The Long Fall

“I want to be a pilot,” she said. This childish bravado I thought might be the real Hannah Hull. “What do you think about that, Mr. McGill?”

I hunched my shoulders and poked out my lower lip. “The sky’s the limit as far as I’m concerned.”

“That’s pretty brave of you.”

“What’s brave about telling a young person that they can do something?”

“My father might be mad at you,” she said speculatively.

“I don’t owe him a thing.”

This answer so surprised Hannah that she sat upright and stared.

“Why are you here?”

“Do you know a Thom Paxton or a Willie Sanderson?”

“I never heard of Thom Paxton. I don’t know a Willie, either, but once we had a woman work for us, a cleaning lady named Sanderson. Lita Sanderson. I don’t remember her having a family. Who are these people?”

“One of them died seventeen years ago,” I said. “The other, Sanderson, tried to kill me maybe seventy-two hours back.”

“He really tried to kill you?” She moved to the edge of her seat.

“Really, really.”

“And you think my father knows something about it?”

“I think he might know something about Paxton or Sanderson.”

“Murder is the worst crime man can commit,” she said.

“It’s very high on the list,” I agreed.

“I want to be a pilot,” she said again, “but I’m studying philosophy.”

“At Wellesley.”

“Yes. How do you know that?”

“The rich can’t hide much from the people,” I replied, thinking that I had heard the same words from my father, though intending something very different.

“I’m doing a summer paper on anarchism,” she went on, shrugging off my insincere Marxist patter. “It’s about people who believe that they are morally required to share the fates of their victims. In other words, the murderer must murder himself to keep his intentions pure. What do you think about that?”

I felt as if someone had stabb³€eone haded me in the liver. This pain didn’t start with Karmen Brown, it was something from a long time ago, a cloud that hung over the length of my entire life. It was rare that I was ever touched so deeply by a stranger. I looked up at the girl. Her expression was inscrutable but nonetheless intent.

“I need to speak to your father,” I said, automaton-like. “When will he be home?”

“They’re at our house in the city,” she said. “Two blocks north and half a block west of Gracie Mansion. It’s a big, ugly house.”

I stood up abruptly, feeling that knife shift in my gut.

Hannah stood up, too.

She reached out, maybe intending to stay me by touching my hand. But she didn’t touch me.

I have a daughter—sort of. I’m over half a century in age but I felt something very natural about this aborted invitation. There was a momentary connection between us.

“Who the hell are you?” someone shouted.

Ê€„

38

Standing in the doorway of the kidney-shaped den was a very skinny and tall young man with wiry red hair that stood up here and there. His eyes were bluish and his expression one of indignation that teetered upon madness.

This, I knew, was Fritz, Hannah’s slightly older brother. There seemed to me something natural about this wild intrusion, like the comic relief in a bloody slasher film.

Fritz wore a dark-green jacket, brown trousers, a buff-colored shirt, and a red-and-black bow tie. He wasn’t wearing glasses but should have been—to make the geek image complete.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked again, a little louder this time.

“You don’t have to shout, Fritzie,” Hannah said. “This is Mr. McGill. He’s looking for Daddy.”

“Why is he in my house?”

“It’s my house, too,” the princess said to the nerd.

“What are you doing with my sister?” Fritz asked me.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit exposed, a masher in the sudden light of a passing car.

“What are you doing to my sister?” he said again, this time looking at Hannah.

“He’s not doing anything. He was just telling me about why he’s here.”

“He might be stealing from us,” Fritz said. His agitation was definitely escalating.

“I’ve been with him the whole time,” Hannah argued. “How can he steal anything when we’re sitting down, looking at each other?”

“He has pockets,” the boy pointed out as if having discovered a new continent in the distant ocean. “I have to search him. He could have taken something when you weren’t looking.”

I began to think that Bryant Hull’s endowment of the Sunset Sanatorium might have been a wise long-term investment.

“You wouldn’t want to do that,” I said to Fritz in a detached, objective tone.

“I sure the hell do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Why not?” he screamed.

“Because I’m a trained fighter and if you touch me I’ll knock you unconscious. And when you’re out cold, imagine how much I could steal before you came to.”

“Why did you let him in here?” Fritz yelled, turning on his sister.

The girl’s response was to look at me. She didn’t want me to do anything. Hannah just asked me silently, with her eyes, to bear witness to something she lived through every day, or maybe every other day, making the span in between one of dread.