Free The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel by Nevada Barr Page A

at the foot of his dam.
    When the canyons were flooded there had been angry outcries from those who loved the crooked desert channels with their stone arches, rainbow-hued walls, and wealth of history. Jenny would have loved them as well, but not the way she loved the lake, how it met the land, lifted her up, invited her to share secrets hidden for eons.
    Uplake, where the water was close to five hundred feet deep, high on a cliff wall was the bottom of a ledge where a slab had fallen away. There, upside down, as if the creature had lived when there was no gravity, was a line of dinosaur prints, three-toed marks, walking into oblivion. Geologists surmised the fossils were hidden when the sediment flipped and heaved, then lay buried for millions of years, to be exposed when the slab fell away. For eons the tracks were lost halfway down a cliff a thousand feet high. With the lake, they could be seen with the naked eye. Backcountry purists suggested that if these sights weren’t earned by the labor of hiking in to them, they were undeserved, as if too many eyes sullied them.
    That salon-tanned rich women and greedy developers vacationing somewhere they hadn’t ruined yet could see the dinosaur prints from the decks of their yachts didn’t bother Jenny one whit. Like luck, no matter how many people enjoyed beauty, one’s share of it was never diminished.
    Of all the wonders the lake made accessible to the fat, the lazy, and the inebriated, Panther Canyon was Jenny’s favorite. A conscientious mother, Jenny would never admit as much in front of the other canyons.
    Panther was one finger uplake from Dangling Rope. Like the rest of the water-filled crevices, it was a drainage for the Colorado Plateau. It also carried the brunt of the runoff from Fiftymile Mountain. Subsequently it was deeper and longer than most, snaking north and east for eleven miles.
    Desert varnish painted the cliffs to either side of the channel, intricate designs in black and red, traceries that looked like the finest lace ever tatted, then slipped into the strong strokes of an irate painter with a burning vision of the universe, only to be offset by a whimsical natural cartoon resembling Snoopy or Betty Boop, or the abstract swish of a soaring bird.
    The top of Panther’s walls were buff-colored sandstone, the middle red-gold Navajo sandstone, and, near the water, gray Cedar Mesa Sandstone: Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic. Through the windscreen of her boat she could see two hundred and thirty million years into the past.
    Jenny cut back the throttle as the channel grew slender, teal water glowing gold where shoulders of stone shrugged toward the surface, light playing from water to walls, sending darting, ephemeral fishes swimming toward the canyon rim. Panther Canyon didn’t so much end as unravel in ever smaller side canyons that twisted and shredded into the rock.
    There was only one place boats could beach in Panther, and it was Jenny’s sacred place. Shortly before one of the unraveling threads thinned to a slot that would wedge a water snake, should it swim far enough, was a clamshell grotto fifty yards long, at least a hundred feet high at the top of the arch, and twenty-six yards deep. Fine white sand, mirroring the crescent shape of the roof, carpeted the floor.
    The previous summer it was smooth and flat to where the wall curved down to meet the sand. Spring of 1995 had been wetter than usual. Flash floods roared down in grinding tides, resculpting the landscape. This summer, halfway between the shore and the back wall was a sandy shelf six feet high.
    Sheltered from the elements—and too high for the graffiti vandals to reach—pictographs survived, paintings of strange creatures twice the size of human beings with diamond-shaped torsos, tiny heads, and stunted arms that stalked the imaginations of ancient artists. Three of them kept watch over the grotto.
    This sacred grotto was Omaha Beach in Jenny’s war—a favorite camp, where