Nevada Barr - The Rope

The Park Service did not see lesbians. The fact that Jenny was wearing her hair down more often, buying more expensive wine, shaving her legs with regularity, and sparkling every time her housemate appeared went unnoticed.

“What do you mean it’s not fair to me?” Jenny asked after a minute or so.

“Don’t play games,” Regis said coolly, keeping the smile from his lips. The hook was set. With luck it would prod her into a territorial mood and she’d insert herself between Anna and Bethy, keep them from spending their lieu days together.

A woman alone was easier to kill.

Despite mental gymnastics, Jenny couldn’t eradicate the seeds of uncertainty—jealousy—that Regis planted. For the remainder of the trip she didn’t see desert varnish or intricate sculptures of stone; she saw Anna and Bethy enacting all the boisterous joyous fantasy scenes in which Jenny would have liked to star.

The sort of betrayal Regis suggested, that his wife, for heaven’s sake, and Jenny’s housemate were supposedly laying the groundwork for, was not new to Jenny. Mostly she’d been named the betrayer. She never saw herself in that light. Where neither promises nor commitments were made, she felt no promises could be broken nor commitments go unmet. That’s what she told herself when the proverbial shoe had been laced to her own slender foot. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, it felt like a knife between the shoulder blades.

As she and Regis pulled into Dangling Rope she saw Jim, out of uniform, sipping a beer, and chatting up Libby Perez, this season’s lone female concessions worker. Libby was twenty years older than Jim and had the lush velvet beauty of a full-blown rose when the petals are loose and lazy and the reds grown deeper at their edges.

“Jim!” Jenny called before Regis had shut down the engine. “Do you know if Anna’s around?”

Afraid of seeing a smirk on Regis’s face, she didn’t look at him as she jumped ship.

“Is Anna up at housing?” she asked.

“Why? Something happen?” Despite the sandals, Dos Equis, and Libby, Jim came into law enforcement focus so quickly he almost shimmered badge-gold.

Jenny realized she sounded anxious. Damn Regis. Emotional balance was difficult enough to maintain without louts with hidden agendas tipping the scales.

“Regis is worried Ms. Pigeon has eloped with his wife,” she said and was rewarded by a look of annoyance as Regis came up beside her.

Jim laughed. “I think that’s the case,” he said easily. “As I was coming off duty, I passed them in the Zodiac. Bethy said they were headed for Lover’s Leap to do a couple hours in the slot.”

Lover’s Leap. Jenny was crushed. That was a place she’d been saving to show Anna.

“What do you say, Jenny? Shall we go surprise them?” Regis asked.

To her shame, she immediately said yes.

The boat ride to the little canyon with its here-today-and-gone-tomorrow beach was less than half an hour. Neither Jenny nor Regis spoke. Both seemed to have dropped the pretense that this was spur-of-the-moment fun.

The closer they got to their destination, the worse Jenny felt. In acquiescing, she had shown disrespect for Anna, herself, and their friendship. Even in the sanctity of her own mind, she didn’t call it a relationship. The societal connotations of that word were too fraught.

More than once she thought to tell Regis she’d changed her mind, that she needed to get back to the Rope, but a cruel aspect had shut down his face. He looked much as she imagined a soldier would before battle or a cowboy before he shot his crippled horse, so she’d said nothing.

Jenny knew Regis had maneuvered her into this so misery would have company. He wanted to break up Anna and Bethy’s outing and thought he could use Jenny as an ally or at least an excuse. Jenny didn’t picture him as the jealous husband, rushing out to catch his bisexual wife in flagrante delicto. More likely he didn’t like his wife monopolizing a woman he was interested in. Didn’t want them becoming friends, swapping notes.

The whole thing was sick. Jenny was sick of her part in the soap opera. “Regis!” she called over the engine noise. “This is a bad idea. We need to turn back.”

“We’re almost there,” he said determinedly. Less than a minute later, when he throttled back to turn the boat into the side canyon, Jenny tried again.

“Regis, take me back. The sun is nearly down. It will be too dark to make the climb up and back.”

“So we meet them halfway.”

He was set on making this particular mistake, and Jenny was along for the ride. She gave up.

Anna didn’t know she was in love with her, Jenny reasoned. Anna wouldn’t know that she’d agreed to “surprise” her and Bethy from base motives. No one would know except Regis and herself. That Regis now knew she was an easily manipulated lovesick fool didn’t much bother her.

That she was one did.

Regis nosed the speedboat in beside the Zodiac on the minuscule beach, nimbly walked over the pointed bow, and began tying up to the same deadwood to which the Zodiac was moored.

Before he finished, Bethy came stalking out of the opening in the sandstone. Suffused with blood, her face lent her the aspect of an exceedingly angry beet. Her hair, pulled back in a high ponytail, fifties cheerleader style, had partially escaped its rubber band and made inharmonious lumps on the side of her head.

“Bethy, is everything okay?” Regis asked cautiously at the same moment Jenny demanded, “Where’s Anna?”

“I want to go home,” Bethy said as she clambered over the side of the speedboat. “She can take the Zodiac.” She turned cold eyes on Jenny and said, “You can wait for her, for all the good it will do you.” Bethy dug the key to the Zodiac out of her shorts pocket and was about to heave it over the bow onto the sand.

“I’ll take it,” Jenny said quickly, grabbed the key, and climbed awkwardly out of the boat.

“Regis, I want to go home now, ” Bethy hissed at her husband.

“Anna—” he began.

“Now!”

Emotion left Regis’s face with the suddenness of a shade being drawn over a window. Without another word, he untied the boat, shoved it back from the sand, then leaped over the gunwale. In thirty seconds all that remained of the Candors was a wake lapping fiercely at the beach.

Key clutched in her hand, Jenny turned toward the neat vertical crack in the cliff.

“Anna?” she called timidly. Then, with rising panic, “Anna!”

Before Jenny could rush headlong into the slot, her housemate stepped from the dark of the crevice into the shadowless gray light of the evening. Her shoulders were slumped with weariness, a bruise was forming around her right eye, and a thin trail of blood from her nose had been smeared into a fan across her cheek.

“Jenny!” Anna said with a start.

“I came to surprise you,” Jenny said lamely.

“Everybody seems bent on surprising me today,” Anna said.

For the first time since Anna had arrived at Dangling Rope, she and Jenny spent the evening in the dim cool rattle of the swamp cooler’s realm. Anna was in no mood for social intercourse with their next-door neighbors. One on either side of the kitchen counter, she and Jenny sat on stools picking over the carcass of a frozen chicken-and-pineapple pizza.

“So she just hurled herself at you?” Jenny asked.

“I sat down next to her, prepared to be awed by natural beauty, and she went in for the kill. Our foreheads banged together and her chin hit me so hard it made my nose bleed. If we were still in high school, I swear our braces would have gotten locked. I haven’t been kissed like that since I was in fifth grade and George Cramer kissed me on a dare.”