the boat was long. Anna climbed out of the bow and, line in hand, walked the few feet to the only anchorage, a dead tree wedged tightly between a rock and a hard place.

The sand apron that formed their landing area had been washed down from a slot canyon, a mere crack in the sandstone cliffs, carved and smoothed by the runoff from a million years of rain on the plateau and Fiftymile Mountain. A gold-and-gray pathway beckoned them into the heart of the rock. Straighter and shallower than many slot canyons Anna had seen in previous weeks, it was not dark and did not fill her with the mix of excitement and foreboding she’d grown accustomed to.

While Anna tied off the line, Bethy unloaded the gear. “This one’s not a technical thing. We’re not going to need ropes and stuff. I’m not even going to wear a helmet,” she said as she sorted through the plastic laundry basket that served as her gear chest. “You want one?”

Anna knew she should—safety first and all that—but it was hot and she hated wearing the things. “I guess not.”

“We won’t need ropes either, but I’m going to carry this one. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?” Anna asked, resisting the impulse to offer to carry the coiled line with a carabiner affixed to either end. Once she had eschewed the helmet, the idea of scrambling totally unencumbered took precedence over good manners.

Bethy looked nonplussed. “I don’t know. Just in case, I guess, you know, we need to tie something to something or something.”

“Be prepared,” Anna said and raised her hand in the three-fingered Boy Scout salute.