The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [229]
The sheriff held up a hand. “Mr. Picton, sir, you can spare the effort. I’ll admit, I wasn’t in favor of this investigation, nor of this hearing, before today—but after what I seen and heard in there …” The man’s sun-creased eyes wandered to Clara Hatch; and it seemed to me like maybe a tear or two might come out of them. “Well, sir,” he went on, stroking his big gray mustache, “I’m man enough to admit when I’ve been wrong. And I’ve been wrong about this one.” He turned the tough eyes to Mr. Picton again. “We’ll get the woman up here, sir, provided the New York cops give us a hand. And all I can say concerning what comes after that is”—Sheriff Dunning held out a hand—“I hope the Lord stays with you, Mr. Picton. Because you’re doing his work.”
Mr. Picton, who might’ve been expected to at least show some gratitude or emotion in response to this pretty earnest eating of crow, just shook the sheriff’s hand quickly and nodded, making it clear that praise and damnation from such people were all one and the same to him. “Well, the Lord’s work right now involves me talking to that crowd outside,” he said with a flick of his head. “So if you and your deputies will just clear me a spot on the steps …”
“Yes, sir,” the sheriff answered quickly. “Right away. Abe! Gully! Let’s go, boys!”
The three men moved toward the front door, what was still tightly closed, while the rest of us fell in behind them. A strange kind of thrill—exciting, but frightening and maybe a little sad, at the same time—was beginning to course through me, and I think that all the other members of our team felt the same way. As for the Weston family, the only parts of said emotion they shared were the fear and the sadness, that much was pretty obvious: they clustered around Clara like a human wall, as if they thought someone might try to snatch her right out of their midst. Given the mood outside the court house, such didn’t seem an unreasonable attitude, either.
As the door cracked open, the same angry mumbling what we’d left outside two and a half hours ago started up again, and Sheriff Dunning and his boys had to do a little coaxing—and finally some straight-out pushing and shoving—to clear a little place at the top of the steps for Mr. Picton. Stepping out and putting a match to his pipe, Mr. Picton looked out over the bobbing, grousing heads with an expression of what you might call extreme disdain. After he’d let them shout at him for two or three minutes, he held his hands up.
“All right, all right, get yourselves under some kind of control, now, if that’s possible!” he shouted. “Neither the sheriff nor I have any desire to declare this an illegal assembly, but I’ve got to ask that you listen to what I have to say very carefully!” The general level of noise died down, and then Mr. Picton scanned the faces in front of him more closely. “Is Mr. Grose still here?”
“I am!” came the voice of the newspaper editor in return. He moved up to the front of the crowd. “Though I’m not too happy about standing in the midday July sun for hours on end, sir, I will say!”
“Quite understandable,” Mr. Picton answered. “But the wages of rabble-rousing have never been just, have they, Mr. Grose? At any rate, I’d like you to get the following details straight, so I don’t have to repeat them endlessly during the coming weeks. The grand jury has met, and it has made its decision—and we all owe that decision our respect.”
“Indeed we do!” Mr. Grose said, looking around with a smile. “I hope you’re prepared to respect it, Mr. Picton!”
“Oh, I am, Mr. Grose,” Mr. Picton answered, delighted to discover that the editor was assuming that the state’d lost its bid. “I am. At this moment an indictment is being prepared against Mrs. Elspeth Hunter of New York City, formerly Mrs. Elspeth Hatch of Ballston Spa, formerly Miss Elspeth Fraser of Stillwater, New York. She is charged