by Caleb Carr
“Well,” Lucius answered slowly, as he sat up, “grunts and laughter argue against physical trauma or some other pathology making her incapable of talking. Assuming, that is, that the bullet didn’t hit any of the throat organs associated with speech. There definitely wasn’t any brain damage, according to Dr. Lawrence’s report, and that would be the usual physical cause of the kind of muteness they were talking about at the time.”
“So if it’s not physical pathology or trauma,” Marcus said, “then it’s psychological.”
“And if it’s psychological,” Mr. Moore chimed in, “there’s a good chance Kreizler can break through.”
Nodding and then glancing up the hill, Marcus took a drag off his stick. “Let’s have another look at those pieces of the wagon,” he said, as he started back up.
Mr. Moore, Lucius, and I trailed behind him. “What are we looking for, exactly?” I asked.
“A bullet,” Marcus answered, his city shoes slipping a bit on the many years’ worth of dead and decaying leaves what coated the hillside.“Or, if we get very lucky, bul-lets. You see, Stevie, Dr. Lawrence’s report mentions only the point of entry for the two shots that killed Thomas and Matthew Hatch. They were dead when he arrived at the house, so he didn’t think to go into any more detail. He did trace the path of the bullet that struck Clara a little more carefully, since she was still alive. It had been traveling at an upward angle, but may still have embedded somewhere in the wagon—probably the underside of the seat.”
“But,” I said, scrambling to keep up, “can’t we just ask Dr. Lawrence about the bullets what killed the boys?”
“We did,” Mr. Moore answered, “on our way out here. But Lawrence has been coroner since ’84—seen a lot of dead bodies in those years. And like Marcus says, his attention in this case was pretty well focused on the little girl. He really can’t say whether there were exit wounds in the boys’ backs.”
“Which leaves us with two options,” Marcus continued, “one just tedious, the other next to impossible. We can either tear the appropriate parts of the wagon into tiny pieces to see if a bullet lodged in the wood somewhere, or…”
“Or?”
Marcus sighed. “Or we try to get a court order allowing us to exhume Thomas and Matthew.”
“The problem there being,” Mr. Moore added, “that any judge is going to want to consult with the mother before ordering an exhumation.” He looked at me and smiled. “Care to post some odds on what Libby Hatch’s reaction to that kind of request would be, Stevie?”
I just shook my head. “Wouldn’t be worth the trouble of figuring them.”
Leaning against one big tree in the front yard was a four-by-three-foot slab of ash wood along with an old, moth-eaten driver’s seat. The bunch of us collected around the things and stared at them.
“But I still don’t understand,” Mr. Moore said. “If Libby was the one who shot the kids, wouldn’t she have made some effort to get rid of the wagon, and any stray bullets along with it?”
“Ballistics is an infant science, John, even among experts,” Marcus answered. “Also, Dr. Lawrence admits that he never examined the boys for exit wounds, since they were already dead—so he never would’ve mentioned such wounds while he was in the house, which meant that she wouldn’t have thought of them, either. Lawrence would, of course, have made a fuss over the wound in the back of Clara’s neck, which must have been pretty awful, given the range.”
“She keeps her hair in a fat braid at the back,” I said, feeling a sudden sadness that I hadn’t when I’d noticed the girl’s hair at the Westons’ farm. “Probably to cover the scar.”
Marcus cocked his head in a way what said this fact fit in with his theory. “But it’s doubtful,” he went on, “that Libby was educated enough about firearms to go speculating about exit trajectories.”
Just then we heard the sound of a rig coming our way, and we all turned to look down the overgrown drive. Heading up it was Miss Howard, sitting on top of a hired buckboard and steering a feisty-looking Morgan stallion. She wrangled the compact, muscular animal to a stop near us, then brushed a few stray wisps of hair out of her face and jumped to the ground.
“Found her!” she called, smiling wide and marching over to us. “Mrs. Louisa Wright, of Beach Street—she lives in a house behind Schafer’s commercial greenhouses. She worked for the Hatches for seven years—and there is, apparently, nothing that she won’t talk about!” She pointed down the hill. “What about the gun? Any luck?”
“Hopefully,” Lucius answered, holding up his moldy old package.
“Yes,” Miss Howard said when she saw it. “Mrs. Wright told me that she wrapped it in a brown paper bag before dumping it. Well, then, we’d better get back, there’s a lot to do!”
As we all gathered around to pile the pieces of the Hatches’ wagon onto our buckboard, Marcus asked Miss Howard what else she’d been able to find out during her visit with Daniel Hatch’s former housekeeper.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” Miss Howard answered, climbing back up to do the driving. “She was, as I say, very talkative. But one thing stands out: she suspects that only one of Daniel Hatch’s children was shot that night.”
“What do you mean, Sara?” Mr. Moore said, as the rest of us got aboard.
But Miss Howard looked to me. “You saw Clara, did you, Stevie?” I nodded. “Fine, light brown hair, eyes a similar shade? Pale-skinned?” I nodded again. “Well, that’s not what the two boys looked like, apparently.”
I right away thought back to Mr. Picton’s request during our approach to the Weston farm, that Dr. Kreizler make a note of Clara Hatch’s coloring. “So that’s what he meant,” I said.
“What who meant?” Mr. Moore said.
But before I could answer, Miss Howard had cracked the reins against the Morgan’s haunches and we were under way.
I wasn’t sorry to say good-bye to the old Hatch place, and was glad to see Miss Howard continue to make liberal use of the reins to get us away quickly. Mr. Moore and I sat up on the seat with her, while the detective sergeants rode in the bed with the ash plank, the driver’s seat, and the gun, the last of which items they didn’t plan on unwrapping until we got back to Mr. Picton’s house. For the moment they were full of questions about Mrs. Louisa Wright, questions what Miss Howard tried to answer as fast and thoroughly as she could; and each little bit of information she revealed made it plain that the old housekeeper was going to be a very important player in our case against Libby Hatch.
She hadn’t had much use for Libby during her years with her, Mrs. Wright hadn’t; but fortunately she’d felt the same about Daniel Hatch, which meant that her observations about what went on in the house wouldn’t look to a jury like she was nursing a grudge against the handsome younger woman who’d been her boss. When Marcus asked why, if Mrs. Wright disliked the Hatches so much, she’d stayed on with them for so long, Miss Howard explained that the tough, take-no-nonsense widow’d been the only woman in town who’d been willing to serve the couple; because of that, the family’d grown more and more dependent on her over the years. As they did, Mrs. Wright eventually reached a point where she could pretty well name her fee from old Daniel: over time she’d squeezed enough money out of her tightfisted boss to be able to buy a decent house of her own in town, something that no other job in Ballston Spa what was available to a woman would’ve put her in a position to do. Mrs. Wright hadn’t shed much of a tear when Hatch died, being as he’d left her nothing in his will; and when Libby asked her to stay on at the house the housekeeper’d insisted on her regular salary, which Libby’d agreed to pay, rather than go to the trouble of trying to find and break in somebody new. In other words, emotional considerations hadn’t warped Mrs. Wright’s opinions any; so what she’d seen and was now reporting to us could be pretty well relied on.
Which wasn’t to say that she’d felt nothing for the Hatch kids, who, Mrs. Wright’d told Miss Howard, were caught in a strange and mixed-up situation that kept th
em in a constant state of skittishness. They’d all spent their early months, as Miss Howard had suspected, with a wet nurse, a setup what’d stopped them from becoming living demonstrations of Libby Hatch’s maternal shortcomings—and was, because of that, the only reason why they’d survived their infancies at all. But life after those early months had still been pretty rocky for them. Clara’d had things the best, being as Daniel Hatch was as sure as he could be that she was his child. But the arrival of first Matthew and then Thomas had caused trouble, being as by then Hatch had begun to suspect his wife of being unfaithful. The fact that the two boys had thick, curly black hair, deep brown eyes, and olive skin (unlike either of their parents or their sister) was taken by Hatch as proof that they’d been fathered by another man; and even though he was never able to say who that man was, he grew more and more hostile to Libby as time went by, and lost interest in Thomas and Matthew altogether.
Strangely enough, Mrs. Wright said, all this hadn’t been just an old man’s ravings: Libby had been cheating on her husband, though with a man that her husband never would have suspected of the crime. It seemed that the minister who’d married the Hatches, one Reverend Clayton Parker, had the same coloring as young Matthew and Thomas, and paid regular visits to the Hatch homestead, where old Daniel entertained him to the best of his curmudgeonly ability. Apparently Mrs. Wright had more than once seen Parker and Libby locked in steamy embrace in the woods beyond the Hatch house, and Libby’s sudden relapse into moody agitation in the summer of 1893 had occurred, coincidentally, right after Parker’d told his superiors that his spiritual talents were being wasted in Ballston Spa, and he’d been dispatched to do good works in that modern-day Babylon, New York City.
“A minister?” Marcus said, when he heard all this. “What the hell did a minister have to offer a woman who was married to one of the richest men in town?”
“Youth, good looks, and charm, for openers,” Miss Howard answered. “Though I think Mrs. Wright is correct when she says that Libby wouldn’t be satisfied with just those qualities. No, it was something else, too. A kind of—respectability, in a way. No, more than that. Redemption, maybe.”
“Redemption?” Lucius said.
“An inside track to God?” I threw in.
“Yes, that’s closer to it, Stevie,” Miss Howard answered, urging the little black Morgan along toward Mr. Picton’s house. “I’m not exactly clear—I want to get the Doctor’s opinion …”
We’d reached the section of our route where the Charlton road became Charlton Street. Standing up to try to peer ahead through the dimming light of the evening, I soon caught sight of the four turrets of Mr. Picton’s house—and I also saw the surrey standing horseless by the porch.
“Well, it looks like you’ll get your chance,” I said to Miss Howard. “They’re back from the Westons’.”
After we’d pulled up to the house, we put the section of boarding and the driver’s seat from the Hatches’ wagon up on the porch and went inside, entering the living room to find Cyrus at Mr. Picton’s piano and our host standing in the far corner, where the Doctor was transferring notes onto a large chalkboard what had appeared.
The thing was well on its way to becoming a duplicate of the one at Number 808 Broadway, and Mr. Picton was clearly fascinated by the process.
“Now, this,” Miss Howard said with a smile, making them all aware of our entrance, “is a homey little scene, isn’t it?”
Cyrus stopped playing, and the Doctor and Mr. Picton came over to us quickly. “At last!” the Doctor said. “What news from the Hatch house? Our new board awaits!”
The next hour or so was one of those jumbled times, as everybody tried to explain to everybody else what progress had been made during our first day in town. Things between the Doctor and Clara Hatch had continued to go very well after I’d left the Westons’ farm, and though the girl still hadn’t given out with any actual words, the Doctor was sure that he could eventually coax her to do so. It wouldn’t be easy: Clara was in a state of what the Doctor called “protracted hysterical disassociation,” meaning that what she’d seen was too terrible to make any sense of, either to herself or to anybody else. But Mr. Picton made it clear that we had to get her to talk: he didn’t have a ghost of a chance of getting his boss, District Attorney Oakley Pearson, to agree to summon a grand jury to consider an indictment against Libby Hatch unless Clara was prepared to say flat out that her mother had shot her. We could assemble all the physical evidence in the world, but none of it would count for much in a case that had aroused so much emotion—and would surely fire up a new kind of outrage when we announced our theory of the crime—if the girl didn’t talk. Though he went on for quite a while explaining all this to us, Mr. Picton’s basic point was simple: if you were going to accuse a woman of murdering her own kids, you’d better be damned sure you had not only motive, opportunity, and means, but a witness, too.
Motive, opportunity, and means would still, though, play their parts, and these were things that we could pursue while the Doctor went about the process of trying to get Clara Hatch to communicate. The subject that seemed the most open to investigation that evening was means, being as Lucius had, we hoped, brought the instrument of attack up out of the old well. Asking Mrs. Hastings for a piece of oilcloth what he proceeded to drape over the piano, Lucius carefully positioned his damp brown parcel on the thing, then slowly began to unfold and pull away the paper bag with a couple of his steel medical probes.
“I asked Mrs. Wright if she’d noticed anything unusual about the gun before she dropped it down the well,” Miss Howard said, as we all crowded around Lucius. “Anything that might indicate that it’d been moved or fired. But she said she’d been far too upset to take any notice of those kind of details.”
“Understandable,” Marcus said, watching his brother straighten out the bag, its hidden contents still bulging outward. “Did she say how old the thing was?”
“Hatch told Mrs. Wright he’d always kept it under his pillow,” Miss Howard said. “He didn’t fight in the Civil War himself—he paid a substitute—so that eliminates the possibility of it being a weapon he picked up in the army.”
“Yes,” Marcus answered. “It’s probably one of the more common store-bought brands. And given his age, along with the likelihood that he hadn’t fired guns very often, he probably wanted something easy to use.”
“Right,” Miss Howard continued. “Something like a Colt Peacemaker—it looks like one, from the silhouette. An early edition, too. The first Single Action Army models came out when, in ’71? The timing would be about right.”
“But is it a weapon that would be easy for a woman to use?” the Doctor asked.
It was the kind of question what Marcus or Lucius would ordinarily have answered; but Miss Howard enjoyed the limelight, and the two brothers knew enough to stay out of her way. “I don’t see why not,” she said with a shrug. “A forty-five-caliber pistol might not seem like a woman’s weapon, on the surface, but the Single Action Army used metal cartridges, and had very smooth action. A fairly simple, serviceable piece, really. Add the fact that even the longer-barreled models didn’t weigh much more than three pounds, and she would’ve been fine, even if she didn’t have much experience with guns.”
I saw Mr. Picton give Miss Howard a surprised look, and then turn to Mr. Moore. “Do not” Mr. Moore said, “push your luck with this girl, Rupert.”
Lucius suddenly looked troubled. “I don’t think I can get the bag off in one piece.”
“Any reason why you need to?” Mr. Moore said.
“If we can prove that the wrapping was manufactured locally,” Marcus explained for his brother, “then it argues against the possibility that this was some other gun dumped more recently by someone else.”
“Well, you don’t need to keep it in one piece to do that,” Mr. Picton said. “Look at the bottom of the thing, Detective—you should find the words ‘West Bags, Ballston Spa, New York’ in small black print.”
> Lucius focused his attention on the part of the bag what was draped around the mouth of the gun barrel; then he brightened up. “You’re right, Mr. Picton—it’s there! Let me just cut it loose—” He pulled a surgical scalpel from his pocket and made four neat little slits in the bottom of the bag, then pulled away a rectangular piece of the brown paper and laid it out carefully on the sheet. “There we go. And now we can …”
With slightly faster strokes, Lucius began to peel away strips of the remaining brown paper, revealing a plain, single-action revolver, of the type seen in your standard Western magazine illustrations. Its dark brown grips were dusted with light green mold, and its blue steel chamber and barrel were red with rust. None of the rest of us knew quite what to think until Lucius picked up the gun by slipping one of his probes through the trigger guard, examined it with his brother, and then smiled.
“Thank you, Mr. West,” he sighed.
“You mean it’s in good shape?” Mr. Moore said.
“Let’s just say this,” Lucius answered. “Ballston Spa is, in fact, the home of the world’s finest paper bags.”
Marcus nodded confidently as he took his turn examining the pistol. “Hmm, yes,” he said, trying to control his enthusiasm. “With a little work we should be able to actually fire it again.”
“And that means—” Mr. Moore asked.
“That means,” Miss Howard answered, herself smiling, “a ballistics test.”
Mr. Moore’s face went blank. “A what?”
“Provided,” Lucius said, putting down the gun and holding up a finger, “that we can find a bullet in those pieces of the wagon for comparison.”
“Whoa, slow down, here,” Mr. Moore said.
“What about it, Mr. Picton?” Marcus asked. “How are your judges on the subject of ballistics analysis?”
Mr. Picton shrugged. “They’re aware of the field, of course. But to my knowledge we haven’t yet had a case where it’s been used to convict. On the other hand, I can’t think of one where it’s been specifically excluded, either. And our judges don’t tend to be absolutely primitive about such matters—they don’t mind setting a precedent every now and then. If we come up with something convincing—especially if it’s in conjunction with other evidence—I think I can run it up the pole and get a salute.”