Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 (16 page)

"I know I'll feel a whole lot better if I could at least get her home and buried properly. I didn't ask where they put unclaimed bodies but I know it's a kind of lonely and nameless place. Not right for a little girl.

"I'll be on tonight, midnight to eight like regular. Come and see me if you don't have nothing better to do."

It was signed,
"Yours truly, James Hatchett (Hatch)."

Leaving her backpack on the bench and delighting in the knowledge that she was in one of the privileged few places in New York City where one could do that with a fair expectation of finding it there on one's return, Anna went back into the house.

There was no answer at Molly's apartment. She'd expected none; she was just covering her bases. Columbia-Presbyterian politely routed her to various helpful souls before they tracked down Molly's new room number.

"Hi," Anna said when her sister picked up. "Is Frederick there?"

"What, no small talk?" Molly asked, and Anna mentally kicked herself for failing to at least pretend she occasionally thought of someone other than herself.

"One-track mind," she apologized. "Remember that guy Hatch I was telling you about? The Park Policeman with the jumper?" Molly didn't. Anna had related the tale when drugs and tubes were taking up most of her sister's attention. She began to give a shortened version, when Molly cut her off.

"Oh, right, the little girl Frederick is investigating."

Anna quashed a surge of irritation. It was one thing to preempt a sibling, but taking over a case--even one not technically hers--was a serious breach of etiquette.

Out of courtesy and guilt, she managed to stifle her impatience and ask Molly a few polite questions: "How are you? How's the new room?" But she didn't hear the answers. Molly, sensing Anna was to conversing what empty calories are to dieting, handed the phone over to Frederick Stanton.

"Hey there, what's up?"

He was too jolly by half but he was at Molly's sickbed and Anna was truant, so she let it slide. "Did you find out anything about that unidentified corpse?"

"Molly, your little sister is playing with dead children again." Frederick's voice veered from the phone. Anna heard Molly laugh and imagined she heard the faintest of snicking sounds, the FBI guy winking at her sister. Molly's laughter paid for any annoyance incurred and she waited with moderate good cheer till Frederick refocused on the matter at hand.

"I did get to it," he said. The caution in his tone let her know not to expect too much. "There's not a whole lot to go on. They figure she's thirteen or fourteen years old. No dental work--none. She's missing a couple teeth. The report said it looked as if they'd been pulled or knocked out. Nothing recent--maybe two to four years ago. No fillings but three cavities, the kind a kid getting regular checkups would have had filled."

"That tallies with the runaway theory," Anna said.

"Except for the pulled teeth."

"Knocked out? Family abuse?"

"Maybe. There was evidence of an old break to her left ulna, but no other signs of physical abuse. No bruising not caused by the fall. No scars. No injuries in various stages of healing. She was small for her age but not from malnourishment. Skin, hair, teeth, bone development, were all consistent with a child who's been well fed and well cared for, with the exception of the teeth and scarring on her right eardrum, probably from an ear infection untreated and causing the drum to burst."

"Sexual activity?"

"Hymen intact."

"That doesn't go with making a
good living on the street, enough to feed and care for herself well."

"Your buddy the Park Policeman thought she was a thief, a pickpocket," Frederick offered.

"Crime doesn't pay like it used to, not at fourteen, not in the city. Somebody was looking after her. Or she ran off recently. So recently she hadn't time to lose weight or virginity."

"No match with missing persons reports," Frederick went on. "It'll take a while. She could be from anywhere in the country. New York's a magnet for runaways."

"And actors," Anna said, apropos of nothing but a fleeting image of Zachary.

"Like I said," Frederick teased.

While he related this feeble witticism to Molly, Anna let the information he'd given her settle in her mind. "Did you see the body?" she asked.

"How's that?"

Dutifully Anna repeated the question. Love was making Frederick Stanton goofy. "No," he replied. "I did look at her effects. The girl traveled light."

"Whatever she had would have been in the pack that was stolen," Anna reminded him.

"What they've got are her pants--either hand-me-downs or thrift-shop, but probably not hers originally. A size too big and the cuffs cut and hemmed by hand. No help there. A boy's shirt. Ralph Lauren, long-sleeved, a hundred percent cotton, oxford style. Expensive but also probably hand-me-down or secondhand. No belt, no brassiere. Cotton underpants, new, white with blue flowers, Wal-Mart. Socks and shoes no longer new but in good shape. The wear patterns suggest they were bought new for the girl. All the clothes were clean but not ironed."

"That's it?" Anna asked.

"All I got."

"Thanks," she said absently, and: "See you guys this afternoon."

She hung up Patsy's cordless and wandered back out to the bench under the plane tree. The little girl was cared for insofar as she was fed and clothed and no one had apparently sexually or physically abused her. Yet her teeth had been pulled or knocked out, the cavities left unfilled, and an ear infection, which Anna remembered from childhood as being very painful, left untreated, resulting in a burst eardrum and possible loss of hearing in one ear.

Several possibilities suggested themselves. The child's parents or caregivers could be poor. That might account for the secondhand clothing and the lack of medical attention. They could be ignorant and/or poor and so let the child's health suffer. They could hold religious convictions that forbade the interference of modern medicine in the healing process. None of these explanations fit with the body going unclaimed.

A vague sense of something forgotten weaseled around in Anna's skull as she walked the "back alleys" of Liberty Island--a short concrete work area between the building used by park personnel and a line of maintenance storage areas. Mentally she went over Stanton's oral report and could find nothing missing. Except any real comfort in the form of hard information to offer Hatch when next she saw him.

Once she was clear of the tourist-choked quay, all that glittered was gold to Anna. Sunlight, splintered into mirror shards by a choppy wind teasing the harbor, sparkled from below. Sailboats were out in force, triangles of winged color blowing across the water. The occasional fisherman, lines cast from his boat, hoping for edible fish. Ferries, one from Staten Island and two from the Circle Line, churned unstoppably through the lesser fry.

Stepping off the
Liberty IV,
Anna realized the something missing that had been plaguing her had nothing to do with Frederick's report on the girl. It was a beverage. In her lunch-filled knapsack, she'd neglected to pack anything to drink.

Knowing where Patsy kept her stash, she rode the elevator to the second floor of the powerhouse behind the registry building on Island I and made her way down the kinked corridor to the employee break room.

Minutes after the noon hour, it was inhabited by the park's acting troupe. The faux Jamaican and the faux Irishman sat at one table lunching in what struck Anna as sullen silence. At the second table, alone at the far end of the room, sat a third character clad in the garments of a nineteenth-century western European immigrant. The familiar brown dress was a couple sizes too small for the woman wearing it and, to Anna's surprise, the hair wasn't the pale yellow of the fragile blonde who'd professed such an interest in Billy Bonham and his pet ghosts, but flaming-red hair cut in a modern ear-length bob.

"Hey, Mandy," Anna said as she took a Coke from the refrigerator. "Nice uniform."

"Hah!" Mandy returned. She actually said "Hah!" just like Anna imagined it when she came across the expression in books. "That size-one bitch--"

A spoon was clacked forcefully down on the Formica at the actors' table. "Poor little Miss Mandy." A warm Irish burr cut into the interpreter's words. "Havin' to squeeze her considerable 'talents' into Corinne's costume has ruined her temper."

The woman portraying the Jamaican finished the insult. "Tight clothing constricts the lymph flow. Throws the bodily humors out of balance. Hence Miss Mandy is out of humor."

"It's that or bad acting," Brooklyn Irish muttered, a stage whisper meant to be audible at a distance.

A flush crept up Mandy's pale cheeks. Baiting her would be child's play, Anna thought. "I've had about enough of you," Mandy said, and stood to gather up her lunch things.

"Right you are, lass, right you are," the actor said, still using his character accent. "It was ungentlemanly of me to enter into a battle of wits with an unarmed woman."

The black actress laughed. Mandy knew she was being insulted, but Anna was willing to bet she didn't know exactly how. At a loss for a sharper retort, she said: "At least I show up." With a snitty-sounding click of heels on the linoleum, she stomped out of the lunchroom.

"Where is Corinne?" Anna asked.

"Maybe she got a real acting job," the man in knee britches replied.

"Fighting with Macho Bozo," the actress suggested.

"Ran off with sweet Billy Bonham," the man added.

"More power to her," said the actress. "Wish she'd called in sick or dead, though. Working with the Mandy beast is what I believe they refer to as suffering for one's art."

"She is most definitely a black hole on stage into which all talent vanishes," the actor agreed.

From this rattled exchange, which was not directed at Anna but meant only to amuse the two theater people, she surmised Corinne had gone AWOL and left them holding a Mandy-sized bag.

Having little interest in taking on the role of audience in this comedy, she wished them luck, tucked her soda in her daypack and followed the pitter-patter of Mandy's feet down the corridor toward the elevator. Avoiding human interaction on Island I, she slunk down the bricked walkway and through the decaying laundry room with its rusting mangle and shredded ceiling. Ascending floor after floor, each more decrepit than the last, each housing its own biosphere dictated by how much of the natural world had penetrated the old hospital's man-made defenses, Anna felt the cares of the peopled world dropping away much as they did when she stepped off trail and hiked into the wilderness on the mesas of southern Colorado.

She'd not been into the labyrinth of rooms and hallways of Island II since the first days of rain. Golden light poked warm fingers through broken windows, down skylights and into the chinks in mortar and wood. As she climbed into the final stairwell leading to the fourth floor, the one sans stairs that could only be ascended by clinging to an aging rail and finding footholds on the stubs of long-gone risers, each patch of light was verdant with tiny green mosses. Above, on the landing beneath a skylight, were the familiar branches of the little oak glowing yellow-green with new foliage, its roots sunk in the verdure of rot and bird droppings, its leaves reaching for the glory of an obscured sky.

Anna muscled up the last yard and stepped away from the crumbling hole that once housed five stories of stairs. For a moment she stood tasting the peculiar brand of urban silence. Across the inlet, on Island I, was the mutter of thousands of voices, the growl of ferryboat motors. Muted by thick stone walls and the knowledge that the babbling hoi polloi could not reach her, it deepened the quiet of the ancient building for Anna. She listened until the small voices of the gods began to make themselves heard. In a nearby attic a pigeon murmured. A rat, a mouse, a small bird or a very large spider scratched through dead leaves. Quietly, like the ringing of tiny bells, the previous week's rain dripped unseen behind the walls, beneath the floorboards. Breathing deeply, as if iron bands had fallen from around her chest, Anna skirted the captive sapling and entered the second door on the left; her aerie, her hiding place.

Remnants of the Coast Guard's mess were scattered across the floor, covered now with several inches of dust and debris. Moss, green and thick, carpeted the floor in oblongs beneath each window where air, light and moisture had made their way inside. Treading with great care lest she prove the Assistant Superintendent right about her ability to take care of herself in this derelict backcountry, she crossed toward the sun-dappled balcony. Planting her rump on the granite sill, she prepared to swing through to freedom.
Self-defenestration.
"Defenestrate," she said, and smiled, wondering if it was a verb.

This idle amusement was aborted. Between her feet, inside the window, clearly marked in the new-made loam of the fourth floor, were two clear prints of human feet, bare feet.

A jolt, possibly as deep as that of Robinson Crusoe on seeing Friday's track in the sand, wiped Anna's mind clear. For no reason she could put her finger on, she felt afraid. Though difficult to reach, the top floor of the Island II buildings could hardly be called inaccessible. And she could scarcely be the only explorer lured into the twisting heart of the old hospital. How did the law put it? The words surfaced: she had no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in this place.