Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  Whatever the ruse, Anna was grateful for the time he could spend with Molly, grateful for the love he showed. Mostly she was grateful he was gone. Till she woke up in Molly’s apartment, she hadn’t known how desperately she needed to be by herself. She breathed like a woman suddenly free of corsets. Alone but for the benign presence of a cat, she felt herself expanding, each crushed, cringing unit of body and soul filling with solitude, resuming its natural contour.

  MOLLY WAS BACK off the respirator. Throat sore from the tube, weak from battling pneumonia and hung over from sedatives, she was a feeble shadow of herself. Even her unruly red and white curls were defeated and lay close to her skull. She mustered a smile for Anna, croaked, “Can’t talk,” and closed her eyes. Frederick had cleaned up. Not because he felt like it, Anna guessed, nor to impress anyone, but simply because it might cheer Molly to see him that way. Anna was going to like him a whole lot better as a friend than she ever did as a lover.

  Unless he annoyed or harmed her sister in any small way.

  To pass the time, she told the story of Dr. Madison and the Persian kittens research on his computer. Frederick raised an eyebrow, a trick Anna had tried to master since high school without success. One perfectly arched brow and Sister Mary Vionney could subdue the multitudes.

  “Did you look at these kittens?” Frederick asked.

  Anna didn’t know if he was trying to find out how deeply she’d invaded the doctor’s privacy, or genuinely wanted a description of Rani’s peers. She told him she hadn’t. He watched her for a moment as if he had more to add.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  Not in a mood to pursue the topic of Dr. Madison, Anna described the disfigurement Corinne’s attacker had carved on her forearm.

  “STOPMUDP four J,” Frederick repeated. The bizarre clue drew him out for the first time since she’d arrived. Molly’s eyes were open. Through a fog of drugs and pain her intelligence responded to a puzzle.

  With Anna coaching, Frederick wrote it out on a paper towel and draped it over the footrail of the bed. The three of them stared at it.

  “A message from the would-be-still-could-be killer,” Frederick mused.

  “That’s the thinking at the moment,” Anna agreed.

  “Stop mud. That’s enlightening. Mud slides, mudslinging, mud pies, your name is mud,” he murmured.

  “Mudluscious,” Molly whispered, and Anna laughed.

  “Maybe it’s an acronym,” Anna suggested. “Mothers Under Duress. Manhattanites Unsettled and Depressed.”

  “An acronym would make sense.”

  Anna looked at him.

  “You want me to do something,” he accused. “Something hard and boring and illegal.”

  “The FBI keeps a file of killers and other questionable types.”

  Frederick sighed. “I’ll see if I can run it through somebody’s computer,” he promised. “See if the MO matches anything.”

  A side glance at Molly followed. It was not lost on Anna that he was being good to her to please her sister. Whatever worked.

  “Then there’s P four J,” she said.

  “Page four?”

  “Could be. Of what?”

  “J. ‘J’ is for Judgement? Jane Austen?”

  They gave it up. Too little to go on. After a minute’s dead air, Frederick opened Tom Sawyer to Chapter 7 and began reading. Anna left them like that, Molly resting, Frederick folded over Mark Twain. They looked right, like an old married couple at ease with each other’s frailty.

  Anna finished up her errands: a little food, a little wine and the photos she’d remembered when she found the receipt the previous night. The pictures of Hatch’s effects were as worthless as she’d thought they’d be, but there were a couple nice shots of Charlie. She’d give them to him by way of thanks for the tour of the statue and apology for waking him with pointless questions.

  Shortly after noon, she got off the Number 1 train and sat in Battery Park to lunch on a pretzel with mustard and watch the tourists till it was time to catch the twelve forty-five staff boat back to Ellis and Liberty. The Circle Line to the islands took on passengers at the Battery. Lines were already long as visitors queued up for tickets.

  Heat brought out the beast in people, abrading away the thin veneer of civilization till they snapped and snarled like ill-mannered dogs. Sticky children whined at sunburned parents and tired husbands nipped at overwrought wives. All in all an entertaining show. Deep in the shade, surrounded by aggressive pigeons hoping for her crumbs, Anna was content to observe the scrabble for food, sex and amusement that was the fate of earth’s creatures.

  The train disgorged passengers beneath the park and funneled them out through the doors of a stone station house with the look of a charming little old-world cottage. To see hundreds of people exiting a building that could scarcely hold a dozen was a delicious illusion. The doors, the masonry, the rumble of the world beneath, the bovine movements of the tourists, put Anna in mind of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, with the carnivorous Morlocks running the subterranean machinery and the witless Eloi fattened up as cattle.

  A familiar figure emerged from the pageant. Mandy. She carried a small suitcase and Anna bet she had spent the night in Manhattan with her mysterious beau.

  “Aha,” she breathed; not so mysterious anymore. Tonight she would have a juicy tidbit of gossip to share with Patsy over cocktails. Mandy’s suitor was with her and as disreputable-looking as Anna could have hoped. A good deal older than Mandy, probably near forty, he dressed like a Fidel Castro clone right down to the beard. On a day that would reach the mid-nineties, the combat boots and long-sleeved camo shirt were ludicrous.

  Deep in conversation, they passed without noticing Anna tucked back in the shade on her bench. She gave the last of her pretzel to the birds and fell into step half a block behind them. She had no interest in tailing them. It was time to catch the boat.

  A block from the MIO pier, they stopped. The man handed Mandy a paper sack, then faded into the shadow of the trees on the periphery of Battery Park. Either by his choice or hers, he didn’t want to be seen by the people she worked with. Anna dawdled, giving Mandy time to get ahead. Proximity might force them into conversation. A situation neither would relish.

  By the time Anna meandered in, Mandy and Assistant Superintendent Trey Claypool waited at the end of the dock. Beyond, the Liberty IV motored deftly through a harbor crowded with boats.

  The Fourth of July, Patsy promised, would bring out so many boats they would nearly cover the water. Anna looked forward to that with trepidation. The harbor was the only open space her eyes had been allowed since she deplaned at Newark.

  Standing well apart and facing different directions, Trey and Mandy were making it clear they had absolutely no interest whatsoever in each other. Too clear? If they had something going on, they would have had to go to extraordinary lengths to hide it on the island. Then there was Fidel. Maybe Mandy got smacked because she was two-timing Claypool with a scrap of army surplus. Anna tired of trying to see past the obvious, making meaning where none was to be made. She wanted to go home. Soon, she promised herself. Soon.

  Thinking it would be silly to space herself equidistant from both the Assistant Superintendent and the interpreter, she opted for the Assistant Super. Waiting in the glare of the sun, eyes narrowed against the water, he looked almost handsome. Anna had been noticing that sort of thing a lot lately. Pretty Park Policemen must have triggered a tide of hormones. Men in uniform carrying big guns. How could a girl resist?

  “Hey,” she said, talking to justify coming to stand next to him. “Long night on the town?”

  “Huh?” Again Claypool seemed not to recognize her. She was not going to reintroduce herself. “No. Business,” he said curtly.

  The Liberty IV chugged closer. Mandy moved to be in place, the first up the gangplank.

  “You?” Claypool asked, after so long it took Anna a second to remember the drift of the convers
ation.

  “Yes indeed,” she replied. “But this time I actually got to sleep in a bed. My sister has a place on the Upper West Side. Last time, you abandoned me to a cold night on a hard conference table.” She was only kidding, wanting to say something to pass the time, but he shot her such a strange look she must have struck a nerve. His head cranked around and he stared at her with eyes so blank the carp image resurfaced.

  “I didn’t abandon anybody,” he stated.

  “Well, not abandoned,” she hedged. Somewhere along the line her social skills seemed to have atrophied. “But a lift home in your runabout would have been nice.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The tail end of his sentence mingled with engine sounds from the staff boat. Anna let the failed tête-à-tête go. Lord knew what Trey Claypool was up to on his nocturnal visits to Manhattan. The sex shops on Forty-second Street flashed through her mind as Cal handed her aboard. She decided she didn’t want to know any more secrets. If it wasn’t one’s birthday, secrets and surprises had a way of turning out to be nasty.

  21

  CROSSING THE WATER brought a few minutes’ respite from what had so rapidly become an oppressive summer heat. As she disembarked on Ellis, oppression returned; both physically and psychologically. Anna wondered if she might be coming down with something: leukemia, AIDS, clinical depression. Corinne’s assault, the meaningless deaths, the petty mysteries, the weird accidents that plagued her stay at the monument pounded inside her brain as the heat pounded down on her unprotected head. Most crimes had a linear quality. The root cause of this was that most criminals were not all that bright. Agatha Christie was bright. P. D. James was bright. Dick Francis was bright. Criminals were thugs: Not very creative. Not ingenious. Opportunists who’d flunked long-range planning. Hence nonfictional crimes tended to be fairly straightforward.

  On these two islands a series of incidents occurred from which no one appeared to have emerged the winner. Hatch had no money, nobody wanted his job. He had no wife to covet, no wife or lover Anna could find to want him dead for personal reasons. His insurance policy was the pittance that went with the job. With no other living family, it would go to his father. Not only did Jim seem to genuinely love his only son, but he was too crippled to kill him if he’d wanted to. Agnes Tucker, the little lost girl, wasn’t a missing heiress in disguise. She was lost to her mother, and given that her father hadn’t claimed her, had probably run away from him. Since the man had gone underground after kidnapping her, it wasn’t a stretch to picture him constantly on the move, Agnes grabbing her chance and finding herself alone in the big city. Considering the way she had fallen, accident was ruled out. That left murder at the hands of the Park Policeman or suicide. As there was no discernible connection between Hatch and the girl, murder was unrealistic. But Anna had never seen a suicide behave as Agnes was reported to have: running headlong, pack on her back, to dive to a gory end.

  Then some SOB stole the pack off the little corpse.

  That presented a possibility. Hatch wanted to look in her knapsack. He suspected her of being a pickpocket. The child had jumped when he chased her. Had she chosen to die rather than get caught with whatever was in the sack? What could she get caught doing that was that bad? Even if the knapsack had been chock-full of the body parts of dismembered babies, Agnes wouldn’t have served any hard time. In New York State fourteen was legally a minor. She must have known that. After the media blitz that hit the country when grade school kids began shooting up playgrounds, Anna doubted there was a juvenile delinquent left who didn’t know his or her rights.

  What if the pack contained something that might get someone else, an adult, in trouble? The thought put enough of the pieces together that Anna stopped walking and stood in the heat-drenched shade between the registry building and the old powerhouse to focus her faculties on this idea. Fourteen was a perfect age to die for someone else. Anna didn’t remember a lot before she was thirty-nine or so, but she did recollect fantasies of heroism and self-sacrifice that had entranced her in early adolescence. That was the age girls wanted to become nuns, work with lepers, die of scarlet fever nursing the man they loved. And boys wanted to kill large numbers of people with powerful guns to save the known universe. If Agnes thought what she carried was that dramatically vital, she might well have hurled herself from a sixty-foot parapet. Giving her life that others might whatever.

  Then the backpack had been snatched away; immediately, before Anna got to the girl. Following the idea that the pack contained something incriminating, valuable or necessary to some plan, the disappearance suggested not the callous robbing of a still-warm corpse but that Agnes had a confederate as invested in the contents of the pack as the child herself was.

  Drugs? Diamonds? Microchips containing Bill Gates’s game plan? Anna resumed her walk. Why would anyone drag that sort of thing up the Statue of Liberty? It was a rotten place for a deal or an exchange. The worst place she could think of to arrange an illicit sale. The statue was crawling with federal employees and had security at the one entrance. Besides, any criminal arriving after ten A.M. would have to wait. Anna didn’t picture underworld types being willing to stand in line for several hours to do a dastardly deed. Central Park was far more workable.

  In another park, Anna would have considered resource theft. Miss Liberty was valuable only in wholeness; in spirit. Pieces of steel or copper that could be carted off by the strongest, most determined child would be worthless. The kid could make more money collecting aluminum cans for recycling.

  If the pack contained incriminating evidence, then of what? Before Hatch’s death, no crime of any magnitude had been committed in the monument for ages. Guns and knives would have shown up at the security gate. And the same things that made the statue a lousy place to sell, buy or trade contraband made it a lousy place to do so with anything that could be used for blackmail. Blackmail was the only purpose Anna could think of for toting around incriminating evidence.

  If the child was unknown to Hatch and had suicided, then it made no sense that Hatch jumped out of guilt for pushing her. If the child suicided, it also took away the revenge motive for Hatch’s death. If he hadn’t murdered the child, why kill him? Unless whoever the kid was working with, the mysterious snatcher of packs, blamed Hatch because he’d chased the girl, caused her to sacrifice her life. That brought Anna back around to the pack. What was in it that was so important it fomented a suicide and a murder? And who had the means and opportunity to avenge themselves on Hatch? Means wasn’t tough. It wouldn’t take much strength to dislodge a man sitting on a wall. Anna could do it if she had a running start and the element of surprise. Opportunity was trickier. The pusher would have to get on the island after hours, get into and up the statue and know where and when Hatch would be at his most vulnerable. A number of people working on the island knew of Hatch’s Gauloise habit. Any one of them could have done it. Or anybody who had been watching the statue for a time. Hatch’s smoking perch was visible for miles in three directions.

  Then there was Corinne: different island, mixed with different people, no known connection with Agnes, Hatch, the backpack or the statue. Anna wasn’t a die-hard cop who didn’t believe in coincidences. They happened all the time. In literature they were rife. Thomas Hardy made a good living writing about improbable coincidences that had an impact on many lives. But this didn’t feel like one. There was a common thread tying all the incidents together: none of them made one whit of sense. That was a pattern. If none of them made sense, it indicated there was a key piece of information missing, the key that would unlock doors on both Liberty and Ellis.

  The “attacks” on her? The collapse of the stairs, the push into an oncoming train? Her memory of those events had mutated. At the time, she’d felt a malicious intervention but in retrospect she wasn’t sure. What connection had she, a stranger, to anything that might be festering at the monument? Maybe one, and it was a stretch, but if there had been something
hidden under the stairs, the same thing that had been moved to the garden where she’d found Corinne, it was possible someone had been afraid she’d seen it and so tried to dispose of her. Seen what? The same flaws in logic that stymied her when she thought about the contents of the child’s backpack applied. Ellis was almost as unlikely a place for the exchange of illegal substances as Liberty. The south side was relatively deserted but given a choice of all the places in New York to hold a secret rendezvous, it would be near the bottom of any list.

  Hypervigilance was a common symptom of people under stress. Perhaps the “attacks” were simply an overstimulated survival instinct latching onto common events with uncommon fear. Like her suspicions of Dr. Madison and his locked desk drawer. The identity of Agnes Tucker had been established. If Madison for some obscure reason had been trying to obfuscate his connection with the city morgue, he’d been wasting his time. Therefore it wasn’t logical that he was hiding anything. Logic had to factor in. There was no reason to injure or kill her; therefore no one had attempted to do so. QED.

  PATSY WAS IN her office. Once again the phone was clamped to her ear. Plans for the Pot Party, as she’d deemed it, were in full swing. “Pot” was not the pot of parties Anna had frequented in her salad days but short for “melting pot.” Because of the nature of the bill Mrs. Weinstein was angling for, this Fourth of July Liberty Island would represent nearly as many nationalities as it had during its heyday as a port of immigration. A fitting tribute and clever politics.