When she’d finished piling up her worldly goods, she heaped sand over them. Without light she couldn’t tell if she’d buried them completely or not. Running her hands over the sand, she checked for bits of exposed fabric or leather. The motion gave her the sensation of swimming through thick black waters so far beneath the surface of the ocean that not a glimmer of sunlight penetrated.
The monster would have a flashlight; Anna knew that. Carving WHORE into her thigh had taken time and a decent light to work by.
Scootching backward on her newly bare behind, pushing with her heels and the palms of her hands, she crossed the whisper of moonlight and reached the wall of the jar. There she lay down on her right hip, the questionable left arm on the sand in front of her face. Pulling her knees up in the futile hope of protecting her vulnerable belly and breasts, she waited.
The noise, light and irregular, was joined by the sound of panting. Anna squeezed her eyes shut. A high-pitched strangled cry jolted them open again. A small black object, like the head of a doll—or a cat—fell into the crescent of waning light on the sand. It bounced into the impenetrable black of the datura patch near the grave.
Then nothing. Silence, so complete Anna could feel its weight on her skin, filled the solution hole. Staring up at the narrow mouth, she couldn’t see anything but the prick of a single star.
Whatever was there was gone.
Whatever was here was here.
FOURTEEN
Opening the throttles, Regis reveled in the rush of speed as the powerful engine dug in and the hull climbed to the lake’s surface. Three, four, five hundred feet below the keel were the rotting remains of dozens—if not hundreds—of boats. No one knew the precise number. Boats sunk too deep to be salvaged. In more wrecks than the NPS liked to admit, corpses, preserved by the cold, floated in dark cabins.
Lake Powell covered over two hundred fifty square miles of what had once been dry land. The ruins of ancient civilizations were drowned. Derelict machinery, trailer houses, sheep pens, watering troughs, windmills, broken-down vehicles, propane tanks, rubber tires—any junk that was not cost-effective to haul away was fed to the rising water.
The living danced, drank, partied, and water-skied over the dead.
As it should be, Regis thought. The pure joy of being one of the living caught him by surprise as it sometimes did when he was flying. Delicately he probed the phenomenon. Like a majority of the human race, he was accustomed to living in a psychic brownout: Barely There, walking dim pathways, hearing muted voices. The difference was, he was aware of the muffling. Others seemed contented with somnambulism. Whether he envied or scorned them depended on his mood.
Today, on this murderous playground of a lake, he was suddenly totally and completely alive. His veins and arteries hummed like high-voltage wires, electrifying every part of him. Maybe it was the speed of the boat cutting clean and fast through dark water. Speed sometimes affected him like a drug. No. This was new. This was speed and fear combined, a kind of wild, teetering high that pulled him from the shadows.
A single day of this high-octane life was worth years of reviewing seasonal applications, sitting through endless meetings, eating hash brown casseroles, and watching Bethy’s bottom spread. A single day of this made going back wretched to consider. It wasn’t that Regis had never felt good before. He’d thought he’d been happy enough, often enough. In early lust for Bethy he’d had his moments. Climbing with her up canyon walls so sheer even sunlight couldn’t stay on them, he’d felt totally awake.
Risk. It came to him and he felt God’s own fool. It hadn’t been the young, and then nubile, Bethy who’d turned his life from black-and-white to living color those few months. It was risk, the risk of falling, being killed, of her falling, being killed or crippled. Risk and the promise of wealth; that was the combination that had him down on one knee, diamond solitaire in hand.
“Holy smoke.” The wind snatched the words away from his lips as they formed. Falling in love. Bethy was necessary, but it was the thrill of the fall he was in love with.
For the first time, he got why people chose to be firefighters, track down lions, arrest felons—type A’s. Cops, rangers, sheriffs were always telling people to stand back, let the professionals handle it, call for help. They’d done a fabulous job of convincing the sheepish public that taking matters into their own hands would just make those matters worse.
They didn’t care about the sheep; they wanted to keep the fun for themselves. Risk, that was what made the blood sing high and fine. Two hours ago he’d been afraid of the risk he’d taken calling in sick. Regis bleated, then smiled. When had the wool been pulled over his eyes? When had he donned sheep’s clothing?
Cutting a sharp right into the mouth of Dangling Rope, head back, hair wild in the wind, he realized he was laughing.
“Slow down!” somebody yelled as he waked the marina, slamming boats into their bumpers. Regis waved. He wasn’t going to slow down. He might not ever slow down again.
Unerringly, he speared the cigarette boat into the mooring slot nearest the marina store. The slot was reserved for NPS boats. Risk. Having leaped to the dock, he whipped his lines over the cleats. Mad dogs and Englishmen: In the noonday sun he jogged up the incline from the dock toward the gray duplexes hugging the square of green like elephants guarding an oasis. He’d resented spending the summer out here rather than in their house in Page. No more. Life was edgier at the Rope. People were more open. Gory memories of Kippa dulled. Sun blessed his bare head; the air was cut to fit his lungs. The desert was limned with gold and red, every dry blade of grass, every stone as clear-cut as a new diamond.
Sweat ran down his spine. Glen Canyon in July was so hot even Superman would sweat through his tights. Regis smiled at the thought and broke into a run for the last fifteen yards. Heart attack, heatstroke: risk.
Jenny would scream like a banshee when she found out he’d gotten her a new roommate and he was a person of the male persuasion. Jenny insisted her preference for women was not sexism but sanitation, citing the fact that women seldom, if ever, pissed on the floor and that, given her job, she should at least be allowed to eat in an environment free of human waste.
Barry Mack—aptly named “Mackerel” by his co-workers in honor of his body odor—the toilet scrubber, would be out to the Rope as soon as the paperwork to up-jump him from a GS-3 maintenance man to a GS-5 interpretive ranger was finished. Risk. Regis would definitely be on hand when Jenny was introduced to Barry and his grime-encrusted fingernails.
Panting, he let himself in through Jenny’s battered screen door. He paused and looked back into a glare the honey locusts were too small to filter out. No one was watching him. Again he laughed. Risk bred paranoia. Who cared if anybody saw him entering Jenny’s duplex? He was here on business, here to check the room the Mackerel was assigned. The room Anna Pigeon had occupied.
Bed stripped, closet doors partly open, window blind at a drunken angle in one window, air-conditioning unit in the other: The room was as he’d last seen it. Footsteps noiseless on the drab carpet, he crossed the room and turned on the swamp cooler. The fan thumped and clanked as if it were cutting carrots instead of air but, after a minute, blew cold.
He switched it off and stepped back into the hallway. The door to Jenny’s room was closed, leaving the hall in semidarkness. What light there was leaked from the bathroom at the end of the hall. Feeling for the ghosts, Regis stood in silence and stillness. The Not There were not there for him in his present heightened state. He didn’t miss their nonexistent emanations. No self-respecting ghost should be forced to haunt the likes of Barry the Mackerel.