Our curiosity most definitely roused, we all got up to follow Mr. Picton to the front door; and as we went, I noted that his agitated manner had a sort of infectious quality, being as we were all starting to move and talk in a much quicker and jumpier way. All of us, that is, except the Doctor, who moved steadily and curiously through the front hall, his mind clearly focused on the matter of Libby Hatch but possessing enough spare energy to try to figure the riddle of our host, too.
It was pretty apparent from the size of the houses on Ballston Spa’s High Street that it had been favored by the gentry of the town for many generations. There were joints that were even bigger than Mr. Picton’s place; and those what were smaller generally made up for the deficiency by being very old and bringing to mind, with their simpler but still refined styles, the days when white men had first put the power of the Kayaderosseras behind their moneymaking schemes. Some of the trees around the newer houses were young, but there were enough thick, shady old-timers to give testimony to the age of the land that the town was built on; and as I studied those stout maples, oaks, and elms, I again began to feel very sorry that what must’ve once been a beautiful stretch of landscape should’ve been turned into a homely little mill town. Yet that same feeling of sadness and waste made the place a peculiarly fitting spot in which to be talking about a woman like Libby Hatch.
“Until shortly before the birth of her second child,” Mr. Picton said as we left his front yard, “Libby was the same mercurial woman the town had come to know over time. But then, suddenly, she changed—drastically. She seemed to become nothing short of a loving mother and doting wife, happy in a situation that most women wouldn’t have wished on their worst enemy.”
“Isn’t it possible,” Miss Howard said, “that she might have been just what she seemed, Mr. Picton? No one ever knows the intimate facts of a marriage except the couple themselves, after all. Perhaps she really had learned to care for the old man.”
“Don’t listen to her, Rupert,” Mr. Moore threw in. “She’s just trying to rationalize her pal Nellie Bly’s marriage to that old fossil Seaman.”
If we’d all known Mr. Picton a little better, I’m sure that Miss Howard would’ve belted Mr. Moore right then; as it was, she gave him one of her more deadly looks.
Mr. Picton chuckled a bit. “To tell you the truth, there’s a part of me that would like to agree with you, Miss Howard.”
“Sara,” Miss Howard said, her look changing with typical speed to a very engaging smile. “Please.”
Though caught up in his story, Mr. Picton flushed and stuttered a bit. “Why, I—I’m honored!” he said. “And you must call me Rupert, Sara—unless of course you dislike the name. Some people do. I’ll answer to almost anything, as Moore will confirm. However, I digress! Yes, Sara, if I could believe that Libby Hatch had ever actually cared, on the deepest level, about either her husband or her children, I would be far less haunted by this case. But you tell me what you think of the facts that follow. About two and a half years after her second son was born, Libby’s mood again changed overnight. One day she was the same pleasant, engaging citizen whom people had gradually grown to accept; the next, she had reverted to her old self. Worse, really: she became a scowling, seemingly desperate ball of nerves. No one could explain it—until word got around that Daniel Hatch was mortally ill.”
“Did that come as a surprise?” the Doctor asked. “He must have been close to eighty by then.”
“True,” Mr. Picton answered. “And as a result, it did not come as a surprise, but rather served to explain why Libby’s behavior had become so agitated. She was, apparently, deeply distressed over the fate of the old miser that she and she alone had found a way to love.”
“If anybody feels a little moist,” Mr. Moore said, “that’ll be Rupert’s sarcasm.”
Laughing once, Mr. Picton nodded. “All right, I confess, I was and remain utterly skeptical. But I later learned that I had reason to be. You see, old Hatch suffered through a prolonged illness, punctuated by two severe attacks. Yet when I came to assemble a chronology of the period, I discovered that Libby’s pronounced change in mood had preceded the onset of the illness. So it was not concern for his health that rattled her so badly.”
“Mr. Picton,” Marcus said, asking the question that was in all our heads, “just what kind of ‘attacks’ were they that Mr. Hatch suffered?”
Mr. Picton smiled. “Yes, Detective. They were heart attacks.” As the rest of us received this news silently, our host stopped walking and reached into his jacket pocket. “After I got your messages, John, I went out to the old Hatch place. It’s falling down, now, and the garden’s terribly overgrown. But I was able to find this….”
Out of his pocket Mr. Picton brought a withered but still very distinctive-looking flower.
“Digitalis purpurea,” Lucius announced quietly. “Purple foxglove.”
“Oh, it wasn’t easy to kill him!” Mr. Picton said, in a tone that you might almost call excited. “Hatch was a strong old coot, and as I’m sure you know, Detective, digitalis induces many toxic side effects if given in doses that are insufficient to produce fatal overstimulation of the heart.”
Lucius nodded as we all started walking again. “Nausea, vomiting, blurred vision …”
“He held on to life almost as tightly as he’d held on to his money,” Mr. Picton went on, in the same energetic tone. “Lasted some three months, before she could finally get enough of the stuff into him without any of the servants noticing.” At the sound of his own words, Mr. Picton’s smile shrank up and his voice grew quieter. “The poor, unpleasant old soul. No one should have to go like that.”
“There was never any suspicion cast on Mrs. Hatch?” the Doctor asked.
Mr. Picton shook his head. “No. Not given the way she’d always acted toward her husband. But as it turned out, Hatch had been less fooled by his wife than had most of the town. She received virtually nothing in his will.”
“Who’d he leave it all to?” Mr. Moore asked. “The children?”
“Just so,” Mr. Picton said. “In trust, until they achieved their majority. And he named the local justice of the peace—not his wife—as trustee. Libby was to receive only enough money to support the family. Apparently, Hatch had become quite bitter about something toward the end. But his actions were foolish, because the arrangement of the estate only put the children at terrible risk.”
“Meaning that if anything happened to them,” Miss Howard said, “the fortune would pass to her?”
“Yes,” Mr. Picton answered. “And, bitter as he obviously was, I don’t think even Hatch knew what his wife was really capable of—ah! Here we are.”
We’d reached the front of what Mr. Picton later told us was called the “new” court house, being as it’d been occupied for less than ten years. It wasn’t a particularly interesting-looking building, just a big, gabled mass of stone with a square tower rising out of one corner; but my guess was that, whatever the architectural types might think of its design, as a jail it was probably top of the line: the walls were ponderously thick, and the bars across the cell windows in the basement were strong enough to contain even a seasoned escape artist.
“Well, with any luck at all, this will be our battleground before long!” Mr. Picton announced, looking up at one of the four clock faces what were set into each side of the tower’s roof and pulling out his watch to check it against the bigger time piece. Then his silvery eyes moved steadily around our group, taking, it seemed to me, the measure of each of us in turn. After that he smiled. “I very much wonder if you know what you’ve gotten yourselves into …”
Mr. Picton walked up the court house’s few steps, then held the big door open for us; and as we all filed in without a word, he kept on smiling, without ever telling us why.
The inside of the Ballston court house more than made up for the place’s run-of-the-mill exterior. The walls in the main hall were constructed of alternating types and colors of stone, set in
pleasing patterns, and the double-height windows were framed in deep oak what was kept richly polished, as were the big mahogany doors to the main courtroom, located at the far end, and the smaller hearing room on the left. Sunlight was thrown across the marble floor from a few different directions, and the marble stairs what led up to the offices had a beautiful semicircular window at their first landing, along with a series of expertly made iron lighting fixtures running along the banisters. There was a guard’s post to one side of the large space, and Mr. Picton called out to a big man who was standing at it, reading a copy of the town paper, the Ballston Weekly Journal.
“Afternoon, Henry,” he said.
“Afternoon, Mr. Picton,” the man answered, without looking up.
“Did Aggie bring those files from the clerk’s office?” Mr. Picton asked, leading us to the stairs.
“Yeah,” the man answered. “She said it looks like you’re gonna try to go after that nigger ag—” The man stopped suddenly when he looked up and saw Cyrus standing near Mr. Picton; his small eyes grew as big as they could, and he rubbed the top of his narrow head in confusion. “That—uh—that fellow who shot Mrs. Hatch’s kids. She said it—looks like you’re gonna go after him again.”
Mr. Picton brought himself to a stop at the bottom of the marble staircase. It looked like he might get hot for a second, but then he just stopped, sighed, and said, “Henry?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Picton?” the guard answered.
“Mr. Montrose, here, is going to be working with me for a bit.”
“That so, Mr. Picton?”
“Yes. So, Henry—find another word. I doubt that you’d appreciate my coming in here every day and saying, ‘Good morning, Henry, you pinheaded shanty trash’!”
The guard’s face sagged like a kicked dog’s. “No, sir. I would not.”
“I didn’t think so,” Mr. Picton said, turning and continuing to lead the way upstairs. Once we were on the second floor, he turned to Cyrus.
“I am sorry, Mr. Montrose,” he said.
“It’s nothing unusual, sir,” Cyrus answered.
“Yes, and not very helpful to our cause, in its commonness,” Mr. Picton said with another deep sigh. “Such a quaint-looking little town, too, isn’t it?”
The hallway on the second floor was less grand than the big entry way downstairs, but just as pleasant to look at. There was a series of polished oak doors leading back toward an entrance to the gallery of the main courtroom. We grabbed a quick look inside this last chamber, as court was not in session that day; and though it had less frills than most of the courtrooms in New York I’d frequented, it was still handsome, with fruitwood pews for the spectators on the main floor and in the gallery, and a high judge’s bench made out of the same fine material. Looking down at the room, I began to realize that this might actually be the place where we would bring the golden-eyed woman with many names to some kind of justice for murdering God-only-knew how many children; and as my nerves started to flutter with this thought, I began to understand why Mr. Picton had wondered if we were really ready for all the things that might happen during what was sure to be a controversial and probably very unpopular trial.
Mr. Picton’s office was located across and down the hall from the gallery doorway, around a corner from the district attorney’s much grander suite. As only an assistant D.A., he had just two rooms, one a small space for a secretary (though he preferred to work without one), the other, beyond a thick oak door, a larger office that looked out over the railroad tracks and the train depot what lay down the hill. The office had a big rolltop desk and the usual endless quantity of law books and files that could be found in any lawyer’s office, all of them scattered around in what seemed a very disorganized way. But as soon as we were inside, Mr. Picton began to retrieve things in a fashion what showed that the clutter made perfect sense to him.
“Just clear a space for yourselves wherever you can,” he said to the rest of us. “I fear that I’m too ardent a disciple of the philosophy that an orderly office indicates a disorderly mind. And vice versa.”
“Amen to that,” Mr. Moore said, quickly dumping some books off of a big leather chair, then sinking down into it before anyone else had a chance.
As he continued to go through some files on his desk with fast motions what made him look like a second-story man at work, Mr. Picton caught sight of Miss Howard still standing, and then pointed with some embarrassment to the outer office. “Oh, I am sorry, Sara. There are more chairs outside. Moore, you swine, get out of there and let Sara sit down!”
“You don’t know her yet, Rupert,” Mr. Moore answered, settling in further. “Sara despises deference to her sex.”
Cyrus had snatched an oak desk chair from outside. “Here you are, Miss Howard,” he said, setting it near her.
“Thank you, Cyrus,” she answered, sitting down and giving Mr. Moore a sharp kick in the shin as she did.
He let out a yelp and bolted upright. “Dammit, Sara! I will not take any more abuse! I mean it! I’ll go to Saratoga and start gambling right now, and you and your señora can go hang!”
“As you can see, Mr. Picton,” the Doctor said, shooting Mr. Moore a warning with his eyes, “ours is a rather unusual investigative style. But please, if you would return to your story?”
“Certainly, Doctor.” Mr. Picton handed a file across to him. “Here is the sheriff’s report on the incident—Sheriff Jones was his name. Since retired.”
The Doctor began to read the document quickly as Mr. Picton related its contents to the rest of us in a way what was not only agitated, but hinted at the kind of dramatics the man might be capable of in a courtroom.
“Mrs. Hatch claimed that on the night of May thirty-first, 1894, she was driving her family’s depot wagon home after spending the afternoon buying groceries and gardening supplies in town and then taking her children over to Lake Saratoga to watch the sunset. At what she guessed to be about ten-thirty P.M., out on the Charlton road about half a mile shy of her house, a colored man armed with a revolver jumped out of a stand of bushes and demanded that she come down off the wagon. She refused, and tried to drive quickly on. But the man leapt onto the driver’s seat and forced her to stop. Then, seeing the children, he said that if Mrs. Hatch did not do everything he told her to, he would shoot all three of them. At that point, although close to hysteria, she agreed to follow the man’s orders.
“He told her to get down off the wagon and remove her clothes. She followed the command. But as she was removing her undergarments she stumbled, apparently making the man think that she was trying to either flee or go for a weapon. The man shouted, ‘Lousy white bitch—this’ll be on your head!’ and shot each of the children. Thomas and Matthew—ages three and four, respectively—died instantly. Clara, aged five and a half, survived, though she was comatose. The man, after firing the shots, jumped down from the wagon and fled back into the woods, leaving the now-distraught Mrs. Hatch to first try to tend to her children and then, when she realized how dire the situation actually was, to make for home as quickly as possible. Dr. Lawrence, one of our medical men who doubles as the town’s coroner, was summoned. However, he could do nothing. Clara Hatch survived, but did not regain consciousness for quite some time. When she did, it was found that she had lost the ability to speak, along with the use of her right arm and hand.”
There were some quiet expressions of sadness in the room (though none of surprise), along with the scratching sound of Lucius taking notes. Then the Doctor asked, “Was the little girl shot in the head?”
Mr. Picton looked very happy with the question. “No, Doctor, she was not. The bullet entered the upper chest and traveled at an upward angle, passing out through the neck.”
“But—that doesn’t make sense,” Lucius said softly.
“Nor do a great many other things, Detective,” Mr. Picton answered. “Our next chapter”—he handed the Doctor another file—“is Dr. Lawrence’s report. By the time he arrived, Mrs. Hatch and her h
ousekeeper had moved the children inside. Mrs. Hatch was in a state of hysterical distraction, alternately trying to revive the boys and racing through the house—through every room in the house, including her dead husband’s—screaming incoherently. Lawrence quickly determined that Thomas and Matthew were dead and that Clara was in a desperate state. He informed Mrs. Hatch of all this, sending her off into an even greater fit. She told Dr. Lawrence—and I’d like the detectives to note this, particularly—that her husband had kept a revolver under his pillow all his life, and that she had never removed it after his death. But now, she said, she was afraid that she might seize the gun and do herself harm, so great was her grief and guilt at allowing her children to be attacked. Lawrence immediately administered laudanum to get the woman under some kind of control, and told the housekeeper—Mrs. Louisa Wright, a widow woman who’d taken on the housekeeping chores after Libby and Daniel Hatch were married—to retrieve the gun from Mr. Hatch’s room and dispose of it. He then did what he could for Clara and sent to Saratoga for a surgical specialist.”