Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  That didn’t mean Frederick had pushed her.

  Under her breastbone Anna felt a gnawing: tiny teeth, sharp and vicious, like the fox the Spartan boy hid in his coat. Like the boy of legend, Anna didn’t let the bite show on her face, hid her pain. The gnaw wasn’t the fear that Frederick had pushed her but the unpleasant evil that she almost wished he had. A reason to hate him, to lash out, to keep her sister from him. An assertion he’d been a low and scaly creature bent on hurting more than her ego, trifling with more than her affections. A defensible place to dump the anger and frustration she’d felt for the past days. Scenes ran behind her eyes, fragmented film clips of telling Molly, of the righteous indignation and tears of sympathy.

  At Fifty-ninth Street Anna moved with the herd, changing to the Number 1 train. When the doors opened under Christopher Street she detrained and climbed above ground to settle her mind in the relative peace of the twisting European streets of Greenwich Village. One of the ubiquitous sidewalk eateries, cloned from some immigrant’s vague memory of a bistro, beckoned. A jolly young man rehearsing an Irish brogue brought her a sauvignon blanc. In the strengthening sun of early summer she organized her thoughts and sipped 12.5 percent in glassed courage.

  Thus fortified, she searched out a pay phone tough enough to have survived the neighborhood vandals, and punched out the number of the phone in Molly’s apartment. Frederick answered on the third ring, the familiar “Hello” of a man at home. “I think Dr. Pigeon’s residence would be more appropriate,” she said. Frederick made no reply and she wished she’d kept her venom to herself. “I just called with a couple of questions,” she pushed on.

  Across the street, at another in the array of alfresco cafés, a giant rainbow-hued tricycle, the seat a dozen feet from the sidewalk—piloted by a person in a clown suit and trailing a French poodle in a purple tutu—rolled to a gentle halt. The clown began to play an accordion. The little dog danced. Anna stuffed a finger in her free ear and nosed into the half-shell of metal and plastic that housed the phone. Like much of the city, it smelled of stale urine. “Did you come over to the downtown side of the A platform?” she asked.

  A beat of silence dulled her ear. Then: “Sorry. Rani was climbing up my leg. What did you say?”

  Frederick was going to lie. Anna repeated the question and waited for the inevitable. He didn’t disappoint her. “Why would I do that?” he said, as if he were having a problem recollecting any subway station in his recent past.

  Even people trained to detect lies, to note the signals—vagueness, evasion, answering questions with questions—fell into the same patterns of deceit. Anna chose to cut through the fog. “I saw you. You were walking up the exit stairs with the cat under your arm just as my train was pulling out.”

  Another silence. Anna watched the tricyclist. The clown had stopped playing. His dog ran from table to table with a hat in his mouth.

  “Why the elaborate trap?” Frederick said finally.

  “Not elaborate.”

  “I was on the downtown side. I won’t deny it. ” Resentment laced through his words.

  He’d already denied it, but Anna let that pass. “Why?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  He was in full defensive posture now. It made Anna tired. Too tired for games. “Somebody tried to push me in front of the train,” she said.

  The dog was trotting back to his master, still perched on the seat above the crowd. The clown lowered a butterfly net mounted on a long pole and the dog placed the hat in it to the desultory applause of the onlookers.

  “Anna, you don’t think I pushed you, do you?”

  Frederick’s mix of hurt and affront sounded genuine, but Anna had been lied to by experts. Mostly she’d believed them. At least for a while.

  “No, I don’t,” she said truthfully.

  “Why would I?” Frederick demanded.

  She’d already given that considerable thought. The only reason she could scrape up was his fear that she would come between him and Molly. A motive for murder only if the murderer was insane and did not truly love. Frederick was not and Anna believed he wouldn’t intentionally hurt Molly. Her death would hurt Molly; ergo, Frederick was off the hook.

  “No reason,” she said. “Why did you lie to me?”

  A sigh, pregnant with all the toxins of a man found out, blew through the wires. “I was embarrassed,” he admitted.

  “Why?”

  “Anna, you’re beginning to sound like a broken record. Or a three-year-old.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “Oh, Jesus. Okay, Sherlock, I came to ask when you were going to tell Molly it was okay . . . you know . . . for her and me.”

  “Yup. That’s embarrassing all right.”

  “You never thought I pushed you.”

  “Not with any conviction.”

  “So who did?”

  “An accident,” she replied wearily. “It happens.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  She didn’t but couldn’t say why.

  “You want to come stay with me?” Frederick offered.

  “I would rather embrace the third rail.” To her relief and annoyance, he laughed.

  “See you tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes. Work on that ID for me?”

  “I’m on it.”

  Anna hung up the phone but stayed where she was, looking through the scratched plastic at the tricycle as it lumbered, dog in tow, down the street. Not something one saw every day in Cortez, Colorado.

  “You making a call or what?” came an executive whine.

  She pushed herself from the phone and left it to a prosperous-looking man in spandex and a helmet, a fifteen-speed bicycle balanced on his shoulder.

  Accidents waiting to happen; Anna had read statistics on that somewhere. A dollop of stress, a family tragedy, a lost job. Mind skittered, reflexes slowed and the chances of having an accident skyrocketed. Making a poor decision. Climbing rickety stairs in the dark. Standing too close to the tracks on a crowded platform at rush hour.

  For a minute she stood on the sidewalk, half a dozen feet from the phone, and pondered another sauvignon blanc. Pedestrians eddied around her, taking no more notice of her than they would of a tree or a fire hydrant or—in New York City—a hippopotamus smoking hashish. Greenwich Village was a place of dogs, she noted idly. Big dogs on leashes. Labs and Dobermans and huskies that lived in tiny apartments, out twice a day to “do their business.” Allowed to run only on weekends and then only when their owners weren’t otherwise engaged. A city of happy prisoners.

  Wine evaporated from her wish list. Two glasses would not be enough. More than two would be overkill. Condemned to moderate sobriety, she began to walk. Though there was much to be said for it, urban hiking didn’t work the way a walk in the wilderness did. The seedier parts of town west of the burgeoning gentrification on Hudson Street more closely suited her taste. The stained warehouses, the wildlife in the doorways, the occasional predator glimpsed through a shade-less window, the myriad smaller fry decked out in camouflaging plumage, strutting in hopes of so closely aping the killers as to avoid being killed. These streets sharpened her senses. The need to remain alert and aware took her outside of herself. As evening came, and with it the chill off the Atlantic and the changing of day people for night people, she felt alive and clearheaded.

  Before descending to Manhattan’s end, where the NPS boat docked, she indulged in a pleasure not available in small towns. She foraged for food: crisp lettuce at a vegetable stand, fresh bread from a bakery, pasta and coffee and wine, each item from its own store. Each lovingly selected and anticipated. The convenience of supermarkets, the tossing of packaged goods into a rolling metal cart, saved time but did little to fill a woman’s primal urge to hunt and gather.

  By the time the Liberty IV’s pale wake cut a ragged line through the lights reflected on the harbor, Anna had come to a resting place: Frederick Stanton wasn’t a psychopathic killer and Molly was
on the mend. Sometimes one had to simply take the bad with the good.

  11

  PARTY BOATS PLIED their trade till Anna dreamed of rearming Fort Wood, now serving as Lady Liberty’s step stool, and smashing them into the sea with cannonballs. When silence came, sleep followed, deep and dreamless. She awoke to an empty house and a clock that insisted it was ten-fifteen. She’d not slept that late since she was a teenager. Middle age seemed bent on thwarting this adolescent pleasure. She felt more groggy than refreshed.

  Coffee and a shower drove away the cobwebs and she discovered the day was worth venturing into: clear with the promise of intense heat. Years in the high deserts had turned her into a bit of an exotherm. Bright baking days of true summer recharged batteries drained by long nights and cold winds.

  If all went according to plan, Molly would be in transit today, moving from the ICU to the less threatening climes of a private room on a regular ward. The move—no doubt with Frederick in panting attendance—would take up a chunk of the morning. Anna wouldn’t visit till afternoon. Realizing she felt let off the hook, she accepted a small pang of guilt, but it was short-lived. Given New York City, threats to life and limb and the turning over of a slightly used but still serviceable boyfriend, she’d been a veritable saint. She deserved a morning off. She would spend it lost in the badlands of Ellis Island.

  Having packed a lunch gleaned from the gourmet forage of the previous day—raspberry truffles, blue corn chips, smoked catfish pâté, sweet pickles and some peachy-colored muffinlike item that looked determined to keep one regular, Anna pushed open the kitchen door. Pinched between screen and frame was a legal envelope with the statue’s NPS address in the upper left corner. An official, if unofficially delivered, communiqué for Patsy. Plucking it out to keep it from falling, she saw her own name scrawled across the front.

  To the right of the door, beneath the spare and beautiful branches of an old plane tree, was a bench. The only use Anna had ever seen it put to was as a lounge for Mandy’s sporadic cigarette smoking. Not willing to go back indoors even for the brief time it would take to read the note, she plopped herself and her goods on the wooden slats.

  The missive was written in the same round childish hand as her name. “Dear Ms. Pigeon (Anna),” it read. “I thought about banging on your door but as it was only 7:30 and early, I was afraid you’d still be in bed. That’s where I’d be if I had any sense which I don’t. What I was wondering was if you’d found out anything about that little girl, who she was. I went to the morgue in the city. It’s not that they wasn’t helpful exactly but they didn’t seem much interested. Can’t say as I blame them. There’s a lot of dead people in New York. One more didn’t exactly put them into a frenzy or anything. I think it’s maybe up to me to find out who she belongs to. I feel responsible anyway.

  “They wouldn’t let me see the body which was okay by me. Once was plenty, let me tell you. I’ve seen dead bodies—you know, car crashes and froze climbers and the like, even a vagrant or two when I worked in D.C.—but kids is different. You don’t get used to kids. They let me look at her stuff, her ‘affects.’ There wasn’t much but maybe I got an idea but not much of one.

  “If you come up with anything I could sure use the help. This has got me pretty down. One of the interpreters kind of laid into me last night. Not saying I pushed the little girl, but maybe as how I’d scared her and more or less chased her off that balcony. That maybe is true, I guess I’ll never know. I sure didn’t mean to but ‘mean to’ is pretty sorry at this point.

  “I know I’ll feel a whole lot better if I could at least get her home and buried properly. I didn’t ask where they put unclaimed bodies but I know it’s a kind of lonely and nameless place. Not right for a little girl.

  “I’ll be on tonight, midnight to eight like regular. Come and see me if you don’t have nothing better to do.”

  It was signed, “Yours truly, James Hatchett (Hatch).”

  Leaving her backpack on the bench and delighting in the knowledge that she was in one of the privileged few places in New York City where one could do that with a fair expectation of finding it there on one’s return, Anna went back into the house.

  There was no answer at Molly’s apartment. She’d expected none; she was just covering her bases. Columbia-Presbyterian politely routed her to various helpful souls before they tracked down Molly’s new room number.

  “Hi,” Anna said when her sister picked up. “Is Frederick there?”

  “What, no small talk?” Molly asked, and Anna mentally kicked herself for failing to at least pretend she occasionally thought of someone other than herself.

  “One-track mind,” she apologized. “Remember that guy Hatch I was telling you about? The Park Policeman with the jumper?” Molly didn’t. Anna had related the tale when drugs and tubes were taking up most of her sister’s attention. She began to give a shortened version, when Molly cut her off.

  “Oh, right, the little girl Frederick is investigating.”

  Anna quashed a surge of irritation. It was one thing to preempt a sibling, but taking over a case—even one not technically hers—was a serious breach of etiquette.

  Out of courtesy and guilt, she managed to stifle her impatience and ask Molly a few polite questions: “How are you? How’s the new room?” But she didn’t hear the answers. Molly, sensing Anna was to conversing what empty calories are to dieting, handed the phone over to Frederick Stanton.

  “Hey there, what’s up?”

  He was too jolly by half but he was at Molly’s sickbed and Anna was truant, so she let it slide. “Did you find out anything about that unidentified corpse?”

  “Molly, your little sister is playing with dead children again.” Frederick’s voice veered from the phone. Anna heard Molly laugh and imagined she heard the faintest of snicking sounds, the FBI guy winking at her sister. Molly’s laughter paid for any annoyance incurred and she waited with moderate good cheer till Frederick refocused on the matter at hand.

  “I did get to it,” he said. The caution in his tone let her know not to expect too much. “There’s not a whole lot to go on. They figure she’s thirteen or fourteen years old. No dental work—none. She’s missing a couple teeth. The report said it looked as if they’d been pulled or knocked out. Nothing recent—maybe two to four years ago. No fillings but three cavities, the kind a kid getting regular checkups would have had filled.”

  “That tallies with the runaway theory,” Anna said.

  “Except for the pulled teeth.”

  “Knocked out? Family abuse?”

  “Maybe. There was evidence of an old break to her left ulna, but no other signs of physical abuse. No bruising not caused by the fall. No scars. No injuries in various stages of healing. She was small for her age but not from malnourishment. Skin, hair, teeth, bone development, were all consistent with a child who’s been well fed and well cared for, with the exception of the teeth and scarring on her right eardrum, probably from an ear infection untreated and causing the drum to burst.”

  “Sexual activity?”

  “Hymen intact.”

  “That doesn’t go with making a good living on the street, enough to feed and care for herself well.”

  “Your buddy the Park Policeman thought she was a thief, a pickpocket,” Frederick offered.

  “Crime doesn’t pay like it used to, not at fourteen, not in the city. Somebody was looking after her. Or she ran off recently. So recently she hadn’t time to lose weight or virginity.”

  “No match with missing persons reports,” Frederick went on. “It’ll take a while. She could be from anywhere in the country. New York’s a magnet for runaways.”

  “And actors,” Anna said, apropos of nothing but a fleeting image of Zachary.

  “Like I said,” Frederick teased.

  While he related this feeble witticism to Molly, Anna let the information he’d given her settle in her mind. “Did you see the body?” she asked.

  “How’s that?”

 
; Dutifully Anna repeated the question. Love was making Frederick Stanton goofy. “No,” he replied. “I did look at her effects. The girl traveled light.”

  “Whatever she had would have been in the pack that was stolen,” Anna reminded him.

  “What they’ve got are her pants—either hand-me-downs or thrift-shop, but probably not hers originally. A size too big and the cuffs cut and hemmed by hand. No help there. A boy’s shirt. Ralph Lauren, long-sleeved, a hundred percent cotton, oxford style. Expensive but also probably hand-me-down or secondhand. No belt, no brassiere. Cotton underpants, new, white with blue flowers, Wal-Mart. Socks and shoes no longer new but in good shape. The wear patterns suggest they were bought new for the girl. All the clothes were clean but not ironed.”

  “That’s it?” Anna asked.

  “All I got.”

  “Thanks,” she said absently, and: “See you guys this afternoon.”

  She hung up Patsy’s cordless and wandered back out to the bench under the plane tree. The little girl was cared for insofar as she was fed and clothed and no one had apparently sexually or physically abused her. Yet her teeth had been pulled or knocked out, the cavities left unfilled, and an ear infection, which Anna remembered from childhood as being very painful, left untreated, resulting in a burst eardrum and possible loss of hearing in one ear.

  Several possibilities suggested themselves. The child’s parents or caregivers could be poor. That might account for the secondhand clothing and the lack of medical attention. They could be ignorant and/or poor and so let the child’s health suffer. They could hold religious convictions that forbade the interference of modern medicine in the healing process. None of these explanations fit with the body going unclaimed.

  A vague sense of something forgotten weaseled around in Anna’s skull as she walked the “back alleys” of Liberty Island—a short concrete work area between the building used by park personnel and a line of maintenance storage areas. Mentally she went over Stanton’s oral report and could find nothing missing. Except any real comfort in the form of hard information to offer Hatch when next she saw him.