hind end. The jarring loosed fire-bolts of pain in both arm and head. She almost welcomed them. They made it hard to think.
Nothing much looked like human hair but human hair.
“Help! Help me!” Anna screamed.
EIGHT
Regis was sitting in the bedroom of Jenny’s duplex, the one that Anna Pigeon had used for such a short time. It wasn’t his lieu day—like a lot of HQ employees, he had Saturdays and Sundays off just like normal people. He had called in sick. The parks frowned on permanents calling in sick or going on vacation at the height of the season, but he’d done it anyway. Seasonals never called in sick. At least he’d never heard of one doing it. They just didn’t.
Was it possible they never got sick? he wondered.
He never got sick. There wasn’t a day in his childhood he could remember staying home sick. He wasn’t sick now. He was—agitated. It wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, he liked a change from the neutral nothing he felt most days. A life lived in ecru, he thought wryly. Ecru. That was his mother’s favorite color. Half his genes were from a woman whose favorite color wasn’t a color at all. “Everything goes with ecru,” she liked to say.
She would have approved of the employee housing color scheme at the Rope: outsides gray with no adornment, insides varying shades of ecru. Possibly the original decorators—buyers was probably the more accurate term—who’d chosen the carpets and furnishings had dared a splash of color, but over the years time and use had sucked it out. Dust and the neglect of serial renters had done the rest.
The room Anna Pigeon slept in was no different: a double bed, stripped now, a dresser and bed stand of the processed woodlike substance that looks battered and old a week after it’s brought home from the store and limps on in that shabby state for the next hundred years. Opposite the bed were a shallow closet with sliding doors, the wood warping slightly, and a single window, blinds down, three of the bottom slats broken.
Anna Pigeon’s things had been taken, but Regis wanted to sit in the room where she’d stayed without people butting in and asking him what he was doing or why he was there. He was in personnel; as far as he was concerned he had a right to be anywhere he wanted. And, in the park, nobody bothered to lock their houses, especially not at Dangling Rope, Bullfrog, Hite, or Halls Crossing. They were too remote by road to attract thieves, and people who came by boat were too rich to covet the trash that could be bought on a government salary.
Regis sat on the bed and listened to his pulse racing in his ears. The emptiness of the shabby space was more than just the lack of a tenant. Too many people who cared too little about the room filled it with ghosts. Not the ectoplasmic phantoms fools pretended to see when they wanted to feel special. Real ghosts, the kind that don’t exist, the kind that are made up of dead air, the kind you see in the eyes of an animal when the vet puts it to sleep. The kind that are Not There.
Growing up he hadn’t been allowed pets. The first time he’d seen the Not There of death was the previous winter when Kippa died. Kippa was their six-month-old French bulldog. A golden bowling ball of love. Regis smiled, remembering. The image shifted into another, the wide grin red with blood, blood where his ears had flopped, screams that came out through his mashed nose. Regis had been holding him like a baby, looking deep into his brown eyes, when all of a sudden there was no dog, just dog meat, carrion. There, then Not There.
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.”
