Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  Once she was clear of the tourist-choked quay, all that glittered was gold to Anna. Sunlight, splintered into mirror shards by a choppy wind teasing the harbor, sparkled from below. Sailboats were out in force, triangles of winged color blowing across the water. The occasional fisherman, lines cast from his boat, hoping for edible fish. Ferries, one from Staten Island and two from the Circle Line, churned unstoppably through the lesser fry.

  Stepping off the Liberty IV, Anna realized the something missing that had been plaguing her had nothing to do with Frederick’s report on the girl. It was a beverage. In her lunch-filled knapsack, she’d neglected to pack anything to drink. Knowing where Patsy kept her stash, she rode the elevator to the second floor of the powerhouse behind the registry building on Island I and made her way down the kinked corridor to the employee break room.

  Minutes after the noon hour, it was inhabited by the park’s acting troupe. The faux Jamaican and the faux Irishman sat at one table lunching in what struck Anna as sullen silence. At the second table, alone at the far end of the room, sat a third character clad in the garments of a nineteenth-century western European immigrant. The familiar brown dress was a couple sizes too small for the woman wearing it and, to Anna’s surprise, the hair wasn’t the pale yellow of the fragile blonde who’d professed such an interest in Billy Bonham and his pet ghosts, but flaming-red hair cut in a modern ear-length bob.

  “Hey, Mandy,” Anna said as she took a Coke from the refrigerator. “Nice uniform.”

  “Hah!” Mandy returned. She actually said “Hah!” just like Anna imagined it when she came across the expression in books. “That size-one bitch—”

  A spoon was clacked forcefully down on the Formica at the actors’ table. “Poor little Miss Mandy.” A warm Irish burr cut into the interpreter’s words. “Havin’ to squeeze her considerable ‘talents’ into Corinne’s costume has ruined her temper.”

  The woman portraying the Jamaican finished the insult. “Tight clothing constricts the lymph flow. Throws the bodily humors out of balance. Hence Miss Mandy is out of humor.”

  “It’s that or bad acting,” Brooklyn Irish muttered, a stage whisper meant to be audible at a distance.

  A flush crept to Mandy’s pale cheeks. Baiting her would be child’s play, Anna thought. “I’ve had about enough of you,” Mandy said, and stood to gather up her lunch things.

  “Right you are, lass, right you are,” the actor said, still using his character accent. “It was ungentlemanly of me to enter into a battle of wits with an unarmed woman.”

  The black actress laughed. Mandy knew she was being insulted, but Anna was willing to bet she didn’t know exactly how. At a loss for a sharper retort, she said: “At least I show up.” With a snitty-sounding click of heels on the linoleum, she stomped out of the lunchroom.

  “Where is Corinne?” Anna asked.

  “Maybe she got a real acting job,” the man in knee britches replied.

  “Fighting with Macho Bozo,” the actress suggested.

  “Ran off with sweet Billy Bonham,” the man added.

  “More power to her,” said the actress. “Wish she’d called in sick or dead, though. Working with the Mandy beast is what I believe they refer to as suffering for one’s art.”

  “She is most definitely a black hole on stage into which all talent vanishes,” the actor agreed.

  From this rattled exchange, which was not directed at Anna but meant only to amuse the two theater people, she surmised Corinne had gone AWOL and left them holding a Mandy-sized bag.

  Having little interest in taking on the role of audience in this comedy, she wished them luck, tucked her soda in her daypack and followed the pitter-patter of Mandy’s feet down the corridor toward the elevator. Avoiding human interaction on Island I, she slunk down the bricked walkway and through the decaying laundry room with its rusting mangle and shredded ceiling. Ascending floor after floor, each more decrepit than the last, each housing its own biosphere dictated by how much of the natural world had penetrated the old hospital’s man-made defenses, Anna felt the cares of the peopled world dropping away much as they did when she stepped off trail and hiked into the wilderness on the mesas of southern Colorado.

  She’d not been into the labyrinth of rooms and hallways of Island II since the first days of rain. Golden light poked warm fingers through broken windows, down skylights and into the chinks in mortar and wood. As she climbed into the final stairwell leading to the fourth floor, the one sans stairs that could only be ascended by clinging to an aging rail and finding footholds on the stubs of long-gone risers, each patch of light was verdant with tiny green mosses. Above, on the landing beneath a skylight, were the familiar branches of the little oak glowing yellow-green with new foliage, its roots sunk in the verdure of rot and bird droppings, its leaves reaching for the glory of an obscured sky.

  Anna muscled up the last yard and stepped away from the crumbling hole that once housed five stories of stairs. For a moment she stood tasting the peculiar brand of urban silence. Across the inlet, on Island I, was the mutter of thousands of voices, the growl of ferryboat motors. Muted by thick stone walls and the knowledge that the babbling hoi polloi could not reach her, it deepened the quiet of the ancient building for Anna. She listened until the small voices of the gods began to make themselves heard. In a nearby attic a pigeon murmured. A rat, a mouse, a small bird or a very large spider scratched through dead leaves. Quietly, like the ringing of tiny bells, the previous week’s rain dripped unseen behind the walls, beneath the floorboards. Breathing deeply, as if iron bands had fallen from around her chest, Anna skirted the captive sapling and entered the second door on the left: her aerie, her hiding place.

  Remnants of the Coast Guard’s mess were scattered across the floor, covered now with several inches of dust and debris. Moss, green and thick, carpeted the floor in oblongs beneath each window where air, light and moisture had made their way inside. Reading with great care lest she prove the Assistant Superintendent right about her ability to take care of herself in this derelict backcountry, she crossed toward the sun-dappled balcony. Planting her rump on the granite sill, she prepared to swing through to freedom. Self-defenestration. “Defenestrate,” she said, and smiled, wondering if it was a verb.

  This idle amusement was aborted. Between her feet, inside the window, clearly marked in the new-made loam of the fourth floor, were two clear prints of human feet, bare feet.

  A jolt, possibly as deep as that of Robinson Crusoe on seeing Friday’s track in the sand, wiped Anna’s mind clear. For no reason she could put her finger on, she felt afraid. Though difficult to reach, the top floor of the Island II buildings could hardly be called inaccessible. And she could scarcely be the only explorer lured into the twisting heart of the old hospital. How did the law put it? The words surfaced: she had no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in this place.

  A bootprint, she decided, would not have shaken her. It was the mark of little bare feet. A small woman or a child pattering about without shoes in a place that only a lunatic would attempt to traverse unshod. Islands II and III were a mecca for lockjaw germs—or whatever microorganism caused the condition.

  Ghosts, Anna thought, Billy Bonham’s stories coming to mind, the pallor of his lips and the twitch of his lower eyelid as he told them. A tremor ran through her, a sensation her grandmother would have attributed to the unexplained phenomenon of a goose walking across one’s grave.

  “Ghosts don’t leave tracks,” she said aloud, and laughed because she was absurdly relieved by that piece of paranormal wisdom.

  She slid from the sill, crouching down for a closer look. Moss covered half the area where this creature had stood. The springing nature of the plant obliterated most of the print of the left foot and a quarter of the right. Choosing a patch of virgin territory, Anna pressed the heel of her hand into the moss, putting her weight behind it. Miniature fronds were crushed, releasing a pleasant forest smell. They stayed crushed. How long the plants would rem
ain that way, she could only guess, but judging by the recovery of the plant material that had been stepped on, the prints were probably eighteen to twenty-four hours old. They were approximately the size of her own feet. In her distraction over Molly’s illness the last time she’d fled to this hideout, could she have kicked off her shoes without thinking? That would be like her were she at home, or even in a camp she’d policed. Not so in a crumbling wreck of nail and brick and glass. She’d hiked too many miles not to have learned to take care of her feet.

  This little creature, then, was not a ranger—or not a very bright or very experienced ranger. “Hah!” Anna echoed Mandy as she suffered nostalgia for the good old days when National Park Rangers were generalists. They knew the flora, the fauna, enforced the laws, picked up garbage, deported hostile raccoons and, when called upon, played the guitar around the campfire. No more. Specialization had taken over. It was not unusual to find a law enforcement ranger who was merely a cop in green pants, who didn’t give a damn for the resource, just liked carrying a gun and the excitement of the chase. Or an administrative ranger who didn’t know a big-horn from a bobcat and worked only for salary, retirement and medical insurance.

  A ranger could have made the footprints. A ranger who’d never walked the wilderness, depended on her boots and muscles to carry her that last twenty miles out to a cold beer and a hot bath. Anna huffed, a noise very like the “Harumph!” found in England’s comedies. The sound made her smile at her own snobbery. Still and all, she doubted the tracks were made by a ranger.

  Since the footprints were the size of her own feet, it was a safe bet the owner of the feet that made them had a stride about equal to hers. Without moving, she searched the floor in a two-foot radius from the marks. Her scrutiny was rewarded by a portion of a heel print toward the center of the room. Painstaking searching led her to three more. The barefoot intruder had come in by the same door as Anna.

  In the hallway Anna lost the trail. Away from the windows, the rubble was of larger chunks and a harder consistency. Not a good medium for tracking.

  A glance at her watch told her it was one-thirty. She had to abandon the hunt or give up her picnic lunch. Since she didn’t know why she was so intent on tracking a person she had no pressing need to find, hunger won out.

  MOLLYWAS REGAINING her health with a rapidity that warmed Anna’s heart. That she could take no credit for it pinched a little in the vicinity of her ego, but not so much that she couldn’t keep it from showing. Frederick too was looking better with every passing day. He’d gotten a haircut that wasn’t half bad and was dressing like a man in love: shirt pressed, trousers with a crease and a good fit through the butt and crotch. The Jesus sandals were gone, replaced by a pair that looked vaguely Italian.

  Sartorially speaking, Anna was definitely outclassed. Ensconced in a private room, free of tubes and machines, Molly was sitting up and wearing a new bed jacket. Not the cliché of peachy quilted pseudo satin and feathery weirdness that Anna might have expected from a man not accustomed to shopping—for it was obvious from the joy with which Molly wore it and the proprietary pride on Frederick’s face that he’d bought it for her—but a buttery-soft stonewashed Levi’s jacket embroidered with a colorful riot of jungle birds and tropical blooms.

  Rani was not in evidence and Anna missed her. And Molly and Frederick were bending over backward to make her feel included. So much so that she strongly suspected they had discussed “the problem of Anna” in advance of her arrival. It would have been nice to have a playmate, even one with claws and a tail.

  As she began to cast about for an excuse to escape, she was rescued by the timely appearance of Dr. Madison. Long-necked, balding pate, his head preceded him into the doorway like a cartoonist’s depiction of a balloon.

  He blinked several times, his pale blue eyes looking unfocused and rabbity behind the bifocal lenses of his spectacles.

  “Good afternoon, David,” Molly said.

  Anna noted with pride that Molly’s power was flowing back. The sheer force of her wolfish personality cloaked in the sheepskin of good manners instantly relegated Dr. Madison to the role of guest in his own hospital.

  The doctor seemed to sense it too. He smiled, a sweet guileless grin that ruffled his short beard and showed a row of very white but singularly crooked bottom teeth. “Looks like you don’t need me,” he said, and came into the room checking charts and feeling pulses in a routine made so familiar by medical dramas on television that Anna couldn’t help feeling it was an act.

  That done, there was some tepid doctor banter he and Molly dredged up to fill time. It petered out and still the doctor loomed around the room, his six-foot-five-inch gaunt frame teetering like an unbalanced question mark. Surely if he needed a private word with his patient, he would exhibit the professional wherewithal to say so outright.

  “Earning your visit fee?” Molly joked. Madison laughed but made no move to leave. Armed with the short-lived but potent telepathy of new love, Molly and Frederick exchanged glances. Anna edged toward the door.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess I’d better be getting back to ...” Since she had no job, no family, no life to be getting back to at the moment, the sentence faded out.

  “Would you like a tour of the facility?” Dr. Madison asked.

  “Facility?” Anna echoed.

  “The hospital.” He seemed very close to animated and Anna realized that till this second he’d moved with the slow grace of a man seen through thick fog.

  “No. God no,” she said. “I’ve seen way too much of it as it is.”

  “Do it,” Molly commanded. She and Frederick exchanged another psychic glance and Anna realized it wasn’t Molly Dr. Madison wanted a word alone with. It was her. A hollow place opened up and she felt the sickening adrenaline rush one gets when Death rears his ugly head unexpectedly. Madison was going to tell her that Molly was dying, that this apparent recovery was a false dawn.

  “Okay,” she managed, and walked woodenly from the room. A warmth was on her lower back, Madison’s propelling hand, but she felt it distantly, as if it happened in a dream.

  “Let’s see.” Madison’s voice floated above her head. “I can offer you the morgue, the newborns’ nursery, the operating theater and the cafeteria. What suits your fancy?”

  Anna stopped abruptly and he plowed into her. Stepping back so she didn’t have to look so far up to meet his eyes, she said: “I don’t need to see anything. Just tell me.”

  An irritating blankness smoothed his face. “Tell you?”

  “What you dragged me out here to tell me. Tell me.”

  Shoving his hands into the pockets of his ill-fitting lab coat, he looked down the hall in the direction from which they’d just come. Maybe he hoped for rescue. An image of grabbing that long slender neck and wringing information from it flickered violently through Anna’s mind. “Tell me,” she repeated.

  “I was hoping to ease into it a little more naturally, but I’d thought now Molly’s out of danger, and I can’t be considered to be blackmailing you into being nice to me, we could go out to dinner or something. Drinks. Coffee,” he finished when Anna failed to respond to his first offer.

  She still wanted to strangle him—for frightening her if for no other reason—but she knew she was out of line. The mistake had been hers. Frederick had known. Molly had known. Hence the command: “Do it.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and walked toward the elevators.

  David Madison drifted along at her left shoulder, a wayward cloud between her and Columbia-Presbyterian’s fluorescent suns.

  “I was married for twenty-three years. I’ve been divorced for two and a half. Since the divorce I’ve been on three dates and one of them doesn’t count because it was my cousin. What I am saying is, if it’s not me personally you find unacceptable, then there’s the chance that my admitted lack of experience has caused me to ask all the wrong questions the wrong way. In the last quarter of a century it’s possible ‘dinner, dri
nks and coffee’ might have become slang for some unspeakable practice. I’ll never know unless you help me out.”

  Anna poked the elevator button several times in hopes of hurrying it along.

  “We could go to the zoo,” he suggested. “Or an art museum. I’m pretty worthless at art museums. I’m the kind of person they could rent a bicycle to at the front desk. I’d enjoy the ride but no stopping and studying the masters or anything. Especially at the Guggenheim. Wouldn’t you love to ride a bike down the Guggenheim?”

  Anna was being charmed. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sensation. “I thought you were going to give me bad news about my sister,” she admitted.

  “What! But I was so careful. I never sat down once and I made a point not to appear benevolent or caring.”

  It felt good to laugh and to see the pleasure her laughter brought him. The elevator doors opened and Dr. Madison took Anna’s elbow protectively. A nurse in her sixties and most kindly described as “Rubenesque” stepped out. Her name tag identified her as Sonya Twining. In a glance she took in Anna and Madison. “Forty-five?” she asked the doctor, and smiled so sweetly Anna suspected an underlying dislike.

  Ignoring her, David Madison said, “After you,” ushered Anna into the elevator and rode to the lobby with her. By the time he walked her out to the sidewalk she’d agreed to drinks at the Rainbow Room and dinner at a Chinese restaurant she’d never heard of but he assured her was “the finest in the city.”

  She was halfway to the subway before it occurred to her that she had only Levi’s to wear. Times might have altered considerably since she’d lived in New York, but there were anchors of sanity in the ever-changing sea of culture. She had a sinking feeling that the Rainbow Room was such an anchor. It had been a jacket-and-tie kind of place. Scruffy specimens such as herself were turned away at the door. Usually by an impeccably dressed male who took few pains to disguise his abhorrence for peasants who had the unmitigated gall to storm the castle gate.