The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [99]
“Well… there isn’t any reason for the Doctor to know this part of the story. Doesn’t have anything to do with the case that I can tell.”
“Right.” I finally managed to give my friend another quick look. “Thanks, Cyrus.”
He just nodded, stood up, and left the carriage house slowly.
I stayed at my work for several more minutes, the caked mud in Frederick’s shoe coming away quicker as it mixed with my silent tears.
CHAPTER 19
It’s a peculiar thing, how you can go to bed one night convinced of a fact and wake up the next morning to find yourself faced with its opposite…
When I drifted off soon after sunset on that Sunday evening, I was dead certain that I would never see Kat again: even if my heart could have stood visiting her at the Dusters’ joint, things had so fallen out with Ding Dong during our jaunt to Bethune Street as to make even an attempt at such a visit worth my life. The realization that the door on my strange relationship with her seemed to have suddenly swung shut alternately angered and saddened me all through Sunday afternoon and evening. So black and blue did my mood become, in fact, that the Doctor—preoccupied as he was with the case-felt the need to visit me in my room and ask whether I was feeling all right. I didn’t tell him the true story, and he, of course, sensed that I was holding something back; out he didn’t press it, just told me to get some extra sleep and see how things looked in the morning.
I woke at just past 8:30 on Monday to find the Doctor and Cyrus getting ready to head up to the Museum of Natural History. Mrs. Leshko was, not for the first time, late, and Cyrus was seeing to the preparation of coffee, a task what he could accomplish with far happier results than could our Russian cook. The three of us sat in the kitchen and had big mugs of a fine South American brew, the Doctor trying to cheer me up by reading aloud the details of a lead story in the Times that concerned new developments in the “mystery of the headless body.” It seemed that the lower torso of the still unidentified corpse (wrapped in the same red oilcloth what Cyrus and I had seen at the Cunard pier) had washed up at the watery edge of the woods near Undercliff Avenue, all the way on the north side of Manhattan. The police—whose theory of a crazed anatomist or medical student had been dismissed even by the coroner they themselves had engaged, after the man had found about a dozen stab wounds and a couple of .32-caliber bullet holes in various parts of the body—had changed their theory, and were now trying to drum up panic and excitement by saying the body belonged to one of two lunatics who’d escaped from the State Asylum at King’s Park, Long Island, a couple of weeks earlier. This story, we all knew, was as likely to prove true as the first; but whatever the real identity of the unfortunate soul whose body’d been distributed all over town, the attention that the case continued to receive could only help us to go about our work more easily.
The Doctor and Cyrus headed off at a little before nine, and though a visit to the Museum of Natural History would ordinarily have been my sort of fare, the morning was a cool, grey one, and my spirits were such that I found the idea of staying home alone somewhat comforting. And, of course, it was advisable that someone stick around and try to determine what in the world had become of Mrs. Leshko. So I walked the pair of them out to the calash and saw them off, pausing to glance up at the misty sky before heading back to the house.
I’d just gotten the door open when a voice whispered tome:
“Stevie!”
It was coming from beyond some hedges on the east side of the Doctor’s small front yard. Carefully closing the front door again, I crept over to the hedge, looked up and over it, and found—
Kat. She was crouched down low and huddling by the side of the building next door, her clothes looking very wrinkled, her hair undone, and her face a picture of exhaustion. I couldn’t’ve been more surprised if she’d been a ghost or