The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [182]
“Now, this,” Miss Howard said with a smile, making them all aware of our entrance, “is a homey little scene, isn’t it?”
Cyrus stopped playing, and the Doctor and Mr. Picton came over to us quickly. “At last!” the Doctor said. “What news from the Hatch house? Our new board awaits!”
The next hour or so was one of those jumbled times, as everybody tried to explain to everybody else what progress had been made during our first day in town. Things between the Doctor and Clara Hatch had continued to go very well after I’d left the Westons’ farm, and though the girl still hadn’t given out with any actual words, the Doctor was sure that he could eventually coax her to do so. It wouldn’t be easy: Clara was in a state of what the Doctor called “protracted hysterical disassociation,” meaning that what she’d seen was too terrible to make any sense of, either to herself or to anybody else. But Mr. Picton made it clear that we had to get her to talk: he didn’t have a ghost of a chance of getting his boss, District Attorney Oakley Pearson, to agree to summon a grand jury to consider an indictment against Libby Hatch unless Clara was prepared to say flat out that her mother had shot her. We could assemble all the physical evidence in the world, but none of it would count for much in a case that had aroused so much emotion—and would surely fire up a new kind of outrage when we announced our theory of the crime—if the girl didn’t talk. Though he went on for quite a while explaining all this to us, Mr. Picton’s basic point was simple: if you were going to accuse a woman of murdering her own kids, you’d better be damned sure you had not only motive, opportunity, and means, but a witness, too.
Motive, opportunity, and means would still, though, play their parts, and these were things that we could pursue while the Doctor went about the process of trying to get Clara Hatch to communicate. The subject that seemed the most open to investigation that evening was means, being as Lucius had, we hoped, brought the instrument of attack up out of the old well. Asking Mrs. Hastings for a piece of oilcloth what he proceeded to drape over the piano, Lucius carefully positioned his damp brown parcel on the thing, then slowly began to unfold and pull away the paper bag with a couple of his steel medical probes.
“I asked Mrs. Wright if she’d noticed anything unusual about the gun before she dropped it down the well,” Miss Howard said, as we all crowded around Lucius. “Anything that might indicate that it’d been moved or fired. But she said she’d been far too upset to take any notice of those kind of details.”
“Understandable,” Marcus said, watching his brother straighten out the bag, its hidden contents still bulging outward. “Did she say how old the thing was?”
“Hatch told Mrs. Wright he’d always kept it under his pillow,” Miss Howard said. “He didn’t fight in the Civil War himself—he paid a substitute—so that eliminates the possibility of it being a weapon he picked up in the army.”
“Yes,” Marcus answered. “It’s probably one of the more common store-bought brands. And given his age, along with the likelihood that he hadn’t fired guns very often, he probably wanted something easy to use.”
“Right,” Miss Howard continued. “Something like a Colt Peacemaker—it looks like one, from the silhouette. An early edition, too. The first Single Action Army models came out when, in ’71? The timing would be about right.”
“But is it a weapon that would be easy for a woman to use?” the Doctor asked.
It was the kind of question what Marcus or Lucius would ordinarily have answered; but Miss Howard enjoyed the limelight, and the two brothers knew enough to stay out of her way. “I don’t see why not,” she said with a shrug. “A forty-five-caliber pistol might not seem like a woman’s weapon, on the surface, but the Single Action Army used metal cartridges, and had very smooth action. A fairly simple, serviceable piece, really. Add the fact