The truck had a double cab. Though Anna was the smallest, Jenny, Chief Ranger Madden, and Jim were condemned to the cramped rear seat. Sheriff Frank Patterson drove, Steve rode shotgun, and Anna sat uneasily between them trying to keep her knees out of the way of the gearshift knob.
As the truck jolted over rock and sand, trailing a plume of white dust, she scoured the land beyond the windshield trying to find a rock or bush she might have seen before. From a distance, the land along the rim appeared flat, nearly featureless. In reality, the weathered and broken chunks of sandstone were scattered like coins strewn across a floor: stones smaller than dimes, stones the size of basketball courts, of buildings, stones overlapping, piled up, falling down, scattered, clustered. They could hide ten thousand openings, ten thousand canted throats, ten thousand jars.
As she stared, they began to run together. Heat mirages melting the coins, melting the desert.
The truck lumbered up a slight incline, then down into a shallow swale on a low shining shoulder of stone. “Stop!” Anna cried.
Sheriff Patterson braked in a sudden cloud of dust, and everybody exited the truck. Patterson turned to Steve. “You want any tracking done, better keep at least eight of these big feet off my ground.”
Gluck said, “You heard the man.”
No one got back in the truck, but neither did they follow Anna and the sheriff as they walked the small depression. It was not the swale where Anna had witnessed the murder of Kay. The shining rock was not the rock she had come gasping over.
The next time she yelled, “Stop!” it still wasn’t.
As in all good fairy tales, the third time was the charm.
TWENTY-FOUR
When Anna found the bloodstained rock, Jenny suppressed a sigh of relief. The sheriff, the chief ranger, Steve, and even Jim, though she thought she’d trained him better, had begun to exude the unmistakable air that suggested they were about three manly breaths from writing little Ms. Pigeon off as a hysterical woman. If Jenny squinted her psychic inner eye, she could almost see “that time of month” and “rape fantasy” and “cry for attention” flickering behind their eyes. Jenny could tell Anna felt it, too, and, because this was Eve’s Achilles’ heel, was beginning to believe that maybe the men were right, maybe she was crazy, maybe …
The bloody rock changed all that. The guys went on point like good hunting dogs. Cameras came out, as did little orange flags; measurements were taken; radios were held up to mouths as the machinery of however many law enforcement officials of however many jurisdictions were called.
Anna, chastised for picking up the bloodstained rock, as well as for walking across the crime scene to do so—though, until she had, none of them had known it was a crime scene—stood at the right front fender of the sheriff ’s truck, clutching her plastic water bottle and looking stunned. More than anything, Jenny wanted to wrap her arms around the poor bewildered little person, cradle her and tell her everything was all right, that Jenny was here and she needn’t ever be afraid of anything again. Instead, she wandered over and leaned against the hood next to her.
The metal was as hot as a branding iron. “Do you know where we are?” she asked gently.
Anna shook her head, one short jerk right, one short jerk left. She didn’t look at Jenny.
“About three hundred yards that way”—Jenny pointed south—“is the head of Panther Canyon. We went there the first day we worked together, taking water samples at the grotto.” Anna said nothing, gave no indication that she heard. Jenny wasn’t an EMT. She had no idea whether a person could go into shock this long after the traumatic event had occurred. Anna had been held prisoner, starved and dehydrated, then had wandered lost for twelve or thirteen hours before finding her way home. That would have put Jenny in shock, but Anna had seemed to cope well enough, playing with Buddy, tending to personal hygiene, relating her story to Steve and Andrew.
Until now she’d seemed, if not a pillar of strength, at least a reed, bent by the wind but unbroken. “Anna?” Jenny dropped her voice to the place women use to communicate heart-to-heart with children, injured souls, and small animals. “Are you sure you want to go through with this? We could wait here while the rangers go get the bad guy. I bet Steve would even radio the pilot to come back if you’d feel safer at Bullfrog or the Rope.”
Anna looked at her. The woman might be shocked into stillness and compliance with law enforcement, but her eyes were not blank and scared. They were determined and scared.
Unblinkingly she said, “What? And miss the eleven o’clock number?”
Jenny had no idea what that meant—something to do with the theatrical life, she guessed as she saw the ghost of a smile whisper over Anna’s lips.
Sheriff Frank Patterson was a tracker of local renown. Jenny and Jim Levitt had been informed of this by the NPS pilot who spent his lieu days on a piece of land near Escalante where he was building a house. As the men were going all Last of the Mohicans and testosteroning up for the big tracking event, their efforts were made moot by what sounded like distant shouting.
The six of them went utterly still. Had the others not reacted, Jenny might have thought her ears were playing tricks on her. The canyons played havoc with sound, muting noise nearby, carrying a laugh a mile before letting it go. Echoes had echoes, yet silence reigned. No one moved. Shadows black as crude oil puddled between their feet.
“I think—” Jim began. The sheriff, ahead and slightly above the rest of them, hushed him with a raised hand. Quiet as a stalking cat, Patterson began following tracks in the dirt, his head cocked at an odd angle as if sound would drop into his ears more efficiently that way.
Thin and small, the shout came again. A faint dying “Heeeeeeeeeelp.”
The eternal winds, breath of the canyons, sawed across the ears, and the voice sounded as if it emanated from the bottom of a well.
“Hello!” Steve Gluck shouted, hands around his mouth to form a megaphone.
Patterson pointed. “This way,” he said. He’d found the tracks. “Stay off to the side. Don’t foul the trail. It’s got a story to tell.”
Jenny was impressed with the display of woodsmanship until she topped the low rise where he stood. The trail wasn’t exactly as challenging as tracking ducks across a pond. It was more of a scrimmage line where several heavy-footed individuals had stampeded across the desert’s skin.
Anna started to trot. “Wait,” the chief ranger shouted.
Steve Gluck yelled, “Hold up there.”
Anna broke into a run.
“Damn the torpedoes,” Jenny muttered and ran with her.
Anna came to an abrupt stop. “There,” she said.
Jenny barreled into her and had to grab her lest the smaller woman fall to the ground. The feel of the bird-boned body and the clean smell of her sun-warmed hair robbed Jenny’s apology of much of its sincerity. She steadied Anna, in no rush to take her hands off her. Jenny would never, as the boys called it, “cop a feel,” or force her attentions where they were not invited, but a gift was a gift and she enjoyed it.
“That’s it.” Anna pointed to a black hole gaping at the sky from a flat stretch of ground. The slit in the earth was no more than two feet wide at the center and about five feet long, both ends tapering to a point like the lids of a half-closed eye. Beyond it were two sentinel boulders, taller than Jenny, and squared off as if machined that way. Their shadows fell across the opening. Coupled with low scrub brush and a scattering of rocks, the twin shadows effectively camouflaged the opening of the solution hole.
“That’s the mouth of my jar,” Anna said. She sounded proprietary. Had Jenny been stuck in a jar like strawberry preserves put up for winter, she’d have wanted sticks of dynamite tossed in and her name severed from the ruin evermore. Anna sounded almost fond.