The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [352]
Standing by his open grave as his casket was lowered in, each of us sneaked a peek at the headstones of the other members of his family; and we were all slightly shocked to find that every person in that plot—not only Mr. Picton’s parents, but a younger sister and brother, as well—had died on exactly the same day. This led the Doctor to put some gentle questions to Mrs. Hastings after the ceremony, which she answered by saying that indeed, Mr. Picton’s family had all been killed one night as they slept, by a gas leak in the big house at the end of High Street. Mr. Picton had been away at law school when it’d happened, and he’d never spoken of the matter in later years; and while Mrs. Hastings wouldn’t comment on the odd coincidence of gas leaking in so many rooms of the Picton house at one and the same time, she did say that it was after the tragedy that Mr. Picton’d decided to pursue a career in prosecution. This was enough for the Doctor, who knew—as did, I think, Mrs. Hastings—that the “coincidence” of the several gas leaks was so incredible as to be dismissable. Someone had deliberately done away with the family, and the fact that all the doors of the house had been bolted when it’d happened indicated that it’d been one of the Pictons themselves.
Beyond that, though, neither the Doctor nor anyone else could do more than speculate. Had Mr. Picton’s mother, in a fit of some kind of despondency, done away with her husband, her offspring, and herself by means of gas—not an uncommon practice, according to the Doctor, among lethally melancholic women? Had Mr. Picton suspected the truth about the matter, and had that suspicion not only made him endlessly anxious for the rest of his days, but driven him for so many years to convict Libby Hatch? We would never know. But just the possibility, combined with the sad occasion of the funeral itself, was enough to keep us all very quiet during the train ride back to New York.
Things calmed down eerily around Seventeenth Street in the days what immediately followed—the case was over, but there was no possibility of returning to a normal routine, being as, even if our spirits had been strong enough to bounce back so quickly, we were still waiting to find out the results of the court investigation into affairs at the Doctor’s Institute. On Friday morning the Isaacsons—who’d put off giving their testimony ever since we’d gotten back to town—finally went before the closed court and told their tale. That same afternoon the Reverend Bancroft was called to give his opinion about how the Institute was set up, whether the staff were up to snuff, and if, in general, the place was a sound proposition. The court waited until Monday to hand down its decision, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that those two days were among the longest of my life. The weather turned foully humid, coating every person in the city in the kind of thin sheet of heavy sweat what seems impossible to get off and always sends tempers flaring. Monday was no better: the thermometer’d already climbed into the high eighties by ten, and when Cyrus, the Doctor, and I boarded the calash to head down to the Tweed court house at two I wasn’t sure that either Frederick—whose weeks of boarding had made him a touch lazy—or any of the rest of us was going to make it.
But make it we did, in every sense of the word. Not only did Judge Samuel Welles surprise us by declaring that the affairs of the Institute were in order and the case of Paulie McPherson was “an obvious aberration,” but he went on to shock the entire courtroom by giving those city fathers what had brought on the investigation a tongue-lashing. Dr. Kreizler’s methods might be unorthodox, Judge Welles said, and some people might not be comfortable with them; in fact, he wasn’t so sure that he was comfortable with all of them himself. But you couldn’t argue with results, and the plain fact was that in all his years of operation the Doctor had lost exactly one kid, one who, as the detective sergeants’ investigation had plainly