The Alienist - Caleb Carr [178]
The three of us stopped briefly at Gramercy Park so that Sara could pick up a few things (in case her visit to New Paltz lasted longer than anticipated), following which we engaged in another bit of subterfuge with the same set of decoys that Laszlo had hired prior to our trip to Washington. Then it was back to the Grand Central Depot. Sara split off to buy a ticket for the Hudson River Line, while Kreizler and I made purchases at the New Haven Line windows. Goodbyes were, as they had been on Monday, brief and unrevealing of any connection between Sara and Kreizler; I was beginning to think I was as wrong about them as I’d been about a rogue priest being responsible for the murders. Our Boston train departed on time, and before long we’d passed through the eastern portions of Westchester County and into Connecticut.
The difference between Laszlo’s and my trip to Washington earlier in the week and our present journey to Boston, on Saturday afternoon, was roughly the difference between the two respective landscapes surrounding us, as well as that between the kinds of people who inhabited the regions. Gone, on Saturday, were the verdant, rolling fields of New Jersey and Maryland: all around us the scraggly countryside of Connecticut and Massachusetts crept awkwardly down to Long Island Sound and the sea beyond, bringing to mind the hard life that had made such mean, contentious people out of the farmers and merchants of New England. Not that one needed such an indirect indication of what life in that quarter of the country was like; human exemplars were sitting all around us. Kreizler hadn’t purchased first-class seats, a mistake whose gravity only became fully evident when the train reached top speed and our fellow travelers raised their grating, complaining drawls to overcome the rattle of the cars. For hours Kreizler and I endured loud conversations about fishing, local politics, and the shameful economic condition of the United States. Despite the din, however, we did manage to formulate a sound plan for dealing with Adam Dury if and when we found him.
We detrained at Boston’s Back Bay Station, outside of which were collected a group of drivers who had rigs for hire. One man in the group, a tall, gaunt fellow with vicious little eyes, stepped toward us as we approached with our bags.
“Newton?” Laszlo said to him.
The man cocked his head and stuck out his lower lip. “Good ten miles,” he judged. “I won’t be back ’fore midnight.”
“Then double your price,” Laszlo answered peremptorily, throwing his bag into the front seat of the man’s rather battered old surrey. Although the driver looked a bit disappointed at losing the chance to quibble over the cost of the trip, he responded to Laszlo’s offer with alacrity, jumping up onto the rig and grabbing his whip. I rushed to climb aboard, and then we drove off to the sound of the other rig drivers groaning about what kind of interloping fool would offer double the going rate for a ride to Newton. After that, all was silence for quite a while.
A troubled sunset that seemed to promise rain reached out over eastern Massachusetts, as the fringes of Boston slowly gave way to mile after mile of monotonous, rocky farmland. We didn’t reach Newton until well past dark, whereupon our driver offered to take us to an inn that he said was the best in town. Both Kreizler and I knew that this probably meant the place was operated by some member of the man’s family, but we were tired, hungry, and on terra incognita: there was little to do but acquiesce. Rolling through the impossibly quaint streets of Newton, as numbingly picturesque a community as one could hope to find even in New England, I began to get the disturbingly familiar feeling of being trapped by narrow lanes and narrow minds, a kind of anxiety that had often consumed me during my time at Harvard. The “best inn in Newton