“I know what you are,” Bethy said as if that explained her actions. “You lied. You told me you were a dyke and hated men.”
“I did not!” Anna exclaimed. Of all the reasons Bethy might have listed for dangling Anna over a chasm, that hadn’t been one she’d thought of.
Bethy’s bizarrely childlike expression turned mean. “Yes. You. Did.”
Anna knew she hadn’t. She also knew it mattered not one whit. Because she and Jenny were close, and because she didn’t vehemently deny being homosexual, in Bethy’s mind it was the same as saying she was.
“Maybe it wasn’t a lie,” Anna tried. “Maybe I was telling the truth.” To be or not to be gay, that was the question. Which answer might save her life?
“Nope. You lied. I tried to kiss you and you wouldn’t let me,” Bethy said.
“Gay or straight, you’re the last person on earth I’d want to kiss,” Anna snapped.
That was the wrong thing to say.
Bethy spit in Anna’s upturned face and withdrew her head from view.
A sigh was ordered up by Anna’s brain to express the utter futility of trying to communicate with the Bethys of the world. Her lungs did not follow through. Suspended with her arms over her head was making breathing difficult. Circulation cut off by the cuffs, her hands were growing numb. Soon she would not be able to climb up even if Bethy threw her the rope.
“Do you think I was trying to steal your husband?” Anna asked. That was the only misapprehension she could think of that might have triggered Bethy’s psychosis. Not for a second did she doubt that Bethy Candor was in the midst of a full-blown psychotic episode.
Bethy didn’t reappear. Anna strained to hear her. Paper crackled. Bethy hadn’t left.
“What are you doing?” Anna called.
“I’m eating your potato chips,” Bethy yelled back, her voice full of malice. “I’m going to eat your whole lunch.”
“Then what?’ Anna asked.
“Then we wait for my husband,” Bethy said, her words slightly garbled as if she spoke around a mouthful of food.
What then? Anna wondered but did not ask.
Bethy fell silent. Impotent rage drained from Anna. Its place was filled by helpless confusion. Years of listening to her sister had taught Anna that mental illness was more widespread than one might think. Those with sociopathic tendencies or narcissistic leanings were often presidents, superstars, business moguls. Powerful men with destructive sex addictions were in the news every other week. Lots of people were crazy in lots of ways, most of them damaging but still socially acceptable—or at least not illegal. Mental illness was as common as the cold, but full-blown homicidal maniacs were rare.
The boys who’d assaulted and killed Katherine—Kay—Nelson wouldn’t be considered insane. Brutish, certainly, but rape was a constant the world over. From what Anna’d seen, the murder wasn’t intentional, merely a by-product of anger. Rotten as shoving her and Kay into the solution hole was, it made sense in the pseudo-sanity of human existence: a crime covered up, a witness silenced, a consequence avoided.
Stripping a woman naked, drugging her, and carving WHORE into her flesh should definitely be considered serious symptoms of major psychosis. Letting two college boys die of drowning and hypothermia was also a tad too far from the norm to be considered sane.
Along with everyone else, Anna had laid the blame at the feet of the conveniently suicidal unsub three, Jason Mannings, the boy with the acne.
That was one psychopath.
Bethy made two.
Two, both bent on tormenting Anna, was too much, too many, the audience wouldn’t buy it. Anna didn’t buy it.
An anomaly that had been tacitly ignored flared in her maelstrom of thought: the box of her belongings, packed and sealed and addressed to her sister in New York. Due to the jangle of jurisdictions, the paucity of investigators, and a general wish of all concerned to put the tragic incident behind them, the mystery of who had cleared out Anna’s room had been mostly ignored. The fact that it didn’t make a whole lot of sense had been glossed over.
Bethy could easily have done it.
Bethy or Regis.
“You’re the reason Regis hit me,” Bethy said, breaking into Anna’s distractions.
“I am?” Anna called back to keep the conversation going. Bethy’s chatter might be enough to cover the noises she was about to make.
“Yeah. He didn’t like that I was spending time with you. He hates you. He said you’re ugly as dog shit on the side of a new shoe.”
Anna was swinging gently, pumping her legs to propel her body back and forth across the cliff face like a metronome. Despite weeks of physical training, she would need momentum. She only had the strength for one good try. Gravity was a lot higher in the real world than it was in the weight room.
“And you’re the reason Regis is sending me away. He thinks I shouldn’t be around you. Regis hates your guts.”
“Sure sounds like it,” Anna said and hoped Bethy didn’t hear the effort in her voice. At the top of her truncated swing, Anna bent in half, throwing her legs upward above her hands. One heel missed. The other went between the two lines tethering her to the cliff top. Before her strength failed, Anna managed to bend her knee, catching the rope behind it.
Now she hung by her wrists and one knee. The relief to her blood-starved hands was immediate. Inch by inch she pulled her upper body skyward with her manacled hands and the muscles of her stomach and back. Sweating, smothering lungs that wanted to gasp for breath, she got herself upright, straddling the rope, her hands clamped at eye level around one of the lines. Stable, she let herself rest and tried to remember what Bethy had done.
She’d linked the carabiners, then thrown the looped rope over a rock the size and shape of a big television set. If Anna tried to climb one rope, it was possible that the loop would slip and Anna would be in much the same situation as a hamster running on a wheel.
“Regis thinks you’re a whore,” Bethy gloated. Food still factored into her diction, but a packed lunch could only last so long.
Forcing herself to move, Anna dragged one foot up, knee under her chin, and pressed the sole of her sneaker against the line, heel in her crotch, toe pointed out. “I figured as much,” she called up to Bethy. WHORE, Regis had cut it into her flesh. He hadn’t come to rescue her; he’d come back either to harm her further or finish her off.
“W-H-O-R-E. All capital letters so’s everybody would know what you were.”
Despite the heat and exertion, suddenly Anna felt chilled. The healing cuts had not been reported, nor had Anna worn anything short or sheer enough that they could be seen.
“Regis tell you that?” she asked, then sucked in a breath of air, held it, and pushed up with every aching ounce of strength in her butt and thigh. Pressure on the rope through the sole of her foot, she dared pull up harder with her hands and arms without the fear of shifting the rope loop and warning Bethy that she was moving. That or it would spill her out of her single-thread hammock and leave her again dangling like a trout on a line. She would not have the strength to perform this mutant high-wire act a second time.
“No, stupid, I told Regis you were a whore.” Bethy laughed. Paper was being crumpled, wadded up. Lunch must be at an end.
Anna was upright, her leg trembling. She jammed her other foot in the rope stirrup and looked up. The top of her head was only a few inches beneath the sharp stone lip where the plateau fell away into the canyon. Her toes and knees pressed hard against the rock, she leaned into the cliff, letting it steady and support her. Her wrists were slightly above her head, one on either side of the looped rope. Anna wondered if Bethy had packed two lunches and eaten them both, or if she guessed Anna would opt to dine above the slot canyon. Then she wondered why the human brain would wonder over trivia when it might be smashed like a melon in the next few minutes.