The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [133]
“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Marcus said, opening up some windows to let the warm evening breeze come into the place, along with the sounds of celebration from the street. “From what I could see, those documents may be the evidence we need to demonstrate a pattern in this woman’s behavior.”
“That may be, Marcus,” the Doctor said, going over the papers. “I cannot yet tell. But what they most certainly will do—or rather, what their absence will do—is let Nurse Hunter know who broke into her house, and why.”
“Well, come on, Kreizler,” Mr. Moore said, carefully setting an overloaded plate onto an arm of one of the easy chairs. “If our visit on Sunday wasn’t an open declaration of hostilities, I don’t know what would be.”
“It is not hostility toward us that concerns me, Moore,” the Doctor answered, still reading the hospital reports. “It is the possibility that our attempts to rescue the child may eventually be interpreted, in Nurse Hunter’s mind, as the child’s fault. That is her peculiar ability, to turn responsibility for all that goes wrong—in her own life as well as the lives of the children she touches—back onto the children themselves.”
The Doctor turned to a new sheet of paper as the rest of us absorbed that disturbing notion; then his eyes suddenly went very big. “My God …” He quickly set his plate aside so that he could tear into the stack of documents faster. “My God …” he repeated.
“What have you found, Doctor?” Miss Howard asked for all of us.
But the Doctor only looked to Marcus. “How many of these letters did you read?”
Marcus shrugged, gnawing on a lamb chop. “Just enough to get the general idea: a child named ‘Jonathan’ was in her care, and went through several cyanotic episodes. The last one was fatal.”
The Doctor pounded a finger on the stack of papers. “Yes. But the relationship was not that of nurse to patient. This last admitting form reveals the child’s family name: ‘Hatch.’ He was Jonathan Hatch. Her own son.”
Even my jaw dropped at that one, and I thought right away about the series of photographs of babies and children that I’d seen in the secretary at Number 39 Bethune Street.
“She was not a nurse at St. Luke’s,” the Doctor went on. “She brought the child in as a patient. Three times.”
Marcus just sat there, the lamb chop bone dangling from his hand. “But—I just assumed …”
The Doctor waved him off, the motion of his hand saying “Of course, of course” as clearly as his voice could have. He kept on reading and digging. Then his voice went shocked again. “Good Lord—she lists her place of employment as One, West Fifty-seventh Street.”
Mr. Moore’s wineglass hit the floor with a crash. “Christ!” he said in shock. “That’s Cornell Vanderbilt’s house!”
Cyrus was still struggling with the first bit of new information. “But I thought we’d decided that the woman was incapable of having children.”
The Doctor just kept waving his hand. “True, Cyrus. And there’s nothing to say that she—wait. Here.” He’d grabbed the newspapers that were at the bottom of the pile and handed them to Cyrus. “See what sense you can make of these.”
His mouth full of pheasant, Cyrus picked up his plate with one hand and took the papers with the other, moving to one of the desks, where he could both read and eat.
The Doctor kept his eyes on the hospital reports. “Each of the events conforms precisely to the pattern described by the nurses at the Lying-in Hospital. Every time that the woman—described here as ‘Mrs. Elspeth Hatch’—arrived at the hospital, the child Jonathan, eighteen months old, was already choking and cyanotic. Each incident occurred in the middle of the night—the mother claimed to have been awoken by the sound of his gasping, and rushed to find him unable to breathe. The first two letters are quite dramatic: ‘Had you, Mrs. Hatch, displayed any less alacrity in bringing the child into professional hands,’ writes the attending physician in the initial communication, ‘he should most certainly have