Liberty Falling Read online

  The old man pulled a large white handkerchief out of the pocket of the blue jumpsuit he wore—the unstructured kind that doesn’t bind when one is sedentary. As the hankie was released, she noticed a silver sliver disappear into a leather case snapped to a belt loop. It was long and narrow-bladed, like the knives used to gut fish. She’d been right to respect the man’s space.

  Mr. Hatchett blew his nose with a honking sound, then pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and unashamedly wiped the tears out of his eyes. “Nothing’s unendurable. But damn near. Damn near. Come on in.” He pushed the door open with his hip and held it for her with one foot of his walker. “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” he explained as she passed him. “When it gets to your lungs, they say it kills you. We’ll see.”

  Anna’s dad had died of Lou Gehrig’s disease; cheated her and Molly out of another twenty years of having a father. “That’s what got my dad,” she told Mr. Hatchett, “but it took fourteen years to do it.”

  “I got two left then. Sit down.” He pointed to a rocking chair beside a fireplace filled with a dried-flower arrangement. Anna sat and James Hatchett, Sr., swung himself and the walker to a sideboard beside the door. “Scotch?” he offered.

  It was eleven-thirty in the morning. “Don’t mind if I do,” Anna said, surprising herself. The Scotch was in honor of old Mr. Hatchett, Molly and her own father.

  “A man’s a damn fool to drink before he’s forty and a damn fool not to afterward,” Mr. Hatchett said. She heard the sound of liquid pouring into a glass; then he said: “I’ll let you do the honors. Mine’s the one with the straw.”

  Anna thought he was joking, but his was in a single-serving apple juice jar with a straw. She remembered then how stiff her dad’s back and neck had gotten at the end. Stiff and terribly weak. It had been hard for him to put a glass to his lips, then tip his head back. That was soon before he died. Mr. Hatchett might not have two years left. She hoped she was wrong.

  “Here you go, sir.” She put the jar on the wide arm of the La-Z-Boy he’d settled into.

  “Jim.”

  “Jim,” she said, and took her seat. Recalling Hatch’s accent, she said, “You don’t sound like you’re from Brooklyn.”

  “Seattle,” he said. “Originally. Then all over. Then here. Stevedore for thirty-one years down on the docks. Here’s mud in your eye.” They toasted solemnly and sipped their drinks.

  The apartment—or what she could see of it—was built in railroad style. They called it “shotgun” in the South. Each room was connected to the others in a line, like railroad cars. The living room, where they sat, was at the rear of the building. Two windows, uncurtained and opened to catch the breeze, looked out on a tiny garden fenced off from a dozen other gardens, equally tiny, behind the buildings that lined this street and the next. Hatchett’s garden was well kept, roses in beds and potted plants around a square of brick paving. His apartment was equally well tended, if totally masculine. The few knickknacks looked to be souvenirs from around the world: a plaster Leaning Tower of Pisa, a wooden pagoda, a metal Eiffel Tower about six inches high, seashells and a plastic hula dancer in a faded grass skirt. There were lots of books, one floor-to-ceiling bookcase of paperbacks. At a glance, the complete works of Louis L’Amour and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Two black-and-white pictures in old frames—one of a woman, one of a ship—graced the mantel. Faded prints of heavily forested mountains framed the chimney. The only feminine touch was the dried flowers in the fireplace. Anna must have looked at them, because Jim said, “The housekeeper does that. She puts ’em in every June and lets ’em collect dust till September. I don’t see the point but it keeps the old bat happy. Look out. We got company.”

  Anna turned in time to see a big tiger cat jumping from the windowsill to the arm of her chair. He paused, showed her his rear end long enough for her to pay her respects, then leapt to the arm of Jim’s lounger. There he flopped down, legs hanging limp, chin on the upholstery in the same pose Anna had seen his larger cousins take when draped over tree limbs in the Serengeti.

  “Hey, Crumbum,” Jim said, and rubbed the cat’s head with scarred knuckles. The cat’s left ear was a ragged stub and one of his eyes was missing.

  “Used up a few lives?” Anna asked politely.

  “A few. He used to be quite the ladies’ man. A real fighter. Till we got him fixed and he forgot what it was he was fighting for.”

  Silence settled between them. Anna could feel the sun warm on her shoulder, the Scotch warm in her stomach, and hear the uneven rattle of the tiger cat purring.

  “You want to talk about Jimmy,” Mr. Hatchett said after a fortifying sip from the straw.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Nah. I want to talk. Memory’s all that keeps ’em alive. Jimmy, his mom, my folks, all alive and well in here.” He tapped his temple. “A piss-poor excuse for the real thing, but you take what you can get.” He pulled out the handkerchief and whisked it under his nose. Crumbum lazily batted at the cotton as it brushed by.

  “Do you think he killed himself?” Anna asked bluntly.

  Jim didn’t answer and he didn’t meet her eye. After half a minute she wondered if he’d heard her. “I like to think he didn’t,” he said finally.

  “Sounds like you might think he did.”

  Again the silence. For a man who said he wanted to talk, words were coming hard. “Get that picture off the mantel, would you?” he asked at length.

  Anna got up to do as he requested.

  “The one on the end there in the black wood frame. Careful. That frame’s falling apart. I keep meaning to get around to regluing it but never seem to quite make it.”

  Holding it securely together, Anna lifted down a photograph of a sweet-faced woman in the fitted coat and wide collar fashionable in the forties. She was leaning against the rounded fender of a car, her hand shading her eyes from the sun. No. Anna looked closer and smiled. She was saluting. The clothes looked about right for World War II. She appeared to be Italian, great dark eyes with straight black brows and shoulder-length waves of lush dark hair.

  “Hatch’s mother,” Anna said. There was no mistaking the eyes.

  “Hatch . . . Right, that’s what they called Jimmy at work. Jimmy’s mom, Angela. I took that the first day I met her. She was seventeen. It was wartime. I was in the Navy and we got married a week later. Two days after that I shipped out and was gone three years. We were so hot for each other you could see the sparks. And in those days, if you cared about a girl, you married her first. You can’t tell at that age what’s hormones and what’s love, but Angie and I were a couple of the lucky ones. We fell in love writing letters. All those three years. Hundreds of letters. I’d still know Angie’s handwriting if I saw it tomorrow on a flyer in the gutter. Spiky little back-hand. She was a southpaw. I got home and we got right to the business of being married like no time had passed at all.”

  Jim sucked up some Scotch and scratched the cat’s head, flattening what was left of his ears out at right angles to his skull. Anna waited. She knew the beginning of a story when she heard one.

  “What Angie’d managed to hide in her letters—not on purpose, she didn’t have a dishonest bone, but because she’d hid it her whole life—was she had some kind of problem just being happy. She had dark times when she’d go off, walk by herself for hours. I was pretty worthless. Looking back, maybe there’s something I could have done, but we didn’t know much in those days. Only crazy people saw head doctors. I knew she wanted a family. I did too. I didn’t become Catholic like they wanted, but I signed papers saying the kids would be raised Catholic. Church isn’t all that bad for kids if you don’t take it too seriously. There weren’t any kids, though. We didn’t run around testing ourselves like people do now. It was just the woman’s fault. ‘Barren’ was the word Angie used to beat herself with.”

  Never having had much interest in children except from a scientific viewpoint, Anna found it hard to imagine the emptiness a woman like Angela Hatchett
must have experienced when she was unable to bear. On two occasions she’d watched friends go through a frustrating fertility quest in their late thirties; seen it take over their lives, nearly destroy their marriages. Both cases had ended in not one but two successful pregnancies. She’d celebrated for them but known, deep down, she did not understand. As she did not truly understand now.

  “To make a long story short,” Jim went on after a minute, “the dark times got longer and darker. That woman must have walked a thousand miles. Hell, maybe she sat. I wasn’t allowed to go with her. At thirty-nine she got pregnant. Everything went well, even the delivery. Angie had that baby laughing. Just like that’s what she’d been born for.”

  “Hatch,” Anna said.

  “Jimmy. He was the best baby I ever saw. Sweet-tempered. Almost never cried. Laughed before he could sit up. A cat’s tail and an empty box were all the toys he ever needed, though you can bet we bought him everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  “I thought that’d do it. A baby. For a while she was so happy, my Angie. Like the surf had finally come out. But whatever it was came back. When Jimmy was about five, she started walking again.”

  Anna had thought this fairy tale was going to have a happy ending, that the old man had forgotten the original question and was enjoying his reminiscences. Now she got a bad feeling Jim was just answering her in horrid detail.

  “When Jimmy was eight, Angie jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. It was more than a month before we knew. The body had to wash up and then it wasn’t like it looked like Angie anymore.”

  “No note?” Anna asked.

  “No note.”

  “No threats?”

  “Never. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. I always thought if I had it to do all over again . . . Then I did have it to do all over again, with Jimmy this time, and I didn’t see it coming. Son of a bitch.”

  Out came the handkerchief.

  Crumbum abandoned his master and, tail switching, stalked off through French doors that Anna guessed, from having frequented apartments like this in her younger days, opened into the dining room.

  His mother’s suicide explained a lot: Why Hatch reacted so badly to the lady who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, the flowers, his distress at the death of the girl at the statue, the azalea blossoms. Why he had needed so desperately to find out her ID, remembering, maybe, the weeks he and his dad had waited, not knowing. Anna waited till Jim had done with crying for the moment; then, briefly, she told him the story of the woman at the Presidio.

  “That sounds like Jimmy,” he said when she’d finished. “They say kids who had a parent commit suicide are more likely to do the same than kids that didn’t. Jimmy never had dark times like his mother. He was a sunny little guy from the day he was born. I figured he’d be okay. Maybe there was something I wasn’t seeing. He was brooding about that little girl killed at the statue, I know that. He never said outright, but he blamed himself. I think he blamed himself for his mom too. Hell, we both did. But I was a grown man and he was just a boy. I see these things on TV about little kids harboring these awful thoughts for years and then something triggers it and they go haywire. It was on Oprah.”

  “I don’t think he killed himself,” Anna said. Psychologically the facts might fit, but viscerally it didn’t feel right.

  Jim looked up from his apple juice bottle. “I don’t want to think he did, but I’m an old man and Jimmy’s father. Do you have anything or are you just wishing too?”

  Anna gave him her best stuff: the ash and the tin. Spoken aloud, it sounded pretty feeble.

  “That little meathead.” Jim laughed. “He told me he’d quit smoking. Though I don’t suppose one cigarette a day would kill anybody.”

  Given the situation, the words rang hollow and the two of them waited out the ensuing silence.

  “Can I see Hatch’s apartment?” Anna asked abruptly.

  “Now, why would you want to do that?” Jim asked amiably, but suddenly Anna was acutely aware of the fish-gutting knife on his hip.

  “I don’t know.” She wasn’t being entirely honest. Hatchett’s gray eyes hardened as if he sensed it. “I was hoping to find something that could go toward explaining things. Just looking,” she admitted. “Not looking to find.”

  He said nothing and her nerves began to tingle. Had Hatch kept a child for seven years, the old man would have known it, been a party to it. “The police have already looked for a note,” Jim said finally. “I haven’t been up there in a couple years.” Tapping his walker with the back of his hand, his wedding band ringing dully against the aluminum tubing, he watched her as if guessing the weight of her soul.

  “Sure. Why not. The key is on that hook by the door. Come on back when you’re done. I’ll leave my door open.”

  “Thanks.” Knowing a burden of trust had been laid upon her, and hoping she’d find nothing more sinister than dirty socks, she took the key and left. Jim didn’t ask her if she knew where she was going. He knew she’d already figured that out. Whether he suspected why depended on how much he had to hide, either on his own behalf or that of his son.

  Clearly the “old bat” who cleaned for Mr. Hatchett, Sr., did not perform the same services for his son. Had Anna not seen many bachelor apartments in her life, she might have thought the place had been searched, ransacked by slovenly amateurs. The floor plan was the same as downstairs. Windows were closed and blinds drawn. The air was hot and smelled of garbage and unwashed laundry. Anna’s mind flashed back to a sickening sweet-sour smell. Where? The infectious disease wards on Island III. No, this was different—homely, stale odors of a life lived. Obviously, Mr. Hatchett, Sr., had not had the heart to have his boy’s place cleaned yet. Anna understood that. The bizarre permutations of grief were not unknown to her. After she was widowed—and she’d never told anyone this, not even her sister—she had slept on the same sheets for eighteen months, never washed them, because they were the last sheets she’d ever slept on with Zach.

  The blinds were old-style paper rolls and the light through them cast a sepia tone over the piles of clothes and newspapers, the relics of a short and solitary life. Anna opened the blinds and surveyed the wreckage. Clearing her mind to sharpen her senses, she walked slowly through the clutter: Lacrosse clothes and sticks—Hatch either played or coached. Police Marksman magazines, a TV Guide. Anna flipped through it. Hatch had circled in red everything he wanted to watch that week. He was hooked on the afternoon soaps and old westerns: Rawhide, Gunsmoke and a handful of others in syndication that aired during the day.

  The living room held little of interest. The dining room was a nest of old newspapers, but nothing stood out, no clippings of special interest: kidnappings, suicides, runaways. His personal mementos, and they were few, were in the bedroom. A photograph of his mother and him as a boy of six or eight. Maybe the last shot of the two of them before she took her life. A cross on the wall. A statue of the Virgin Mary on the dresser. Catholic. James Senior had mentioned that, but Anna had not quite realized the import. To a Catholic, suicide was one of the worst sins a person could commit, a betrayal not only of life but of faith.

  She riffled through a closet, which regurgitated Park Police uniforms and little else. A row of tractor caps were the only pieces of apparel treated with respect. A collection of nine hung across one door, each on its own hook. They were standard tourist fare. Hatch had probably picked them up in the parks he’d worked in or visited. As she was closing the doors, giving up the search as pointless, one of the caps caught her attention. Having removed it from its hook, she turned it in her hands. The cap was dirty white canvas with an adjustable back. On the front, where the logo is usually displayed, was a brown lumpy shape. A potato, Anna realized, and knew she’d seen it before on the dead child. She’d remembered it as a rock or a football, but this was a potato. A spud.

  Was this what was referred to on the cryptic list found on Hatch’s body? And what did it mean? That he’d known the child, that the h
at had special significance? Or was this the clue to her identity he’d hinted at in the letter he left Anna? Identity was moot. Little Agnes Abigail Tucker once was lost but now was found.

  Anna closed her eyes, the better to bring the list Trey had read to mind. “Little girl. Spud. Call Caroline.”

  Back in the living room, she cleared a stack of old pay stubs and assorted bills off the desk. It was an antique secretary rich with cubbyholes and compartments. Anna found what she was looking for in a recess under the pigeonholes: a Rolodex. One by one she flipped through the cards. He had the numbers and addresses of two Carolines: Caroline Rogers in Queens and Caroline Colter at Craters of the Moon National Monument. Having pulled the two cards out, Anna stuffed them in her hip pocket.

  A rapping on the floor let her know her company was missed below stairs. Taking the cap with her, she let herself out and locked the door.

  Jim was waiting for her in his chair. Crumbum was back, squashed over the arm as before.

  “So, did it look like a cyclone hit it?” Hatch’s father asked.

  “Pretty much.” Anna took her seat in the rocker and watched Jim Hatchett’s eyes dull as he looked back through the years.

  “He’s always been like that. Angie threatened, cajoled and prayed but he never changed. Everywhere he went he left a trail—sweaters, socks, books. I always figured he’d grow out of it.”

  Jim was digging down by his hip again. Anna trusted he was looking for the handkerchief and not the knife. To give him a semblance of privacy, she stared out the window. Three little sparrows hopped along the brick in search of seeds.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Jim asked when he’d recovered himself.

  “I don’t know,” Anna replied. “Have you seen this before?” She took the ball cap out of the back of her waistband, handed it to him and watched closely. No glint of recognition or alarm.

  “Jimmy collected these things but I never paid much attention. They all look alike to me. What’s this supposed to be? A potato?”