by Nevada Barr
She needn’t have worried. Something occurred that she’d not foreseen. Molly was, for once, too wrapped up in herself to pay much attention to her little sister. Anna was both relieved and, though she’d never have admitted it regardless of red-hot pokers and bamboo shoots under the fingernails, just a wee bit miffed.
This miniature snit was blown away by the stunningly beautiful sight of her sister’s smile. Weak, watery, lips dry and cracked, it lit up the room, put a glow over Manhattan beside which the bright lights of the Great White Way paled.
The breathing tube was still out and, Anna noted with vicious satisfaction, the apparatus had been banished from the bedside. Gone too was the dialysis machine. As Dr. Madison had promised, her kidneys had recovered on their own.
Molly wasn’t sitting, precisely, but she was propped up on three pillows. Her hair was combed and she had a touch of color in her cheeks. Makeup, Anna could tell, but for a woman like Molly the act of applying cosmetics was a slap in the face of death. The gauntlet of rouge had been thrown down; Molly had entered the fray.
“Looks like you’ve had quite a night,” Anna said, and laughed with delight so pure it threatened to melt into tears. “Good thing I got here early before you left to play golf or something.”
“Maybe tomorrow. Today I’m just hoping to get out of the ICU.”
“Blastoff is thirteen hundred hours according to Dr. Madison,” Frederick Stanton added. “After lunch, if Molly doesn’t screw things up for me. Downstairs they have real chairs for visitors.” Frederick did look awkward with his bones sprinkled haphazardly over the narrow straight-backed chair. Today he was without props. The guitar had been left behind; no new inspirational items had been imported from Molly’s apartment. A paperback copy of Robert Frost’s poems and a shoebox rested on the floor by his chair.
Robert Frost. He’s come a-courtin’, went through Anna’s mind, surprising her because the realization was so devoid of personal rancor. She found herself liking this unforeseen aspect of the FBI guy. Should he perform a hundred more acts of sensitivity and commitment, she might consider entrusting her sister to his care. With that thought came the not entirely welcome knowledge that she did have that power. One word from her and Molly would again slam the iron door of her heart.
“Hey, Frederick,” Anna said, making a mental note to be very careful what she said around the two of them lest she inadvertently slam any iron. Having unfolded a plastic chair some kind soul had left in the room, she scooted it near Molly, occupying the space where the hated respirator had been. Fifteen, twenty seconds ticked by. Nobody said anything. Molly and Frederick exchanged a look Anna could not fathom.
“What?” she demanded. Another look passed between them. A thready little cry leaked out from nowhere.
“Stop that, Anna,” Molly said. Though still whispery, authority had returned to her voice.
“What?” Anna said again, beginning to lose her hard-won good cheer. Again the creaky little noise. Molly was making it or Frederick was. A game of some kind. Anna was not amused. She regressed: “You stop,” she snapped.
Molly laughed. Out loud. The old good whiskey laugh, and it all fell in place. Back in the days when it meant a week in a darkened room, Anna had had the measles. Because she was a giving little beast, she’d infected her sister. At twelve, Molly had somehow missed the disease. As a special treat, their mother had let the two feverish children spend the day in her and Dad’s double bed. By two o’clock the sisters had worn out one another’s patience. Around quarter past, their mother had poked her head in. After she left, Molly started making weird sounds and blaming them on Anna. They’d nearly come to blows before they discovered the gift their mother had left to help them pass the dark, dull hours.
“A kitten!” Anna exclaimed. “You’ve got a kitten.” A half-smile playing around her mouth, Molly reached beneath the sterile white sheets. In that instant she looked twelve years old again.
“Frederick brought her,” Molly said. Cupped in her hands was a small gray Persian kitten, a kitten like the one in the picture Stanton had brought from her apartment. Anna couldn’t even guess how many pet stores he’d have had to canvass to find such a perfect match. Ninety-nine more acts of sensitivity and commitment.
“Rajah,” she said stupidly.
“Rani.”
“Right. You don’t want a cat,” Anna said, wondering why she wasn’t entering into the spirit of the thing.
“It’s my cat,” Frederick said. “At least until Molly falls hopelessly in love and decides to keep us.”
The “us” wasn’t lost on either of the Pigeon sisters. Molly looked uncomfortable and Anna stomped in to make things right. “She will. We will. Molly likes cats. It’s a fine cat.” She was floundering, but her sister seemed to understand she meant well. Molly relaxed, holding the gray puffball to her drawn cheek and closing her eyes.
Molly’s love life was an enigma Anna had spent quite a bit of time fantasizing about when she was younger. Molly never talked much about it, thus adding an irresistible aura of mystery. As Anna grew up she’d come to believe there were no great secrets, just little interest. Molly was made for the cliché “married to her work.” Psychiatry and ambition filled the places in her life where other women stashed husbands and children.
She had been married once, for eighteen months, when she was an intern. If the dissolution of that union left any scars, Molly had never let Anna see them. It wasn’t that Molly lived a celibate life. For eight years or so in her forties, she’d carried on a desultory long-distance affair with a neurosurgeon in Laguna Beach, California. The romance died from neglect. Frederick was the first man Anna had seen really spark something more than desire in Molly’s eyes. Anna wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but there was a faint stench of the Wicked Stepsister about it, of not wanting something until it proved of value to someone else.
The short morning’s visit had exhausted Molly. When lunch came, her visitors left—Anna, Frederick and, hidden away from the vigilant eyes of the hospital staff in its shoebox, the kitten.
“What do Emmett and his family think about Rani?” Anna asked when the silence in the elevator began to prickle.
“We’re staying in Molly’s apartment,” Frederick said. His voice was oh so carefully neutral. He was scared. Anna toyed with the idea of throwing her weight around, abusing her power just because she could, but in the end, she couldn’t drum up the energy required to be spiteful.
“I’m okay with this, you know,” she said. “You and I were what we were, had what we had, but that’s blood under the bridge. You make Molly happy, you make me happy.”
A silence followed, long enough for the elevator doors to open and the two of them to walk through the aching, injured aura of the hospital halls to the bustling sunshine outside.
“And if I don’t make her happy?” Frederick asked at last.
“I will devise a slow and Machiavellian torture comprising three parts Spanish Inquisition and two parts Nazi war crimes,” Anna said. She laughed and Frederick tried to.
“Why don’t I think you’re kidding?”
Anna didn’t reply, but she suspected it was because the man had good instincts.
Seated on the cool, slick plastic of the subway car benches, he spoke again, leaning into her to be heard over the clatter of metal on metal. “It’s not just me who needs to know you’re okay with this.”
Anna waited while nasty retorts cleared off her tongue. Her tender feelings hadn’t been consulted in Frederick’s pursuit of Molly two years before or two days before. Her being “okay” with the romance hadn’t mattered a damn from the moment he laid eyes on her sister.
It was Molly who cared.
Anger born of injured pride spewed vile thoughts into her brain and acid remarks into her mouth. Jaws locked, eyes ahead, she sat till the eruption passed.
It was Molly who mattered.
“I’ll tell her,” she said, and was pleased at the very nearly friendly tone of
her voice. “Give me the kitten.”
With the air of a man sealing a bargain, Frederick passed the ventilated shoebox to her lap and Anna squeezed her fingers under the lid to be rewarded by the velvet pats and needle pricks of tiny paws.
The A train bashed on. Unlikely worlds flickered through the windows. Hitchcockian views of strangers on a train, startling Christie images of the four-fifty from Paddington, shattered by a disorienting strobe of shadow and light. Anna played with the cat. Frederick stared at his feet, long and biblical in leather sandals. He had hair on the tops of his toes, like a hobbit. Anna had never noticed that before. In the grumbling bowels of Manhattan, she found the touch of whimsy endearing.
“Do me a favor?” she asked suddenly.
Frederick shot her a glance that was an interesting mixture of hope and trepidation. Again, Anna realized her power. In this bizarre circumstance, she held, as the nineteenth-century romanticists might have expressed it, the key to his future happiness in the palm of her little hand. The hope, she guessed, was that he could win her over with favors. The trepidation, no doubt, over just what those favors might be. Slaying dragons and ogres was the standard going rate for the hand of any self-respecting princess. Psychiatrists with a profitable practice might go for considerably more.
A moment passed and Frederick said: “Name it.”
Anna’s mind had been turning on James Hatchett. She liked him, pitied him his predicament. The body of the fallen child had been plowed into New York’s considerable justice system. In a city of over seven million people the identification of a dead child, probably a runaway nobody wanted, would of necessity take a backseat to more pressing matters. A Park Policeman, particularly one suspected of possible involvement, would have a tough time sorting through jurisdictions and cutting red tape to get information.
“I need a corpse identified,” Anna said, and smiled at the relief on the FBI guy’s face. Dead people, Frederick was comfortable with. The dead, and those who assisted them into that state, were a goodly part of his job and, as he’d said more than once, some of his best friends were dead people.
Briefly, Anna told him of the jumping death at the statue, of Hatch, the child, the accusation, the missing backpack. “I thought maybe you could lean on your buddy Emmett. Turn over a few rocks for me.”
“Consider it done.” Frederick shook her hand, then dropped it as if it had suddenly morphed into a suckery tentacle.
He rode with her to the Seventy-second Street station. There they both detrained to spend an exceedingly agreeable hour at the pet shop where he had purchased Rani. The cage housing Rani’s two sisters was marked: “Purebred Persians—$499.95.” Anna whistled appreciatively as she passed. “You’ve got it bad.”
“Bad,” he agreed, in the tone of a man diagnosed with an inoperable tumor.
Anna didn’t laugh. He was still scared. And well he should be. He’d already gone through two wives, three kids and Anna. The time had come for him to wake up and be seriously frightened before he dove into another relationship.
After Rani had been outfitted with food, litter box, toys, a tiny purple harness with “diamond” accents and a matching lead, Anna and Frederick repaired to Central Park across the avenue from the subway entrance. While Rani tried her Houdini impersonation in an attempt to wriggle out of her new finery, Anna and Frederick enjoyed ice cream and a rare perfect day in early summer when the park was still fresh with new green, leaves and grass not yet having taken on that soiled, trampled aspect of tired carnival grounds.
Neither of them talked of Molly, though Anna wanted to and, from the way he jumped from topic to topic and gusted forth half-sentences, she suspected Stanton was bursting with the need. She remembered and was jealous. Not of Molly but of Frederick, of that wild ride of new love. Or, in his case, old love aflame with new possibilities.
By mutual unspoken agreement they did not speak of the past, their affair or its limping conclusion.
Areas of conversation thus limited, all that remained was the day, the park, the cat and Anna’s island gossip. For her it felt good to have a death and a small mystery to discuss. She and Frederick had met over murder and worked two cases together before their first date. To dwell again on crime turned the clock back to the days before sex and muttered reticent declarations of love had complicated their friendship.
By the time they again wormed their way under the spiny surface of Manhattan, rush hour had commenced. Frederick left her to the downtown side of the tracks and took the uptown.
The subway platform was crowded. Trains and commuters complained. Elbows jostled, bags and hips nudged. Anna sweated, claustrophobia climbing up her esophagus to dump foul-tasting bile behind her teeth. Coping mechanisms were pulled from memory and she dug Wilkie Collins out of her daypack and retreated gratefully to the previous century.
People continued to pour down the stairs, an unending flood of humanity. No train came. Anna was pushed closer to the tracks. Around her, New Yorkers indulged in the fruitless pastime of leaning out over the six-foot drop where the tracks were recessed to stare into the sweltering tunnels as if they could create trains with sheer willpower. The crush intensified. Anna shifted her weight to her heels to keep from being squeezed off the platform. Shoulders hunched, she reduced her world to the freedom of the printed page. Dimly she was aware the air around her was being breathed in by ever more pairs of lungs. Mere sips were left for her. She read on doggedly.
When it seemed the station must spontaneously combust from the fetid friction of so many bodies, the roar of an oncoming train stirred the crowd the way wind stirs a field of grain. People began jockeying for position, semisentient roulette balls guessing where the doors would stop.
Anna marked her place in the book with her finger and looked up, ready to do battle for a space in the nearest car. Air was pushed from the canyon housing the rails, bringing up the scent of metal and electricity. A picture of bumper car rides at the county fair flashed behind Anna’s eyes. Image triggered action. As the train thundered into the station, someone bumped her, hard, in the small of her back. Wilkie Collins flew from her grasp and she watched, helpless, as the paperback was sucked down onto the rails.
Unbalanced by the shove, she began to tumble after, her moccasined feet slipping from the edge of the platform. A scream—an aborted bark of sound—was drowned by the approaching wreck of noise. Her arms windmilled as she tried to regain control. Her hand smacked something remotely flesh-like and another cry was added to the din. Still she fell. The world kaleidoscoped, mismatched pieces forced together as brain and body flailed for equilibrium. The train smashed into her peripheral vision, filling the station with bone-crushing force. Below, the rails glimmered faintly, scraps of litter swirling between them. In the cropped edges of her vision the feet of those still firmly rooted to the platform flickered: crimson high heels; battered sneakers; army boots, the leather scuffed and torn.
The instant of her death was frozen in time and space. The straps of her daypack jerked her back. Loose-jointed as a puppet, she flopped into the man behind her. He was big of belly, shoulders and head. An immense black man in a tailor-made gray silk suit had grabbed her pack in one meaty fist and lifted her to safety.
“Watch yourself,” he growled when she tried to thank him. “You fall under a train it ties things up for hours.”
The train stopped, doors opened and he was gone. A flock of lesser beings hurried along in his wake as he cleared a path onto the downtown A train. Anna made it on just as the doors closed. Knees still weak from her brush with disaster, she turned her back on the human meat packaged with her and stared out the window. Halfway down the now sparsely populated platform she glimpsed a tall, dark-haired man. Spectral fingers tapped out the theme from The Twilight Zone on the xylophone of her spine.
“Get a grip,” she whispered. “Cut out the alcohol. Start exercising. Get more sleep. Eat less sugar.” People under stress were more accident-prone. That was fact. The stairs on Ellis
. Now the subway.
The train lurched. The window blanked with tunnel wall.
Under the tall dark-haired man’s arm was what Anna could have sworn was a shoebox. Just the size for transporting a five-hundred-dollar cat.
10
SEVERAL STOPS CAME and went. Anna was aware of them only in the sense that an increasingly odious press of bodies was injected into the car, edging her from her place by the doors. So tightly was she hemmed in by pliant walls of flesh, through the insult of stops and starts, she didn’t need to hold on to remain upright.
Despite the duress of forced camaraderie, she didn’t miss the companionship of Wilkie Collins or feel the suffocating nearness of her extemporaneous neighbors. Preoccupation closed around her, rock ramparts intact. The debilitating weakness that flooded her in the wake of her near miss had passed. Once again her knees were sufficient to hold her. Her heart no longer pounded high in her throat.
Manhattan was undoubtedly home to thousands of tall dark-haired men blessed with the physique of pencil-necked geeks. It wasn’t even unlikely that a handful of them might be passing through a subway station shortly after she’d received a fright. But the odds of any one of them carrying a white perforated shoebox of a size and shape suitable for the incarceration of kittens were some excessively large number to one.
Frederick Stanton had been fleeing up the stairs of the downtown side of the tracks moments after her silk-clad angel of mercy snatched her from the proverbial jaws.
