The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [231]
On our drive back to town from the Westons’ farm, the Doctor told us about what had happened during the grand jury’s proceedings. Though an emotional tale, it wasn’t a particularly complicated one: Mr. Picton had carefully laid out most of the physical evidence we’d assembled, and then gone on to paint, with Mrs. Louisa Wright’s help, a picture of Libby Hatch as a fortune hunter and a libertine, a willful, wanton character who, if she hadn’t been directly responsible for her husband’s death, had certainly expected that she was going to profit by it. When it had become clear that her children stood in the way of that profit, Mr. Picton’d stated flatly, Libby had attempted to eliminate them. The Doctor told us that Mr. Picton’s language had been so persuasive—and, true to Mr. Moore’s prediction, so fast and overwhelming—that it’d seemed like many members of the jury were convinced of his argument even before Clara Hatch had been called to testify. And when the girl had taken the stand, Mr. Picton’d asked her only four questions:
“Were you in your family’s wagon with your mother and your brothers on the night of May thirty-first, 1894?” The answer had been a not-so-easy “Yes.”
“Did you see anyone else during your ride home?” Answer: a firm “No.”
“Then you were shot by someone in the wagon?” To this Clara’d just nodded.
“Clara, was that person your mother?” A good minute had gone by before the girl could cope with that one; but steady looks of reassurance from the Doctor, and of love and support from Josiah and Ruth Weston, had given her courage, and finally she’d whispered, “Yes.”
No one in the hearing room had made a sound as the girl stepped down. The members of the jury, the Doctor said, had looked just the same as the crowd outside the court house had when they’d gotten the news about the indictment: as if they’d all been hit with one enormous brick. Mr. Picton had wrapped up his business pretty quickly after that, and the jury’s assent to an indictment on two counts of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder had been very quick.
It wasn’t the kind of story what would make anybody overjoyed or triumphant; and to be sure, all of us in the surrey—having seen what the day had done to little Clara—felt a deep sense of regret and sadness as we clattered back to Mr. Picton’s house. But underneath said emotions of the moment, for all of us, was something what maybe went even deeper: what you might call an unspoken feeling that we were, as a group, finally on something what my dice-throwing pals downtown would’ve called “a roll.” Our investigation, it appeared, had been transformed into a sort of quiet locomotive—and that locomotive was bearing down unstoppably, it seemed, on the woman who’d been committing so much mayhem for so many years. Evidence and testimony—hard won by hard work—were the ropes we were using to strap the golden-eyed killer onto the tracks. True, our responsibilities to Clara, to the Westons, to little Ana, and to our own safety were considerable—but our responsibility to keeping our engine running was the most important of all. And on that Friday evening, we appeared to have a full head of steam, and the way ahead looked good and clear. That was before Marcus came back from Chicago.
CHAPTER 41
The Doctor’d been right in supposing that the general state of what he called “moral confusion” what took hold of Ballston Spa during the days after the indictment of Libby Hatch would make our work easier. It wasn’t that we were suddenly looked on any kindlier by the townsfolk; it was just that they were too busy trying to make sense of the affair—and its long, horrible history—to pay us much mind. The fact that people like Sheriff Dunning had been so convinced of Libby’s guilt by what they’d heard during the grand jury hearing made it impossible for those vexed citizens to just write the upcoming trial off as the work of ungodly troublemakers from New