Nevada Barr - The Rope

“Bethy’s sure looking good,” Jenny said, thoughts of Anna reminding her of Regis’s wife.

Regis grunted. Rather than enjoying the lush bucket seats, he was standing behind the wheel of his sexy red boat as if by so doing he could urge greater speed from it. Lounging in the left-hand seat, Jenny had to admit he was visually compelling: good jaw, good chin and nose, hair wild in the wind, dark and wavy. Such a good-looking man, yet he’d always struck her as a nonevent, a bit of a cipher. Not that she didn’t like him, he just didn’t seem vital enough to waste much attention on. This season that had changed. Somebody or something had turned the lights on in his haunted house.

Rescuing her and Anna from drowning had been positively heroic. Even when they’d been wearing the tights and cape and rescuing him from the jar, he’d been more engaged than she’d ever seen him. Sniping at his wife, once done in an offhand desultory manner, was now done with a keen edge and an eye to her weak points. Regis Candor’s wattage had definitely been amped up. The anger he radiated as he pushed the cigarette boat to its limit was almost as tangible as the late afternoon sun on her skin.

Was it possible the someone who lit all her candles this season was the same one who turned on the lights for Regis? Jenny pondered that for a moment. Love of—or lust for—Anna Pigeon was not an area where she could be objective. Her heart insisted that, of course, every sighted intelligent creature on the planet must be head over heels for the little redhead. Intellectually, she knew that was nonsense. The rose-colored glasses had been given to her alone. Like Joseph Smith’s God-given golden spectacles, her glasses for translating the tablets of Anna Pigeon were not shared by the hoi polloi.

But Regis? It was possible. Clearly he admired Anna. From admiration it was but a small step to the desire for acquisition.

Jenny waited for jealousy to raise its little green head. It didn’t. It was Regis’s wife Jenny was jealous of: jealous of the time she spent with Anna on their shared lieu days, jealous of the mornings and evenings she stole for runs and working out on weights, jealous of the places she showed Anna and the knowledge of canyoneering she gave away, jealous of the temptations of the Zodiac and borrowed gear.

“Why are you staring at me?” Regis demanded.

Caught out, Jenny said the first thing that came to mind. “Didn’t you and Bethy used to stay in town on your days off?”

“We did. Why?” Her conversation distracted him from whatever was ruining his day. The white left his knuckles as he loosened his grip on the wheel.

“You seem to be more at the Rope this summer.”

Regis’s eyes darted to her face, to the windscreen, and back to her face. Not the double take of a comedian; the frightened look of a rabbit that can’t decide which way to run.

“Not complaining, mind you. I appreciate the ride and the company.” The last wasn’t entirely true. Jenny felt it was best to work and play well with others whenever possible.

Regis returned his gaze to the bow cutting through the waves, the boat’s steady pounding against the rough water echoing in the slight spring of his knees.

“We are spending more weekends at the Rope, I guess,” he said in an oddly confessional tone. “Used to be we’d go in every week to spend time with Kippa.”

Kippa, Jenny knew, was a French bulldog, a caramel-colored bowling ball eight parts energy and two parts unadulterated joy. Meeting Kippa was akin to wrestling with a manic dwarf Santa.

“She a year old now?” Jenny asked to be saying something.

“Died this winter,” he said and smiled at her, more a baring of teeth than a show of camaraderie. Jenny didn’t know whether he hid deep emotion or a heart of obsidian.

Either was too much to delve into. She let the conversation drop. Judging by the set of his mouth, she doubted Regis wanted to pursue the subject any more than she did.

Lost in their own thoughts, Jenny’s mostly pleasant, Regis’s, she guessed, not so much so, they rode with nothing but the whine of the engine for company until they rounded Gooseneck Point, a long knuckly finger of land poking into the main body of the lake.

“Isn’t it wonderful that Bethy and Anna are becoming best friends?” Regis asked, looking at her from the corner of his eye, a slight curl to his lips, virtually a smirk.

This was not an innocent question. That unmistakable fishhook-in-the-sternum bite and pull let Jenny know it was on a par with asking Barbie if it wasn’t wonderful that Ken was all over Skipper.

“They sure are getting in shape,” Jenny said carefully, more or less the same remark she’d made an hour earlier that had elicited nothing but a grunt.

“You and I are gym widows. They seem totally engrossed in life without us.” He shot her a smile that she didn’t like one bit. Regis was fishing. For what? Secrets of the lesbian sisterhood? Regis had figured out her sexual orientation years ago, Jenny knew that. Straight men who also happened to be idiots thought woman-on-woman was the bee’s knees. As if the lesbian couple was going to spot them lurking in the hall and yell, “Come on in, the sex is fine!” According to Jenny’s totally unscientific research, that had happened exactly never. Besides, Regis wasn’t an idiot and he’d never come across as lascivious.

“I do miss the hash brown casseroles,” Jenny said neutrally. “Green salads with lo-cal dressing just aren’t the same. Why? Does their friendship bother you?”

He seemed to give the question serious thought. “I guess it does,” he said after a few seconds. “Don’t get me wrong, I like Anna well enough, but I think she’s a bad influence on Bethy. Since Anna’s been hanging around, Bethy is … it’s hard to put into words.”

Jenny crimped her lips together as if she held straight pins in her mouth. Had Regis been trying, she doubted he could have been more insulting. Anna was not “hanging around” Bethy. If anything, the opposite was true. As for his “liking Anna well enough,” the way he fawned over her put the lie to that. Jenny suspected the “bad influence” Anna exerted was the self-confidence Bethy had begun to exhibit on rare occasions.

Not trusting herself to speak, she said nothing. Flying to Anna’s defense would expose more about her than she cared to make public.

Jenny wasn’t rising to the bait. Regis could tell his disparagement of Anna upset her, yet she’d chosen to shut him out rather than side with him. Fear coiled through his insides, loosening everything in its path. What had started out as a fine adventure was now officially a horror show.

Ecru, he thought to himself and smiled sourly. His mother’s favorite color. After all these years he finally saw its charm. A period of bland nothing would be restful. Having discovered the darkness he’d long suspected all people carried within, he doubted he could go back to ecru anytime soon.

“I don’t like them spending so much time together,” he said, trying another tack.

“So you’ve said,” Jenny replied.

No softening there. Tough bitch.

“I don’t think it’s fair to you.” Regis pitched his voice to the tune of concerned empathy, no mean feat over the engine racket.

Jenny glanced at him sharply. He held her gaze until he was sure she knew he knew she was gay and infatuated with the woman from New York. That no one else noticed Jenny Gorman was gay and in love he put down to mass hypnosis. People believed what they wanted to believe and saw—or didn’t see—whatever they needed to in order to ratify their beliefs: angels, aliens, ghosts, the Virgin Mary, demons, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, leprechauns, or Jesus’s face on a grilled cheese sandwich. Those who wanted to believe the earth was only six thousand years old did not see history, archaeology, paleontology, geology, or astronomy.