Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  “I guess,” Anna said.

  “Looks more like a turd.”

  There was nothing wrong with Jim’s eyes or his sense of art.

  Instead of handing it back, he put the cap on and asked: “Why did you take it?”

  She answered with another question. “Does the name Tucker mean anything to you? Agnes Abigail Tucker or Pearl Tucker?”

  Jim’s face altered almost imperceptibly, a tightening of the skin around the eyes. Anna didn’t know whether the names triggered some response or the man just didn’t like being questioned. “Not offhand,” he said evenly. “Why?”

  “Do you have a basement?”

  He looked at her long and hard. “What is it you’re getting at? It’s not just Jimmy jumping. Square with me or stop wasting my time.”

  Anna thought about it for a minute, then decided to tell him. If he and his son had collaborated in kidnapping and perversion, she could probably get to the door before the old guy got the knife out from between the cushion and the cat.

  “I was trying to find a connection between Hatch and the dead girl. Her name was Tucker. She was kidnapped in California seven years ago.”

  “What . . . Wait.” He thought. “That would’ve been about ’92 or ’93.”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “Jimmy was working at that big park they got in San Francisco, down on the bay.”

  “The Presidio.”

  “And nobody found the little girl—found who kidnapped her—and then she was killed?”

  “Right.”

  “A basement?” The pieces were falling into place behind the gray eyes, creating a picture Jim Hatchett did not like. “You thought maybe Jimmy stole this kid, brought her home like a stray kitten and kept her in the basement for seven years?”

  “I didn’t really think it,” Anna hedged. “It just sort of crossed my mind as one remote possibility.”

  “Remote, hell. I’ve got half a mind to throw you out on your ear. What kind of mind sits around dreaming up psycho stories like that?”

  “Somebody stole her. Somebody kept her for seven years.”

  “Jesus. What a world. Get us both another Scotch if you will.”

  Anna did as she was bade, making hers a short one. As she sat with her drink she considered asking again about the basement, but Jim was looking dangerous and she felt she’d pushed him about as far as he was going to be pushed.

  He slurped up a snort of whiskey, his head heavy on the weakened neck. Anna saw her own father, his last days, skin loose, body failing him, but still able to tell a good joke and generous enough to laugh at ones he’d already heard.

  “You never thought Jimmy’d do a thing like that,” Jim stated. His voice was flat and strong. This was as close to pleading as he ever got, Anna would have bet her life on it.

  “No. I never did,” she said. And she never did, not really. It was just a lead, and like a hound dog that knows nothing else, she had to follow it to the end. “And I don’t think he jumped.”

  Jim grunted his satisfaction.

  “Can I take the cap?” Anna asked as she stood to go.

  “Nope.”

  “Can I come back?”

  “You damn well better.”

  The door to the building’s basement was under the front stoop, as were many in the old brownstones. Anna hadn’t noticed it before—she was too busy looking for the address. On the leaving-no-stone-unturned principle, she slipped around and down the stairway. In the basement door, a monolith of solid oak and nail studs, was a barred window. Standing on tiptoe, she looked inside. From the thin light leaking through ground-level windows, she could see a clean open space. To the right were a utility sink, a washer and a dryer. Down the middle ran a clothesline. Against the left wall were two cubicles, storage units for the apartments.

  The odds of keeping a child captive in secret under these conditions were all but impossible. Still, she climbed the steps and walked into the narrow alley of grass and shrubs between Hatchett’s building and the next. Dropping to hands and knees, she peered in the dusty windows. Both cubicles were filled with boxes, bicycles and other household paraphernalia. It all looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed for a good long while.

  Having brushed the evidence of her inquiries from her trousers, she regained the sidewalk.

  “Hey.”

  Anna suppressed a guilty twitch. Jim Hatchett stood on the stoop above, leaning on his walker. “I brought you the key to the basement,” he said. “You still want to see it?”

  “Nah,” Anna said. “I trust you.”

  He laughed, a deep chest laugh that was infectious. “Like one old fox trusts another. Here.” He tossed her the baseball cap with the potato on it. “I don’t know what good it will do you.”

  Anna didn’t either, but since Hatch thought it was important enough to pinch from the New York City morgue, it had to mean something.

  17

  BY THE TIME Anna landed on Ellis Island and plopped herself down in the visitor’s chair in Patsy’s office, it was after four. Phone clamped between ear and shoulder, Patsy was furiously scribbling, punctuating her sentences with “Got it” and “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Whew!” she sighed when she was done. “What a mess.” She tipped her chair back and demanded: “Did you bring me candy? I require gobs of chocolate at this moment.”

  “I have quarters,” Anna countered. “We can get Hershey bars from the machine.”

  “Let’s do it,” Patsy responded, with the air of a naughty adventuress off to heist the family silver.

  “What’s the mess?” Anna asked as they made their way to the basement and the candy machine.

  “Not a mess, really. In fact it’s beautifully organized, but there’s just a lot of it. Do you know of Mrs. Weinstein?” Anna didn’t. “She’s a terrifically rich philanthropist type. For the past couple years she’s been romancing senators, congressmen, lobbyists and the press, trying to get a bill through Congress. You know how they’re required to teach environmental ed in some states? Well, the Spice Bill—as in ‘variety is the spice of life’—will require federally funded grade schools to teach multicultural appreciation. She hopes to get it passed this year so it’ll go into effect in 2003. She’ll do it too. She’s something else. She’s throwing a Fourth of July bash on Liberty. The guest list is a Who’s Who in Technicolor: Asian-American, African-American, Native American, Mexican-American. You name it. And all of them the biggest of wigs. She’ll woo them and the press. Fitting, don’t you think, here at the ‘golden door’ where all these mix-and-match Americans began? This bash will be very high-tone. You know that wall around the plaza at the beginning of the mall to the statue?”

  Anna nodded obediently.

  “She’s hired Ralph Lauren—Ralph Lauren, mind you—to design cushions to go along the whole thing so those horrifically important heinies won’t get numb watching the fireworks.”

  Anna began pumping quarters into the machine while Patsy picked out the appropriate letter/number combination to convince it to dispense Hershey bars with almonds.

  “I didn’t know people could have parties on Liberty,” Anna said.

  “You betcha. Very important people and lowly little rangers. It’s a prime spot, especially on the Fourth of July. The view of the city, the boats in the harbor, the fireworks: you can’t beat it with a stick. You’ll still be here, won’t you? We’ll crash. It’ll be a hoot.”

  PATSY WAS TOO busy to play, so Anna followed her back to her office, watched her work for a few minutes, then wandered off to find a phone that wasn’t in use.

  Only one of Hatch’s Carolines was home, Caroline Rogers in Queens. In her single-minded quest for information, it had slipped Anna’s mind that she could be the hated messenger, that these women might not yet know of Hatch’s demise. Probably wouldn’t, unless they were family or Park Service, where news of this kind would appear on the Ranger Reports on every computer in every park in the country.

  Caroline Roge
rs was neither. She’d been dating Hatch for eight months, and from what Anna could gather, was set on marrying him whether he liked it or not. Small children could be heard shrieking in the background. When Anna broke the news of Hatch’s death, there was more anger and disappointment in Ms. Rogers’s tears than grief of the deep and abiding kind that drew the handkerchief from Jim Hatchett’s pocket. Anna sat out the storm for what she figured was a polite amount of time, then wedged her questions in between fresh outbursts.

  No, Caroline Rogers knew nothing about Agnes Tucker, nothing about a potato hat, nothing about a child who had committed suicide on Hatch’s shift. Clearly, Caroline was not Hatch’s confidante, much as she might have wanted to be.

  Anna spent another seven minutes trying to extricate herself gently from the one-sided conversation before she gave it up as a lost cause, said, “Got to go, thanks,” and hung up abruptly, cutting the other woman off in the middle of another “So anyway ...”

  Virtuously using her AT&T card to avoid misappropriating taxpayers’ funds, Anna dialed long-distance information. There was no Pearl Tucker listed in Turlock, California, but there was a P. Tucker on Weatheral Street, would she like that number? Anna copied it down. If she were a male predator looking for lone women, she’d visit addresses in the phone book where the first name was replaced by an initial. It was a dead giveaway.

  This time around Anna was acutely aware that she might be treading on sacred ground. Before calling the number, she sat for a moment letting the mental dust settle until she could see what information she sought and choose an avenue of inquiry that a woman suffering again the loss of a child—probably as acutely as she had seven years earlier—might be responsive to.

  When she was ready, she punched in the numbers. It was ten past five New York time, ten past two in California. Anna hoped Mrs. Tucker was home. It would be a shame to have wasted all that energy gearing up to face a distraught mother only to get a machine.

  The phone rang seven times. Anna decided to give it fifteen. On nine it was answered with a “Hello” so dull she waited for the beep. “Hello,” came again, a little stronger, and Anna responded.

  “I’m calling for Pearl Tucker. Is she in?”

  “This is Pearl.” The voice was on a sliding scale, the last word hitting the lowest note and giving the short, empty sentence the ring of finality.

  “My name is Anna Pigeon.” Anna picked up what was going to be a very heavy conversational ball and forged ahead. “I’m a park ranger. I’m at the Statue of Liberty.” If one stuck to the letter of the law, this was true. “I was there when your daughter died.”

  “And you think I’d like to know the details.” Again the descending scale, “details” landing like a rock at the bottom of the basement stairs.

  “No, ma’am,” Anna said quickly. “I was the first emergency medical technician on the scene”—again strictly true and totally misleading—“and there was something about your daughter that captured me. It was I who brought in the FBI through a friend of mine. They identified your daughter.”

  “And you want me to thank you.” Basement stairs. Thud.

  Anna had thought finding out who the girl was, though not done by her in the flesh, might be the key to the mother’s heart. Another, less fortuitous possibility was that, in the mother’s mind, her child was alive till the New York City morgue marked her dead. This put Anna in only slightly better odor than the actual killer. From the drop of Pearl Tucker’s voice, she found it impossible to guess what the woman was feeling and even harder to think any of it was good.

  “No, ma’am. I’ve been trying to figure out how she came to be on the Statue of Liberty and why such a beautiful young girl would have jumped. The police told me she’d been kidnapped but no one had ever been able to find out who did it—”

  “Oh, I know who did it,” Mrs. Tucker interrupted.

  That got Anna’s attention.

  “A low-life scum named A.J. Tucker took her. Her father took her.”

  At last Anna identified the strange cadence of Mrs. Tucker’s voice. It was anger grown cold and weary. The kind that could squash you like a cockroach and never bother to look back to see if you were dead or just maimed. Anger without hope, remorse or fear of consequences. Anna was in total sympathy with it. “What a son of a bitch,” she said kindly. “Never a word to you? Dead or alive?”

  “Not a word in seven years.”

  She might as well have said seven thousand years.

  “You remarried?” Anna asked, remembering Frederick mentioning Agnes was survived by a mother and younger half brother.

  “And redivorced. I got a son out of the deal, and the house. He got the truck and thirteen stitches in his scalp.” The woman laughed, no humor, just a small triumph.

  “Yet you kept your first husband’s name,” Anna said.

  “If Aggie ever got away, got near a phone, I wanted her to be able to find me. She was only seven but she knew her mama’s name was Pearl Tucker. I didn’t leave the house, not once, for over a year. Not to take out the garbage. Nothing. Welfare ladies came and did for me. I didn’t go to the toilet but I dragged the phone in with me. Every time I’d fall asleep I’d dream the phone was ringing, but it never was. Then I began to dream she was hurt, sick, calling for her mama. Then I gave up sleeping. I’m still not good at it, but I don’t dream. Not of anything.”

  This was said without a hint of self-pity. She spoke as if she told a story that she didn’t believe about a woman she didn’t like.

  “At first Anna had expected Mrs. Tucker might hang up on her. Now she knew she wouldn’t. Talking, shoveling horse manure, seeing the Bolshoi Ballet—it was all the same to Pearl. Anna had been in that place. She sent up a quick prayer of thanks to Molly and whatever gods were tuned in over New York Harbor that she hadn’t had to live there for seven years.

  “According to the medical reports your daughter was well taken care of.” Anna was glad to have some fragment of solace to offer. “She’d eaten well and was clean and healthy. There was nothing to show anybody had ever hurt her or . . . interfered with her in any way.”

  “He took her to hurt me. I guess that was enough. He didn’t need to hurt her.” That was it, no expression of relief or joy in the child’s care. Anna thought of Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Despair so impotent, anger so tired there’s no life to sustain the emotions.

  “Where was he from?” Agnes Abigail’s clothes had held no clue. Jeans and ball caps could have been acquired in any state in the union.

  “He wasn’t from anywhere,” Pearl said unhelpfully. “He was an army brat who went in the Army himself right out of high school. He made big veteran noises, but he wasn’t a veteran of anything but bar fights. He never got anywhere near Vietnam or anywhere else. He liked to tell people he’d volunteered for ’Nam, but he never did. Then he got to telling people he’d been there, fought, but he never had. A real loser.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone with her?” Anna asked, cutting into the monotone.

  “Anywhere. He could have gone anywhere. Mexico. Canada. He liked camping. Roughing it. He was big into hunting and fishing, killing things. Trapping. Building what he called tepees but were just sticks and blankets in the woods. The police knew he’d taken her. I told them and they believed me. But nobody ever could find him. He had another wife from before and a half-grown kid in Redding—kid was a real piece of work. Last I heard, he was in jail. He and three of his boyfriends beat a little Negro boy nearly to death. His ex said she hadn’t seen him and didn’t want to. The cops said he’d probably set up a new identity for himself somewhere, new name, maybe even driver’s license and credit cards. Though he never could get any credit when I knew him and he’d lost his license on a DUI. Never got another one. Just drove without it. He liked that. The government made him paranoid, thinking they traced everybody through their Social Security numbers and things. That was a laugh. He hates the government, when the only jobs he an
d his old man could ever get were in the Army.”

  “Did he have any favorite places he liked to camp?” Anna tried. She knew that seven years ago the police would have asked these questions. She also knew that after the heat died down and people began to feel safe again, they tended to drift back to their old ways.

  “Oh, God, let me think.” A series of noises followed that Anna recognized from her many phone conversations with her sister. Pearl was lighting a cigarette. “Montana,” came out on a lung-deep sigh. “Colorado. Idaho was big. Northern California till they put in that prison up there near Susanville. He said it brought in too many niggers, wetbacks, wops—his words, not mine.”

  “He sounds like a dream come true,” Anna said.

  “Oh, yeah. If I hadn’t been born stupid, I never would have married him. If I hadn’t grown up even stupider, I’d’ve killed him when I had the chance.”

  Anna had a pretty good picture in her head of Tucker’s insides. She wondered if his outsides were as unappealing. “Do you have any photos of him?”

  “I burned every goddamn one.”

  “Can’t say as I blame you,” Anna said. She’d learned all she was going to from Mrs. Tucker and was wanting to hang up. The woman’s voice could have been used as audiological warfare. Twenty minutes on the phone with her and Anna was ready to stick her head in an oven.

  “Thanks for your time,” she said. “I’m sorry about your little girl.”

  “Okay. You too,” Pearl returned, her words as empty as an abandoned house.

  Anna put down the receiver and rubbed her ear. Too long on telephones was disorienting. Images the conversation called to mind didn’t match images before the eyes. Over time it was anxiety-producing.

  And it wasn’t as if Caroline Rogers and Pearl Tucker had been a barrel of laughs.

  18

  EXHAUSTION SWEPT OVER Anna in enervating waves; the grief of others coalescing into an internal darkness. She escaped to Island II, made the perilous climb up the fallen stairwells and through the window to her fourth-floor balcony. The sky above New Jersey had claimed the sun. The glow of a smog-born sunset dyed the light. Shadows diffused. The air was warm, humid, smelling of earth and ocean and the faint intangible scent leaves make when they rub against one another in the wind.