her out. Maybe he was sending her off to rehab for one addiction or another. Maybe he “needed space” and Bethy was going home to Mom until he came to his senses. Whatever it was, Anna doubted the Parisians would be introduced to hash brown casserole anytime soon.
“I brought some food and gear and stuff,” Bethy said. Anna was relieved she’d returned to real-world subjects. “I was hoping we could do another canyon together so you’d remember me different, not like the total spaz I was last time?” Her voice went up at the end in a question. The look on her face was so beseeching it reminded Anna of a ham actor—but a very fine singer—in a production of
That same look was all over Bethy’s face.
Anna caved without even a token struggle. “Sounds like fun. Let me get my shoes.”
Hugging the canyon walls, Bethy piloted the Zodiac uplake, then turned into the mouth of Panther Canyon. There were several good slot canyons in Panther. It surprised Anna when Bethy passed them up to nose the Zodiac into the blocked slot where Anna and Jenny nearly lost their lives, and the college boys did.
“Isn’t this a little macabre?” Anna asked as Bethy sprang to the sandstone step at the base of the obstruction and began looping the bow line around a rock.
“What’s ‘macabre’?” Bethy asked as she finished and started up the giant’s stairsteps.
Nothing else to do, Anna followed her. “Creepy. Gruesome. Grim. Horrible. Ghastly.”
“Why is it all those things?” Bethy asked, stopping on the top, hands on hips.
Anna joined her, not in the least winded, and remembered how short of breath the climb left her the last time. “Believe it or not, Bethy, some people think corpses and near-death experiences are off-putting,” she said.
In the morning light, the rectangle of water and the narrow slot beyond—grown terrifying in Anna’s memory —didn’t look all that sinister.
“I guess,” Bethy said, sounding unconvinced, “but that was just then and this is a real cool climb. I thought you’d like to, you know, do it because last time … you know. Like you’re supposed to get back on the horse? Come on,” Bethy said, maybe realizing choosing this particular canyon wasn’t in the best of taste. “I got another idea. Way easier and prettier. We can do it in a couple of hours.” She started down the steps, sitting down on the lip of each and then hopping to the next.
Anna stayed where she was.
The water, black as squid ink, cold, and bottomless in her mind, was turquoise in the sunlight and unbelievably clear. Gold sandstone walls shimmered beneath the surface, water acting as a magnifying glass, until the drowned canyon seemed more real and inviting than that above the lake. Canyon walls, leaning, waiting to snap shut like the jaws of a hungry alligator on the edge of her dreams, soared in the varied hues of a sepia rainbow to a ribbon of achingly blue sky. At the far end of the crystalline pool, the crooked narrow slot Anna remembered as a torture chamber worthy of the Spanish Inquisition was a shadowed lane of water that drifted from turquoise to teal as it meandered deeper into the rock.
It was morning, not evening. They had the entire day before them. Anna’s shoulder was healed, and she was stronger than she’d ever been.
“I do want to get back on the horse,” she said to Bethy, who was standing below, near the bow of the Zodiac.
“Goody,” Bethy said. “It’ll be cool. You’ll see.” She snatched a bulky daypack and a coil of climbing rope with carabiners affixed to either end out of the inflatable boat and brought them along with Anna’s pack to the top of the sandstone blocks.
A rope had been looped over the stone to replace the one that had gone missing the night Anna and Jenny were stranded. It was new and the knot properly tied. Anna checked it anyway. Butterflies the size of bats were fluttering madly in her stomach. Fear, yes, but mostly excitement. This slot, this climb: It was what she needed to do. One day, someday, maybe even this day, she would go back to the jar and exorcise the demons that remained there.
Bethy pulled a green garbage bag from her pack, then put the pack and rope inside it. “Anything you wanna keep dry?” she asked. Anna put her daypack in with Bethy’s. The water bottle on her belt wouldn’t suffer from a dunking. Bethy closed the sack by tying a knot in its neck. That done, she attached the awkward bundle to a belt loop on the waistband of her shorts with another carabiner.
As Bethy descended the sheer eight feet of sandstone to the water, Anna again inspected the rope and the knot. Nothing short of human intervention would loosen it, and the men responsible for Kay’s death were dead. Anna had seen them. She reminded herself of this fact when the stomach butterflies threatened to rush up her esophagus along with coffee and a raisin cinnamon bagel.
“Don’t be such a slowpoke!” Bethy called back as she frog-stroked across the rectangular pool toward the slit in the stone.
Taking a deep breath, and bracing herself for the cold, Anna climbed down. In her mind this rock wall was a thousand feet high. In reality, by the time she was an arm’s length from the top, her toes were in the water.
The water wasn’t as cold as she remembered, nor the swim to the slot as long. Reality was going to go a long way toward defanging her nightmares. As they were passing through—as opposed to trying to defy gravity by suspending themselves between—the canyon walls, they made short work of the twenty yards of sinuous swimming to where the canyon closed down tightly.
At water level the crack was no more than six inches wide. Four feet up it opened to where a human being of average size could fit in sideways. Fifteen feet higher and the walls bulged away from the crevice as if an enormous balloon had pushed them out. High in the shadows, they flowed back together, leaning in like dancers and shutting out the thread of blue sky.
Bethy tossed the line with the carabiners over an anchor of bleached driftwood a couple of yards above water level and began climbing.
“This isn’t the best for climbing,” Bethy said, “but use the rope and be sure and test every hand- or foothold, like, twice before you trust it. Some stuff is stuck real tight and that’s okay. Some tries to get you.” She made it up, the dead tree, her feet out of sight beyond the branch. Braced against the east wall of the crevice, she began unclipping the garbage bag with their daypacks from her waistband.
Anna climbed up easily.
“Looks pretty bitey, huh?” Bethy asked happily, glancing over her shoulder into the gloom.
“Exceedingly bitey,” Anna agreed. In the surreal passage debris had collected, some half submerged in the water-filled six-inch crack at the bottom, others wedged at varying levels: entire trees, mangled and dry as bone; rocks; what appeared to be part of an ancient rusted cookstove; the bones of a raccoon or bobcat scattered like caltrops. The crack was not full, not like a junkyard or a garbage can. It was like a gauntlet devised by a particularly malicious child. It was not a place a barefoot woman in bra and panties would want to travel alone in the dark, even if she could have attained the crack without a rope.
Since their bonding in the cold water and colder prospects, Anna had suffered a sneaking suspicion that Jenny could have climbed out but stayed because of her. Knowing Jenny told the truth when she insisted she couldn’t freed Anna of a load of gratitude too heavy to comfortably bear.
Bethy gave Anna her pack, shouldered her own, and led off down the crevice. Following, Anna marveled at the human body, at her own body, the way ankles and feet moved to catch an angled stone, knees braced against walls, hands and fingers clutched and spread catching the weight of an ever-changing center of gravity. In a more sedentary life it had been easy to forget a body’s miraculous engineering and notice only its small uncomfortable failures.
Within two hours they had traversed the slot with no more mishaps than a bit of flesh peeled off the inside of Anna’s ankle by a deer antler wedged with a single prong above the strangled line of water.
For several yards near the end, the slot opened up to the width of two midsized sedans parked side by side, then dead-ended. In that dead end was a three-sided cavity running straight up for fifty or sixty feet. The wide area where they stood was dry and littered with stones and broken branches smashed when the rains carried them over the fall to shatter at the bottom.
The three-sided cavity, a chimney twenty yards high, and the circumfrance of a phone booth but had formed
