less than they pay their maids telling them what they can and cannot do on their vacation, in their lake, on their beach, in their world.
Jenny’s secret to compliance was pretending she was married to Aristotle Onassis and educating the hoi polloi was simply an obligation of noblesse oblige. When that failed it was good to have a large man with a big gun beside her.
Thinking of guns and bozos, she reminded herself to check the grotto at the tail end of Panther Canyon. A party boat of major ubers had camped there, so many college kids per square inch it was a wonder the houseboat was still afloat. Their barge had a bathroom—
There would be many “interpretive moments,” educational opportunities.
There would be pounds of human waste.
Lord, but she was going to miss Anna Pigeon.
This was the first season she’d had a full-time seasonal position under her. Anna Pigeon. Mystery woman, wounded bird, waist-length red hair, rich hazel eyes: Jenny went over the litany of attractions as she brushed her teeth. To it she added the one that had first captured her heart, Anna’s willingness to do hard dirty work without complaining.
Jenny loved meeting new people, preaching ecological concepts, selling the idea of sustainable wilderness, living out of doors, taking water samples, and sleeping on the beaches. Since the unfortunate incident that had earned her a regal title, she did not love cleaning up human waste. Anna was a gift; she actually preferred shoveling shit to interacting with her fellow men and women.
Though it was clear boats, water, docks, and about anything else in Glen Canyon was alien to Anna, she was quick to learn and a natural at handling lines. She moved with an economy and efficiency so complete it was as graceful as a dance. On the one occasion the weather came up quick and bad, and the lake was set on pounding them into bags of bone and pureed meat, Anna was daring the goddess of the lake to do her worst.
Jenny was convinced a quiet camaraderie had been growing up between them. A respect. Admiration. A deep and abiding affection—
Don’t push it, she thought as she spit in the sink.
Anna was gone.
SEVEN
When Anna again awoke—or came to, depending on how she wanted to think of it—she knew where she was before she opened her eyes. In spite of the fact she’d been drugged, sleep had refreshed her and she was able to think with relative clarity. For a time she lay perfectly still, eyes closed, breathing evenly as if she still slept. Before she committed to another day of life in a pit she wanted to be sure she was alone. Light touched her eyelids gently; the sun was up, but not yet in a position to shine into her prison. The sand beneath her body was cool. That would change before long. Thirst was with her, but not with the same screeching, scratching shriek of need as it had been the night before. That, too, would change before long. She would have to decide whether to die of thirst or drug overdose.
She felt queasy—again not as bad as on the first morning—the first awakening? Much of that might have been the head wound. Vaguely, she remembered Molly mentioning that concussions made people sick to their stomachs. Minutely, she twitched the shoulder that had been dislocated. Sore, but better, much better. All in all, it felt as if she would be healthy enough to starve to death or be murdered in a day or two.
It surprised her that she awakened hungry. For the last few months she’d had no appetite and would often forget to eat. Though she was living in New York City within walking distance of the finest restaurants in the world, her weight dropped from a respectable one hundred and eighteen to a boney one hundred and two. Now that she hadn’t so much as a stale corn dog in her future, she was ravenous.
The train of thought ran fast; no more than a few seconds elapsed between washing up from the sea of sleep to finding herself aground in consciousness. Stopping her mind before it could clatter down another track, she listened, trying to feel the air around her with invisible antennae. The desert was not silent: A tiny fall of sand whispered; a powerboat buzzed gently, distance muting its roar to a hum that was almost natural; her heart beat, a steady thump in her temples.
Anna didn’t think there was a monster leaning over her waiting to strike the moment her eyes opened. Surely in stillness as complete as this bottled quietude, she would be able to hear it breathing, feel the fetid air on her neck, smell the foul stench of its mouth.
Did Jeffrey Dahmer have bad breath? she wondered. Was eating people more unclean than eating cows?
That thought ended the whole exercise of keeping the eyes closed and not moving. Anna’s eyes popped open as a jolt of fear electrified her. She was on her back staring up at the all-seeing eye at the top of her world, the clear blue of sky beyond the mouth of her bottle. Absurdly, she wondered if this was the view babies had shortly before they were born. No, they’d see a masked man in scrubs peering back at them. At one time that image would have amused her. Lying naked at the bottom of a dry well, it scared her nearly as much as that of Jeffrey Dahmer picking human flesh from his teeth with his fingernail.
All that kept her from leaping to her feet in terror was the sure knowledge that it would make her arm and head hurt like sons-a-bitches. Carefully, she sat up.
Things had changed.
The night before, when the drug took her, she had been leaning against the side of the jar. She had urinated in the sand where she sat. The canteen was tucked under her arm. Now she was in the center of the arena of sand. The canteen was leaning neatly against the sandstone near the patch of sacred datura, night blooms only now beginning to close with the light. Next to it was a paper sack, the neck rolled down tightly to keep whatever was inside trapped. Around her the sand had been raked into concentric circles as if she sat at the center of a vortex.
Stinging brought her attention back to her body. Her thigh burned. Blood covered the skin, running down and clotting in her pubic hair. Sand stuck between her legs where the blood had pooled and dried.
“Nooooo,” she wailed. The monster had come as she slept and raped her bloody. “No!” she screamed as on elbows and heels she tried to escape the red stain. Movement sent more burning from her thigh to her brain. She began to cry. Tears blurred her vision and ran down the side of her nose.
The bleeding, stopped overnight, began again, seeping from the top of her thigh to run in narrow red rivulets down the crease between her leg and her abdomen. Anna sat still. Gathering her courage, she leaned forward to study the bloodied area. Neither the ooze nor the pain emanated from her vagina, but from the flesh near panty- line, had she had panties to boast of. Scooting backward, she moved to where the canteen rested neatly beside the deadly garden. Having unscrewed the cap, she poured a small stream of water onto the wound. The water ran red; then, slowly, cuts began to show, straight, careful lines incised into a strip of skin about two inches wide: W H O R E.
The monster had come and cut his word into her.
She jerked back as if she could escape the message, but it was carved on her flesh. Ignoring the sudden roar of pain in her shoulder and head, she began scooping up sand, burying the horror that had been made of her.
“No!” she said aloud at the same moment Molly said, “Stop it, Anna.” Opening her hand, she let the sand trickle out between her fingers, watching it rejoin a million other grains that had been worn from the stone over the last millennium, blown and settled in this trap.
He—the monster—had not made a horror of her. He had made a thing of her, an object, a joke, a notepad, a scrap to scribble on, then throw into the trash. He had made her nothing but his butt, a billboard, garbage.
Trembling took her so hard her teeth rattled and her breath came in short shallow gusts. Folding her legs, she began to rock and moan. The moans turned to anguished sobs, and her lips formed a hard open square as ragged screams were forced through. Far away, in the back of her mind, she could hear Molly shouting something, but the words couldn’t penetrate the thick walls of degradation built around her in the night, walls as solid and imprisoning as the stone jar this damaged bit of trash had been dropped into. She rocked and screamed until she
