Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  “Not me,” Anna said.

  MOLLY WAS BACK on the respirator, Frederick back in the red plastic chair.

  “Dr. Madison will be along in a few minutes,” Anna said, and shook her head as Frederick offered her the one chair. “The duty nurse said she would page him.” Bumping Frederick over, she perched on the chair next to him as they’d done the first day.

  “Good thing I’ve got a skinny behind,” Frederick said.

  “It’s how Molly and I always pick our men,” Anna returned. “The bonier the better.”

  Fifteen breaths a minute, Anna counted. Molly had slid a very long way backward in a very short time. Her skin was drawn and gray, the purple beneath her eyes giving her a battered look. Not battered, Anna thought, remembering the rich, life-filled anger of Mandy’s bruises. Cadaverous. The purple not of living blood but the foreshadowing of death.

  “Talk to me,” she demanded as a wave of panic ran up her spine, making the flesh tight and cold.

  “Oh gosh, Anna,” Frederick said wearily.

  “Anything. Anything at all.” Neither looked at the other; both kept their eyes fixed on the fragile form in the bed as if, by will, they would tether her to earth.

  “Anything? Okay, let’s see. Today’s supposed to be partly cloudy, a high of eighty-five, chance of showers in the afternoon. Rani is learning to sharpen her little claws on Molly’s leather couch. She sleeps on my throat. I keep waking up with paws in my mouth.”

  “Litter box paws,” Anna said.

  “Thank you for pointing that out.”

  “Keep talking. You’re doing good.”

  “Lordy. Hey, there is something. This”—he waved a hand over Molly’s inert body—“put everything else out of my mind. They’ve ID’d your Jane Doe.”

  Anna perked up a little, but with Hatch no longer around to tell, the victory was hollow.

  “Remember the fractured ulna? It was an ugly and old break—a pin had been inserted, a special kind that they use on kids so they can grow with it. It’s not common. They traced the pin back to a Dr. Crosby in Mill Valley, California. The doctor still had the files and actually remembered the kid. I take it it was an extremely delicate operation and there was no follow-up care.”

  “Who was Jane?” Anna asked.

  “Agnes Abigail Tucker of Turlock, California, survived by her mother, Pearl Tucker, and a half brother, John Tucker.”

  “How old was she when she broke her arm?”

  “Seven. Just started second grade. She fell off the horizontal ladder on the playground at school.”

  “You’ve been thorough,” Anna said.

  “Visiting hours are short.”

  She noticed his hand had crept out and, with his index finger, he stroked the back of Molly’s wrist feather-gently, as if he were soothing a baby duckling.

  “How old was she when she died? Fourteen?” Anna asked.

  “Almost. Fourteen in August. Here.” Reluctantly, he relinquished his tenuous contact with Molly and fished a notebook out of his shirt pocket. In crisis he reverted to type. Gone were the neatly creased Dockers and ironed button-down collars. An aged olive T-shirt with a faded design on the back and wrinkled madras shorts had reclaimed him.

  Having opened the notebook, he tore out a page and gave it to her. She scanned it: names, dates and addresses of both the doctor and Agnes Abigail Tucker’s mother.

  A real little girl from a real town with a mom and a grade school and a horizontal ladder. Anna felt a wave of melancholy well up for Agnes Tucker that Jane Doe had not evoked. She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. Maybe she’d call the mom, see if there was a connection with James Hatchett. He’d been in San Francisco at the Presidio, she remembered. They could have crossed paths then.

  Frederick’s finger went back to Molly’s hand. Anna let her mind turn on the California Bay Area just because it was beautiful and she and Zach had once spent a glorious weekend in Sausalito, a ritzy tourist town across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. A map of the coastline unfurled in her brain, full color with the green cliffs of Point Reyes and the white froth of waves breaking. Sea lions barked and an otter, belly to the sun, an abalone lunch in his paws, floated placidly in the swells of her memory.

  “Mill Valley,” she said suddenly. “That’s just north of Sausalito.”

  “Sounds right.”

  “Serious real estate. Money.”

  Frederick ignored her, which was fine, she was just vocalizing thoughts as they followed their path. “The doctor must be a big dog. High-end pediatrician, or he wouldn’t be practicing in Mill Valley.”

  “She.”

  “She. So. Mrs. Tucker cares enough to buy her daughter the very best and then no follow-up care?”

  Frederick’s soul slowly came back into his body. He unglued his eyes from the death mask that had settled over Molly’s features and turned to look at Anna. “I’m sorry. Didn’t I tell you? The girl was kidnapped two days after she got out of the hospital. She was a staple on milk cartons for two years, but nobody found hide nor hair of her till she jumped off your statue. So Mom Tucker gets her back and loses her again in the same phone call. Glad it wasn’t me who had to make it.”

  A seven-year-old kidnapping case. Anna let her mind wrap around that for a minute. A second-grader is snatched, never found, to reappear years later dead at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It made a creepy kind of sense if Hatch had kidnapped her. There was no sign of physical or sexual abuse, but he could have been some other kind of psycho, kept her in the basement like a beloved pet. She was very pale. Or maybe he just liked to watch her, touch her. Anna shuddered convulsively. Frederick didn’t notice. She continued with her story. The girl escapes. A couple days later—not too many or Agnes might have been in worse shape, a week or two at most—she comes out to the statue all by herself. Why?

  She could see it from the basement window.

  Hatch told her about it and she thought she’d be safe because he only worked nights.

  Whatever.

  Out she comes, up she goes, and either she sees Hatch and kills herself to evade capture or Hatch gives her an extra nudge over the wall lest she start blabbing to all and sundry about his basement peccadilloes. Later, Hatch, bereft because he’s lost or murdered his little pal, whom in his own berserker way he loved, slides into a suicidal depression and kills himself the same way she was killed.

  The only flaw in that was the cigarette. Rituals die hard. And to Anna’s mind, had that been the case, he would have jumped over the parapet exactly where Agnes had gone over—poetic justice—not from his smoking perch. Even flawed, the theory answered the most questions; Anna decided to file it away rather than trash it.

  “Can I show you something?” Frederick asked suddenly. His words were so out of sync with the fiction she had been spinning that she was jolted, as if plucked up from sleep by the ringing of a phone.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “You won’t think I’m an idiot?”

  “I already think you’re an idiot.”

  “Fair enough. Looky here.” Out of the right-hand pocket of his dilapidated shorts he pulled a black velvet box, the kind with a spring hinge and a rounded top; the absolute Tiffany-to-Target, movie-classic box.

  “You’re kidding,” Anna said. “You’ve only known her a week or so. And most of that she was unconscious.”

  “I’ve known her two years, ten months and a week or so. I could tell you how many hours, but my preoccupation with my love life might strike you as juvenile.”

  Anna snorted,

  “Wanna see?”

  She did and he so obviously wanted to show her that she nodded. With care, as if what dwelt within could take fright and fly away, he turned the box toward her and opened it.

  Not a diamond. Frederick did things his own way. The ring was deep gold—probably twenty-two karats—not filigreed but delicately patterned in a bas-relief of vines and swirls. The stone was set flat in the band, a clear, dark g
reen, liquid emerald, the edges beveled.

  “It’s perfect,” Anna admitted. “Absolutely perfect for Molly in every way. She will marry you just to get that ring.”

  “And I will marry her.”

  “You’d better hurry,” Anna said, the hissing of the breathing tube ominously loud in her ears and the stark smell of sterile sickness threatening to clog her throat.

  Whether she swooned or just really pissed Frederick off, she was never sure, but all of a sudden his hands were clamped painfully over her upper arms and he was shaking her with a strength his scrawny body belied.

  “Molly will live,” he said. “Don’t you for a single second doubt that. She will live to be an old, old woman. She will bury you. She will bury me.”

  Oddly, Anna was comforted by the outburst: the pain, the anger, the vehemence. Because she believed him, she began to cry. The FBI man wrapped his long arms around her and, awkward on their shared seat, he rocked her.

  “Okay. Okay. Enough. I’m fine,” Anna said when she could stop the unwanted outpouring of emotion. She struggled free and escaped to the end of the bed. “Jesus.” She grabbed a handful of paper towels from beside a sink attached to the wall and scrubbed her face. “Fuck.”

  Frederick laughed. “Anna, why do you always have to be such a dink? This was supposed to be a special bonding moment between us where I humbly request your permission to ask for your sister’s hand in marriage, and you screwed it up.”

  “Sorry.” Anna blew her nose.

  “Can I?”

  “Sure.”

  “Will you be my best man?”

  “If you rent the tux.”

  “Done.” Frederick stood up, reached over Molly’s feet and shook Anna’s hand. The moment, as highly emotional moments tend to do, became embarrassing because there was no place else for it to go.

  “Yes. Well. It’s settled, then,” Frederick mumbled, and backed ungracefully into his chair.

  Anna remained standing at the foot of the bed, watching her sister’s chest rise and fall to the unpleasant mechanical sounds.

  “She’s got to say yes,” Anna warned.

  “There’s that,” Frederick admitted. “I know her better than you think I do.”

  Anna started to get the cold feeling around her sternum that impending news of betrayal brings on, but Frederick dispelled it with his next words.

  “She never knew, but I’ve read every article she’s ever written. Your sister’s brilliant, did you know that?”

  “It crossed my mind a time or two,” she said dryly.

  “Whenever I was in a city where she was lecturing, I’d go—sit way back like the skulking Tom I am.” He smiled crookedly and Anna could see the relief on his face when she smiled back.

  “How often did you ‘happen’ to be in a city where Molly was speaking?” she asked.

  He had the grace to look sheepish. “Quite often, actually. And I’ve read every article about her.”

  “Even the one in the Sentinel responding to her speech that suggested Gulf War, chronic fatigue and a handful of other syndromes might be based on cultural stress rather than organic causes?”

  “Somebody should have slapped that bozo upside the head. He screwed it all around and attacked her for his own ends. The toad even admitted he’d ‘never heard Ms.’—Ms., mind you, not Dr.—‘Pigeon’s speech but ...’”

  Frederick was protective. Anna liked that. Molly was not so tough as she liked everyone to believe. She deserved someone to lift heavy objects for her: couches, suitcases, the death of friends, the loss of years.

  “I want a silk tux,” Anna said. “Peach with a matching cummerbund.”

  “Fan club meeting?” Dr. Madison asked as he came in and closed the door behind him.

  Neither answered. They wanted the news. “Molly’s not so bad as it might look,” he said, sensing their potential hostility if he didn’t cut to the chase. “The respirator is as much a precaution as a necessity, given Molly’s recent history. She’s responding well to the antibiotics. I expect tomorrow we’ll try her off the respirator, and a day or two after that she can probably move out of the ICU. We don’t want to get premature. The sedatives are helping her with the natural anxiety and discomfort of her situation, but she’s remained fully conscious and alert.”

  “She has?” Frederick and Anna’s alarm confused David Madison.

  “That’s a good thing,” he reassured them.

  Anna looked back at the bed to see Molly’s clear hazel eyes watching her. Molly signaled for a pen by miming writing, and Frederick scrambled to fulfill her request.

  For a moment she wrote, then handed the pad back to the FBI agent.

  He read it aloud to Anna: “I was asleep right up to the part about the silk tux. I swear it.”

  16

  ANNA TOOK THE Number 3 train to Brooklyn. A call from Dr. Madison’s office to Patsy had gotten her Hatch’s address and that of his nearest kin, James Hatchett, Sr. The addresses were only differentiated by a letter. Anna guessed they had upstairs/downstairs apartments in the same building.

  In the middle of the day the train was sparsely populated and she had the car to herself. Stations clacked by to the accompanying sound of train car doors opening and closing and announcements so highly intelligible and gratingly cheerful that Anna wondered how the conductor had managed to get into the union.

  Thinking of David Madison’s office pleased her. He’d asked her to wait for him there, first making it perfectly clear it was a personal request and not a professional one, lest she worry. Knowing he was going to ask to reschedule their date, Anna had been gearing up to turn him down. Not for any specific reason, simply because of the vague feeling of wrongness that seemed to emanate from him. Or her. Probably her. While she was waiting she underwent a change of heart. Sitting in the oversized chair behind his high desk, she had, naturally, checked the drawer where the slippery file had vanished: locked. Looking around for other amusement, she hit one of the keys on his computer screen just to see what would come up. The Screensaver vanished to be replaced by the doctor’s AOL bookmarks. Under “favorite places” was Persian Kittens.

  Madison must have known about Rani, chosen not to rat them out to the nurses and even gone so far as to read up on the breed. Anna was touched. When the doctor arrived, she accepted a date for Saturday, July 4. It being only Tuesday, that wasn’t too threatening.

  Persian Kittens. Maybe the man had depths of soul she’d not suspected.

  At the Clark Street stop, Anna detrained and emerged into the sunshine. The Hatchetts, Junior and Senior, lived in a nice neighborhood. Pricey now, but James Senior may have bought and paid for his home in the fifties when it could still be done by regular people. With that thought, it occurred to Anna that she had assumed Hatch was from a blue-collar background. As she looked for 364 President Street, she realized why: his accent and his usually successful attempts to correct it. Speech patterns learned from a workingman who wants his son to have better.

  By Colorado standards President Street was narrow and, with cars parked down both sides, almost choked, but the trees were mature. Late June found them in the fullness of their splendor, not yet tinged by smog or drought. The brownstones lining the street were simply designed, with square fronts and wide stoops. Unlike the Upper West Side’s deep canyons, here buildings were on a more human scale, four stories mostly. That small concession changed the light, allowing the street a dappled neighborhood quality.

  Number 364 was halfway down the block on the left. It had only two stories, quaint and cottagelike between its taller neighbors. The stoop was swept and two potted geraniums stood sentinel on either side of a formidable wooden door. Beside the door were two bell pushes. A: James Hatchett, Sr. B: James Hatchett, Jr.

  Anna pushed A and waited for the buzz. When it came it engendered in her, as always, a sense of urgency, as if the person within would let go of the buzzer before she could yank open the door. She made it with seconds to spare and stepped i
nto the gloom of the hallway. The house was laid out like many she’d been in in New York City: apartments to the left, stairs to the right zigzagging up to the floor above. Flooring and stairs were of dark wood, worn but cared for. The inevitable nicks and scuffs had recently been restained and the whole had a new coat of varnish. A rug cascaded down the steps like a tongue in a Disney cartoon. It was held in place at the back of each riser by a brass bar. The same blue paisley configuration continued on a runner over the hardwood to the door to apartment A.

  As her eyes adjusted, she saw a man standing at the far end of the hall. There was a light above him, but either it had burned out or he’d decided not to turn it on.

  “Excuse me, are you Mr. Hatchett?” she asked.

  “The same.” The voice was strong but had the coarsened quality of age. Walking into the darkness, she could see he was well into his sixties and leaned on a walker. His upper body was heavy, barrel-chested and short-waisted, with thick ropy arms. In his youth he must have been immensely strong.

  “What can I do you for?” The offer was spoken in a friendly manner but it stopped Anna. This was territorial. This was a city. One did not accept strangers into one’s home unexplained. Not even small female strangers.

  She put her hands where he could see them and shifted her weight so the light through the high window in the front door reached him. He was square-headed, his hair black and white, in a grizzled old-fashioned crew cut. High and hooked, his nose jutted out from between thick black brows. Beneath, his eyes were gray and sharp. Even old and crippled, he wasn’t a man Anna wanted to mess with.

  She’d spent some time concocting a story to feed the old guy, but under his steady gaze she abandoned it. Either he’d help her or he wouldn’t, but that nose looked as if it could sniff out a lie at fifty paces. “I met Hatch at the statue,” she said. “We spent a little time together, not much. I was helping him identify the girl that died. I don’t think Hatch jumped. I wanted to talk to you. If it’s too painful, I’ll go. I know I’m intruding on what must be an unendurable grief.”