Tags:
Fiction,
General,
detective,
Suspense,
Mystery & Detective,
Women Sleuths,
Mystery,
Mystery Fiction,
Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths,
Fiction - Mystery,
Crime & mystery,
Mystery & Detective - Series,
Pigeon; Anna (Fictitious character),
Women park rangers,
Mystery & Thrillers,
Ellis Island (N.J. and N.Y.),
Statue of Liberty National Monument (N.Y. and N.J.)
desensitized. The child's face, the blood and brains on the stone, would be filed away with other like horrors and probably never referred to again unless a similar incident brought them to mind.
Aware of the innate selfishness of the human heart, she realized that the heaviness she was experiencing--a depression that felt more like physical exhaustion than mental disorder--was because the accident had brought death too vividly to the fore: Molly's death, Anna's young husband Zach's death, her own death. With that thought came an unsettling sense of life's being meaningless, either too short or too long.
To her relief, the Liberty IV was motoring up to the quay. She began to run the last fifty feet, an uncomfortable reprise of fleeing Manhattan the day before. Lest she look as haunted as she felt, she forced herself to slow to a walk.
Liberty IV was a trim little ferry with a high snug bridge above a passenger cabin, a square box with padded benches for fifteen or twenty people. A walkway ran between the rail and the cabin from the bow to the flat open area in the stern. There the American flag flew, rain or shine.
Cal Jackson, a black man so skinny his considerable strength seemed to emanate from skeleton rather than muscle, made an unerring toss of the rope, lassoing the thick wooden upright that supported the dock. No one currently working on Ellis or Liberty, the two parts of the National Monument, had ever seen him miss. Cal never boasted. He just never missed. At first Anna had thought him a young man, but on talking with him had revised her opinion. He looked maybe forty, but he talked of having worked on a fishing boat off Long Island in the early fifties and hiring on as a deckhand on a boat that supplied oil rigs off the coast of Texas in the early sixties after he got out of the Navy. He had to be close to retirement age.
Today Dwight Alvers captained the Liberty IV. Though sunlight and relative solitude tempted her, Anna climbed the short stairs to the bridge.
"Look what the cat drug in," Dwight said, and moved amiably aside to let her squeeze by. Patsy had gotten her in the habit of riding up on the bridge for the trips from island to island. The captains never seemed to mind the company and the view was good. There were two long-legged stools in front of the instrument panel, a radar screen hanging down in the middle of the window over the bow, a walking space no more than thirty-six inches wide, then a deep, butt-high wooden shelf finishing the small cabin. This shelf, with the captain's log and his lunch box, was Anna's favorite place.
Dwight was thick and red-necked. Anna didn't know if his politics fit, but his neck was the color of old brick. Hair bristled blond from creased, burnt-looking skin. His eyes were deep-set beneath brows bleached white. The nose, decidedly too delicate for the beefy face, sat aloof above a wide mouth. Narrow lips and a frown that showed Dwight's genes more than his disposition gave him a forbidding look. The crew cut and single diamond stud in his left ear didn't help.
Today he'd been unmasked. Events conspired to reveal what lurked in the heart of this man.
The console, the instrument panel--whatever one called the dashboard of a boat--was crowded with stuffed animals. Boneless lions and elephants like the ones that kids called Beanie Babies slouched on the radar screen and peeked from beneath charts. Anna recognized Nola from The Lion King and a crustacean in red velveteen that might have been from The Little Mermaid. Bears were well represented, as were dinosaurs. The keeper of this menagerie was the frail, intellectual-looking child of eight or nine who had been hidden behind Dwight's considerable self.
"What's all the excitement on Liberty?" Dwight asked. "The radio's been jammed with emergency chatter."
Anna looked at the man's son. "Jumper," she said, and left it at that.
Dwight whistled long and low; then he too shelved the subject till little pitchers took