That’s why feet and denial had been invented.
She went inside, took the binoculars from her daypack, and ventured back out into the hard-baked glare of afternoon. Ninety-six degrees, virtually no humidity, stiff breeze out of the southwest; Jenny doubted Anna had the strength to carry enough water for a sentimental journey to the jar. In the high desert there were days that sucked the moisture from a human body almost faster than it could be replaced.
Having walked a ways up the gentle rise behind the housing area, she put the binoculars to her eyes and scanned the faint tracking of the trail up the rubble in the side canyon and back across the broken cliff.
No Anna. She couldn’t have made it to the top in the three hours Jenny had been gone.
Gil and Dennis in dust-covered green-and-gray uniforms—good camouflage for this part of the country— walked into her line of sight from the direction of the sewage treatment plant.
“You guys see Anna around?” Jenny asked when they were within hailing distance.
“What’s it worth to you?” Dennis grinned and waggled his eyebrows.
Jenny was not in the mood. “Have you?” she demanded.
“Guess you don’t rate, Dennis,” Gil said and whacked his pal’s shoulder with his ball cap.
Jenny waited, and not patiently.
“Yeah,” Dennis said, “a while back. She and Bethy were headed into the maintenance barn. If they’re not still there, I don’t know where they are.”
“Thanks,” Jenny said and brushed by them.
“Whoo!” she heard Gil stage-whisper, “wonder what blew up her skirt?”
Though it was bright and sunny with no dark alleys in sight, dread built as Jenny headed to the maintenance building. She had never felt fear on the lake. Physical fear, yes, of a near miss with a boat or a hostile drunk, but not haunted-house-graveyard-fog-goose-prickles-down-the-spine dread. Of course, nothing more malevolent than snotty uber-rich kids had crossed her path until this summer. This summer there were redheads carved with the word WHORE, crucified pink pygmy rattlesnakes, ropes that vanished, and water that killed.
The maintenance building was seldom quiet. Four big generators gutted the silence most of the time. Today was no exception. Jenny walked in the open garagelike front and stopped. There was only one reason for Anna to come here; the old weight room. No one but Jim ever used it. Threading her way behind the generators, she stepped into the concrete doorway.
Bethy was hunched over Anna like a Kewpie doll intent on drinking human blood. Pale and looking scared, Anna lay on the weight bench, the bar pressing down on the soft flesh of her neck. Her braid fell to the floor and coiled like a line waiting to be tied off.
Bethy lifted the bar.
“That’s what a spotter is for,” she said matter-of-factly. “You get to doing reps and the point is to push yourself to muscle exhaustion, but then, like, well, your muscles are
The bar settled back into the metal stand with a clank, and Jenny’s heart began beating again. Relief made her dizzy. Slouching a shoulder against the concrete, she gathered herself together. For a moment she had thought Bethy Candor was choking the life out of Anna. Love was said to make one blind, but paranoid? That was a bit beyond the pale. Jenny never trusted herself to travel beyond the pale, not by herself.
Anna and Bethy were so wrapped up in what they were doing, neither noticed her. “Wanna try it with five pounds on it?” Bethy asked. “That’d be ten, five on each side. The bar I think is thirty-five or maybe forty-five. I don’t really remember.”
Anna didn’t look like she wanted to try it again. She looked as if her organs and viscera were still quivering from having the bar pressed on her trachea. Or maybe Jenny was projecting and it was her own innards still aquiver.
“Okay,” Anna said. “Five pounds.”
Jenny shook her head and smiled. Got to love a woman with pluck.
Anna managed to lift the bar six times with Bethy helping a little on the final one.
“Pathetic,” Anna murmured disgustedly as she sat up.
“Sort of,” Bethy said.
“Yeah,” Anna said and laughed. “I coulda been a contender.”
The laugh jarred Jenny. An unpleasant tentacle coiled around her esophagus. The green-eyed monster, she thought and poured self-mockery on it to loosen its grip.
“Marlon Brando,
Anna’s face lit up with pleasure. So very good.
Bethy’s did not. That, too, was good.
“Both bodies were recovered,” Jenny said. “Steve wants me to take you over to Bullfrog and see if you can positively identify them before they’re flown out to the morgue.”
THIRTY-NINE
“Are you freaked at having to look at the bodies?” Jenny asked.
Anna and Jenny were perched on the high white vinyl cabin chairs in Jenny’s gunmetal gray boat. Jenny let Anna drive. Anna tried to resist the impulse to yell “Whee!” when the little boat came up on plane.
“Nope,” Anna answered. “Not to seem callous or anything, but once you’ve had the opportunity to really get to know some dead people, you find out they’re not half bad.”
“That night in the slot canyon they did prove to be quiet and well behaved, particularly for men of that age,” Jenny concurred.
“What do you think it will mean if I can identify one or both of them as the guys who attacked Kay and me?” Anna asked.
“I guess just that the slot at the end of Panther was how they got onto the plateau. It’s two more chances to get an ID. Maybe somebody reported one of them missing.”
“I don’t get why nobody has reported Kay missing yet,” Anna said. “She had good teeth, hair, Tevas, the stuff of a well-raised girl with a family that loved her.”
“If she was on vacation, maybe the vacation isn’t up yet and nobody knows she’s missing,” Jenny suggested.
“Maybe.”
Anna and Jenny talked a lot about what the bodies had to do with the jar, if anything, and what the bodies meant to the two of them specifically. Had the third man killed his two companions? More importantly, had the third man tried to do the same to them? Were these just two unlucky, inexperienced guys who got hypothermia and drowned?
Jim and Steve had gone back in the daylight and tried to find what happened to the missing rope. So had Jenny and Anna. It was simply gone. There was no way to know if it had been pulled up and carried away or had fallen into the water and sunk.
The divers who recovered the bodies said they didn’t see it. They said the corpses were only twenty-seven feet below the surface. Below that, the canyon walls pinched in too close together for anything as large as a full- grown man to pass. A rope could have slithered down without a hitch.
Anna leaned back in her seat. By Lake Powell’s agitated standards the water was smooth. Aside from the psychotic predator stuff, Glen Canyon was the perfect park to take her virginity, she decided as they sped toward Bullfrog. The part of her soul that would always belong in the theater gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in a red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.
The dam and the lake did everything a good piece of art should: provoked, evoked, inspired, incensed, amazed. Lake Powell made visitors question their relationship to the earth. Was it a toy to be played with, broken, and cast off? Was it a tool to be used as Man saw fit? Could it be destroyed? Could it be remade?
Desert formations rearing defiantly out of the water were so staggeringly out of place as to appear man- made or out of context, the way a stuffed grizzly bear in a glass case in a bank foyer is out of context. Anna could
