Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 (17 page)

A bootprint, she decided, would not have shaken her. It was the mark of little bare feet. A small woman or a child pattering about without shoes in a place that only a lunatic would attempt to traverse unshod. Islands II and III were a mecca for lockjaw germs--or whatever microorganism caused the condition.

Ghosts,
Anna thought, Billy Bonham's stories coming to mind, the pallor of his lips and the twitch of his lower eyelid as he told them. A tremor ran through her, a sensation her grandmother would have attributed to the unexplained phenomenon of a goose walking across one's grave.

"Ghosts don't leave tracks," she said aloud, and laughed because she was absurdly relieved by that piece of paranormal wisdom.

She slid from the sill, crouching down for a closer look. Moss covered half the area where this creature had stood. The springing nature of the plant obliterated most of the print of the left foot and a quarter of the right. Choosing a patch of virgin territory, Anna pressed the heel of her hand into the moss, putting her weight behind it. Miniature fronds were crushed, releasing a pleasant forest smell. They stayed crushed. How long the plants would remain that way, she could only guess, but judging by the recovery of the plant material that had been stepped on, the prints were probably eighteen to twenty-four hours old. They were approximately the size of her own feet. In her distraction over Molly's illness the last time she'd fled to this hideout, could she have kicked off her shoes without thinking? That would be like her were she at home, or even in a camp she'd policed. Not so in a crumbling wreck of nail and brick and glass. She'd hiked too many miles not to have learned to take care of her feet.

This little creature, then, was not a ranger--or not a very bright or very experienced ranger. "Hah!" Anna echoed Mandy as she suffered nostalgia for the good old days when National Park Rangers were generalists. They knew the flora, the fauna, enforced the laws, picked up garbage, deported hostile raccoons and, when called upon, played the guitar around the campfire. No more. Specialization had taken over. It was not unusual to find a law enforcement ranger who was merely a cop in green pants, who didn't give a damn for the resource, just liked carrying a gun and the excitement of the chase. Or an administrative ranger who didn't know a bighorn from a bobcat and worked only for salary, retirement and medical insurance.

A ranger could have made the footprints. A ranger who'd never walked the wilderness, depended on her boots and muscles to carry her that last twenty miles out to a cold beer and a hot bath. Anna huffed, a noise very like the "Harumph!" found in England's comedies. The sound made her smile at her own snobbery. Still and all, she doubted the tracks were made by a ranger.

Since the footprints were the size of her own feet, it was a safe bet the owner of the feet that made them had a stride about equal to hers. Without moving, she searched the floor in a two-foot radius from the marks. Her scrutiny was rewarded by a portion of a heel print toward the center of the room. Painstaking searching led her to three more. The barefoot intruder had come in by the same door as Anna.

In the hallway Anna lost the trail. Away from the windows, the rubble was of larger chunks and a harder consistency. Not a good medium for tracking.

A glance at her watch told her it was one-thirty. She had to abandon the hunt or give up her picnic lunch. Since she didn't know why she was so intent on tracking a person she had no pressing need to find, hunger won out.

Molly was regaining her health with a rapidity that warmed Anna's heart. That she could take no credit for it pinched a little in the vicinity of her ego, but not so much that she couldn't keep it from showing. Frederick too was looking better with every passing day. He'd gotten a haircut that wasn't half had and was dressing like a man in love: shirt pressed, trousers with a crease and a good fit through the butt and crotch. The Jesus sandals were gone, replaced by a pair that looked vaguely Italian.

Sartorially speaking, Anna was definitely outclassed. Ensconced in a private room, free of tubes and machines, Molly was sitting up and wearing a new bed jacket. Not the cliché of peachy quilted pseudo satin and feathery weirdness that Anna might have expected from a man not accustomed to shopping--for it was obvious from the joy with which Molly wore it and the proprietary pride on Frederick's face that he'd bought it for her--but a buttery-soft stonewashed Levi jacket embroidered with a colorful riot of jungle birds and tropical blooms.

Rani was not in evidence and Anna missed her. And Molly and Frederick were bending over backward to make her feel included. So much so that she strongly suspected they had discussed "the problem of Anna" in advance of her arrival. It would have been nice to have a playmate, even one with claws and a trail.

As she began to cast about for an excuse to escape, she was rescued by the timely appearance of Dr. Madison. Long-necked, balding pate, his head preceded him into the doorway like a cartoonist's depiction of a balloon.

He blinked several times, his pale blue eyes looking unfocused and rabbity behind the bifocal lenses of his spectacles.

"Good afternoon, David," Molly said.

Anna noted with pride that Molly's power was flowing back. The sheer force of her wolfish personality cloaked in the sheepskin of good manners instantly relegated Dr. Madison to the role of guest in his own hospital.

The doctor seemed to sense it too. He smiled, a sweet guileless grin that ruffled his short beard and showed a row of very white but singularly crooked bottom teeth. "Looks like you don't need me," he said, and came into the room checking charts and feeling pulses in a routine made so familiar by medical dramas on television that Anna couldn't help feeling it was an act.

That done, there was some tepid doctor banter he and Molly dredged up to fill time. It petered out and still the doctor loomed around the room, his six-foot-five-inch gaunt frame teetering like an unbalanced question mark. Surely if he needed a private word with his patient, he would exhibit the professional wherewithal to say so outright.

"Earning your visit fee?" Molly joked. Madison laughed but made no move to leave. Armed with the short-lived but potent telepathy of new love, Molly and Frederick exchanged glances. Anna edged toward the door.

"Well," she said. "I guess I'd better be getting back to..." Since she had no job, no family, no life to be getting back to at the moment, the sentence faded out.

"Would you like a tour of the facility?" Dr. Madison asked.

"Facility?" Anna echoed.

"The hospital." He seemed very close to animated and Anna realized that till this second he'd moved with the slow grace of a man seen through thick fog.

"No. God no," she said. "I've seen way too much of it as it is."

"Do it," Molly commanded. She and Frederick exchanged another psychic glance and Anna realized it wasn't Molly Dr. Madison wanted a word alone with. It was her. A hollow place opened up and she felt the sickening adrenaline rush one gets when Death rears his ugly head unexpectedly. Madison was going to tell her that Molly was dying, that this apparent recovery was a false dawn.

"Okay," she managed, and walked woodenly from the room. A warmth was on her lower back, Madison's propelling hand, but she felt it distantly, as if it happened in a dream.

"Let's see." Madison's voice floated above her head. "I can offer you the morgue, the newborns' nursery, the operating theater and the cafeteria. What suits your fancy?"

Anna stopped abruptly and he plowed into her. Stepping back so she didn't have to look so far up to meet his eyes, she said: "I don't need to see anything. Just tell me."

An irritating blankness smoothed his face. "Tell you?"

"What you dragged me out here to tell me. Tell me."

Shoving his hands into the pockets of his ill-fitting lab coat, he looked down the hall in the direction from which they'd just come. Maybe he hoped for rescue. An image of grabbing that long slender neck and wringing information from it flickered violently through Anna's mind. "Tell me," she repeated.

"I was hoping to ease into it a little more naturally, but I'd thought now Molly's out of danger, and I can't be considered to be blackmailing you into being nice to me, we could go out to dinner or something. Drinks. Coffee," he finished when Anna failed to respond to his first offer.

She still wanted to strangle him--for frightening her if for no other reason--but she knew she was out of line. The mistake had been hers. Frederick had known. Molly had known. Hence the command: "Do it."

"I don't think so," she said, and walked toward the elevators.

David Madison drifted along at her left shoulder, a wayward cloud between her and Columbia-Presbyterian's fluorescent suns.

"I was married for twenty-three years. I've been divorced for two and a half. Since the divorce I've been on three dates and one of them doesn't count because it was my cousin. What I am saying is, if it's not me personally you find unacceptable, then there's the chance that my admitted lack of experience has caused me to ask all the wrong questions the wrong way. In the last quarter of a century it's possible 'dinner, drinks and coffee' might have become slang for some unspeakable practice. I'll never know unless you help me out."

Anna poked the elevator button several times in hopes of hurrying it along.

"We could go to the zoo," he suggested. "Or an art museum. I'm pretty worthless at art museums. I'm the kind of person they could rent a bicycle to at the front desk. I'd enjoy the ride but no stopping and studying the masters or anything. Especially at the Guggenheim. Wouldn't you love to ride a bike down the Guggenheim?"

Anna was being charmed. It wasn't an altogether unpleasant sensation. "I thought you were going to give me bad news about my sister," she admitted.

"What! But I was so careful. I never sat down once and I made a point not to appear benevolent or caring."

It felt good to laugh and to see the pleasure her laughter brought him. The elevator doors opened and Dr. Madison took Anna's elbow protectively. A nurse in her sixties and most kindly described as "Rubenesque" stepped out. Her name tag identified her as Sonya Twining. In a glance she took in Anna and Madison. "Forty-five?" she asked the doctor, and smiled so sweetly Anna suspected an underlying dislike.

Ignoring her, David Madison said, "After you," ushered Anna into the elevator and rode to the lobby with her. By the time he walked her out to the sidewalk she'd agreed to drinks at the Rainbow Room and dinner at a Chinese restaurant she'd never heard of but he assured her was "the finest in the city."

She was halfway to the subway before it occurred to her that she had only Levi's to wear. Times might have altered considerably since she'd lived in New York, but there were anchors of sanity in the ever-changing sea of culture. She had a sinking feeling that the Rainbow Room was such an anchor. It had been a jacket-and-tie kind of place. Scruffy specimens such as herself were turned away at the door. Usually by an impeccably dressed male who took few pains to disguise his abhorrence for peasants who had the unmitigated gall to storm the castle gate.

Suffering the teenage angst that only menopause can cure, she was afraid to go back to the hospital lest she run into Dr. Madison. She called Molly's room from a pay phone in the back of a bar two streets from the hospital.

With the annoying need of all lovers to have others catch their dread disease, Molly and Frederick fell in enthusiastically with her plan. By four-thirty, Anna and Frederick were on the Upper West Side. He sat on the sofa and sipped Scotch. Anna and Rani repaired to Molly's bedroom to effect the magical makeover so beloved in romances: rags to riches, pauper to princess, ranger to femme fatale.

Once the process was under way, Anna found herself having terrifically good fun. For the fashion-deprived, Molly's closet was the mother lode. And accessible to the style-handicapped. Clothing was arranged by type--evening, work, casual--and then by color. Tidy racks held shoes of every shade and heel height. Plastic hanging bags, cut into tiny windows, showed off the hosiery and scarves to accessorize each variation on the ensemble theme. Cosmetics, jewelry, bath luxuries all received the same anal-retentive devotion.

For nearly an hour she played dress-up. As a psychiatrist, Molly wasn't a great proponent of inner-child reparenting. Anna made a mental note to give her this anecdotal evidence next time they talked. When she was a little girl she'd loved playing in Molly's things. They were deliciously grown-up. Sitting in her sister's expensive satin slip on a padded bench before a mirrored vanity of inlaid wood from the height of the Art Deco craze, Anna felt the same tingling sense of forbidden fruit and endless possibilities.

When she emerged in a dusty-rose sleeveless summer dress, low at the neck and flaring over the hips, her labors were rewarded by a brotherly wolf whistle. Because the dress was Molly's, it was made not of rayon but of silk. Sweat would probably discolor the armpits before Anna got anywhere near Rockefeller Center, but she was in a mood to live on the edge.

"The good doctor hasn't got a chance," Frederick said.

"You don't have to make sure I get a new puppy," Anna grumbled. "I told you I'm okay with you and Molly." She hadn't meant it unkindly--at least she didn't think she had. God and Molly only knew what her subconscious was up to at any given moment. Still Frederick looked hurt.

Unable to think of words that would undo any damage, she said, "Wish me luck," and left.