doable. Canyoneers do it a couple times during a season.
“Kay and the men who attacked you could have gotten up to the plateau. They would have come out north of Hole-in-the-Rock Road, about a quarter of a mile from where Frank Patterson parked his truck.” Jenny was enjoying herself. She loved being able to tell Anna of wonders, introduce her to stunning mysterious slots.
Jenny sat down on the edge of the drop, feet over the water below, and made herself comfortable. “Have you ever heard of canyoneering?” she asked.
Anna eased down beside her, groaning softly. When she noticed the sympathetic look on Jenny’s face, she stopped abruptly and finished her move without showing fatigue or pain. What a woman.
“I haven’t,” Anna said. “I have lived only in the canyons of steel. New York’s skinniest alleys are six-lane highways compared to this. This isn’t a canyon, it’s a crevice, a crack.”
“Cracks are growing in popularity. When I started here nobody much paid attention to anything too narrow to drive a Jet Ski up. The whole Escalante region is full of winding, wandering, narrow canyons. More and more we have people come for the purpose of climbing them. Sandstone is too soft for any true technical climbing, but get a good crack, not too wide, and you can sort of wriggle and worm your way to the top. Of course, if it widens out you’re screwed, and if it gets very, very skinny at the bottom, and you fall, you can get wedged.”
“Like this one does?” Anna asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Anna said.
“Actually, it’s satisfying. You use your whole body like you did when you played as a kid. Grown-up amusements don’t allow for crawling and wriggling, getting good and muddy, and tearing the knees of your pants.”
“True,” Anna said. “Why doesn’t the water fill up behind this dam?”
“Only the top forty feet or so is solid. Below it’s boulders and rubble. The water can flow through.”
“Ah.”
For a minute they sat shoulder to shoulder, feet dangling like children, and soaked in the utter silence of the canyon. Not even the sound of water lapping against stone disturbed it. Lest they forget they were in a recreation area, the thin roar of an approaching engine made its way up from the direction of the grotto.
“Campers returning on their Jet Skis,” Jenny said.
“How would Kay and those guys get a rope to the top if they were climbing up from here?” Anna asked.
“You’re a single-minded wench, aren’t you,” Jenny teased.
“How could they?” Anna asked.
“Lookie there.” Jenny pointed at a frayed old climbing rope anchored around a boulder on the right side of the step where they sat. The rope snaked over the edge and down the sheer rock face into the dark water below.
“Canyoneering types don’t use fancy new climbing gear for this grubby sport. Often, if they’ve found a way, or gotten somebody to drop a rope so they can make the impossible spots, they’ll leave it behind for the next guy. This rope’s been here a couple of years. If somebody left a rope down that last fifteen or so feet from the plateau you could make it out.”
“Is there a rope?” Anna asked.
“There was the last time I was there,” Jenny said, “but that was a couple of seasons ago. It’s possible it’s still there. If it is…”
“The murderers could have climbed out,” Anna finished. “How far down the slot can we wade before it turns into an obstacle course?” she asked.
“Not wade, dear heart. The water here is over thirty feet deep.”
Anna drew her feet up and tucked her heels next to her butt, her arms wrapped around her knees.
Jenny laughed. Knowing a vast lake was hundreds of feet deep was entirely different from looking on a body of water scarcely more than a few yards wide and knowing that beneath were fathoms of water. It brought on the sense of perching on the edge of an abyss, a pit so bottomless as to create its own mysteries. After years on the lake, Jenny could still feel the pull.
For a moment they sat, Jenny savoring the stripe of gold thirty yards above, where the last ray of sun struck color from the stone, the impossible depths below, and the warmth radiating from Anna’s shoulder.
Anna was fixated on something else. “What’s that?” she demanded suddenly.
Jenny dragged her attention from the glories of nature. Obviously Anna was not sharing in the exalted experience. “What’s what?” Jenny asked.
“There.” Anna stood and pointed toward the end of the pool to where the slot began.
Getting to her feet, Jenny tried to see in the growing gloom.
“Under the water. A shape,” Anna insisted, still pointing.
It was easy to get spooked by the twisted earth and sinister darkness of the water; easy to imagine leviathans of the deep—albeit skinny leviathans—reaching up with skeletal claws or fins or whatever leviathans reached with. Jenny’s mouth was full of warm reassuring words. She swallowed them. There was a shape beneath the mirror-still water. A pale rectangle with a dark oval in the middle of it. Unless monsters of the deep wore T- shirts with logos on them, it was either lost laundry or a dead body.
Jenny stripped off shirt, shorts, and sandals. Just in case, she had forgone her old-lady panties that protected her skin from her uniform shorts and tossed aside her workmanlike brassiere. For Anna—just in case—she’d donned matching red bikini and bra with oodles of lace and industrial-strength underwire. She hoped Anna was appreciating the view.
“I’m going to check it out,” she said. “Wait here.” She didn’t inform her that this might turn into a body recovery. The poor thing had enough grisly images, without her adding to them. Maybe it was just a T-shirt or a plastic bag.
Catching up the rope near the frayed knots where it was tied around the boulder, Jenny lowered herself the few yards down the sheer rock face and into the water.
“Yikes,” she squeaked, hanging on to the rope.
“What?” Hands on knees, pigtail swinging, Anna looked over the edge.
“I forgot how cold the water can be in these slot canyons,” she admitted. “It’s so deep and gets zero sunlight.”
Needing to generate body heat, she let go of the rope and swam toward the unidentified floating object. From where she’d entered the water to the body—and it was a body—was no more than forty feet, not enough to get the blood flowing. Six inches beneath the surface of the water was a back and a head covered in dark hair long enough to halo out around the skull like seaweed. The drowned man added to Jenny’s chill.
Kicking powerfully with her legs and sculling with her right arm, Jenny grasped a handful of T-shirt. The wet cloth rucked up and her knuckles brushed bare skin. She emitted a horrid little gulping sound she hoped Anna didn’t hear. What the backs of her fingers brushed didn’t feel like skin. Eight seasons on the lake, Jenny had seen her share of drowned people; two were little kids. This was the first time she had ever touched one. She didn’t know what she’d expected a dead body would feel like, rubber maybe, or cold skin, maybe like a chicken breast out of the refrigerator. She hadn’t expected it would feel exactly like a dead body, a body a thousand times deader than a cold dead chicken.
“Someone’s drowned,” she called to Anna. “A man, I think. The water is so cold I’m afraid to leave him. He might sink or something.” Holding the corpse out to one side, she swam back toward Anna with a one-armed frog stroke. Jenny had her lifeguard’s license. High school summers were spent on a white wooden tower blowing a silver whistle at obnoxious children. She knew how to rescue a swimmer: arm under the shoulder, backstroke, the swimmer towed along, nose and mouth clear of the water, but there was no way in hell she was going to hug a dead body snuggled up to her best red lingerie.
The corpse tugged back. Again Jenny squeaked. Above, the light had gone gray; below was liquid darkness. The air in between was thick with permanent shadows. Given the setting, the cold, and the corpse, Jenny was beginning to believe in things she would have mocked when she was high and dry with Anna. It was in her mind to leave the dead to care for the dead and let go when Anna called, “Are you okay?”
Jenny looked to where she stood, rope in one hand, all one hundred and ten pounds of her ready to come to the rescue.
