by Nevada Barr
“You look rode hard and put away wet,” Patsy said cheerfully.
Mandy, who’d apparently intended to go to her room—or the bathroom—without so much as a by-your-leave, stopped in the hallway and turned to face them.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her voice was edged, her fists balled as if she was looking for a fight. Instinctively, Anna eased her feet from the coffee table and centered her weight in case some evasive maneuver might be required.
“Oh, sweetie, what happened?” Patsy asked, with such sudden sympathy that Mandy’s fingers uncurled and her eyes teared up. Her hair fell back from her face and Anna saw what had triggered Patsy’s maternal concern. Mandy’s right eye was swollen shut, the lid as round and purple as a grape. The lower lid puffed out, revealing the thin bloodred line of inner lid. The right cheekbone was burning with an angry raised welt half an inch wide and two inches long.
One plump white hand fluttered up, exploring the damage. “I fell,” Mandy said, and her voice broke like a child’s. “I was running and I slipped and fell.”
“Ouch,” Patsy said. “You got a real shiner. Let me get you some ice to put on it.” She scrambled up from the low chair and bustled out to the kitchen. Mothers bustle. Anna couldn’t put her finger on the precise mechanism of locomotion that transmuted a walk to a bustle, but she’d never seen Patsy do it except when she was tending to a sick or wounded child.
Comforted by the role Patsy took on so effortlessly, Mandy followed toward the kitchen. Walking past the couch, her left profile was to Anna, the undamaged half of her face. Below her ear, halfway between lobe and esophagus, was a vicious-looking bruise about the size of a quarter.
“What did you do to your neck?” Anna asked. She thought she sounded perfectly kindly—not like Patsy, but close enough to pass muster. Evidently not. One of Mandy’s pasty little paws flew up and she clapped it over the mark with the vehemence of a woman swatting a biting horsefly. Tears dried, burned away with the heat of returning anger. She glared at Anna.
Seconds ticked by and Anna watched in fascination. From the kitchen came the sound of ice breaking from trays and chatter, as Patsy talked to an audience that had lost interest in her. Hand still glommed over the bruise, Mandy was frozen in place by some strong emotion. Hate, confusion, fear, flickered over the round face with such rapidity it was as disorienting as being caught in a strobe light.
“There was this thing,” she said, searching for words. “A thing that stuck out ...” Her voice trailed off and the one eye Anna could see took on a vague unfocused look. She wondered if Mandy had suffered a slight concussion.
Anna started to rise from the sofa. The movement snapped that one blue eye back into white-hot focus.
“Like I’ve got to explain anything to you,” Mandy sneered. “It’s none of your goddamn business. Nothing here is any of your business. This house is as much mine as it is Patsy’s, though you wouldn’t know it from the parade of losers she’s got coming through. But I pay the same rent as she does, and for my money, you’re not welcome. Go back to Colorado and bugger a moose.”
“Elk,” Anna said automatically. “No moose in Colorado.”
For a heartbeat, Mandy was at a loss for words. She fell back on the classics: “Fuck you,” she said, and stomped down the hall. The end of the journey was punctuated by the violent slamming of her bedroom door.
Patsy appeared from the kitchen, ice cubes in a plastic bag, the bag wrapped in a soft terry cloth towel. “What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna replied honestly. “I asked her about another bruise she was sporting, and boom, meltdown. Just like that. Zero to sixty in sixty seconds. She finished up with ‘Fuck you’ and stormed off.”
“Were you horrible?” Patsy asked, having known Anna many years. “Mean or poking or anything?”
“I don’t think I was horrible. I asked as nice as I know how.”
“Your nice isn’t too bad. It shouldn’t set anybody off like that. You’re sure you were nice?”
“Intentionally, premeditatedly nice,” Anna assured her.
“Then whatever it is is her problem,” Patsy said philosophically. “Want ice for anything?”
Anna didn’t. Patsy dumped it into the sink, then followed Mandy’s example, if less histrionically, and took herself off to bed.
Anna turned out the lights, carried the remnants of her wine to the dining table and stared out over the water to the fairy lights of the murder capital of the world. Unless Los Angeles or Hong Kong had usurped the title in recent decades. Eyes on this wonder of generated electricity, she played back Mandy’s scene from captivating entrance to dramatic exit. Mandy was what Anna’s mother-in-law would have referred to as “a pill,” hard to take under any circumstances, so it wasn’t the woman’s general peevishness that struck a wrong note. Anna slowed her mental projector down, clicking frame to frame: Mandy in the doorway; turning to the hall; facing back toward the living room, anger on her face; Patsy’s kind words; Mandy softening, tearing up; Patsy to the kitchen; lamblike, Mandy following; Anna seeing the bruise on the left side of her neck; mentioning it; Mandy hiding the mark; half-sentences; anger; exit.
Clearly Anna’s mention of the bruise triggered a strong reaction—of fear, the need to hide something. Hence the anger.
Damage on the right side of the face.
Two-bit-sized bruise on the left side of the neck.
Mandy had said what? Anna closed her eyes and leaned her head back to listen for the past. “There was this thing. A thing that stuck out.” When she’d spoken, her eyes wandered to the northwest corner of the ceiling. Her voice became a monotone.
Mandy was lying and Anna knew why. She hadn’t hurt her neck in a fall. The bruise configuration wasn’t new to Anna, just forgotten; she’d seen dozens like it. But not for over twenty-five years. It was a hickey. Mandy had a big fat old-fashioned hickey on her neck.
Anna laughed. Time she too should be going to bed.
SHE DID GO to bed but not to sleep. Though the wine called her into its own dark version of rest, her mind would not let go of the puzzle.
Mandy could have gotten her hickey on the mainland from the apocryphal boyfriend Dwight alluded to. But had she had the thing on her neck for twenty-four hours, not only would it have lost its vampire bloom but Mandy would have covered it with makeup, a Band-Aid or a scarf, tricks all high school girls learned. Or she wouldn’t have been alarmed when Anna remarked on it. Given Mandy’s usual attitude, Anna would have expected her to wear her hickey with pride, a red badge of love, a puerile desire to shock. Though if Mandy thought Manhattan found hickeys shocking, she wasn’t from around here.
None of that had transpired. When Anna noticed the hickey, Mandy’s instinct was to hide it. Then to explain it away with lies. And last, to confuse the issue with a personal attack on Anna.
Mandy didn’t want them to know she’d gotten the hickey that night and on Liberty Island. The only logical explanation was that she wanted to keep the giver of the hickey a secret.
This was beginning to get interesting. Anna sat up in bed and crossed her legs under her, enjoying the cool ocean air on her skin as the sheet fell away.
Who would be harmed by the knowledge that they had bestowed a hickey on the thick white neck of a GS-7 National Park Service interpreter? As far as Anna knew, nobody living on the island was married, so that angle didn’t work. Andrew? Because he was black? That didn’t feel right either. Andrew was so good-looking anybody but a dyed-in-the-wool racist would brag about getting his attention. From a few comments Mandy let drop in unguarded moments, Anna suspected she just might be that dyed-in-the-wool racist. In which case Andrew would not be her type. And a good thing for Andrew, Anna couldn’t help thinking. Cleaning crew? Maybe, but there was little cross-pollination between day interpreters on Ellis and night janitors on Liberty. Odds were good Mandy didn’t even know them.
Charlene, the secretary next door, might account for a hidden lesbian
hickey. Two kids didn’t mean a thing. Half the lesbians Anna knew had children from previous heterosexual marriages, or had borrowed sperm from a gay male friend. Usually via turkey baster since neither party was interested in anything but procreation. Sex at its purest form, if one decided to take the conservative fundamentalist interpretation. Either of Charlene’s sons could be the culprit. They were of proper hickey-bestowing age. Mandy might be embarrassed about robbing the cradle next door. Embarrassed, yes, but afraid? Anna didn’t think so. Not the kind of fear that makes it impossible to move or speak.
Trey Claypool.
That made sense. Assistant Superintendents are severely frowned upon if they go about sucking upon the necks of their inferiors—sucking upon any portion of the anatomy of their inferiors for that matter.
Another detail niggled into the mind picture Anna was painting. The kiwi-colored jogging suit. It was rumpled—as would befit a bout of heavy necking, or being left on the floor in a heap had the deal been consummated—but spotlessly clean and sans sweat stains. No running. No falling down.
Mandy had been given a hickey and a black eye. Probably by the same person and around the same time. A scenario common enough in law enforcement that it wasn’t remarkable. Sex and violence were so linked in the American subconscious that movie theaters on Forty-second Street alternated XXX shows with slasher films.
Anna had no proof anything had happened the way she pictured it, but the pieces fit, and perfect fit was often a sign of the truth.
Mandy could have been both ashamed of being beaten and protective of whoever had beaten her. That was the usual pattern. Absolutely none of this was Anna’s business. However, at the moment, she had no business but other people’s. Thirty years from now, she’d probably sit on her porch and watch her neighbors’ comings and goings so she could piece together their secret lives.
She smiled at the image and slid back between the sheets. It wasn’t everybody who was lucky enough to be born with an avocation.
15
“SORRY, ANNA. WAKE up. You’ve got a phone call.” Anna opened her eyes. Patsy, wrapped in a blue brocade kimono with rich purple edging, bent over the bed.
“I’m awake,” Anna said, and was. Patsy’s demeanor called for instant and total consciousness.
Patsy handed Anna the cordless. “I’ll make coffee.” Even in non-birthing emergencies humans felt compelled to boil water.
Sitting up, back against the bookcase that served as a headboard, Anna said: “Anna Pigeon speaking.”
“This is Paulette Mallory at Columbia-Presbyterian. You are Dr. Molly Pigeon’s sister?”
“That’s right.” Anna felt things visceral shifting, teetering on a precipice over a bottomless world.
“Your sister has been moved back into ICU. I’m sorry. She’s stable. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“What happened?” Anna asked, ignoring the disclaimer.
“Pneumonia.”
“She has pneumonia? Again?”
“It happens. The immune system gets weakened. Dr. Madison said to have him paged as soon as you get here.”
“Thanks,” Anna said automatically, and punched the off button. Setting worry aside with frenzy, she began pulling on clothes. A look at the travel alarm on the bookcase robbed her of her hurry. It was seven-fifteen. She couldn’t catch a staff boat to Manhattan till eight. Trey Claypool’s boat was probably moored at the dock and Anna would have no trouble piloting it—it wasn’t anything but an eight- or ten-foot runabout with an outboard motor—but by the time she looked up Claypool, got clearance and drove the slower boat across a busy morning harbor, she’d save only minutes. If that.
She joined Patsy in the kitchen, watching coffee trickle from the filter into the pot.
“Molly?” Patsy asked.
“Pneumonia.”
“Bad?”
“Stable. Whatever that means.”
Each imprisoned in the ivory tower of her own cranium, they waited until enough liquid gathered to fill a mug. “First one’s yours,” Patsy said gallantly.
Anna gentled the brew with heavy cream and left Patsy watching a second cup trickle through the grounds. She took her cup out the back door and sat on the picnic table, her feet on the bench. Manhattan was hard shadows and harsh edges in the glare of the rising sun. Not a breath of air stirred, not a cloud touched the sky, no mist rose from a harbor so still it mirrored the rocks edging Liberty and the high ruin of hospitals on Ellis.
A ferry, canary yellow and navy, plowed from Staten Island toward Manhattan, leaving a perfect white wake. The scene lacked reality. Even the moving boat appeared only a model moving along a track in front of a painted backdrop.
Anna wondered how Molly could survive, indeed thrive, in a place so removed from that which was eternal, that which was real. That which grew and carried within itself the seeds of rejuvenation. Not thriving now, Molly, Anna thought, and took a gulp of coffee.
Unfiltered cigarettes were very bad karma and no karmic debt goes unpaid. After thirty years of Camel straights, Molly’s lungs probably rivaled the La Brea Tar Pits. God knew what might be dredged up out of the bubbling ooze. The most pathetic excuse for a germ could take down one of the finest minds and greatest hearts Anna had ever known.
Tears boiled hot and Anna blinked them back. Molly didn’t deserve homage. If she hadn’t been so fucking stupid, so fucking pigheaded, so fucking addicted . . . Anna’s anger was no match for the salt water. Fury poured down her cheeks. For years Molly had lectured her for putting herself at risk: climbing mountains, fighting fires, rappelling into caves. And all the while she—an M.D. with an IQ about the same as the top NASCAR speed—all the while she’d been sucking down poison. “God damn you!” Anna muttered. “Do anything for me? Live for me.” Having set the coffee cup down, she pulled the tail of her shirt free of her jeans and mopped her face. She stopped short of blowing her nose and smiled at the sound of her mother-in-law Edith’s words in her head: “Really, Anna, is such crudity necessary?”
“Edith, somebody should tell you you’re dead,” Anna said to the exquisite blue of the sky. But she felt better. Another sip of coffee and she was able to think of somebody besides herself: Frederick Stanton.
A quick trip into the house, then back on the picnic table, coffee mug refilled, Patsy’s cordless in hand, Anna dialed the number she’d called so many times she could recite it in her sleep or punch the buttons in total darkness: the number of her sister’s Upper West Side apartment.
“Hello,” Frederick answered, and Anna begrudged him the good cheer in his voice yet was sorry to be the one to destroy it.
“Molly’s back in ICU,” she said without preamble. “Pneumonia. She’s stable, that’s all they could tell me.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Shit. See you there.”
Frederick hung up while Anna still held the receiver to her ear. “Shit” was the strongest expletive she could remember him ever uttering. “See you there,” she said to the dial tone.
AS ALWAYS, THE Liberty IV was on time. Anna was waiting at the end of the dock, blessedly free of tourists at this time of the morning: the sweeter sounds of gulls and lapping water could be heard. A young black deckhand who was not Cal handed her aboard, not with grace but with a perfunctory eye to safety. Anna didn’t bother to see who the captain was. Kevin probably, given the time of day. She went to the stern to hide in the engine noise beneath the Stars and Stripes.
An interloper had usurped her spot. A Park Policeman in blue and bluer—like a Smurf, Anna thought uncharitably—stood watching her, a half-smile on his face. Not as if he was smirking, but as if, though tired from night shift, he was still willing to meet friendliness halfway.
Anna let her crabbiness go, and like a kid’s kite carried away on the wind, it was gone. Of course he was pretty. She’d already met the token ugly policeman. Stocky, Asian and something else, this one had a coal-black crew cut that sparkled in min
ute waxed spikes, black single-lidded eyes, a nose from a plastic surgeon’s stud muffin menu and a crooked mouth just to prove he was a regular guy. His name badge read “Joshua Hoang.” Another trendy name. The melting pot was melting the minds of young mothers.
“Where’s Billy?” Anna asked to make conversation. “Lieu day?”
“Billy’s working days now,” Joshua said, and rotated his compact muscular form to ape her pose, forearms on the gunwale, eyes on the churning water as the Liberty IV eased from the dock.
“Since when?”
“Since they dragged me here from D.C.,” Joshua replied. His voice was light. Not a good voice for bullhorns or barking orders, but a great voice for eliciting confidences. “I came in yesterday and went on duty,” he elaborated. “Are my dogs barkin’.”
For half a minute Anna was stymied; then her stint in the Midwest—or Upper Midwest, on Isle Royale—came to her rescue. “Dogs barking” somehow equaled “feet tired” in Minnesotan.
“Hmong?” she asked. Hmong refugees from Laos made up the latest in the waves of immigrants to hit the Upper Midwest.
Joshua looked pleased and surprised. “St. Cloud, Minnesota,” he said. “Second-generation. How’d you guess? You buy a quilt cheap or something?”
“Something like that.” Anna was too distracted to map out the tortuous route of her thoughts. “Tell me about Billy.”
“I don’t know the man,” Joshua said, but he sounded as if he’d already met, accused, tried, judged and sentenced young Billy. Weakness was not a trait that went unforgiven in blue and gold circles. “But I hear he’s got some problems. Said he wouldn’t listen to ‘them’ moaning and groaning. ‘Them’ being ‘them,’ I take it. As in paranormal manifestations. So. He’s days. He’s happy. I’m nights. I’m still employed. Who can complain?” He flashed her a smile of such perfect orthodonture the sun practically glinted off his incisors.
