And no one down the path was now walking back in his direction. He was alone here, unobserved. He put the camera on the sunny top of the wall and started crawling over, one bare knee then the other, scraping his shin but getting himself down onto the dusty ground where Frances was supposed to be, beyond where the film package and the cigarette box were. He took a step through the loose rocks — it smelled warm and familiarly like urine. But after only four cautious steps (a snake seemed possible here) he found himself at a sudden rough edge and a straight drop down.
And it was at this instant that his head began to pound and his heart jerk, and his breathing became shallow and difficult and oddly hoarse, and a roar commenced in his ears, as if he’d been running and shouting to get to here. And it was now that he got down on his knees and his fists like an animal, as though he could breathe better that way, and peered over the jagged edge and down, far down, far, far down — certainly not to where the river was shining whitely. But far. Two hundred feet, at least, to where the dirt and rock sidewall of the canyon discontinued its straight drop and angled out a few feet before breaking off again for the long, long drop to the bottom. There were rocks and more piney bushes there, and a tree — a ragged, Asiatic-looking cedar growing into the dirt and stone at an angle that would eventually cause it to fall away. And it was just there, at the up-slope base of this ancient cedar, that Frances was, two hundred feet below him.
It was her face he saw first, appearing round and shiny in the sunlight. She was staring up at him, her eyes seemingly open, though the rest of her — her white shorts and blue sail-cloth top with the anchor, her bare legs and arms — these were all jumbled about her in a crazy way, as if her face had been dropped first, and then the rest of her. It actually seemed, from here, that one arm was intact but separated from her body.
And she didn’t move. For a moment he thought the expression on her face changed the instant he saw her. But that wasn’t likely, because it didn’t change again. As poorly as he could make her out, her expression never changed.
How long did he kneel in the pine scrub and rubble and bits of paper trash and urine scent beyond the wall? He couldn’t be sure. Though not long. The roar in his ears stopped first. His heart beat furiously for a time, and then seemed almost to stop beating, after which a cool perspiration rose on his neck and in his hair and stained through his T-shirt. He looked down at Frances again and, keeping a careful eye on her very white upward-turned face, he tried to think what he might do: help her, save her, comfort her, bring her back to here, give her what she needed, given where she was. Anything. All of these. What? Time did not pass slowly or quickly. Yet he seemed to have all the time he needed, alone there in the brush, to decide something.
Only, he knew that this time wouldn’t last. Howard gazed up toward the telescopes, where the other visitors had wandered. Frances would not be seen at first — she was too near to the canyon wall, too hidden among the cedar branches. Too surprising. For a time she’d be mistaken for something she wasn’t. An article of her own clothing. No one would want to see what had happened. They wanted to look at something else entirely.
Though if anyone had seen, they would already be coming — shouting, arms waving — the way he’d felt a moment or ten minutes ago. Other people would already be at the wall looking down. He would be seen, too, hunkering like an animal, his T-shirt a white flag in the underbrush. Soon enough this would happen. Her camera was on the wall. He needed to move, now.
On his hands and knees he backed away from the edge, got turned around and crawled up through the pine roots and human debris to the piss-scented base of the wall. And as he was so tall, he simply stood and peered over, able to see all the way back down the asphalt path to the parking lot where he and Frances had followed the crowd. No one was walking up, nor was anyone coming back from the telescopes. And in that moment’s recognition he leaped-hoisted himself up onto and over the wall, and in doing so kicked Frances’s cheap Pentax down onto the pavement.
He stood up again quickly, on the right side of the wall, the correct side, where the rest of the world was supposed to stay. And it was not, he felt, the cool breeze lifting out of the open expanse of canyon — not at all a bad feeling to be here. Whatever was bad had occurred on the other side. Now he was here. Safe.
Though all the other many phrases were about to begin now. Their exact meanings would very soon be present in his thinking. Authorities notified. Help summoned. Frances rescued (though of course she was dead). The forces responsible for terrible events had to be mobilized and mobilized now.
He stared at the Pentax lying on the black sequined asphalt, ruined. He tried to remember if she’d taken his picture in the car this morning, his picture in the motel last night, his picture in Phoenix, his picture at the scenic turn-out even one hour ago. But he simply couldn’t remember. His mind wasn’t so still that he could bring back that kind of thing, although he knew he very much wanted for the answer to be no, that she had not taken his picture, and for the camera to stay where it had come to rest. (Though hadn’t he touched it?)
And of course yes, the answer was that his face was in the camera. More than once. That recognition did come back now. And of course he had touched it. And despite the fact that in two minutes or less he would walk quickly to the tourist center or the ranger station or to whatever there was, and make a call for emergency assistance, the camera needed to be removed. Since everything that would happen — happen to Frances, happen to him, happen to Mary, to Ed — could depend on what happened to this one camera and what it contained. Now being the significant time — he knew this from TV — with Frances suspended face-up to the empty sky and himself unscathed; now was the “critical period” that, in a thorough police investigation, had to be accounted for, challenged, scrutinized, gone over again and again and again. The time up to, during, and immediately after, would be considered and reconsidered to determine if he had killed Frances Bilandic and why that had suddenly become necessary. (Love gone sour? A sudden breakfast quarrel? Resentment repaid. An inexplicable act of passion or fury. A simple mistake. You could almost think you did do it, there were so many allowable reasons that you might’ve.)
Too bad, he thought, standing above the black camera, on its side on the black asphalt, too bad he hadn’t snapped Frances just at the moment she’d gone over. So many thousands of words would be saved by that luck. “Oh my.” Those were her last words to the world, apparently. He was the one who’d heard them. No one else knew that. He was very involved in this.
He grabbed the camera up then and, for a reason he wasn’t at all clear about, started back from the canyon rim toward the parking lot, not toward the tourist village where help was. Newly arrived Grand Canyon tourists-enthusiasts were strolling out of the lot in shorts and bright sweaters, carrying cameras, lugging backpacks, laughing about seeing “a big hole in the ground.” They would see him holding Frances’s camera. But there was nothing truly suspicious about him except that he was very tall and alone. Did his face look strange? Distressed?
A pay phone sat just at the border of the prettily landscaped parking lot, at the edge of some pinewoods. Pink wildflowers still grew here. Of course he should make the call. Do that much. Call in the emergency. Though there was no such thing as an anonymous call now. Everything flashed up on a screen someplace: “Howard Cameron is calling in a death.” Response would be instantaneous. And then what? He needed to think, as more visitors drifted past him chatting, chuckling. Call and say what? Explain what? Own up to what? (Since he hadn’t done anything but not take a picture.) Possibilities fluttered hotly in his face like cinders above a fire — none of them distinct or graspable, but all real, full of danger. And it was so so odd, he kept thinking: they had just arrived, and then she’d fallen in. He had wanted not to come.