The Alienist - Caleb Carr [179]
Rising early the next day, Laszlo and I tried but failed to avoid the innkeeper’s breakfast offering of thick, tough flapjacks and coffee. The sky had cleared, evidently without shedding any rain, and outside the inn stood the old surrey, with our driver aboard and ready to depart. Traveling north, we saw little sign of any human activity for nearly half an hour; then a herd of dairy cattle came into view, grazing in a pitted, rock-strewn pasture, beyond which a small group of buildings stood amid a stand of oaks. As we approached these structures—a farmhouse and two barns—I made out the figure of a man standing ankle deep in barnyard manure and trying with difficulty to shoe a tired old horse.
The man, I noted quickly, had thinning hair, and his scalp glistened in the morning sun.
CHAPTER 34
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To judge by the dilapidated state of his barns, fences, and wagons, as well as the absence of any assistants or particularly healthy-looking animals, Adam Dury had not made much of a go of his little dairy cattle enterprise. Few people live in closer proximity to life’s grimmer realities than do poor farmers, and the atmosphere of such places is inevitably sobering: Kreizler’s and my excitement at actually laying eyes on the man we’d traveled a fairly long way to find was immediately tempered by appreciation of his circumstances, and after getting down from the surrey and telling our driver to wait, we approached him slowly and carefully.
“Excuse me—Mr. Dury?” I said, as the fellow continued to struggle with the old horse’s left foreleg. The fly-ridden brown beast, its hide bare in several spots where a yolk would have rested, appeared to have absolutely no interest in making its master’s task any easier.
“Yes,” the man answered sharply, still showing us nothing more than the back of his balding head.
“Mr. Adam Dury?” I inquired further, trying to induce him to turn around.
“You must know that, if you’ve come to see me,” Dury answered, finally dropping the horse’s leg with a grunt. He stood up, rising to a height of well over six feet and then slapped the horse’s neck, half in anger and half affectionately. “This one thinks he’ll die before me, anyway,” he mumbled, still facing the horse, “so why should he be cooperative? But we’ve both got many more years of this to go, you old…” Dury finally turned round, revealing a head whose skin was so tightly drawn that it appeared little more than a flesh-colored skull. Large yellow teeth filled the mouth, and the almond-shaped eyes were of a lifeless blue tint. His arms were powerfully developed, and the fingers of his hands as he wiped them on his worn overalls seemed remarkably long and thick. He took our measures with a squinting grimace that was neither friendly nor hostile. “Well? What can I do for you two gentlemen?”
I moved directly—and, if I may say so, gracefully—into the bit of subterfuge that Laszlo and I had worked out on the Boston train. “This is Dr. Laszlo Kreizler,” I said, “and my name is John Schuyler Moore. I’m a reporter for The New York Times.” I found my billfold and revealed some professional identification. “A police reporter, actually. My editors have assigned me to investigate some of the more—well, to come to the point, some of the more outstanding unsolved cases of recent decades.”
Dury nodded, a bit suspiciously. “You’ve come to ask about my parents.”
“Indeed,” I answered. “You’ve no doubt heard, Mr. Dury, of the recent