pack full of first aid supplies on the coffee table in front of her. Hard not to hit or push when he sat next to her. Hard not to jerk away as he prodded her arm and pinched her fingertips, asking where it hurt.
The thought startled her. Jim Levitt was not a monster—at least not that she knew of. He was a big, pleasant-looking man, no more than twenty-two at a guess, with dark close-cropped hair, dense as a knit cap, and wide-set brown eyes, kind and intelligent, under straight black brows. His shoulders were overmuscled and his neck thick. Probably he’d played a lot of football in high school and college. Crooked but very white teeth gave his smile character, as did the bump on the bridge of his nose from an old break.
Directors in New York would cast Jim Levitt as the small-town hero who went off to war and never came back, or the big brother who took care of the family when Dad was too drunk to.
Even as Anna made note of these reassuring characteristics, her stomach was clenching and her skin trying to shrink closer to her bones. She was not free of the jar. Men, all men, but powerful men in particular, were a threat to a small female with naught but a baby skunk for protection. The monster was faceless and so could be anyone. Could be everyone. The WHORE cut into her thigh felt as if it bled whenever Jim leaned too close, burned when he touched her.
As the paramedic palpated her head, seeking any residual damage from the bang to the skull she’d gotten, Anna dug her nails into her palms to keep from screaming. The blood pressure cuff felt like an iron manacle crushing her arm, the thermometer a blade beneath her tongue.
Either Jim sensed her fear, or had seen enough of it in his work to read it on her face. The examination finished, he closed the EMS kit and, moving slowly and deliberately, the way Anna did when she didn’t want to frighten a skittish cat, stepped away and sat in the chair across from the couch. Anna liked him for that; it was easier to draw breath, easier to ignore the acid word on her thigh.
“The shoulder was dislocated?” Jim asked.
Anna nodded, afraid if she spoke her voice would quail. Back in the jar, a thousand years ago and yesterday, she’d thought she’d won free of fear. Evidently it was an ever renewable resource.
“What did it look like?”
Anna told him in as few words as possible. By clipping each one off with her teeth, she could keep the quaver out of her recitation.
“Sounds like a forward dislocation. That’s when the upper arm bone moves forward and down out of its joint, tearing the labrum and joint capsule. Did it swell up?”
“Some,” Anna said. Her voice wasn’t strong enough to reach the orchestra pit in even a small theater.
“Did it feel numb or weak or anything?”
“Yes.” Her throat was growing dry. Though the questions were well intended and for her welfare, they increased her anxiety. Knowing tougher questions were to come built on the anxiety until she felt made of wires strung to the breaking point.
“And you think it may have partially dislocated at a later time?”
Anna didn’t answer.
“Any muscle spasms?”
“It’s fine,” she said more harshly than she’d meant to.
“Sounds like your dislocation diagnosis was right on the money. I can see it’s still bruised. There’ll be soreness for a week or so, depending on how badly you’ve strained or torn ligaments and tendons. You should get checked out at the hospital. An X-ray will be able to tell you if you’ve damaged the rotator cuff or the head of the ulna.”
He stared at her, open, amiable, waiting for her to ask a question, state a desire, make a comment.
“No hospital,” Anna said. In hospitals they took your clothes away, gave you drugs, and strange men came and did things that hurt you. Hospitals were jars. Even if a jar was for her own good, Anna had no intention of getting in it.
“You’ll need to talk with Steve about that.”
“No. I won’t.” Her voice was stronger; it might not reach the back of the house, but the first row of the balcony would hear her loud and clear.
Jim didn’t argue. Leaning back in his chair, granting her another eighteen inches of space, he said, “Other than the sore shoulder, you’re suffering from dehydration, exhaustion, and trauma. Your skin is warm to the touch —”
Anna flinched at the words the way she had when he’d laid hands on her.
“—so I don’t think we need to worry about shock.”
He waited, his big hands clasped loosely on his lap, his warm brown eyes full of kindness and understanding.
Law Enforcement Ranger Jim Levitt wanted her to talk. A hard mass of shame and fury clogged Anna’s throat.
After a minute he stood. “I’m going to radio Steve. Let him know you’re more or less in one piece and see if he needs to come over tonight or if it can wait till morning. Jenny, you said something about Xanax?”
“She’s got a prescription. She left it when she … she left it,” Jenny said.
“I can’t prescribe anything, but if it was me, I’d think now was a good time to take one. What do you say, Anna?”
Suddenly she was afraid he wanted her drugged, like the poison canteen, like the foggy nights and blurry days. She shook her head.
“Okay. Chill out. I’ll be right back and let you know what Steve wants to do.”
Leaving the medical pack on the table, he let himself out the screen door.
“You sure about that Xanax?” Jenny asked. “In your sandals, I’d take two or three and wash them down with red wine.”
“After,” Anna croaked and looked at the door to the deck.
Knowledge bloomed in Jenny’s eyes. Her mouth thinned and her round cheeks went hard. “After,” she agreed quietly.
Jim banged back in. For a large man, he was quiet and graceful. For a young man, he was sensitive and controlled. Still, large and young, he banged.
“Steve says to get your statement, then let you rest. He’ll be over tomorrow, probably with Andrew, the chief ranger, to talk with you some more.”
Dread curled around and settled in Anna’s stomach. People wanted to get inside her, like the monster’s knife, like the poisoned water. These were the good guys, she reminded herself. They only wanted to force themselves into her mind. Maybe there were no good guys.
Jim again sat in the far chair. She expected him to take out a pad and pencil to take notes, but he didn’t. He sat as before, relaxed, hands folded. “You went missing four days ago. Want to tell me about that?”
“Four days?” The number surprised her. Surely it had been a year or a month. In less than a week she had been taken and changed as completely as anyone beamed up by aliens and subjected to medical procedures, their glands replaced by monkey glands or whatever the fashion of alien abduction was at the moment.
“Five, if you count today,” Jenny said.
Five sounded more reasonable. Five months would have sounded more reasonable still. Jenny brought Anna a glass of orange juice. She took a sip, trying to find the words Jim Levitt needed. None came. Talking about it made it too real. Or too unreal, like a nightmare from which she’d awakened. To speak of her life in the jar felt like airing dirty laundry, made her vulnerable. Jim would picture her naked. In his mind he would see her posed, watch the monster cutting WHORE into her flesh. An echo of the horror she’d felt that the monster might take pictures of her after she was dead reverberated through her.
“I was hiking,” she said finally. “I didn’t bring enough water. I hit my head, I guess. I don’t remember a lot.” That was true. Also true was that she remembered too much. “I don’t know why my things were gone from my room—or why my shampoo and other toiletries weren’t,” she offered. That, too, was the truth.
She did know where she’d been, that she’d roomed with a corpse, that she’d been drugged and stripped and molested, and that she’d come back to Dangling Rope in a dead woman’s clothes. Soon—tomorrow—she would have to tell. Not telling Kay’s family what had become of her was cruel. Anna’s humiliation would eventually be made public. If the monster—or monsters—were caught, she’d have to testify in court.
