Regis was turning to leave when the dim light from the bath caught his attention. On the bath mat in front of the sink cabinet somebody—Jenny, who else?—had arranged two lines of irregularly shaped objects. Backlit, they looked like men in a futuristic game of chess. Jenny Gorman was an interesting woman. Her sexual preferences never made her any more or less interesting to Regis. Playing peculiar games on the bathroom floor was another matter entirely.
Moving quietly out of habit, Regis closed the distance between Barry Mack’s new room and whatever Jenny had set to guard her bathroom sink. At the door, he flipped the light switch. Along the ratty edge of a faded pink terry-cloth mat, Jenny had lined up two rows of feminine detritus, tampons, birth control pills, the usual stuff women keep in the bathroom. “Riddle me a riddle: Why did the lesbian line up her girl things?” he asked the ether as he squatted on his heels.
“To convince herself she is a girl.”
That wouldn’t fly. Jenny was all girl all the time, so much so she’d fallen in love with her own gender.
Hairbrush, Xanax … Jenny didn’t strike Regis as the Xanax type. She loved the classics: nicotine and alcohol. Anna Pigeon, tranquilizers fit her.
“Damn it,” Regis hissed and snatched open the door of the cupboard. Like items lined the top shelf. The shelf near floor level was bare. When Anna Pigeon’s things were packed, these were forgotten.
Regis stood and switched the light off. People left things behind in the units all the time. Every fall, after the seasonal nomads moved on, maintenance collected the forgotten or abandoned bits and bites of them and tossed them in the trash.
These must have felt different than the usual leftovers to Jenny. Why else would she line them up as neat as soldiers on parade? Evidently, to her, these meaningless items had meaning. “When the Pigeon flies the coop, why does Jenny arrange her toiletries in two lines?” Regis muttered.
Playtex tampons, Secret deodorant—regular scent—Xanax, birth control pills in a flat round dispenser.
What they had in common was that these weren’t things women could take or leave, these were things women needed. It was unlikely they would be forgotten or purposely left behind.
If they were not purposely left behind, it suggested Anna Pigeon did not leave on purpose either. She’d been planning to come back, shower, put on deodorant, maybe change a tampon, take a birth control pill and a Xanax and go to bed.
Fear welled up, curdling the exhilaration of risk. The downside of being fully alive was that even that which was bad was felt more keenly. Fear clenched Regis’s stomach. Sweat broke out at his hairline.
What had Jenny Gorman done?
More to the point, what was she doing now?
He walked down the hall and let himself out into the sunlight. In three steps he crossed the barren ground between her porch and his own. Ignoring the heat and the glare, he collapsed into one of Bethy’s pink-and-green Walmart lawn chairs. What, exactly, had he seen? Did Jenny leave Anna’s things out knowing he would see them, knowing Anna’s position needed to be filled and Regis would come check the room? That seemed a bit far-fetched. Yet there they were, basically on display.
Television—the movies—suggested some criminals, especially the serial murderers, wanted to get caught. The Zodiac and his letters. BTK and his hints. Until this moment on the porch, searing light making his shadow hard and black as it struggled to crawl from beneath his chair, Regis had thought that was absurd.
Anna Pigeon’s belongings had been cleared out of her room. Everything except the things in that one cupboard. Regis wanted it to be simple oversight, but nothing was that simple, just like nothing was perfect. Maybe that was the catch with the perfect crime; it was impossible because the criminal would betray himself if nobody else did.
Feeble rattling trickled up from beneath the porch boards, faint as the ticking of a buried clock. Distracted from questions to which he had no answers, Regis rose from the chair and stomped once on the porch floor. Rattling came back stronger. He jumped off the porch and, in one fluid move, knelt on the dry earth. Palms on burning soil, he peered into the shadows beneath the duplex.
Pinky Winky, the midget faded rattlesnake, was pulled out to its full length. A nail behind its head and one at the base of the rattles pinned it to the ground where it was rattling out the last painful hours of its life.
FIFTEEN
As was beginning to be the norm, Anna woke with a drug hangover, a spotty memory, sand in every orifice, and thirst and pain her old familiars. Curled in a tight ball, spine against the reassuring curve of sandstone, she lay with her cheek pillowed on the sand. Night terrors, real or imagined, had settled to the bottom of the solution hole and weighed on her bare skin like chills following fever. Thirst was already clawing at her with scratchy panicked fingers. She knew she couldn’t deny herself water long enough for the drug to clear from her system. Thirst was too cruel an adversary. She would drink and, always, the monster would find her helpless, hazy, unconscious, or nearly so. Drugged until she could die without even noticing.
For a time she lay unmoving, eyes closed, repositioning herself in the universe she had fallen into, much as Alice had fallen into the rabbit hole: the jar, the sounds of movement from above, the terror, the black thing thrown into the last whisper of moonlight.
Doll’s head, she’d thought. Severed cat’s head, she’d thought.
Tarantula, she thought now. Her eyes snapped open. Only in zoos and horror movies had Anna seen tarantulas. That had been sufficient. Though inferior in size to grizzly bears, muggers, vampires, and other assorted predators, they made up for it in sheer horridness.
Tarantulas were native to Glen Canyon. That, along with the fact that there were five separate species of rattlesnakes, had been divulged during orientation by the park naturalist with what Anna thought was an inappropriate amount of glee. He had gone on to say that certain kinds of the humongous bugs made wonderful pets. He assured the assembly that the immense hairy ugly spiders were not aggressive or particularly poisonous.
They had no need to be. One look and their prey dropped dead of a heart attack, to be dragged away at the creature’s leisure.
The instant the thought scuttled into her mind on eight little feet, Anna was certain the fist-sized black fuzzy item tossed into her jar the previous night was a gigantic tarantula. Sitting up so suddenly her shoulder and head shrieked in protest, she quickly checked around her. In the meager colorless light of either dawn or dusk—depending on how long she’d been out this time—every ripple in the sand seemed the hunched back of a tarantula, ready to spring.
Hirsute insect legs tickled her lower back. Terror overrode the messages her sore tendons and bruised skull tried to send. Screaming, she thrashed, kicking and clawing to put as much distance between her and the spider as she could.
The thing came with her, running across her back where she could not see it. Still screaming, she twisted and bucked. It skittered up her spine to her neck, then over her shoulder onto her chest.
“God fucking damn it. God fucking damn it!” she wailed, wanting to cry but having neither the moisture nor the strength to do so.
It was the tail of her long braid that had tickled and clung and pursued her halfway across her sandpit. The waste of strength and the aftermath of fear burned down the channels of her brain to flicker out in the ashes of her mind.
Panting, tongue too dry to coax saliva from her cheeks or gums, Anna realized two things: One, she was naked again, and two, she was no longer afraid. The nakedness confused her. Had she imagined finding the body of a woman named Kay, stripping it, and reburying it? Had the monster come again while she lay drugged? The anti-Santa, the Satan, climbing down the chimney to steal from children and molest them as the sugarplums danced?