The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [180]
“She keeps her hair in a fat braid at the back,” I said, feeling a sudden sadness that I hadn’t when I’d noticed the girl’s hair at the Westons’ farm. “Probably to cover the scar.”
Marcus cocked his head in a way what said this fact fit in with his theory. “But it’s doubtful,” he went on, “that Libby was educated enough about firearms to go speculating about exit trajectories.”
Just then we heard the sound of a rig coming our way, and we all turned to look down the overgrown drive. Heading up it was Miss Howard, sitting on top of a hired buckboard and steering a feisty-looking Morgan stallion. She wrangled the compact, muscular animal to a stop near us, then brushed a few stray wisps of hair out of her face and jumped to the ground.
“Found her!” she called, smiling wide and marching over to us. “Mrs. Louisa Wright, of Beach Street—she lives in a house behind Schafer’s commercial greenhouses. She worked for the Hatches for seven years—and there is, apparently, nothing that she won’t talk about!” She pointed down the hill. “What about the gun? Any luck?”
“Hopefully,” Lucius answered, holding up his moldy old package.
“Yes,” Miss Howard said when she saw it. “Mrs. Wright told me that she wrapped it in a brown paper bag before dumping it. Well, then, we’d better get back, there’s a lot to do!”
As we all gathered around to pile the pieces of the Hatches’ wagon onto our buckboard, Marcus asked Miss Howard what else she’d been able to find out during her visit with Daniel Hatch’s former housekeeper.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” Miss Howard answered, climbing back up to do the driving. “She was, as I say, very talkative. But one thing stands out: she suspects that only one of Daniel Hatch’s children was shot that night.”
“What do you mean, Sara?” Mr. Moore said, as the rest of us got aboard.
But Miss Howard looked to me. “You saw Clara, did you, Stevie?” I nodded. “Fine, light brown hair, eyes a similar shade? Pale-skinned?” I nodded again. “Well, that’s not what the two boys looked like, apparently.”
I right away thought back to Mr. Picton’s request during our approach to the Weston farm, that Dr. Kreizler make a note of Clara Hatch’s coloring. “So that’s what he meant,” I said.
“What who meant?” Mr. Moore said.
But before I could answer, Miss Howard had cracked the reins against the Morgan’s haunches and we were under way.
I wasn’t sorry to say good-bye to the old Hatch place, and was glad to see Miss Howard continue to make liberal use of the reins to get us away quickly. Mr. Moore and I sat up on the seat with her, while the detective sergeants rode in the bed with the ash plank, the driver’s seat, and the gun, the last of which items they didn’t plan on unwrapping until we got back to Mr. Picton’s house. For the moment they were full of questions about Mrs. Louisa Wright, questions what Miss Howard tried to answer as fast and thoroughly as she could; and each little bit of information she revealed made it plain that the old housekeeper was going to be a very important player in our case against Libby Hatch.
She hadn’t had much use for Libby during her years with her, Mrs. Wright hadn’t; but fortunately she’d felt the same about Daniel Hatch, which meant that her observations about what went on in the house wouldn’t look to a jury like she was nursing a grudge against the handsome younger woman who’d been her boss. When Marcus asked why, if Mrs. Wright disliked the Hatches so much, she’d stayed on with them for so long, Miss Howard explained that the tough, take-no-nonsense widow’d been the only woman in town who’d been willing to serve the couple; because of that, the family’d grown more and more dependent on her over the years. As they did, Mrs. Wright eventually reached a point where she could pretty well name her fee from old Daniel: over time she’d squeezed enough money out of her tightfisted