Liberty Falling Read online

  This was a different man from the one Anna had met her first day, crossed paths with on shipboard. In the backcountry of his urban wilderness a keen intelligence shone out of his carp eyes. Anna could almost see the images his mind must be forming: reconstructing, restoring, ferreting out the secrets of the past.

  “It’s called the Animal House,” Trey said. “Could have been used for storage or office space. The name and some of the stories suggest it was used to house research animals for the medical facility.”

  “I’ve heard—” Bonham said.

  Anna had forgotten he was with them. He’d been so withdrawn his very corporeal self had faded from view.

  “What?” Trey prompted.

  Fear skittered across Billy’s weary face. “Just the stories. Same old,” he said, and Anna wondered why he was lying.

  “Are you okay, boy?” Trey asked.

  If the term “boy” offended the Park Policeman, he didn’t let it show.

  “No sir. I mean, yes sir, I’m fine. Tired. Night shift and all.” North Carolina, Patsy had said. Anna could hear the faint drawl under the words. She hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe, like Hatch, he hid the sounds of home for fear he would seem a bumpkin to the sophisticated ears of the Big Apple.

  Claypool eyed him narrowly, came to some conclusion he didn’t intend to share and brought his attention back to Anna. “Want to see the morgue? It’s right here.”

  Unable to resist the inducement of a genuine turn-of-the-century New York City morgue, Anna followed him, picking her way over the litter of glass and plaster.

  “A little something for the spelunker,” Trey said, apparently apropos of nothing. Then Anna’s eyes lit on a fringe of stalactites creeping like icicles from the roof of the walkway. Leaves, ocean storms, mineral deposits, pigeons: all the forces of nature—earth, water, land and air—vied for the privilege of being the first to wrest back the island from the clutches of man.

  Claypool led them around an immense incinerator and back into the bowels of the building. The last door on the left opened into the morgue. Anna and Trey enjoyed it with the ghoulish delight of children. Billy Bonham stood in the doorway, bored or trying to look that way. The facility was as grim and Victorian as any fan of Dickens could wish. A row of concrete steps descended to a tiled floor eight feet below. Beside them, three concrete terraces the width of the room: the gallery where medical students once gathered to watch autopsies.

  At the bottom of the room, over the staging area, a rectangular lamp two by three feet in size was suspended on a long metal arm. Directly below was a deep porcelain sink. With very little imagination Anna could see blood dripping down the white sides, hear the rasp of saw through bone.

  “This is the best part,” Claypool said. In the classic pose of a circus ringmaster, he stood before an immense cupboard built into the wall to the left of the sink. Eight square wooden doors were stacked in double rows. The bottom doors were at floor level, the top two a foot shy of the ceiling.

  Trey opened the one on the bottom right and pulled out a wooden rack made of slats, the sort of thing used to dry jerked meat. “The cooler,” Trey said. “They could keep up to eight corpses at a time for research.”

  “Ever get in one?” Anna asked.

  “Sure. You want to try it?”

  She did, just because it was one of those opportunities that seldom knock and she hated to miss anything. But her clothes were clean and Columbia-Presbyterian was her next stop. “I’ll take a rain check,” she said regretfully.

  Crossing broken gray tiles fitted with floor drains to carry away splattered effluvia, she opened another of the cupboards and peeked in. “A much more amiable place to lie than the steel filing drawers of a modern morgue.”

  “I’d think so,” Claypool said.

  Anna opened the door next to it. “Jesus Christ.” She slammed the door.

  “A mouse?”

  “Not a mouse.” Recovered from the initial shock, she opened the cupboard again. The image burned into the back of her eyes was that of a child as shriveled and desiccated as a body mummified by the New Mexico desert.

  Claypool was at her shoulder. “One of the little people, a Ratner. I’ll have to have a talk—another talk—with the head of Interpretation and that woman in charge of our troupe of theatrical immigrants. That little blond snippet is the practical joker of the bunch.” Reaching past Anna, he said, “Give me a hand. These little buggers are heavy. Solid bronze.”

  Dragged into the light, Anna’s child mummy turned into a sculpture of an immigrant. Age, race, country of origin, were glossed over with a generic motif of bonnet and ankle-length dress.

  “Why is she two and a half feet tall?” Anna asked.

  “Beats me. There are dozens of these around. They were done by an artist named Ratner. Everybody calls them ‘the Ratners.’ A race apart. The interpreters swear they breed in the dark, and I’m beginning to believe them. Most of them are stored in the old recreation hall on Island Two. For reasons that are a mystery to me, the seasonals have taken against them. We find them in the strangest places.”

  “The morgue?”

  “This is the first here, but it’s not an original idea. This is a popular place. We’ve found mannequins dressed in NPS uniforms, unpopular SOP manuals. Once—before my time—two curators were caught in flagrante.

  “Billy,” Trey barked. “Was this Ratner here when you did rounds last night?”

  There was a hesitation just long enough so Anna guessed Billy didn’t check the morgue.

  “I don’t think so,” Bonham said, and Claypool let it go. The Park Police had no directive to check the buildings room by room. Not only would such an expedition take all night, but after dark it would be foolish from a safety standpoint, too much to trip over and fall into.

  They left the midget immigrant at the intersection of hallways to be retrieved on the return trip, and continued on to the infectious disease wards on the southeast corner of the island.

  After three false leads and an increasing feeling of unreality, Anna found the ruined stairwell. It was as she remembered, with the exception of size. She would have sworn the one she’d dangled from was three times as high and the splintered wood and metal far more piercing in aspect.

  “I didn’t think to look here,” Claypool said accusingly. “There’s never been anything stored in this part of the building. What there is is upstairs in what used to be the nurses’ quarters.”

  “It could have—” Anna stepped gingerly over the debris, having no desire to skewer herself on a nineteenth-century nail steeped in fifty years of bird shit. Beneath what remained of the upper landing she picked through the fragments of plaster, what looked like wax shavings, nails, pieces of rusted metal and mouse droppings. There was nothing under the mess but interlocking circles where paint cans or nail kegs had once been. “It could have been somewhere else, I guess,” she said, but she didn’t think so. “Could it have been moved? Dwight saw somebody here at about the same time I was.”

  “That was you,” Billy said, the first words he’d spoken since they made their unscheduled stop at the morgue.

  “Not me. Dwight saw somebody dressed in black. I wasn’t. And I wasn’t outside.”

  “Why didn’t you report it?” Trey asked.

  Professional guilt stabbed at Anna’s middle. “I thought Dwight . . . I guess I had other things on my mind,” she finished lamely.

  “A sister in ICU? Are you two close?” the Assistant Superintendent asked.

  “Very. Very close.”

  “With stress like that it’s hard to keep things in perspective. You might not want to poke around back here by yourself for a while. One minute’s inattention and ...” He gestured meaningfully at the collapsed stairs.

  Anna was being treated like an overwrought tourist. Though she’d done it to others more than once, she didn’t like being on the receiving end. “Could the stuff I saw under the stairs have been moved, is what I was getting at. Moved b
y whoever it was Dwight saw?” she went on doggedly.

  “Nothing is impossible,” Trey said, and she knew she was being brushed off. Proving himself once again more sensitive than she’d given him credit for, when he saw her face turn to stone the Assistant Superintendent changed tactics. “Black is big in New York. It’s a city in mourning. Everybody wears black winter and summer. Probably Dwight saw a straggler or an adventurer. We get them over here fairly regularly. We’re not so much concerned about them damaging the resource as hurting themselves. Uncle Sam’s deep pockets. It’s a litigious man’s dream come true back here. I know what you’re thinking, though. I’ve worked the western parks. Could be somebody stealing artifacts, poaching, drug-dealing. We just don’t have that. Things worth stealing—appliances, plumbing, copper pipe—were mined out long before we got it. There’s nothing to poach but pigeons and no reason for anybody to rendezvous here to deal drugs. You can do it anywhere in the city and call less attention to yourself than you would here.”

  The speech had Anna convinced. Billy was pointedly looking at his watch, loath to miss the next staff boat. “I was thinking more along the lines of the little people. A joke.” She tried saving face.

  “Could be,” Trey said, letting her. “But those things are awful heavy.”

  “Right.” Suddenly Anna was as anxious as Billy to be away. There was that about the forgotten islands of Ellis that made one doubt oneself and yet resent the voices of sanity trying to explain away the discrepancies. When Molly was well, Anna would ask her if stress could be manifested in confusion and imagining things.

  Even as the thought crossed her mind, Anna caught the “when.” A beautiful word. Now it was “when” Molly got well, not “if.” Shadows vanished. Anna was reborn in sunshine.

  WITH A CONVENIENT attack of executive urgency, Trey left to walk back on the straight and sunlit path by the water. Anna and Billy were to go back via the Animal House to pick up the displaced little person and return her to the old recreation hall where the rest of her clan awaited.

  Bonham was in a hurry and walked rapidly down the light-riddled passageway. Leaf litter, deposited patiently one leaf at a time through cracked panes and broken mullions, was imbued with false life only to die again the moment after his gusting passage.

  Shorter of leg, Anna trotted along behind. The unnecessary pace—they had twenty-five minutes to catch the boat—irked her thigh, but she didn’t want to lose Billy. It was a dull morning. She wanted to tease stories from him. Years of campfire programs righteously elevated to educational tools to assist the public in appreciating the natural world left her nostalgic for good old-fashioned ghost stories. And it would give her something to talk about in the ICU. If nothing else, she could bring Molly interesting case studies. Molly was not a believer in the paranormal, but was fascinated by the quirks of the human mind.

  The pint-sized immigrant was at the junction. Billy lifted the sculpture with a grunt. He was strong enough but without bulk, and so retained grace of movement. Anna enjoyed the play of muscles along his forearms and biceps as he adjusted his burden.

  “What did you hear?” she asked. “You started to tell us you heard something here, by the Animal House. What was it?”

  Billy didn’t want to answer—that was clear in the crimp of his mouth and the fact his eyes wouldn’t meet hers. Anna knew she’d win. He was a southern boy. She was a lady and old enough to be his mother. An irresistible force south of the Mason-Dixon Line. “Come on,” she cajoled. “I told you about my psycho-cats.”

  Billy looked sheepish, but he smiled. “Psycho-dogs,” he admitted. “One night when I used to patrol here I heard a dog barking, high and yappy, like a dog in pain.”

  “Did you check it out?”

  “Not right away. I had some things to do,” the officer defended himself. “But I came back at the end of shift—the next morning—and couldn’t find anything.”

  “You think it was a real dog?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Could a dog get on the island?” Anna asked.

  “Sure. All it would have to do is walk across the bridge from New Jersey.”

  He didn’t sound convinced. A ghostly manifestation of a long-dead animal used in medical experimentation struck Anna as unlikely. But then so did a dog trekking over the water for no apparent reason, never seen by an island daily overrun with people.

  Bonham opened the padlock to the recreation hall and Anna followed him into the dusty recesses of an enormous room filled with metal racks that reached nearly to the high ceiling and were cluttered with historical refuse: chairs, desks, lamps, boxes. At the far end of the room was a raised stage crowded with, among other things, a community of midget immigrants who appeared to be roughly formed with hammer and chisel. Caps, satchels and babes-in-arms were well represented. Bonham bumped the lady down among her peers. “These things give me the creeps,” he said. “This whole island gives me the creeps. I don’t want to get branded a flake but I do want to get off of here. I signed on to fight flesh-and-blood bad guys.”

  “What do you see?” Anna pressed since he was in the mood to talk.

  “It’s not like I go around looking for things,” Billy said. “I’m not one of those guys who are always communing with crystals. Before coming here I’d only ever seen one ghost in my life and I was so snockered at the time, it was probably a pink elephant kind of thing.”

  He relocked the theater and the two of them abandoned the brick passage for the less imaginative path in back of the buildings. Anna resisted the temptation to quiz him, knowing the pressure of silence would be more effective.

  “Here, cripes! It’s one thing and another. Candles flickering in attic windows. Music I barely hear that stops when I really listen. That dog. A pale face behind a dirty window. Up high where you can’t get to it without risking your neck. I don’t much care whether I’m nuts or haunted. I just want off the island.”

  The dock behind the museum was empty, but a hundred yards out they could see the Liberty IV.

  “Keep this to yourself,” Billy warned. The boy was gone. Looking out of the baby-blue eyes was an angry man.

  “Mum’s the word,” Anna said, and watched for the boy to return. He didn’t.

  9

  ANNA AND BILLY shared a boat back to Liberty, then across the harbor to MIO, but he was no longer speaking to her. Not surprising; confessions, not hedged neatly about with incense and holy water, were unsettling things. People seemed driven by twin devils: the need to unburden themselves and the fear of being undone by their secrets. If past experience was anything to judge by, Billy Bonham would avoid her for a good long time. Should his ego be slightly deformed, he might even go so far as to hate her for knowing him too well.

  He’d taken the passenger cabin. That left the stern or the bridge to Anna. She chose wind and sun and sea over Kevin’s jovial company. The harbor, the boat captains had told her, was on the mend, recovering from the days when a city’s pollution was a testament to its economic well-being. Dwight said he’d seen seals and Kevin had sighted a school of silver-scaled fishes close to four feet long. Good news. Anna tried to dwell on it, and for a minute or two, actually succeeded. Then the fog of Billy Bonham’s tired gray anger began to creep back. A dull ache started in the base of her skull where the weight of her head balanced precariously on the tip of her spine.

  Without the splendors of nature to ameliorate it, the tawdriness of humanity loomed large. All the tacky, needy, sordid, whiny, frightened, peevish citizens grasping for their daily dose of happiness began to gather in her mindscape, peopling what should have been an arresting view of the Jersey shore.

  A bony forest of iron and steel scratched against the blue of the sky. Machines engineered to lift or to pump, to load or to move, etched out an industrial “park” west of the Verrazano Narrows. Between this spiky horizon and the graceful drape of the bridge was an apartment complex. Location, location, location, the three most important things in real es
tate. Idly, Anna wondered if the word “Folly” had been added to the developer’s name yet.

  At the dock on Liberty Island Kevin took on two more passengers, neither of whom Anna recognized, then churned back into open water for the short trip to Manhattan. Billy still slept—or feigned it—in the cabin. The others joined him. Anna lost herself in the roar of the Liberty IV’s engines.

  Before she saw Molly she wanted to shake the sense of unease that had settled around her, shrug off the venom of Billy’s last words. No threats had been made. “Keep this to yourself” scarcely constituted verbal abuse. Premonitions, signs and portents, Anna realized. She had a bad feeling. Modern law enforcement techniques hardly recommended reading the entrails of chickens or calling 1-800-PSYCHIC for clues, but no cops—at least no old cops—recommended ignoring what they called their “gut.” Women, being less encumbered with the need to link feelings to bodily urges, knew it as intuition.

  The eye saw and the mind stored more than the conscious brain could readily assimilate or immediately articulate. A hundred tiny things—the way a person stood, something missing or added, a smell, a shift of the eyes, things done and undone—that were too minute to take focus, but when recorded by eye and mind, coalesced into a feeling. This morning Anna felt all was not right with the world. She was not safe. This was a dangerous and angry place. And it had nothing to do with the reputed horrors of New York City. New York had never frightened her. Annoyed her, yes. Pissed her off, occasionally. Disgusted and amazed her on a regular basis. But never scared her. This had to do with the little islands. Or, she admitted as the Liberty IV docked and she joined the short queue disembarking at MIO, maybe more to do with Molly, alcohol, too little sleep and—who knew?—maybe perimenopause. Anna had always been precocious.

  The subway conspired to add to the pervasive sense of unease. From the 125th Street station on, a scrofulous young man in leather and chains, with various parts of his anatomy shaved, pierced or tattooed, sat across the aisle staring through her. The fact that he scurried after her at the 168th Street stop shouting, “Pardon me, ma’am, but you forgot your backpack,” lightened her mood somewhat, but not so much that Molly, wits sharpened by being the firstborn and a psychiatrist, wouldn’t note her gloom. On the short and sunny walk from the subway to the hospital, Anna whistled a happy tune to see if the prescription worked anywhere but musical comedy.