“Very well.” The Doctor turned back toward the porch. “You make it necessary for me to ask your mother…” He seized hold of the handle on the door, only to have Franklin grab his forearm with one of his powerful hands: not roughly, but with desperation, all the same.
“Wait!” Franklin said; then, as the Doctor spun a scowl on him again, he released his grip. “You—you just want to look around the barnyard?”
“Mr. Franklin, you know perfectly well what we want to see,” the Doctor answered; and as he did, Miss Howard suddenly clutched at her forehead, apparently realizing whatever it was that the Doctor was driving at.
Swallowing hard, Franklin looked to her. “Libby’s in a lot more trouble than you said she was, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Miss Howard said, “I’m afraid so.”
Seeming a little pained by that information, Franklin nodded once or twice. “All right. Come on, then.”
Leading the way with long, slow steps, Franklin guided us off the back lawn of the house and across the dusty drive, then into the manure-and mud-covered barnyard. As he did, Miss Howard and I pulled up close to the Doctor.
“You suspect—” Miss Howard asked.
“I suspect nothing,” the Doctor finished for her. “I’m certain. We need only an accurate description of the site, to demonstrate to the woman that we have actually been here and are in earnest.”
“Description of what site?” said yours truly, now the only member of our group who didn’t know what was going on; but Miss Howard and the Doctor both kept following Franklin silently, around to the far side of the barn.
There was a muddy water hole to one end of the structure, round back, and a large patch of prickly raspberry bushes at the other. Franklin walked over to one section of the raspberries and then, sighing as he looked to us again, grabbed an old branch that’d fallen off of a gnarled crab-apple tree what stood not far from the water hole. He used the branch to slash and pry at the thick, thorny stems of the bushes in front of him, and as he did a small object came into view on the ground:
It was a wooden headstone, maybe two feet high. The thing was cracked in a few spots, but not badly, and the lettering what’d been painted on it, though faded, was easy to read:
FITZ
1879-1887
LOVE ALWAYS, FROM MAMA
As I read the last line, I felt as though somebody’d run along my back with the hard end of a goose quill: they were the very same words what were carved on Thomas and Matthew Hatch’s graves in Ballston Spa.
“Sure,” I whispered to nobody, taking a couple of frightened steps back as I kept staring at the headstone. “Of course—she was a wet nurse …”
At the sound of the Doctor’s voice I finally looked up. “What did the dog the of, Mr. Franklin?” he said.
Franklin just shook his head. “I don’t know. She brought him to me—dead. Not a mark on him. I built her the coffin, and she took it off and sealed it up. Then I helped her bury it.”
“And your sister’s—‘bilious fever’?” the Doctor asked.
“It lasted all night,” Franklin answered, turning to stare at the headstone. His voice became what you might call detached as he added: “Came on her after we’d all gone to sleep … nearly killed her. But do you know? She never said a word, until morning. Never made a sound… My mother and father, they slept right through it. Right through it.”
The Doctor nodded. “You understand, Mr. Franklin, that a person who destroys evidence of a crime can be indicted as an accessory?”
Franklin nodded, his face still blank. “It’s only a dog…”
The Doctor moved closer to the man. “I hope, for your sake, that your sister will see reason, and make it unnecessary for us to return with a court order authorizing an exhumation of this—dog. In the meantime, I advise you to make very sure that the grave is not tampered with.”
Franklin didn’t say anything to that, just kept nodding and staring at the headstone. Satisfied that the fellow’d gotten his point, the Doctor looked to Miss Howard and me, then turned and started back for the surrey.
“Doctor,” Franklin mumbled as we went, causing us to stop and turn back to him. “She never—Libby, I mean—she never had much. You heard my mother—she was just a servant in this house. Not even that—a servant gets her own quarters.” He looked down at the grave again. “She had men—boys, really—who chased her. She was foolish. But it was something of her own. She deserved to have that much, without it ruining her life. She deserved to have more than just a dog …”
The Doctor nodded once, and then we kept moving to our rig.
“Do you think,” Miss Howard said quietly, “that Judge Brown will give us a court order?”
“It’s my belief that such action won’t be necessary,” the Doctor answered. “Darrow and Maxon will be able to see reason, even if Libby can’t.”
As we climbed up onto the rig, Miss Howard looked back toward the barn. “And the brother—did he know? Does he know?”
“He suspects, certainly,” the Doctor answered, as I started our horse moving. “But as to whether or not he’s sure …”
“What about the mother?” I asked. “She ain’t so harebrained as she makes out—she might know, too.”
“It’s possible, of course,” the Doctor answered. “She, too, suspects much about her daughter, and wouldn’t be altogether surprised by this. But I don’t think she’s aware of it. A woman like Libby Hatch would have found ways to conceal the pregnancy—and you heard what happened when she finally delivered the child. She never made a sound. In most cases I wouldn’t believe it, but in this instance we are dealing with a person capable of incredible discipline when she finds herself trapped.”
“But who was the father?” Miss Howard asked.
“All questions to be answered later,” the Doctor replied. “Stevie—I saw an inn on our way through the town. They may have a telephone. We must call Mr. Picton, and tell him to meet us at his office as soon as we return. Then he must contact Darrow and Maxon and have them, along with their client, join us at, say—” Pulling out his watch and checking the time, the Doctor made a quick calculation. “Nine o’clock. Yes, that should leave us enough time to work out the details.” Tucking the timepiece away again, the Doctor folded his arms anxiously. “And then we shall see.”
CHAPTER 50
By seven-thirty that evening our entire team was packed into Mr. Picton’s office one more time, to weigh the results of our trip to the Franklins’ farm and determine what we should do about it all. Even El Niño was present: as usual, it wasn’t that he understood most of what was going on or had anything to contribute, but he was always concerned that “the lady,” “Mr. Mont-rose,” Mr. Picton (his future “jefe”), or one of the rest of us might be set upon by some villainous characters. He’d come to believe that it was his personal mission and responsibility to prevent any such assault; and as those of us what actually had something to say about the case sat in a circle around Mr. Picton’s desk, the aborigine stood by the door, weapons at the ready. At the time I considered this, like so much of his behavior, amusing and touching, nothing more; later, I’d come to wish that we’d all followed his cautious lead.
The main topic of conversation—a conversation what rapidly turned into a debate—was how we were going to present our discovery to the defense lawyers, and what the best deal to try to strike with them in light of it was. The general thought was that Mr. Picton would tell Libby Hatch that the state’d be willing to forget about the coffin what was buried behind her family’s barn in return for her changing her plea to one of guilty—but guilty of what? Mr. Picton was very reluctant to abandon the first-degree murder charge, what would’ve sent Libby to the electrical chair; but he knew that giving someone a choice between death now and death later wasn’t really much of a carrot. So, he tried to reconcile himself to the next best thing: second-degree murder and a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Some of our group—Ma
rcus and Mr. Moore, mainly—didn’t see why Libby’d go for that option, either, given her personality: a woman who seemed to enjoy her freedom in as many different ways as this one did wasn’t likely to look on the prospect of spending the rest of her days behind bars with much enthusiasm.
But the Doctor disagreed. He figured that, though the woman might rebel at the idea of such a sentence on the surface, some deeper part of her soul would accept and maybe even welcome it. Mr. Moore and Marcus were skeptical about this thought, too, until the Doctor explained it further. Prison, he said, would actually satisfy the conflicting longings of Libby’s spirit: the need to be isolated while at the same time having people around; the need to perform what she saw as some sort of useful task (for a woman as clever as Libby would no doubt be assigned to a position of some authority among the prisoners in, say, the women’s block at Sing Sing) while at the same time feeling like she was defying accepted social customs and authority (she would, after all, be a jailbird). And then there was the question of her desire to control what went on around her: many criminals, the Doctor said, especially those of Libby’s stripe, secretly craved some kind of regulation and discipline in their lives (she had, he reminded us all, been able to go through hours of labor without ever making a sound loud enough to wake her parents); and though physical control in this case would actually be administered by the prison, Libby, with her talent for self-delusion, would quickly convince herself that in fact she was the one who was dictating what went on. And in a way, the Doctor said, she’d be right, being as it would be her own criminal actions what would’ve landed her in jail. But one consideration weighed above all others in convincing the Doctor that Libby would take the deal what Mr. Picton planned to offer: over and over we’d seen her demonstrate that she prized her own life above all things, including the health and safety of her own offspring—the chance to escape execution would be enough, the Doctor said, to make Libby play along, even without the other influences.
Marcus was satisfied by this reasoning, but Mr. Moore still had his doubts; and Mr. Picton, though he knew they were taking the only sensible course, continued to feel a little cheated by not being able to secure a death sentence. But the Doctor insisted to all of them that the only thing what was truly important was for Libby Hatch to be put into a place where she’d never again have any contact with children—especially her own child. On top of that, knowing that her mother was going to be jailed for life instead of executed would only help Clara Hatch’s recovery, since the girl wouldn’t have to carry the enormous weight for the rest of her life of having played a part in sending her mother to the chair. Miss Howard stated that this was the best reason of all for making the deal; indeed, she said, considering what effect her mother’s execution might’ve had on Clara, she wondered why Mr. Picton hadn’t made life imprisonment for Libby his goal in the first place. This comment led to some pretty passionate statements from the assistant district attorney about the unknowable future, and how he couldn’t trust that some governor might not get suckered—say, twenty or thirty years down the line—by one of Libby’s effective performances into reversing the part of her sentence what specified that there was to be no parole. The Doctor and Miss Howard might have done a lot that day to explain her evil, he said, but they hadn’t done anything to remove it: only death could provide that kind of solution.
That set the Doctor off again, on the subject of how was science ever supposed to learn anything from criminals like Libby if the state went around frying and hanging them all; and this discussion, along with all others related to it, went on and on as the sun set beyond the train depot down the hill from Mr. Picton’s window. Finally, at a few minutes after nine, there was a knock at the door of Mr. Picton’s outer office. El Niño pulled the thing open, and in wandered Mr. Darrow and Mr. Maxon, the first looking curious but confident as he took in the scene around him, the second seeming, as ever, very nervous. With formal little movements El Niño showed the pair into Mr. Picton’s inner office, and we all stood up.
“Ah! Maxon, Darrow,” Mr. Picton said. “Good of you to come so late on a Sunday evening.”
“Quite a conference you’ve got going here,” Mr. Darrow said, glancing around at us all and nodding a polite greeting. “Having trouble planning your summation, Mr. Picton?”
“Summation?” Mr. Picton said, playing at surprise. “Oh! Great jumping cats, do you know, with all that’s happened today, I’m afraid I completely forgot about closing arguments! But then, I’m not entirely sure we’re going to need them.” He pulled out his pipe and clamped it between his teeth, looking very pleased with himself.
Mr. Maxon—who’d had a lot of run-ins with Mr. Picton in court, and was in a position to know when the man was up to something—started to look even more jittery than he had when he came in. “What is it, Picton?” he asked, pushing his pince-nez down tighter on his skinny nose. “What have you got?”
“What can he have?” Mr. Darrow asked with a chuckle. “The state’s closed its case in chief, Mr. Picton. I hope you didn’t make the mistake of saving anything for last-minute theatricals. Judge Brown doesn’t seem like the kind of man that’ll go for them.”
“I know it,” Mr. Picton answered. “And your colleague Maxon, there, knows I know it. So whatever I’ve ‘got,’ it must be something fairly good to warrant my asking you here tonight—don’t you think so, Maxon?” Mr. Maxon, unlike Mr. Darrow, seemed to take this statement straight to heart; and, pleased by that fact, Mr. Picton looked over to me. “Stevie? I wonder if you’d just run down and tell Henry to have Mrs. Hatch—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Hunter—brought up from her cell.”
“Got it,” I said, making for the door.
As I went out I heard Mr. Picton continuing, “Doctor, why don’t you stay in here with the three of us? The rest of you might just have a seat in the outer office—we don’t want to overwhelm the defendant, after all…”
After bolting down the hall, I dashed onto the marble stairs, taking them two at a time on my way down to the guard’s station in the entryway. Running to it without looking up, I began to say, “Mr. Picton wants—”
Then I saw who I was talking to. It wasn’t the guard Henry at all, but one of the other big men what’d watched the courtroom doors all through the trial.
“Where’s Henry?” I asked.
The man looked at me with a sour expression. “What’s it to you, kid?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. But what it is to Mr. Picton is he’s got orders for him.”
Looking even more irritated, the guard nodded toward a doorway behind him. “Henry’s downstairs. Guarding the prisoner.”
I heard the statement; I accepted it with a simple nod of my head, and never thought twice about it. But now, looking back across the gap of so many years, I find myself once again wishing desperately that something could have made me see what was going on.
“Well,” I told the guard, “Mr. Picton wants he should bring the prisoner up to his office.”
“What, now?” the guard asked.
“I don’t figure as he meant next Thursday,” I said, turning around and heading back to the staircase. “If I was you I’d get moving—they’re all up there waiting.”
“Hey!” the guard called after me, as I started up the stairs. “Just remember, I don’t get paid to take orders from any kid!” Then he turned to go through the door behind him.
“You just took one, mug,” I mumbled, smiling as I got back to the second floor. “So go chase yourself.”
Back in Mr. Picton’s outer office I found that Cyrus, the detective sergeants, Mr. Moore, Miss Howard, and El Niño were all crowded around the closed oak door to the inner chamber. Cyrus had the aborigine up on his shoulders, from which spot El Niño was looking through a partly open transom, spying on what was going on among the three lawyers and the Doctor and trying to whisper his intelligence back to the others; the only problem was that his English wasn’t good enough to understand much more than half of what the men
inside were saying.
“They are speaking of the girl, Clara, now,” El Niño whispered as I came in.
“What about her?” Miss Howard asked.
“Something—something—” El Niño shook his head in frustration. “The Señor Doctor is saying things I do not understand—some things about sickness, and about the mother—she who is the killer …”
“Oh, this is useless,” Mr. Moore said in frustration. Then he signaled to me. “Stevie, trade places with your friend. I want to know what the hell’s happening in there.”
I was about to follow the order when there came a knock at the outer door. Waiting for El Niño to get down off of Cyrus’s shoulders, I opened the thing, and found myself facing the guard Henry and Libby Hatch. Better than a week in jail hadn’t done anything to damage the way the woman carried herself—her black dress looked as crisp as it had on the night she got off the train—or to dull the devilish gleam in her golden eyes. I’d never been so close to those eyes, before, nor had them focused directly on me; and I found that their general effect was to cause me to back up, slowly and silently, until I near fell over the unused secretary’s desk what sat in that outer office. This reaction caused Libby to smile at me in a way what I hope never to see in another person, a way what brought Mr. Moore’s earthy language at the Café Lafayette back into my mind: you really couldn’t tell, from the look in her face, just what this woman might have in store for you. Love, hate, life, death—all of them, it seemed like, were very possible, so long as they served her purposes.
And from the proud way that she moved through the others to get to the thick door to the inner office, it was pretty clear that Libby Hatch felt like her purposes were being very well served, just at that juncture. She glanced at each of the silent faces before her and kept smiling, then started to shake her head, as if to say that we’d all been terribly foolish to even think about taking her on. Henry kept one hand on her arm (she wasn’t wearing any manacles, another fact what should’ve struck me as odd but didn’t) as he knocked on the inner office door and Mr. Picton told him to enter. He opened the door and indicated to Libby that she should go on in. He did this by way of a single look, the kind of quick, meaningful glance what only people who know each other very well use to communicate.