Bringing victims from his habitat would raise too many questions. He took what was offered on the lake, she decided. Safer to have no connection with his victims, and, with a nice boat, it would be easy enough to pick up a party girl—or a seasonal ranger—whom nobody would miss for a while.
If he hunted on the water, why had he found her? Unless she had forgotten climbing down off the Colorado Plateau, she was on the north rim of Glen Canyon, above Dangling Rope, hours from anywhere. Only a crazy person would travel across a zillion miles of desert from Piddlesquat, Utah, on the off chance a woman would be wandering around alone and unprotected. Had it been mere chance? Monster Man is out poaching lizards or snakes or stealing artifacts or engaging in an unrelated monstrous activity and gets lucky? Had she been stumbled upon by a psychopath?
Anna had turned in a full circle. She had searched the smooth circumference of her bottle without seeing anything new or different, anything that could alter her circumstances. Stopping, she lowered her gaze from that single blue glimpse of sky to the hair straggling over the sand.
There was no reason to bother the nest of hairs. A few swipes with the side of her foot and things would be as they were before—nearly unendurable. Digging up whatever it was she’d be digging up might render them completely unendurable. Knowing what was buried beneath her might make her insane. Of course, not knowing would do it quicker. Nothing drove Pigeons crazier than not knowing that which could be known.
That’s why Molly went into psychiatry; she wanted to know how people’s brains worked. Anna went into theater; she wanted to know how people’s hearts worked. Neither she nor her sister was one to let sleeping dogs —or dead girls—lie. Anna assumed it was a girl because of the length and fineness of the hair, and because it was possible she wasn’t the first specimen to be bottled up and played with until it wasn’t any fun anymore.
Back at the datura, Anna drew a circle in the sand, the strands of hair at the center, and then began gingerly sweeping sand away with the tips of her fingers. The hairs were long, not as long as Anna’s, but they would fall to bra-strap level on a woman of average height. As best she could, she combed the hairs from the sand carefully, laying them out to minimize snarling. Partly she did it to show reverence for the dead, and partly because, should she join this woman, she hoped similar respect would be shown her, and partly to put off the moment she would have to look on a lifeless face.
Clearing away the dirt, she watched a well-shaped ear emerge from the earth, two small silver hoops in the pierced lobe. With the ear came the faint odor of decay. Though she hadn’t thought it consciously, Anna had been expecting a skeleton: dry, brittle, desiccated scraps of skin peeling away from bone, the way old leather peeled from the bindings of ancient books.
The ear was lifelike, plump and pink, yet there wasn’t as much stench as a day-old rat in a subway station. The woman hadn’t been in this hole much longer than Anna.
Memory slammed into the back of her eyes, rocking her onto her heels. The scream had come through the tortured pinon trees; hoping for water, she began to run. The clarity was more than remembering, it was reliving. She saw her abandoned pack, the sun applique smiling up from the hard ground as she passed the patch of shade where she’d been sitting; she felt the wadded-up map, crunched in her fingers.
Running was hard, as it often is in dreams. Her thighs ached and her feet struck the ground heavily. A stitch was sewing her ribs to her liver. She slowed to a jog, clutching her side and panting. More screams drew her on. Anna became afraid the woman was in deeper trouble than she could handle.
Self-preservation, learned from a lifetime in the city, stopped her headlong dash. Anna remembered trying to suck hot dry air through a throat closed from lack of moisture. She could see herself, dark clothes, pale with dust, hands on knees, gasping and thinking maybe this wasn’t something she should get involved with.
Had she not wanted a drink of water so desperately, she might have lost her courage. She straightened up and, still breathing hard, pushed up a small rise of stone. The rise gave way to a round depression half the size of a tennis court.
There were four people in it. A tall boy had a girl with long brown hair, wearing cutoff jeans and a bikini top, in a hammerlock, pressing down on her neck. Her arms were flailing. “Stop it,” he was yelling and laughing. “We don’t want to have to hurt you.” A second boy had his back to Anna. She remembered how his muscles rippled as the sun hit the sweat. His shorts were halfway down his butt as if he’d undone the fly to take them off. He was hopping on one foot, laughing like a hyena, trying to pull off his shorts. He staggered and fell. Drunk, she thought. The fall only made him laugh harder. The third boy, not laughing, not undressing, was a plain-looking kid with ragged brown hair and a fury of pimples across a high forehead. He saw Anna and yelled, “Holy shit!”
The man wrestling with the girl glanced up, locking eyes with Anna. The girl must have hit or clawed him. Letting go of her, he shouted, “Fucking bitch!”
Staggering, the girl fell on her hands and knees. He kicked her. Fighting to get to her feet, she grabbed at his shorts, her fist closing on the front of them. He bent double. For a heartbeat Anna thought he was going to help her to stand. Instead he grabbed up a fist-sized rock and slammed it into her temple.
Anna turned and ran.
The earth lurched and folded beneath her feet, scrub and rock jerking in her peripheral vision. Heat burned up through the soles of her sneakers. A steady strong thud, thud, thud of boots pounded behind her.
Then nothing, then this hole, the dislocated shoulder and a knot the size of a tennis ball behind her right ear.
She hadn’t gotten blind drunk and passed out. Bad men had clubbed her from behind. Honor intact, skull not so much. The blow accounted for the patchy memory. “Yay, me,” Anna said.
“Blunt trauma to the head is the only cause of amnesia I know of outside paperback novels,” Molly once said.
Long brown hair.
The girl Anna was disinterring must have been the focus of Buttboy’s attentions. She dug faster. Grit packed the girl’s nostrils. Her lips were parted and sand had been shoved into her mouth; that or she’d tried to breathe after she’d been buried. Her eyes were open, scabbed with grains of sand.
“Damn, damn, damn.” Curse became mantra and finally made its way from Anna’s mouth to her ears. She stopped her frenzied scooping. Clearing the dirt from the girl’s nose and mouth was not going to save her.
“Sorry,” Anna said to the corpse. Using the end of her long braid as a whisk broom, she gently swept at the dirt sticking to the eyes and teeth. “Were you alive when they buried you?”
Ray Milland, Vincent Price,
Anna had to look away. Her gaze came to rest on the deflated, wrinkled white blossom of the deadly nightshade.
“They hit you in the head,” she murmured, unsure whether she spoke to the girl’s shade or just to keep herself company. “Then they came after me and threw us both down the garbage disposal.” From the wilted flower, her eyes drifted to the walls. With their spin of muted colors spiraling up, she half expected to hear a switch being flipped, a grind begin, and the spiral to move as she and the corpse were ground to mincemeat and sucked into the sewers of hell.
“Young and pretty,” she thought half aloud. “It wouldn’t matter. Young and pretty or old and scrawny, monsters will be monsters. You were dead when they threw you in, weren’t you?” she asked the ghost of the girl. “Otherwise it would be you digging up my grave.”
Buttboy with his pants half down, staggering drunk. Hyena Boy, laughing. Gang rape. Anna shows up, hoping for a refreshing beverage, and they kill the girl instead.
The cuts on Anna’s thigh stung with sweat and sand. Roughly brushing the grit away, she ran a dirty fingernail along the marks, tracing WHORE in dried blood. There’d been three would-be rapists. There were three. One little, two little, three little monster boys.
Her tongue was dry, big, and thick; her lips stuck to her teeth. The drugged canteen beckoned from the other side of the nightshade. Anna crawled to it, fumbled the cap off, and, in thirst and despair, drank too much, drugging herself more than she had to. Water ran from the corners of her mouth and made mud on her breasts. Instantly, she felt the drug flow into her body, felt her muscles loosening. Her head swam, thoughts sloshing like water in a washtub, slamming against the sides of skull bone and bouncing back on one another.
It came to her then that she had to get the girl out, had to.
Having plowed back though the battered weeds, the pain from her injured shoulder driving her as a whip
