“I’m so sorry,” he said. For a moment it looked as if he intended to give her a hug. Anna held up one hand, the way the Indians in those same Westerns had done while bizarrely uttering, “How.”
Regis stopped. “I was just so blown away. I forgot how scared you must have been when I climbed down. You went through far worse than anything I did. I’m sorry I took my own fear out on you, that’s all.”
Anna said nothing. Bits of things she might have said skittered around in her skull, but making conversation was too pointless to bother dragging any one of them down to where her tongue could get around it. Lowering her hand was the best she could do. Unnerved, Regis looked over his shoulder at the other men. They had stopped several yards out from the truck and stood in a neat semicircle, a manly tableau against the canvas of the desert.
“You’re lucky she didn’t kill you,” Steve said without a trace of humor. Broken by his words, the tableau came to life again.
“Where’s Kay?” Anna asked Steve. He didn’t answer right away, and Anna was afraid there was no body, the body was gone or had never existed. “Did you find Kay?” she insisted, louder this time.
“We just dug enough to assure ourselves she was there,” Steve said. He hadn’t wanted to speak, Anna realized, because he knew it would be hard for her to hear. She didn’t like him for the kindness. She didn’t like or dislike any of them. She didn’t care because they didn’t care, not in any way it mattered. Not in any way that would ever make anything right.
“Frank’s going to have the county coroner out here. They’ll recover the body and take it back to Escalante. He’s going to work with us to identify her. If we’re lucky she’s been reported missing.”
They didn’t know she was wearing nothing but underpants. Anna hadn’t told that part of the story. It was ugly and it was hers and she would keep it. For now at least.
“We’ll take good care of her,” Sheriff Frank assured her.
“She’s dead, and I didn’t know her,” Anna said, but she remembered how important it had been to her that Kay’s hair be combed from the sand, not yanked, and she remembered sacrificing the tempting panties so Kay could retain a scrap of dignity.
Regis unscrewed the cap of his water bottle as the sheriff and Jim loaded the ladder and canteen into the bed of the pickup.
“I’ll never take water for granted again,” Regis said, offering a tentative smile to Anna. “I nearly thirsted to death.”
“There was a canteen of water,” she said.
“Empty,” the sheriff told her as he dropped it onto the bed of the truck with a clang.
Anna said nothing. It had been over half full when she hit Regis in the head with it, heavy enough to stun. He couldn’t have drunk it all. If he had, he’d be in a stupor. Instead he was hyperactive, the way a person is after a narrow escape. He could have dumped it, or, when it struck him, the cap might have come loose and the water drained out.
Anna saw no value in voicing these thoughts. She saw no value in speaking anymore.
Jenny and Jim were consigned to the bed of the pickup. Anna tried to follow. Steve cut her off and herded her back into the cab the way a good sheepdog would herd a stray lamb back to the fold.
The sheriff slid behind the wheel. Chief Ranger Madden started to climb into the front passenger side.
“Andrew, take the back again, if you wouldn’t mind,” Steve said. “Anna could probably use the air.” Steve Gluck jammed himself in beside Madden and put Regis behind the driver, as far from Anna as he could be in the truck’s cab. Anna didn’t like him for that, either. “Air” was not what she needed. She needed her own planet.
With two people in the truck bed, the sheriff drove toward Hole-in-the-Rock Road more slowly than he had driven out. Regis couldn’t stop talking.
An older man who wouldn’t give his name had hailed him on the dock at Dangling Rope Marina, he told them as the cab jounced and swayed. The old man stank of beer, Regis said, and was none too steady on his feet. The guy told him a bizarre tale about a girl trapped in a solution hole up around Hole-in-the-Rock Road. He said he’d heard some kids bragging about it like they’d caught a bear cub or a cougar and were keeping it a secret from their parents. He wasn’t clear as to how many kids there were, or how tall or short, and was pretty vague about where he had chanced to overhear the boasts.
Regis said he figured the guy imagined it, or half heard something in a drunken stupor and, when he sobered up somewhat, thought it was real and reported it to the first person in uniform he’d laid his bleary eyes on.
This had transpired around seven thirty or eight o’clock the evening before Anna attacked him, Regis said. Though he figured the guy was crazy, Regis had checked to see if anyone had gone missing. No one had but Anna. Since Anna’d packed up her things, he never thought it could be her, so he let it go.
Then, in the middle of the night, he woke up worrying about it. What if a woman were trapped, suffering in some way, crying for help? He couldn’t stand it, he said, and got up and dressed and started up the unmaintained trail that scrambled and clawed up the escarpment behind the housing area, the only way he knew to get from the Rope to the area the drunk had mentioned.
He’d wandered around until nearly dawn and was about to give it up when he heard a woman crying. He’d found the hole where the weeping came from. Beside it, half hidden under the overhang of a rock, were the boat ladders.
All this poured out with no encouragement but the occasional grunt from law enforcement. As the sheriff turned the ignition off, the truck parked neatly parallel to the dirt track as if meter maids were watching, Regis finished his story.
Anna had not been weeping the night he came to the solution hole. She had been lying under the sand, waiting, like a trapdoor spider.
Anna said nothing.
TWENTY-SIX
There were two phones in Dangling Rope, one in the ranger station on the dock and the other in the small convenience store run by the park concessionaire. Since the Rope didn’t have its own district ranger, as the senior NPS employee, Jenny had the key to the ranger station. Jim thought he should keep it because he was law enforcement.
When he grumbled about it Jenny had said sweetly, “Then next time you give Steve the blow job.”
Anna had thought it funny. Gil, Dennis, Regis—the males—were not laughing. They were thinking maybe it was true. Jenny winked at Anna and rolled her eyes.
That was Anna’s third or fourth day at the Rope. Cocooned in her grief, she hadn’t put herself out to get to know her fellows, not even Jenny. That wink and eye roll surprised her. Jenny had seen her. Being unseen was one of Anna’s skills. During rehearsals, stage managers were visible. During the running of the show, they were not. Anna dressed in black, as did the crew, so if the audience accidentally caught a glimpse of her it would make little impression. She cultivated a soft low voice so backstage noise wouldn’t compete with the show onstage. She wore soft-soled shoes and moved quietly. She did not bump into things or set curtains moving as she passed through. She could see well in the dark.
Before she lost Zach, Anna used this learned invisibility only professionally. Jenny’s wink let her know she had been trying to disappear during the light of day and it hadn’t worked, at least not on Jenny.
That had been less than three weeks before. The jar had turned time on its end, and it seemed a story from when Anna was much younger.
As soon as the dock settled down for the evening, Anna got the ranger station key from Jenny and went down the hill to the lake. She needed her psychiatrist. More than that, she needed her sister. Molly had been so present during her days in the jar that, as she inserted the key and let herself into the cramped office, she reminded herself Molly had been present only in her mind. Her tale would be a shock to her.