Free The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel by Nevada Barr

murmured, unsure whether she spoke to the girl’s shade or just to keep herself company. “Then they came after me and threw us both down the garbage disposal.” From the wilted flower, her eyes drifted to the walls. With their spin of muted colors spiraling up, she half expected to hear a switch being flipped, a grind begin, and the spiral to move as she and the corpse were ground to mincemeat and sucked into the sewers of hell.
    “Young and pretty,” she thought half aloud. “It wouldn’t matter. Young and pretty or old and scrawny, monsters will be monsters. You were dead when they threw you in, weren’t you?” she asked the ghost of the girl. “Otherwise it would be you digging up my grave.”
    Buttboy with his pants half down, staggering drunk. Hyena Boy, laughing. Gang rape. Anna shows up, hoping for a refreshing beverage, and they kill the girl instead.
    The cuts on Anna’s thigh stung with sweat and sand. Roughly brushing the grit away, she ran a dirty fingernail along the marks, tracing WHORE in dried blood. There’d been three would-be rapists. There were three. One little, two little, three little monster boys.
    Her tongue was dry, big, and thick; her lips stuck to her teeth. The drugged canteen beckoned from the other side of the nightshade. Anna crawled to it, fumbled the cap off, and, in thirst and despair, drank too much, drugging herself more than she had to. Water ran from the corners of her mouth and made mud on her breasts. Instantly, she felt the drug flow into her body, felt her muscles loosening. Her head swam, thoughts sloshing like water in a washtub, slamming against the sides of skull bone and bouncing back on one another.
    It came to her then that she had to get the girl out, had to.
    Having plowed back though the battered weeds, the pain from her injured shoulder driving her as a whip drives a horse, she clawed wildly at the sand. Scratching and scraping like a maniacal cat in a litter box of burning coals.
    The dead woman’s head was freed from the dirt.
    Sore tendons shoving daggers into her, vision tunneled, Anna scooped and scraped, bulldozed with knees and forearms, kicked and dug with her heels. Sweat poured into her eyes and ran in rivulets between her breasts, leaving trails in the dust and grime. Sand stuck to her skin. Grunts and cries bubbled up the neck of her jar. She scarcely knew if she was standing, kneeling, or lying in the grave with the dead girl. Finally, hips braced against the sandstone, one foot planted on the prone woman’s thigh, the other on her shoulder, Anna rolled the body from its grave with an ungentle shove.
    Gasping and sweating, she withdrew her toes from the lifeless flesh and surveyed what she had wrought.
    A girl—the girl the boys were attacking—lay facing the scrap of sky eyes open and sand-crusted. Denim shorts were twisted around her scissored legs. A pink and yellow Hawaiian print bikini bra had been hiked up over her left breast, showing a white triangle where she wasn’t tan and a dark brown nipple. Her right sandal had come un-Velcroed during the one-sided struggle and was smashed beneath her knee. Around one ankle was a thin gold chain, K and A and Y in glittery stones dangling from it, the K wedged between chain and skin.
    “Kay,” Anna whispered. “Welcome to my world.”

TEN
    Past the no-wake zone of the marina, Jenny opened the throttles. Twin Honda motors lifted the twenty-eight-foot Almar cuddy onto plane and exchanged its blunt-nosed sluggish push for an exhilarating rush. As she had for all the seasons and all the times she had emerged from Dangling Rope into the main body of the lake, Jenny experienced a sense of awe.
    Engineers had thrust Lake Powell into this evolving, deformed, magnificent piece of the world. Man still fighting against Nature, and Nature would not lie down and die. She would rage down the Colorado and hurl herself at Man’s fabulous wall, scream, retreat, carve out canyons, and return to pile the debris