? ? ?
AS THEY WALKED back to the ferry Anna’s expression was almost cold, her thoughts clearly very far away. Thinking of Rosa, no doubt, and how to tell the little girl about her father’s situation. The gesture she had made—the bottle of laudanum she had pressed on the matron—was as much for Rosa as it was for Carmine Russo. Anna could say, now, that his death would be quiet and painless.
As they waited for the pilot she said, “He’s not an alcoholic, or if he was, that’s no longer his problem. He has an advanced cancer, at least a year gone. Could you arrange for me to bring the girls here, so they can see their father and say good-bye?”
The question took him by surprise. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
Her expression was as sharp as a slap.
He said, “You think it necessary.”
She turned her head and for a long moment her gaze was fixed on the workhouse. Then she turned back, her expression set hard.
“We’re less than a mile from Randall’s Island here. Could we go to the Infant Hospital, or do you have to go back to the station house?”
? ? ?
THEY STEPPED ONTO the Randall’s Island dock as a church bell somewhere nearby struck six. Beneath his hand the muscles of Anna Savard’s arm were tense, but she tried to smile when she looked at him.
“I’m being superstitious and nonsensical,” she said. “But if the baby is here—”
She didn’t finish, and didn’t need to. In her mind the recovery of Rosa’s younger brother would outweigh the news of her father’s condition. Jack understood the impulse and said nothing discouraging; until she saw for herself that the boy wasn’t at the Infant Hospital, nothing he could say would help.
As many times as he had been on Blackwell on police business, Jack had never had occasion to visit Randall’s Island. There were no prisoners here, no jails or holding cells. It was an island of children. And graves, he reminded himself as they came to the front entrance. From here he could see the pauper’s graveyard in the distance, rows and rows of unmarked graves, stark earth tones with a backdrop of ocean and forest in deep blues and greens deepening toward night.
Anna’s whole posture changed when they entered the building, as if, Jack thought, she was preparing herself for disappointment, or battle.
It took no more than ten minutes to find the matron, and for the matron, barely concealing her irritation, to show them to the room where the infants from three to six months old were assigned, two to a cot barely large enough for one.
As he stood in the doorway, Jack’s heart began to hammer in his chest. He had seen many things in service: the worst multiple-murder scenes, cruelty beyond imagination, despair and senseless death. He had seen all that and more, but he couldn’t remember ever being more shocked, and before him was just a sea of young children. Row after row of them in the dim room that stank of soiled diapers and sour milk. Not the slightest breeze to bring relief, nothing to look at but walls painted the color of mud, water-stained and speckled with mold, and other children who couldn’t do anything for themselves.
But worse still was the silence. This room should have been too loud for normal conversation; as Jack knew from personal experience, healthy infants of this age made their needs known at the top of their lungs. It was true that many of the babies did seem to be asleep, but at least three dozen were awake, sitting like so many dolls and staring through the bars of their cots at nothing at all.
If Anna was shocked, she hid it well. She moved into the room and began to go up and down the aisles, pausing only rarely to look more closely and then once, for a full minute, reaching into the crib to touch, her expression lost in the dim light. The matron stood at one end of the room studying her own hands while Anna continued on from one row to the next, her posture never changing. Then she turned and shook her head to make it clear that the Russo boy wasn’t here.
Instead of crossing the room again, she gestured him closer.
She pointed to her bag, and Jack put it on the only flat surface, a long table against one wall interrupted by a single deep sink. Jack hesitated and then cleared a space by pushing dirty bowls encrusted with mush to one side so that roaches went skittering in a wave.
Anna was taking things out of her bag and looking around herself as if something was missing. Without looking toward the matron she called, “I need a basin. Two clean basins, one filled with hot water.”
Jack saw the woman hesitate only as long as it took for Anna to give her a look that could not be misinterpreted.