Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  For a semester of Thursday nights, Anna played board games with the white-card holders. They wore no mark of Cain. They were ordinary—grocery clerks, computer programmers, carpenters, schoolteachers, bus drivers, engineers. They were nice, sometimes funny, warm, often kind. Nobody leered. Nobody drooled. Nobody played pocket pool. And eighty percent of them would be back in prison within a few years for the same offenses.

  James Hatchett could be one. There would be no outward signs. A wife might suspect, or a friend close enough to notice when answers didn’t fit questions, when times were vague or unaccounted for.

  The wretched grinding stopped abruptly. “Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Colette said, and laughed. “This lady was one tough old bird. Can I tell you anything else about your girl?”

  “Did anything strike you as odd?” Anna asked, for lack of a better question.

  “Other than the headfirst attitude, not a thing.”

  “Can you determine mental illness in an autopsy?” Anna asked, knowing the answer was no.

  “No,” Colette said. “Brain tumor et cetera, sure. There was nothing like that. Did the usual blood work. No drugs—Thorazine, lithium, Paxil, Depakote, not even Prozac or Zoloft. Nothing that might suggest she was being treated for mental illness. But then, not everybody gets treated.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said.

  “Anytime.” Colette fired up the saw and Anna let herself back out into the hall. Mental institutions dropped to a lower priority on her list. Had the girl escaped from one recently enough to be in as good shape as she was, there would probably still be some sign of psychotropic drugs. Anyone sick enough to be committed to a mental institution required medical intervention. Talk therapy only worked on garden-variety neurotics. She’d have to ask Molly how long those drugs stayed in the system.

  The building was bustling. Full of businesslike people in nice clothes. Her preconception of empty gray halls echoing with spooky footsteps was suffering a severe onslaught of reality. After a few wrong turns and asking directions once, she found her way to the property room, a large, well-organized place of drawers. Since there was no crime reported, Jane Doe’s worldly goods were not evidence and so had not been taken into the chain of custody by the New York Police Department. An exceedingly disinterested young man, a hardcover book on higher math reluctantly abandoned at Anna’s intrusion, checked a computer. Anna’s name was on it.

  She reminded herself to thank David Madison when they met for their date. Anna was dating. The thought made her uncomfortable.

  The young man vanished to reappear with a box precisely sized and marked with Ms. Doe’s particulars. He opened it and Anna was allowed to look without touching. Sneakers, socks, shirt, trousers, underpants: all the items Frederick had mentioned. Again she had the feeling something was missing. This time she couldn’t write it off to an incomplete picnic lunch. Seeing the child’s clothes brought to mind the girl crumpled on the granite.

  This collection was incomplete.

  “Do you have a list of all items turned in?” Anna asked.

  Affronted, the young man silently tapped information into his keyboard, then turned the monitor so she could read it. She was right. The ball cap. The girl was wearing it when Anna saw her and she was wearing it when her body was delivered to the morgue. Now it had gone missing.

  “Do you keep a list of everybody who has access to this?” she asked.

  “We do.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “You can’t.”

  Anna had no idea whether it was policy or personal, but since she was officially a nobody, she didn’t contest the decree.

  It was possible one of the people working in the morgue had stolen or lost the cap, but from all appearances this was a well-run, security-conscious organization. Anybody could be tempted to theft if the prize was worth enough. The employees here struck her as high-end moralists. They might steal diamonds and make for Rio, but probably none would stoop to pinching a baseball cap.

  “Can I see the effects of a James Hatchett?” she asked on impulse. The young man fetched another shoebox but was not gracious about it. Anna was treated to sighs and eye rolling. He pulled off the lid. Out of habit, she took the 35mm from her bag and began photographing the box.

  “You can’t do that,” the young man said, but she already had.

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, well ...”

  THE DAY HAD been long and it was just past two o’clock. She was to meet Dr. Madison at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central at seven. Drinks, the theater, dinner late, overnight at Molly’s apartment. The thought of all that fun to be had was exhausting. Killing five hours on the pavement of Manhattan was too tiring to contemplate. Anna decided to return to Ellis, hide in the quiet greening ruins. Embraced by the illusion of nature, she would regenerate, decide whether to come back for the proposed gala evening or weasel out on one pretext or another.

  The harbor, the Circle Line, Ellis’s Registry Hall, were in full hue and cry. From the NPS dock on the Jersey side of the island, Anna could hear the gabble. Turning left, she entered the back doors of the registry building, the part the NPS used for administrative purposes. The hall was wide and quiet and cool, the way only old buildings with thick walls and deep-rooted foundations can be.

  Patsy wasn’t in her office and Anna left a note to be personable. On her way back out she passed the law enforcement offices. The door was open. Curiosity lured her within. The office struck her as phony, a stage set. It was so clean and light and tidy. At Guadalupe, Isle Royale, Mesa Verde—all the parks where she’d worked—law enforcement could be counted on to bring a cozy clutter of incomplete paperwork, malfunctioning weapons, confiscated booze and boxes of unidentifiable objects that were essential to some project, very possibly that of a ranger already moved on to a new park. On Ellis the cubicles were neat, desks uncluttered, walls free of bizarre humor and postings so old they threatened to become historical artifacts if not attended to. This unnatural order gave her a Stepford ranger sort of feeling. She suspected, if there was a refrigerator, it would contain no moldy half-eaten sandwiches, the freezer no strange animal parts tagged and ready for court.

  “Trey in?” she asked a Park Policeman who was not Billy Bonham and, to her surprise, wasn’t handsome. Possibly in these politically correct times, even the elite Park Police had quotas to fill and were required to hire a token ugly guy every few years.

  Unsuspecting of this harsh assessment, the policeman smiled politely and pointed to a half-open door. “Always,” he said. Anna detected a note of censure. As the Assistant Superintendent wasn’t law enforcement, it might be a real estate issue. By rights, his office should have been down the hall in Administration.

  Claypool hollered, “Come in,” before she knocked. Nothing wrong with the man’s hearing. Her moccasins on the new carpet made but a whisper of sound. Feet on the desk, hands folded behind his head, he looked quite at home.

  “Am I interrupting anything?” she asked.

  “Nothing that can’t wait,” he replied, unperturbed by the sarcasm. “What can I do for you? Lost? Damaging historic buildings?”

  “Not today.” Uninvited, she dropped into the chair by the door and let her daypack fall at her feet. “Just wanted to see how it went with Hatch.”

  The Assistant Superintendent took his feet from the desk and sat up straight; a show of respect for James Hatchett. It pleased Anna. “Bad news, that,” Claypool said, and she thought she heard genuine regret in his voice. “I worked with Hatch once before, out at the Presidio in San Francisco. I was one of several acting chief rangers they rotated through before they filled the position. A good man. Solid. Did his work.”

  Anna let the eulogy stand for a moment. It took most people two or three minutes before they were willing to speak ill of the dead. Then she said: “Can you tell me what there is to tell? I spent some time on the statue with Hatch. He was easy to like, easy to talk to.”

  Claypool shot her a hard look,
wondering, no doubt, if there’d been a budding romance. Anna allowed her face to soften, her eyes to mist. Maybe he’d tell her more if he thought her closer to the deceased than, in truth, she was.

  “No big secrets,” he said, and she knew the calf’s eyes had been overkill. He wanted to talk. Claypool was isolated for a man so high in the bureaucracy. The walls of his office held framed posters of other parks—presumably parks in which he’d worked—but there were no pictures of people: no wives, children, not even the ubiquitous group shot of grinning hikers against a backdrop of breathtaking scenery.

  “Dead on impact. No signs of a struggle. The toxicology report isn’t in but drugs are unlikely. Not Hatch’s style. Massive bruising from the fall and faint bruising above the kidneys that could have happened if he struck the wall on the way down. Knees broken, arms, hands, one femur, pelvis, neck. What you’d expect.”

  “Time of death?” Anna asked.

  “Between one and two A.M. Seven or eight hours before you and Charlie found him.”

  “Cigarette break,” Anna said, remembering Hatch’s ritual smoke.

  “Andrew told me of your ash and sand observations,” Claypool said. “It will be taken into consideration, but I wouldn’t make too much of it. Don’t start stirring up the idea there was foul play. That kind of thing doesn’t do much for morale.”

  Anna nodded. He was right. She had no desire to play the role of what the mother of a dear friend aptly called a “shit disturber.” Hatch could have pitched his cigarette butt for any of a hundred reasons, including anger, despair or momentary disrespect or resentment. It might not even be Hatch’s cigarette.

  “Anything on the body?” she asked, to see if his list tallied with the box at the morgue.

  “Just the usual pocket flotsam. Forty-five cents in change. His wallet with his law enforcement commission. Half a roll of Life Savers—”

  “I guess they don’t really work.”

  Claypool laughed, then stopped suddenly as if she’d tricked him. “A square of tinfoil in his shirt. That was odd, I thought.”

  Anna told him about the packaging of the nightly Gauloise. “He did smoke it,” she finished. “The ash I found was his ash.”

  “One anomaly explained. In his pants pocket he had a lighter. A carabiner, brand-new from the look of it, was hooked through a belt loop.”

  Carabiners were lightweight, sometimes locking oval links climbers used in many facets of their rope and harness gear. It was not totally unrealistic that Hatch might have had one. They floated around the Park Service like paper clips in an office, put to all sorts of uses, from key chains to holding one’s pants up. In some parts of the country they were an affectation, left about to suggest one was a cool and groovy member of the climbing community.

  Hatch didn’t fit that profile. Anna had not seen the carabiner on him before, and she knew from experience it was not particularly comfortable to clip something lumpy between trouser belt and duty belt. Worth a question or two. Charlie would know. He climbed the lady. He might have dropped a ’biner.

  “No note?”

  “Not a suicide note,” Claypool replied. “In his shirt with the tinfoil he’d scribbled a few words on the back of a gum wrapper, the way you do when you have a sudden thought you’re afraid you’ll lose and haven’t got any real paper.” Anna had seen a note with Hatch’s belongings, but it was folded shut.

  “What was on it?”

  “I wrote it down just because it was unusual. Hang on a sec.” He opened the shallow middle drawer of his desk. From where she sat, Anna couldn’t see in, but she imagined it as Spartan and impersonal as the rest of his office. Without hesitation, he plucked out a small ledger, opened it to a page marked with a blue plastic tab and read aloud: “Little girl. Spud. Call Caroline.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Not much more than a grocery list.”

  Anna committed it to memory in case she found a hole this piece fit in at some later date. “Little girl” was probably the dead Jane Doe. “Spud” could be anything, a nickname, a potato. A firefighter Anna had worked with on Cumberland Island had an alligator in a pond behind his house his wife had dubbed Spud. “Call Caroline” was intriguing but could be anyone from an aging aunt to an auto insurance agent. Without a last name the search could prove time-consuming and fruitless.

  “How long are you here for?” the Assistant Superintendent asked.

  His question was well modulated and pleasantly spoken, but Anna detected a subtle reminder she was a guest of the park and her welcome could be worn out.

  “Till my sister is better,” she replied.

  “Your sister still need you pretty bad?”

  Not so’s you’d notice, Anna thought. “She’s not out of the woods yet,” she said, and changed the subject: “You worked with Hatch in San Francisco?”

  Claypool looked mildly alarmed. “Not with, exactly. He was one of the Park Police there when I was.”

  “Anything noteworthy?” Anna was just casting about, no bait, no hook and no idea what, if anything, she might catch.

  “Do you mean was he a homosexual?”

  The question struck her as a non sequitur until she put together “San Francisco” and “noteworthy.” She laughed. She’d been fishing for a pedophile angle: Hatch and little girls. Gay didn’t work. Pedophilia was no respecter of gender. Grown men, convicted abusers of young boys, weren’t gay. They were pedophiles. It was about power, about control, about twisted minds and mutilated souls. Sexual orientation didn’t enter into it.

  “Not that,” she said. “Just anything that caught your attention at the time.”

  Claypool shook his head. “Hard worker. Open. Friendly. Not a party boy. Not a prig.” He was quiet a minute and Anna waited on the off chance he was thinking.

  “Hatch had his moods,” Claypool said finally. “Golden Gate Bridge is big with jumpers. While I was there we had one who sort of misguessed. She didn’t land in the bay but splattered her fool brains all over Fort Point.”

  Anna had toured that fort once by candlelight. Another perk that helped to make up for the fact that the NPS went with the lowest bidder on uniforms and women could not get pants that fit. Fort Point, like Fort Wood built to withstand cannon fire, was a fortress in beautifully intricate brickwork. Within the walls was an open plaza. Anna remembered standing there, hot wax dripping on her wrist, mesmerized by the glory of lights on the bridge above. “Landed inside the fort?” she asked.

  “Nope. People used to. One day a leaper was bound to land on a ranger or a visitor, so in the seventies we built a fence on the bridge above. This one walked to the end of the fence and jumped. She landed between the fort and the bay.”

  “A kid?”

  “A middle-aged lady. Just divorced. Walked out around eleven o’clock one morning in September. Put her wedding band and her shoes on the rail and over she went.”

  “Hatch found her?”

  “No. That’s why it stuck in my mind. He came on duty later. The body was gone. Maintenance was mopping up. Yet he got, not hysterical—Park Policemen don’t—but withdrawn. He talked about it a lot, like somebody who’d seen it would. After his shift there were wildflowers tossed on the place she hit. Didn’t have to be Hatch. The lady’s friends or a relative could have come and done it. But it was on Hatch’s shift.”

  The Park Service, without being stiff-necked or hard-hearted about it, quietly discouraged private memorials on public lands. Not always easy in the southern and southwestern parks, where it was common practice for the locals to put a great Styrofoam cross bedecked with plastic roses at the site where the dearly had departed. Roads in New Mexico were strewn with these makeshift shrines.

  “Interesting.” Anna filed the information away with other fragments. “I’m off to the wilds,” she said. “Thanks for talking.”

  “As long as it’s just curiosity,” Trey said, his feet going back up on the desk. “We’ve got people here to look into these things, jus
t like you do in the ‘real’ parks out west.”

  From the derision in his voice, Anna guessed his heart was set on a western assignment but his hopes weren’t high. The western parks were a little on the snobby side, as Anna thought only right and fitting.

  “See you,” she said by way of farewell.

  “Be careful.”

  Anna wondered if he meant in her poking around on Islands II and III or poking around in James Hatchett’s business.

  As she stepped out of the registry building into the breeze-way between it and the old powerhouse, the small company of actors was chattering back to the hall for the last performance of the day. Mandy was still with them, squished sausagelike into Corinne’s costume, a sour look on her moon face. The ethereal blonde was evidently still AWOL.

  “Macho Bozo was here again asking for Corinne,” the black actress said.

  “I wish he’d ask me for her. I’d give him a piece of more than my mind,” Knickers and Cap replied.

  “Yeah, except he’s big and mean and fast.”

  “Good point,” the actor conceded.

  Not wanting to hear any more than she had to, Anna fled down the bricked corridor into the hypnotic mix of death-in-life that was the ruins of Ellis Island.

  She had much to think about and needed space and silence in which to do it. Who was on Liberty when Hatch died? What was it about suicide that seduced or repelled the Park Policeman? Was Caroline important? Spud? How hard—how illegal—was it going to be to get a look into James Hatchett’s personal locker in the law enforcement office’s basement on Liberty?

  And more to the moment, could she stand another honest-to-God put-on-your-panty-hose date so soon on the heels of the last?

  14

  DURING THE BOAT trip from Ellis to Liberty the date lost out. Or at least was postponed a couple days. Anna wasn’t sure why the idea was so offputting. She’d had a nice enough time on their first date. Madison wasn’t a firebrand when it came to conversation and he wasn’t glamorous—at least not visually. To women who found power and prestige alluring, a cardiothoracic specialist at Columbia-Presbyterian would be considered a knockout. He wasn’t sexually aggressive, which she appreciated. Slap and tickle was unsettling at sixteen when a girl didn’t yet know she had a choice. Thirty years later it was likely to get somebody’s arm broken. He did do a bit of what Molly, in her homemade psychiatric jargon, referred to as “leaning.” A leaner was a man who stood too close, loomed in one’s airspace, always seemed to be between his date and any convenient escape hatch. Despite his drawbacks Anna had to admit Madison was kind and attentive and oh-so-pleasant. Like Elwood P. Dowd, she thought. But some ingredient was lacking in Madison that Jimmy Stewart had in abundance.