The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [217]
The rest of our morning was filled with more disappointment, as was our afternoon. Town after town, tavern after tavern, postal office after postal office went by, with Miss Howard diligently dragging herself into every establishment and asking the same set of questions about a family named Fraser. By the time the light started to turn golden, I for one was more than willing to acknowledge the hopelessness of our finding anything out before the grand jury convened: we didn’t even know, after all, if Fraser had been Libby Hatch’s original name, an alias, or the handle what the father of her first child had gone by. All we felt sure of was that somewhere—maybe in a completely different state—there was a grave with that first kid’s name on it; and as late afternoon wound on into early evening Miss Howard, too, began to think that maybe such was all we really needed to know, at least for the time being. If Mr. Picton found that he required more specifics concerning that portion of the woman’s life for the actual trial (assuming we got that far), we could keep trying to find them—and he could grill Libby about such matters on the stand, too. But more and more Miss Howard was starting to feel that Libby’s violence was as much a result of having been born a girl in an oppressive, hypocritical society as it was of any possible irregularities in her family life; and our fruitless, pressured search was starting to seem like a waste of time as a result. Needless to say, Miss Howard wasn’t one to put up with such a feeling for very long.
And so, when the court house clock in Ballston Spa tolled out seven o’clock that evening, we found ourselves in a position to hear it, having made our way back into town along the Malta road. We wound through Ballston’s closed shops and quiet houses, then around the train depot and up Bath Street, passing beneath Mr. Picton’s window. El Niño was sleeping in the bed of the wagon, Miss Howard was deep in her own thoughts as she rode next to me, and I was having a tough time keeping my eyes open, as my mind was lulled into relaxation by the slow, steady clatter of our faithful Morgan’s hooves.
Which, of course, was exactly the sort of moment when all hell was bound to break loose.
“Stevie!” I half thought the voice was in my head, part of some dream I was slipping into. “Stevie! Sara! Dammit, can’t you hear me?”
Miss Howard roused me, and together we turned to look at the quiet blocks around us, failing to see a single soul; but when the voice called out to us again, I marked it as Mr. Picton’s, and realized it was coming from his office window.
“Up here!” he said, at which point we glanced up to see him hanging almost half out of the court house, waving his pipe in one hand and a piece of paper in the other, trying desperately to get our attention. “Listen, Stevie,” he went on, “you’ve got to get out to the Westons’ and bring the Doctor back here! They don’t have a blasted telephone, and we need to talk! He was going to be back by nine, but I’ve just had a wire from John—we’ve got to go over it now!”
“But the hearing’s in the morning,” Miss Howard tried to answer, “and he’s still got to—”
“That doesn’t matter—all taken care of” Mr. Picton shouted, confusing the hell out of both Miss Howard and me. “Sara, you’d better take my surrey and go fetch Lucius and Cyrus—but Stevie, you’ve got to get the Doctor, as fast as you can!”
In one quick move Miss Howard jumped to the ground, starting toward High Street and the court house steps at a run. She turned around when she was about halfway there to tell me, “Wake El Niño up, Stevie—he can keep you from drifting off again!”
“Like that’s gonna happen!” I said, full of new energy. “I wanna know what the hell’s going on!”
Miss Howard smiled, gathered her skirt together, and turned to keep running. Thinking the matter