“I’m okay,” Jenny assured her quickly, hoping the fact she was becoming less okay by the minute didn’t bleed into her tone. “I think the—it—got caught on something.”
“What could it possibly catch on?” Anna asked. “This is a slither slot in a rock.”
Pointy bones, Jenny thought, lake zombies wanting to feed on warm human flesh, soggy vampires. What she said was “Could be anything. Flash floods wash entire trees down. Rusted-out truck bodies, shed roofs. You name it.”
Kicking and tugging jostled the corpse a foot or two farther. Something from below touched her foot. The corpse began a slow roll; a shoulder, an ear, the bloated face came free of the water, gray eyes open and glassy, followed by an arm that slid across the chest to flop in the water, splashing like a fish. The second arm loomed up from the dark and a hand drifted palm up and jellyfish-like. Then a third arm floated up beside it.
“God damn!” Jenny yelled, let go of the body, and put a couple of yards between herself and it.
“Holy moly,” Anna called from her elevated vantage point. “It’s two people stuck together. Maybe one was trying to save the other and they both drowned.”
More likely one was trying to climb out over the other and they both drowned, Jenny thought. There came a splash. Jenny turned back to see Anna, fully clothed, in long pants and long-sleeved shirt, disappear under the water at the base of the sheer wall that blocked this side of the canyon from where the boat was moored. The rope was still swinging when Anna resurfaced, sputtering, and began swimming toward her and the corpses.
“The water’s too cold,” Jenny cried. “Go back. I can do this.”
“Many hands make light work,” Anna said as she stopped to tread water near Jenny.
Despite the cold and the dead, Jenny laughed. Or, more likely, because of the cold and the dead she needed to laugh. “One day you must introduce me to whoever taught you to talk.” Before she could lose her courage in front of Anna, she said, “Grab a handful of something on your corpse and I’ll grab mine. They’re too heavy to try to hoist out of here, and it’s not like they’re going to get any deader. We can tow them back and slip the rope through their belts or whatever. That should keep them afloat until the rangers get here. Law enforcement gets all the good assignments: domestic violence, knife fights, body recoveries.”
Anna maneuvered through the water with a dexterity and confidence that encouraged Jenny. The woman could swim. Her long braid seemed to swim as well, coiling like a copperhead snake beneath the water. Near the corpses’ heads, Anna stopped, treading water. Jenny watched her lips firm up and her eyes narrow. Then she quickly reached out and took a handful of hair in her left hand.
“Bravo!” Jenny said. Grabbing “her” corpse by the wrist—the part of its anatomy that was closest—she said, “Take it slow. We don’t want to get tangled up with one of these unfortunate citizens and pulled under.”
Anna said nothing but swam behind and to the left of Jenny, combining the sidestroke and frog stroke so she could pull her burden and stay afloat.
Jenny arrived at the sandstone wall first. Though she hadn’t exerted herself unduly, cold water and the touch of the dead sapped her strength. She turned to grab the rope they’d descended to hang on to until Anna reached her.
There was no rope.
THIRTY-TWO
Jenny pushed back from the wall, treading water. It had to be there. The rope must have caught on something when Anna let go of it. Sheer, clean, the rock face kept no secrets, no cracks where a rope could hide, no knobs where it could hang up, no fingernail grip for hope. The rope had been there and now the rope was gone.
Old, worn, the knots frayed: They must have given way. The rope fell into the water and sank.
Anna gasped up beside her. Pushing the corpse, she wrangled it past Jenny toward where its companion bobbed just below the water surface at the base of the wall.
“The rope’s gone,” Jenny said evenly, her arms making pale fishy sweeps as she stayed afloat. In the seconds it had taken to search the rock face, the seriousness of their situation settled into her brain. If they did not find a way to get out of the water, hypothermia would set in. Their bodies would start to shut down from the cold. Soon, they would be unable to swim.
That must have been how the two men had died. Probably they had braced themselves up in the rocks until they were too exhausted to maintain the necessary tension. Then they fell into the water, the cold shut them down, and they drowned.
“No rope? Well, that’s a drag,” Anna said. She was exerting too much energy keeping her head above water. Using mostly her right arm to scull.
“Did your shoulder go out again?” Jenny asked.
“No. It just hurts,” Anna replied.
For a moment, both of them looked up the sheer rock to the top of the sandstone block, gray now against the fading light.
“We are in a world of hurt, aren’t we?” Anna asked.
“Help,” they yelled in unison.
The slot sent back a muffled echo that struck Jenny’s ears as mocking. The canyon walls were smooth and vertical or, worse, leaned in, affording not even the smallest ledge on which they could perch in the warm night air, not a fingerhold they could cling to to keep their heads out of the water. Not that a handhold mattered. Stopping movement would only hasten hypothermia. Their fingers would slip off and they would drown.
“You said there was a rope at the far end of the slot. The one left behind so people can climb out after the canyon gets too wide for shimmying,” Anna suggested. “We’ll climb out that way.”
“I said there was a rope there last season,” Jenny amended.
“It’ll still be there.”
“We’d be out, but we’d be nowhere. No food, no water, no shoes, and me in my underpants.” Jenny’s teeth were beginning to chatter, and, despite Anna’s bravado, the hollow pitch of her voice let Jenny know with what horror she contemplated a return to a place that had very nearly claimed her life.
“We’ll be warm,” Anna said firmly.
Anna had never done the slot canyons of Utah and Arizona. This one was not the easiest by a long shot. Jenny had her doubts whether Anna could make it during the daylight with a healed shoulder. She knew at night, without protective gear, it would be suicide for them to attempt it.
“We really can’t get out the slot,” Jenny said gently. “If we stay here the rangers will find us.” Anna made a noise that sounded a lot like “Hah!”
“Come on, I can get us out of the water until the cavalry arrives with hot beverages and thermal blankets.” Jenny struck out for the far end of the rectangular pool to where the slot made a black line from the water up sixty feet to the rim. There, she waited for Anna to catch up. By the way Anna moved through the water it looked as if not only were pain and cold sapping her strength, but the long pants were dragging her down.
“Here’s what we have to do,” Jenny said when Anna was beside her. “I’m going to show you. Do what I do, okay?”
Anna nodded.
Jenny paddled into the knife cut. The canyon walls were a little over three feet apart. Turning, she faced Anna. “Okay,” she said. “You kind of wedge yourself between the two walls.” She pushed a hand out to each side, palm on the sandstone. “Put your hands like this and push as if you’re trying to shove the walls farther apart. Okay?”
Anna nodded and spread her arms out, palms on opposite sides of the narrow channel.
“Now do the same thing with your feet under the water. Put the ball of one foot on one wall, the ball of the other on the opposite wall. It’s awkward, but you can do it. Okay? My feet are pretty much doing the same thing as my hands. Now I’m going to lift myself out of the water by pushing up with my feet and inching up my hands. Here goes.”
It was harder than Jenny had thought it would be, and she had swimmer’s shoulders and legs made strong by years of holding herself upright as her boat pounded over rough water. In a couple of minutes she was free of the
