Her body reacted from years of training. She threw herself forward in a flying tackle aimed at the backs of Bob Menechinn’s knees. Big men had bad knees; the joints couldn’t cope with the bulk, and most of them had played football at one time or another. Knee injuries were a small ranger’s friend. Her right shoulder and side of her head smashed into him and the knees gave. Falling back and to the side, he crushed her right arm into the snow. Pain exploded in her elbow.
“It’s a cliff, it’s a fucking cliff, I was going off a cliff,” Bob began yelling. Mad with the sudden realization of physical danger, he scrabbled backward. His knee ground over Anna’s wrist and she cried out. A flailing hand struck her on the side of her head so hard her ear burned and roared.
“You’re welcome, God dammit,” she shouted as she tried to roll out of his thrashing way. On hands and knees, Bob scuttled through the deep snow, moaning and bellowing like a mad boar. He didn’t stop till he’d reached the trees. There he pulled himself upright, using the bole of a tree, and screamed: “He tried to kill me. He tried to kill me.” The litany didn’t stop there, but Anna tuned the rest of it out and got to her feet. Snow and down padding had saved her serious injury. Her wrist still rotated, and, other than the misery of ice down her collar and up her sleeves, the dive didn’t seem to have done any appreciable damage.
Adam was still standing near the cliff’s edge, his feet inches from where the rock fell away.
“Why did you do that?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know,” Anna said. For a minute, they stood, listening to the scissor cut of the wind in the trees and Bob’s lament. Snow came at them in spinning gusts, air currents made wild and playful where the earth dropped away to water.
“You know what he is?”
“Some of it. I think he drugged Robin. I think he did the same to Katherine, then raped her and took pictures to blackmail her into silence. I’m guessing he did something like that to your wife.”
“Cynthia,” Adam said.
“Cynthia,” Anna gave Adam’s memory the honor of a name.
“She was like Robin. Not raised like her or athletic like her, but with that innocence that doesn’t wear off at thirteen like it does for most of us.” Adam’s gaze moved from Anna’s face to where Bob clung to his tree, his moaning and cursing settled into a murmuring chant low enough they could sense the tenor but no longer had to hear the words.
“Cynthia had never been out of school – went straight from kindergarten through to her Ph.D. program. Her dad raised her by himself; only kid. Her mother died of appendicitis when she was barely walking.”
Anna didn’t know what to say and figured nothing was best. The talking was taking the action out of Adam for the moment.
His attention returned from the trees where Bob had run. “Cynthia thought men were nice,” he said. “She thought they took care of women and children, saved kittens from trees and helped old ladies carry groceries to the car.” A hint of warmth touched his voice and it no longer sounded of frozen harp strings.
“I hadn’t thought of that in a while,” he said to Anna and shook his head. “How could I have forgotten that?”
“Too busy hating?” she hazarded.
“It was something to do,” he said, and most of the chill was back in the strings.
“Bob was her teacher?” Anna asked.
“‘Outdoors Education.’ Two semesters.”
Anna waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He drifted, his eyes moving slowly over her head as if he was reading a complex story in the gray of the sky above the basalt. Finally his gaze returned to Earth, to Bob, sitting now, his back to the tree he’d been hugging, his head back and his mouth open.
“Bob drugged her. He did it more than once. She didn’t tell me till she got pregnant. She was ashamed. She was afraid she’d lose me, that either I’d never feel the same way about her or that I’d go berserk and tear his head off and spend the rest of our lives in jail. She couldn’t tell anyone else. There were the pictures, and she knew what they’d do to her dad and me. Then she found out she was going to have a baby. I’d been on a six-week job in Manitoba when the baby was conceived. So she told me. Three days later, she got into the bath and cut her wrists.
“I wasn’t with her when she died,” Adam said, and, for the first time, Anna could hear tears in his voice. “I had to answer the phone. Guess who was calling.”
“God damn,” Anna said, the oxygen gone from the air.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to take him back,” Anna said. “I’m sorry,” she added.
“I could kill you,” Adam said.
“Maybe.”
“Getting killed for the likes of Menechinn’s crazy.” Adam laughed, and there seemed to be genuine humor in it. “Shoot, getting a hang-nail for the likes of Menechinn is crazy.”
Anna said nothing.
“I guess wasting time trying to kill him is crazy too,” Adam said. The thought or the laugh had gentled his voice, and he shook his head as he spoke.
“Maybe,” Anna said.
“No maybe about it.”
Slowly he raised his arms out to his sides, a man crucified on white. He cocked his head, smiled and stepped back into nothing.
31
Anna fell flat on the brink of the drop, arms outstretched. The fingers of her right hand caught Adam’s sleeve above the elbow and closed convulsively over the fabric. Then his weight struck her, and shoulder and collarbone smashed into the stone beneath the snow. The noise in her head was the cacophony of pain. A loud, sucking pop, and her ulna was torn from the socket. Crack of a dry twig: the collarbone snapping. She would have screamed, but cheese-thick agony blocked her throat.
“Don’t let go,” she managed in little more than a whisper.
A ripping sound sawed her eyes open. Her face was hanging over the cliff, her body spread-eagled on the edge. Her right arm, weirdly elongated, wrist showing between glove and sleeve, drew a straight line to Adam’s arm, drawn rigidly above his head. Anna had not held on. No one could have stopped the plummet of one hundred sixty pounds with four gloved fingers and a thumb. Not even Anna. In a freak accident, her hand had jammed through the nylon of his ripped coat and her wrist was in a noose of duct tape he’d wound round the sleeve to keep it together. Had she wanted to, she couldn’t have let him go.
“I’m pulling you up,” she gasped. Breathing hurt where her collarbone had broken, but the pain in the dislocated shoulder made it seem like nothing and she snorted a laugh that turned to snot and mixed with the snow caked on her face.
“Damn you, Anna,” Adam said. She couldn’t see his face; it was gone below the tatters of his sleeve and her arm. For a moment, a moment that was made into a nascent eternity by the vicious firing of nerve impulses in the right side of her body, Adam said nothing.
Finally words floated up their conjoined arms: “Let me go.”
“I’m pulling you up,” Anna said. She doubted she could pull up a four-week-old kitten at this point, but there wasn’t much else to hope for.
“You haven’t the right. Let me go.” He didn’t sound afraid, only tired – so tired he could barely find the strength to speak.
Anna might have done it. People had a right to die if they wanted to. People had a right to die the way they wanted to.
“I can’t,” she admitted. “My glove caught in the duct tape.”
“You are a piece of work,” Adam said.
“Bob!” Anna yelled, an echo of when she’d called for him on the breaking ice. It yielded the same result. There wasn’t enough expansion room in her lungs to try again, and she laid her cheek on the sleeve of her parka, the bare rock of the cliff edge where Adam’s fall had scraped the snow away an inch from her eyes.
It was moving. Tiny increments of rock no bigger than sand pebbles were creeping past. Adam’s weight was dragging her over. Kicking hard, she tried to drive her toes into the snow to anchor herself. The duck-billed Sorels pummeled down to the basalt but found no purchase. The effort accelerated the slip.