The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (26 page)

“We’re set,” she said. “Feel free to disembark.”

Anna leaped gracefully onto the natural step. “Lay on, Macduff,” she said.

Jenny started up the pile of stones, thirty feet an easy scramble, Anna was mastering the climb, but she was sweating and breathing hard. Jenny reminded herself to quit showing off and take it easier on her companion. Women as fragile as her darling didn’t belong between a rock and a hard place.

“You okay with this?” she asked solicitously. “I’m a tough old thing. I’m used to it.”

“I’m getting used to it,” Anna said grimly.

When Anna reached the summit, Jenny gestured toward the sculpted slot canyon beyond and said, “Tada! Beautiful in a strangled creepy kind of way.”

“My gosh,” Anna breathed, and Jenny was gratified. They stood ten yards above an ever-narrowing waterway that had been cut off from the larger part of Panther Canyon by the rock fall. At the base of the obstruction the waterway was twelve feet wide, an almost square pool surrounded by sheer cliffs rising perpendicularly sixty or eighty feet.

“It’s like a quarry,” Anna said. “Like the granite quarries near where I grew up, but in miniature. Molly used to dive in them. Seventy feet. Not me. Too scared.”

It looked not only like a quarry but like a square sandstone jar with water in the bottom. Short staccato sentences: Jenny guessed Anna was afraid longer ones would betray her fear. She opened her mouth to again offer to go back to camp, but knew she was doing it because she felt guilty. Anna would leave when she needed to. At present, she seemed to need to stay and endure.

“A quarry with a tail.” Jenny pointed to the far end of the rectangular pool where a crack opened in the cliffs and the water slipped into a dark and twisting channel. “Runoff carved that slot down from the plateau. Of course, there wasn’t a lake here for most of the millions of years of cutting. That’s what makes the slot canyons here unique. The lake inhabits them. Look how sinuous the walls are. Nowhere near straight up and down. Eons on eons of water carved that S shape into the plateau on its way down from Fiftymile Mountain to the Colorado River. I love the way the wall on your left curves away, like it’s shying from the other’s touch, then, up higher, see how it sways back till it almost meets the opposite wall? Now close as lovers, now falling back. They always look to me like they’re in the middle of a sensuous dance to music timed to a millennium beat,” Jenny finished. “When you’re in the slot you can’t see the sky because of the curves in the cliffs above you.”

“It reminds me of ribbon candy. The kind we used to get at Christmas,” Anna said, sounding determinedly cheerful.

Jenny added her own nonthreatening image, hoping it would help. “Or taffy the way they’d pull it at the county fair, the colors stretching and twisting all through it.” It also resembled the elongated cousin to the canted neck of Anna’s jar. “That’s it,” Jenny said. “The goddess’s own sculpture. Had enough?”

In answer, Anna started down the three giant steps to where the rock sheared off in an eight-foot drop to the water. “Does the slot eventually lead up to the plateau?” Anna asked. “Run uphill getting shallower and shallower and then there you are?”

“Nope.” Jenny joined her on the edge of the drop. “The slot stays between sixty and a hundred feet deep and, for the most part, no more than a few feet wide. Often less than that. It runs back into the sandstone another two hundred yards or so, then ends in a chimney that goes vertically up to the plateau. Or almost all the way up. The last fifteen feet or so you need a rope to traverse. It’s too wide to shimmy up and too smooth to free-climb.”

“Can you swim to the end?”

“No. The water’s still there, but sometimes the walls of the canyon are only six or eight inches apart. Great place to wedge a foot.”

“There must be a beautiful waterfall back there when it rains.”

“I suppose you could enjoy it for a minute or two before it killed you,” Jenny said. “Everything washes down. Traversing the last fifty yards of the slot is an obstacle course the Navy SEALs would appreciate, but it’s definitely doable. Canyoneers do it a couple times during a season.

“Kay and the men who attacked you could have gotten up to the plateau. They would have come out north of Hole-in-the-Rock Road, about a quarter of a mile from where Frank Patterson parked his truck.” Jenny was enjoying herself. She loved being able to tell Anna of wonders, introduce her to stunning mysterious slots.
Stop it,
she chided herself without rancor. Obsession was a bad thing. Feeling sixteen with clear skin and no curfew was delicious.

Jenny sat down on the edge of the drop, feet over the water below, and made herself comfortable. “Have you ever heard of canyoneering?” she asked.

Anna eased down beside her, groaning softly. When she noticed the sympathetic look on Jenny’s face, she stopped abruptly and finished her move without showing fatigue or pain. What a woman.

“I haven’t,” Anna said. “I have lived only in the canyons of steel. New York’s skinniest alleys are six-lane highways compared to this. This isn’t a canyon, it’s a crevice, a crack.”

“Cracks are growing in popularity. When I started here nobody much paid attention to anything too narrow to drive a Jet Ski up. The whole Escalante region is full of winding, wandering, narrow canyons. More and more we have people come for the purpose of climbing them. Sandstone is too soft for any true technical climbing, but get a good crack, not too wide, and you can sort of wriggle and worm your way to the top. Of course, if it widens out you’re screwed, and if it gets very, very skinny at the bottom, and you fall, you can get wedged.”

“Like this one does?” Anna asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Sounds like a nightmare,” Anna said.

“Actually, it’s satisfying. You use your whole body like you did when you played as a kid. Grown-up amusements don’t allow for crawling and wriggling, getting good and muddy, and tearing the knees of your pants.”

“True,” Anna said. “Why doesn’t the water fill up behind this dam?”

“Only the top forty feet or so is solid. Below it’s boulders and rubble. The water can flow through.”

“Ah.”

For a minute they sat shoulder to shoulder, feet dangling like children, and soaked in the utter silence of the canyon. Not even the sound of water lapping against stone disturbed it. Lest they forget they were in a recreation area, the thin roar of an approaching engine made its way up from the direction of the grotto.

“Campers returning on their Jet Skis,” Jenny said.

“How would Kay and those guys get a rope to the top if they were climbing up from here?” Anna asked.

“You’re a single-minded wench, aren’t you,” Jenny teased.

“How could they?” Anna asked.

“Lookie there.” Jenny pointed at a frayed old climbing rope anchored around a boulder on the right side of the step where they sat. The rope snaked over the edge and down the sheer rock face into the dark water below.

“Canyoneering types don’t use fancy new climbing gear for this grubby sport. Often, if they’ve found a way, or gotten somebody to drop a rope so they can make the impossible spots, they’ll leave it behind for the next guy. This rope’s been here a couple of years. If somebody left a rope down that last fifteen or so feet from the plateau you could make it out.”

“Is there a rope?” Anna asked.

“There was the last time I was there,” Jenny said, “but that was a couple of seasons ago. It’s possible it’s still there. If it is…”

“The murderers could have climbed out,” Anna finished. “How far down the slot can we wade before it turns into an obstacle course?” she asked.

“Not wade, dear heart. The water here is over thirty feet deep.”

Anna drew her feet up and tucked her heels next to her butt, her arms wrapped around her knees.

Jenny laughed. Knowing a vast lake was hundreds of feet deep was entirely different from looking on a body of water scarcely more than a few yards wide and knowing that beneath were fathoms of water. It brought on the sense of perching on the edge of an abyss, a pit so bottomless as to create its own mysteries. After years on the lake, Jenny could still feel the pull.

For a moment they sat, Jenny savoring the stripe of gold thirty yards above, where the last ray of sun struck color from the stone, the impossible depths below, and the warmth radiating from Anna’s shoulder.

Anna was fixated on something else. “What’s that?” she demanded suddenly.

Jenny dragged her attention from the glories of nature. Obviously Anna was not sharing in the exalted experience. “What’s what?” Jenny asked.

“There.” Anna stood and pointed toward the end of the pool to where the slot began.

Getting to her feet, Jenny tried to see in the growing gloom.

“Under the water. A shape,” Anna insisted, still pointing.

It was easy to get spooked by the twisted earth and sinister darkness of the water; easy to imagine leviathans of the deep—albeit skinny leviathans—reaching up with skeletal claws or fins or whatever leviathans reached with. Jenny’s mouth was full of warm reassuring words. She swallowed them. There was a shape beneath the mirror-still water. A pale rectangle with a dark oval in the middle of it. Unless monsters of the deep wore T-shirts with logos on them, it was either lost laundry or a dead body.

Jenny stripped off shirt, shorts, and sandals. Just in case, she had forgone her old-lady panties that protected her skin from her uniform shorts and tossed aside her workmanlike brassiere. For Anna—just in case—she’d donned matching red bikini and bra with oodles of lace and industrial-strength underwire. She hoped Anna was appreciating the view.

“I’m going to check it out,” she said. “Wait here.” She didn’t inform her that this might turn into a body recovery. The poor thing had enough grisly images, without her adding to them. Maybe it was just a T-shirt or a plastic bag.

Catching up the rope near the frayed knots where it was tied around the boulder, Jenny lowered herself the few yards down the sheer rock face and into the water.

“Yikes,” she squeaked, hanging on to the rope.

“What?” Hands on knees, pigtail swinging, Anna looked over the edge.

“I forgot how cold the water can be in these slot canyons,” she admitted. “It’s so deep and gets zero sunlight.”

Needing to generate body heat, she let go of the rope and swam toward the unidentified floating object. From where she’d entered the water to the body—and it was a body—was no more than forty feet, not enough to get the blood flowing. Six inches beneath the surface of the water was a back and a head covered in dark hair long enough to halo out around the skull like seaweed. The drowned man added to Jenny’s chill.

Kicking powerfully with her legs and sculling with her right arm, Jenny grasped a handful of T-shirt. The wet cloth rucked up and her knuckles brushed bare skin. She emitted a horrid little gulping sound she hoped Anna didn’t hear. What the backs of her fingers brushed didn’t feel like skin. Eight seasons on the lake, Jenny had seen her share of drowned people; two were little kids. This was the first time she had ever touched one. She didn’t know what she’d expected a dead body would feel like, rubber maybe, or cold skin, maybe like a chicken breast out of the refrigerator. She hadn’t expected it would feel exactly like a dead body, a body a thousand times deader than a cold dead chicken.

“Someone’s drowned,” she called to Anna. “A man, I think. The water is so cold I’m afraid to leave him. He might sink or something.” Holding the corpse out to one side, she swam back toward Anna with a one-armed frog stroke. Jenny had her lifeguard’s license. High school summers were spent on a white wooden tower blowing a silver whistle at obnoxious children. She knew how to rescue a swimmer: arm under the shoulder, backstroke, the swimmer towed along, nose and mouth clear of the water, but there was no way in hell she was going to hug a dead body snuggled up to her best red lingerie.

The corpse tugged back. Again Jenny squeaked. Above, the light had gone gray; below was liquid darkness. The air in between was thick with permanent shadows. Given the setting, the cold, and the corpse, Jenny was beginning to believe in things she would have mocked when she was high and dry with Anna. It was in her mind to leave the dead to care for the dead and let go when Anna called, “Are you okay?”

Jenny looked to where she stood, rope in one hand, all one hundred and ten pounds of her ready to come to the rescue.

“I’m okay,” Jenny assured her quickly, hoping the fact she was becoming less okay by the minute didn’t bleed into her tone. “I think the—it—got caught on something.”

“What could it possibly catch on?” Anna asked. “This is a slither slot in a rock.”

Pointy bones, Jenny thought, lake zombies wanting to feed on warm human flesh, soggy vampires. What she said was “Could be anything. Flash floods wash entire trees down. Rusted-out truck bodies, shed roofs. You name it.”

Kicking and tugging jostled the corpse a foot or two farther. Something from below touched her foot. The corpse began a slow roll; a shoulder, an ear, the bloated face came free of the water, gray eyes open and glassy, followed by an arm that slid across the chest to flop in the water, splashing like a fish. The second arm loomed up from the dark and a hand drifted palm up and jellyfish-like. Then a third arm floated up beside it.

“God damn!” Jenny yelled, let go of the body, and put a couple of yards between herself and it.

“Holy moly,” Anna called from her elevated vantage point. “It’s two people stuck together. Maybe one was trying to save the other and they both drowned.”

More likely one was trying to climb out over the other and they both drowned, Jenny thought. There came a splash. Jenny turned back to see Anna, fully clothed, in long pants and long-sleeved shirt, disappear under the water at the base of the sheer wall that blocked this side of the canyon from where the boat was moored. The rope was still swinging when Anna resurfaced, sputtering, and began swimming toward her and the corpses.

“The water’s too cold,” Jenny cried. “Go back. I can do this.”

“Many hands make light work,” Anna said as she stopped to tread water near Jenny.