Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 by Nevada Barr Page A

in to his siege of affections. How weird would it be to have slept with your brother-in-law?
    Jump off that bridge when you come to it, Anna told herself. Molly was not yet out of intensive care. It was presumptuous to be marrying her off to an ex-boyfriend.
    Nine o'clock brought no relief in the form of mental distraction. Anna decided to take her evening constitutional around Liberty Island, then try for an early bedtime.
    The expected blessedness of the outdoors failed to soothe. Either the eternal hum of the city grew louder or Anna's filtering mechanism grew weaker. The harbor had lost its ability to buffer Liberty from the surrounding congestion. Indeed, the black water seemed but a different kind of pavement bringing the flotsam of noise and tension to the shore. Anna longed for the simple call of a night bird, the sweet cacophony of cicadas in the pines, for a night that was truly dark, pricked only by stars, and those confined to the purer shades of white. Urban nights were garish, without rest. Fervently, she hoped Molly would get well soon. Much longer in New York City and Anna knew she would be in need of a good psychiatrist.
    Narrow wheels rattling on brick brought her out of her black study. Cleaning crew had finished the lady's ablutions and were putting away their equipment for the night. That meant the staff boat would be coming in an hour or so. Cleaning crew rode back to Manhattan on the last boat of the day. If Patsy and Mandy didn't arrive on it, Anna would have the house to herself till morning.
    Men in groups made her leery and she faded into the shrubbery as they clattered near. Three of them were dark-skinned, two African-Americans and one Puerto Rican or Mexican. The fourth was almost painfully white, big and oafish with a neck nearly as thick as his head, which was either shaved or naturally bald from the edge of his green ball cap down. There was something tantalizingly familiar about him, but Anna knew she'd never seen him before. The type was familiar.
    Alongside the smaller, wiry men, chitchatting in East Coast accents both Brooklyn and Bronx, he looked out of place. A big, dumb farm boy out to see the world. As they passed Anna's hiding place, he spoke. No accent, none. Like Anna, he wasn't from around here.
    The four men wheeled their cart under a light and she noticed that the white boy had an unpleasantly large spider crawling beneath his collar. She was considering whether or not to warn him, when he turned his head and she realized it was something infinitely more poisonous than a spider. Two inches below his right ear a swastika the size of a nickel was tattooed. That must endear him to his co-workers, she thought.
    Enjoying as she always did--as she had since she was a child--the simple act of hiding and watching, she let the men rattle and babble to a nearby building that was kind enough to swallow them from sight. Stepping from the concealing branches of the bushes, she continued her walk across the plaza and up the foreshortened mall. For three nights she had walked the island. Anna had seen Lady Liberty from inside and out, from sea, land and air, yet the statue never failed to make her feel, in some indefinable way, proud.
    Tonight an invisible stage manager was calling the cues to Anna's personal show. As she walked up the center of the paved area, the two great bronze doors in Liberty's base swung open and a shaft of gold spotlighted her.                                                                   .
    "I wish I could sing," Anna said.
    "Give it a go," Hatch invited. "Who knows? Maybe Broadway's been waiting for youse all these years."
    Hatch was smiling, standing in his usual laid-back stance, but Anna could see the pull of nerves around his dark eyes, hear it in his lapse into the neighborhood "youse," a habit he'd kept out of his conversation the last time they met.
    "Broadway'll have to go on waiting," she