Nevada Barr - The Rope

Bethy kicked away the last bit of the rope and relaxed back against the rock, her legs straight out in front of her like a little girl or a doll. “It’s in Anna’s pack. Anna stole it. Anna tried to kill me,” she told her husband. Her voice quavered with shock and fear, but her lips smirked at Anna and her eyes danced.

Regis returned with the water and blocked Anna’s view of Bethy while he gave her a drink.

Regis was here to kill Anna.

Regis was worried sick about Anna.

Bethy had saved Anna for Regis to kill.

Colors got too bright. Rocks shifted and slid. Sunlight hot and hard as a shovel in a coal furnace pressed on the back of her neck. The glare of the sky met the glare of the sandstone, breaking the desert into prisms. Anna staggered.

Too close to the cliff. She turned back.

Bethy, still cuffed, was up and running toward her, a hunting knife clutched in her two raised fists.

She, too, had seen psycho.

Anna was slow. Her mind was slow, her body heavy; she couldn’t even draw breath to scream.

“No!” she heard Regis cry. Her peripheral vision blurred. Regis. Flying low to the ground, his shoulder crashing into his wife’s hip, a look of shock on her face, the knife falling from her hands as she flew backward, her feet not touching the ground as her body hurtled over the canyon rim, a sound like a watermelon dropped from a sixty-foot tower hitting the sidewalk.

Squatting, Anna put her head down in an attempt to postpone passing out. Giving in to gravity, she allowed herself to fall back on her rump, still hugging her knees.

Regis stood at the edge of the precipice looking down on what was left of his wife. Anna considered shoving him off just to be on the safe side. Given he’d saved her life twice, she decided not to.

He wasn’t an innocent man. She sensed that with every nerve in her body. Then again, who was? She’d worked in a scene shop one summer. The foreman believed in hiring ex-cons. “At least you know what they’re guilty of,” he’d said. “With everybody else you have to guess.”

Anna didn’t doubt for a second that Bethy Candor intended to stab her to death with that knife, or that Regis Candor had saved her life at the cost of his wife’s.

She also didn’t doubt that Regis gave Bethy the hunting knife. In the forced intimacy of their struggle, Anna would not have missed a lump of that size, nor would Bethy have hesitated to use it.

Regis turned away from the cliff edge.

“She killed Jenny’s snake,” he said distantly. “She nailed it to the ground while it was still alive.” Jenny had told Anna about that. Wanton cruelty to an animal sickened her more deeply than murder, more deeply than the scars Bethy left in her skin.

“And Kippa,” Regis said. “She killed Kippa. Kippa was just a puppy.” His eyes shone in the harsh sunlight as they teared up. “She never would have stopped,” he said. “It never would have stopped.”

Anna nodded, not knowing how thin the ice was or if, indeed, there was any ice at all.

“She left me a note,” Regis said. “I flew up. I’ll take you to Bullfrog if you want, or back to Wahweap.”

His voice sounded mechanical. Anna suspected hers sounded much the same when she said, “I’ll walk, thanks.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure.” He left her sitting in the dirt. When he was out of sight she shoved herself to her feet and began the long walk home.

Two weeks had passed since Anna watched Regis shove his wife to her death at the bottom of the slot canyon. The same canyon Bethy had used to murder the boys and for the attempted murder of Anna and Jenny Gorman.

Where others expected Anna to be curious, wanting to know every twist and turn of the tale, Anna was indifferent. The indifference wasn’t for show. Inside she was indifferent as well. Molly thought it a form of self-preservation. Molly and occasionally Jenny were the only people Anna could discuss the issue with. Law enforcement got the facts that she’d witnessed but nothing more. Joe Friday would have been impressed. At least that’s what Steve Gluck told her.

Both she and Jenny were happy to return to the good clean world of excrement and heavy lifting.

Molly postulated that Bethy Candor had a history of psychotic behavior that probably predated killing Kippa and the snake. From the rapid weight loss and other symptoms, she suggested that Bethy might have gone off medication, possibly lithium, any number of tranquilizers, and/or other antipsychotics. Both Anna and Molly suspected a cocktail of these medications had been thrown haphazardly into the canteen Bethy left in the jar for Anna. As to Regis’s motivation for rescuing those his wife endangered without resorting to the simple expedient of telling the chief ranger and getting the woman locked up—or at least in for a psych evaluation—they could come up with no cohesive explanation. Love didn’t seem to cut it. From what Anna and Jenny had witnessed of the Candors’ relationship, Regis didn’t even like his wife much.

Anna hadn’t seen Regis to ask him since he’d walked away from her on the plateau the day he killed his wife. Given the chance, she doubted she would ask. Molly’s job was to figure out why people exhibited insane destructive behaviors. As a lover of the theater, Anna had been fascinated by what drove the human heart to self-destruct. That was over. Now all she cared about was that they be stopped.

Sitting in Steve Gluck’s cramped office in Bullfrog, she let these thoughts drift through her mind while she waited for Steve to open the conversation. Jenny was in the barely padded chair next to hers, the space so cramped they couldn’t stretch their legs without smacking their toes against the metal desk. The small space was made smaller by detritus and memorabilia collected over forty years in law enforcement and stacked untidily on metal shelves along with manuals on the Park Service way of doing everything from high-angle rescue to cleaning backcountry toilets. In pride of place on top of a scarred beige metal filing cabinet was a battered tan ball cap with OLD SCHOOL embroidered on it, Steve proclaiming where his value system was formed.

Finally Steve spoke. “Here’s how things stand. The kid, Jason Mannings, probably didn’t jump off the cliff below the dam. It’s a good guess Bethy heard all the radio chatter, came to see what was happening, and ran across Jason when he was trying to get away from us. Wrong place, wrong time. He’s a link to her; he gets a free ride to a long drop. I told his folks what we suspected. It meant a lot to them that he most likely didn’t kill himself, but, as the primary suspect suffered death in the same manner as their son, they may not push it. If they don’t, it’ll lay around in law enforcement limbo. Anyway, it didn’t happen in our jurisdiction. That part of the shore is on the Navajo reservation.

“Regis is no longer with the Park Service. No charges are being filed against him. Anna, by your own admission, Bethy was attacking you with a knife when Regis knocked her into the canyon. You also stated you weren’t one hundred percent sure Bethy didn’t have the knife on her.

“Andrew and I and Frank from up Escalante way talked about obstruction of justice, failure to report a felony, and a handful of other charges, but the long and short of it is, Regis saved you two and it’s possible he didn’t know anything about his wife’s extracurricular activities until moments before he ran out to see if he could save the day.

“He had provided her with psychiatric care at his own expense earlier in the year. That was verified. And he had booked her into a facility in Virginia. She was supposed to go in the day after she died. So … that’s pretty much that. We did manage to track down her folks. They hadn’t seen her in ten years. They ‘emancipated’ her when she was fourteen. They wouldn’t tell me why, but my guess is too many of the neighborhood pets went missing. If anything, they seemed relieved she was dead.”