Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 by Nevada Barr

stories of corpses turning into wolves and loping after the living. If there was anything to the "science" of the paranormal, Ellis Island had the prerequisites for a hotbed of ghostly manifestations. Dreams had ended here, most happily but some at the end of a rope slung over the rafters. Families were separated, mothers from children and husbands from wives. Young women were turned away from the promised land because they traveled alone. With no one to meet them, they could not enter the country. The regulation was based on humane principles. An unprotected woman in New York was vulnerable to a number of evils. But who knew what terrors had induced her to cross oceans in the first place?
    Still and all, despite late nights and scary stories, Anna had never actually seen apparitions. Getting the willies was one thing. Hallucinating was another.
    Middle-aged mutant ninja rangers. Dwight's description of the interloper on Island III crossed Anna's mind. Perhaps Billy was not delusional. She glanced at the clock. Time to catch her boat.
    Riding down in the elevator, she reassessed Bonham. Park Police: trained, educated, professional. That didn't rule out superstition, but it did render it highly unlikely that a man trained to watch for intruders would, when faced with a classic black-clad skulker, chalk it up to an otherworldly visitation. Anna would pass the gossip on to Patsy. It was her park; she could decide if the boy needed therapy, drug intervention or a spanking.
    Mandy not yet back from her interpretive duties at the Registry Hall on Ellis, Anna drew every drop of hot water from the aging water heater and soaked till her muscles grew loose and her skin turned rosy and began to shrivel. A bar of hand soap and vigorous scrubbing removed the bloodstains from her trousers. With a fresh dressing over her scratch and clean sweat clothes on, she felt renewed.
    Five o'clock came and went without producing either Patsy or her roommate. Anna was grateful for the prolonged solitude. Six o'clock, then seven were marked off by the wall clock in the kitchen before she began to tire of her own company. Having yet again forgotten her duties to Bacchus, she helped herself to a Bud Light and munched on French bread and salmon pate left over from the day before. By eight o'clock she was feeling abandoned and telling herself she was not a guest but a friend in need and Patsy had every right to a night on the town without asking her along--or asking her permission. Besides, she would have turned down an invitation. She had had her fill of Manhattan for one day. Pacing the living room, she stared out at the coming evening, then the perverse dawn of electric lights on the horizon. For the first time since arriving on Liberty, she noticed Patsy didn't have a television. Positively un-American. On nights such as this, reruns would be just the thing: the mental equivalent of giving a feather to a baby with sticky fingers. Synapses could be kept busy plucking the treacle of sitcoms off of one another. A brief peek into Mandy's lair located a small TV squashed in amongst alternative press newspapers and a framed picture of brother or boyfriend with his army unit grinning out from a spiky forest of rifles. Kids and dogs crowded around, wanting to play war. Desperate as she was, Anna closed the door. The room was a wreck, clothes knee-deep on the floor and a refuse of papers, cosmetics and underwear skidding off every elevated surface.
    Back in the living room, the telephone tempted her but there was no one to call. Not even Frederick. She hadn't bothered to ask for his friend Emmett's last name or phone number. Tomorrow she would rectify that. Fate had made them partners in Molly's recovery. Life would be easier if they became friends.
    Should Frederick stick around--and apparently it would take an act of Congress to get him out of the ICU--he might take up where Molly had brutally left off two years before. With Anna's blessing, Molly might give