The living are There. Ghosts are the Not There, the blank, the dead, the ecru.
That his mind had come full circle to his mother’s favorite color startled Regis out of his self-induced trance.
He’d never seen a human being die. He’d been there when his mother passed, but she was so doped up on morphine it had been a seamless transition. Anyway, her eyes were closed. He imagined it would be the same, though. The person would be There, then simply Not There. The eyes might not be the windows to the soul, but when life left, that was where the falling shutters could be seen.
Anna Pigeon’s room felt like that, like the Not There had taken up residence. Regis had wanted to feel the room, and it felt like nothing. Standing, he looked around at the tawdry space. He wouldn’t come back. Sooner or later another seasonal There would move in and give it the illusion of life for a few months. Nothing would be different.
Agitation was still making his insides quiver. Being still was impossible. He probably should have gone in to work just to be moving, be distracted by the nonsense of the day-to-day world of the Barely There. Leaving Anna’s room, he walked down the hall to the room where Jenny stayed. Jenny Gorman had been an interpretive ranger at the park for nearly a decade, coming back every summer. As he’d anticipated, her room looked and felt as if someone were there. Jenny showed up every season with a huge old hard-sided Samsonite suitcase that she joked was her life in a box.
Regis had never been in her room before, but he expected this was her box-life unfolded. A coverlet with a cabbage rose print, and matching shams, was on the bed; sheets, folded neatly over the bedspread, were printed with sheep in complementary colors. On the bureau a dresser scarf in pale yellows hid the scarred surface. There were two small framed pictures of children—nieces, Regis guessed. Beside them sat an old-fashioned silver-backed brush-and-comb set. He picked up the brush and examined it. Long curling brown hairs were caught in the bristles.
It wasn’t just for show, Jenny used it. That made it real. Regis ran the tips of his fingers over the ornate silver casting. Fine things, quality, endurance, he craved those. His boat and his ancient but perfect Super Cub, made life livable. He looked forward to when he could surround himself with tangible proofs human life wasn’t all shoddy construction and tedious noise.
An oval mirror, cheap but decorative, was hung over the dresser, one she had bought in Page probably. It didn’t look worth enough to haul from wherever she spent her winters. Regis could find out if he wanted. Personnel was where the skeletons of background checks, pay grades, and reviews were buried. Until Anna Pigeon disappeared, Jenny had never interested him enough to bother.
Today Jenny was going up Panther Canyon to check on a party boat full of college kids. Levitt was in court, so she’d be working without law enforcement backup. Regis didn’t like it. That might have been part of why he felt shaken, agitated. The party boat had some bad people on it; he knew that for a fact. Dangerously bad people.
Holding the brush, he looked at his reflection in the glass. Bethy told him he was handsome. When he looked at himself, all he saw was that he was There. Replacing the brush precisely where it had been before he disturbed it, he realized calling in sick had been a mistake. Getting caught in the lie was going to count against him, but he had to go out to Panther Canyon and make sure Jenny didn’t stir up a hornet’s nest.
NINE
Mad as Lady Macbeth, Anna scrubbed her hands together lest any of the long and human hairs buried in the sand should cling to them. Retreating to the far side of the jar, she felt her panic worsening. There was nowhere to be, nowhere to run but in circles like a crazed hamster. Slumping down, she leaned back against the sandstone, hands held before her, too unclean to touch any other part of her body, and stared at the mess of delicate brown strands near her cat hole. “My life is a Stephen King novel,” she whispered. “Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can’t get any worse, everybody dies.”
Everybody dies.
Had she been thrown into a charnel pit?
The monster might have been using this hole for years. Dropping his human garbage into it, playing his games with drugs and cutting and chocolate pudding; watching his victims, sans clothes, sans dignity, sans freedom until, finally, he got tired of them or broke them.
Sans life.
How many women were buried in her sandbox? Into her mind’s eye came rotting arms, skeletal fingers, reaching up through the dirt to drag her down.
“Still breathing here,” Anna said loudly. “Breathing in. Breathing out.”
Bit by bit, a determination that could be mistaken for courage returned.
Gingerly, she made her way across to the tangled strands, aware that she might be treading on the corpses of hastily buried women. A book she’d read came unbidden into her mind, Chiefs. The killer had a long and successful career, sowing his land with dozens of his victims before he was caught. Halfway across her prison floor a noise from the other world stopped her.
Something was coming, an engine, tiny and distant. Humming down through the bottle’s neck was a comforting burr of sound, a small-engine aircraft, one of the little ones that took sightseers on flights over the lake. The sound grew louder. The little plane was close to the ground, close to Anna. Tilting her head back, she squinted at the impossibly blue eye above. The neck of her jar was canted like the slightly twisted dual necks on the old vinegar-and-oil carafe her mother kept on the kitchen counter. The carafe was for show. The only salad dressing they ate was homemade Thousand Island: ketchup, mayonnaise, and sweet pickle relish.
“Down here!” she yelled. “Help me! I’m down here!”
They were looking for her. They had to be. Over her lieu days Jenny probably thought she’d hitched a ride on a boat headed for Wahweap to spend time in town. By now her lieu days must be over. She’d been in the pit at least a night and a day and a night, thirty-six hours. If her weekend wasn’t over now, it would be tomorrow. Without a watch, without knowing how long she had slept or what day it was, time got tricky. Knowing the time kept people from going adrift.
When she didn’t show up for work—whenever that was, today, tomorrow—when she didn’t show up on her “Monday,” Jenny would raise the alarm and the Park Service would come find her. Search and rescue. The rangers were big on that. Visitors, fools like her, were always getting lost, falling into holes, being eaten by wolves, that sort of thing.
Rangers and EMTs. Law enforcement rangers had to be EMTs; she remembered that from the information the NPS sent after she’d gotten the job. They had to take courses every year. Search-and-rescue rangers would search for her and rescue her; EMT rangers would give her aspirin for her head, maybe Valium for her shoulder.
The airplane, it was them.
“Down here!” she yelled again. “Help me!” The plane droned louder. “Down here, goddammit! Help, help!” The engine whined overhead. “Down here, you stupid fucks!” she screamed, leaping to her feet. The plane murmured away. Anna fell to her knees.
The bottom of the jar, down here where the bodies were buried, wasn’t visible from airplanes. Nobody would be peeking into the hundreds of holes. First, they’d think of the water. Lake Powell was so deep, in the main channel there was no dragging the bottom. Deep meant cold and dark. Bodies didn’t always float up. In the cold and dark, they sank. The rescuers and EMTs, did they think she had gone down to the world of the dead, joined the army of the drowned? Had they stopped looking? Or never started?