Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

As the door cracked open, the same angry mumbling what we’d left outside two and a half hours ago started up again, and Sheriff Dunning and his boys had to do a little coaxing-and finally some straight-out pushing and shoving-to clear a little place at the top of the steps for Mr. Picton. Stepping out and putting a match to his pipe, Mr. Picton looked out over the bobbing, grousing heads with an expression of what you might call extreme disdain. After he’d let them shout at him for two or three minutes, he held his hands up.

“All right, all right, get yourselves under some kind of control, now, if that’s possible!” he shouted. “Neither the sheriff nor I have any desire to declare this an illegal assembly, but I’ve got to ask that you listen to what I have to say very carefully !” The general level of noise died down, and then Mr. Picton scanned the faces in front of him more closely. “Is Mr. Grose still here?”

“I am!” came the voice of the newspaper editor in return. He moved up to the front of the crowd. “Though I’m not too happy about standing in the midday July sun for hours on end, sir, I will say!”

“Quite understandable,” Mr. Picton answered. “But the wages of rabble-rousing have never been just, have they, Mr. Grose? At any rate, I’d like you to get the following details straight, so I don’t have to repeat them endlessly during the coming weeks. The grand jury has met, and it has made its decision-and we all owe that decision our respect.”

“Indeed we do!” Mr. Grose said, looking around with a smile. “I hope you’re prepared to respect it, Mr. Picton!”

“Oh, I am, Mr. Grose,” Mr. Picton answered, delighted to discover that the editor was assuming that the state’d lost its bid. “I am. At this moment an indictment is being prepared against Mrs. Elspeth Hunter of New York City, formerly Mrs. Elspeth Hatch of Ballston Spa, formerly Miss Elspeth Fraser of Stillwater, New York. She is charged with the first-degree murder of Thomas Hatch and Matthew Hatch, as well as the attempted murder of Clara Hatch. All on the night of the thirty-first of May, 1894.”

I’ll admit that I’d thought the crowd might break out into a good old-fashioned riot at this news. So I was surprised-as was Mr. Picton, from the look of him-when the sounds what came out of those citizens were ones of hushed horror, as if some ghost had just wandered across their collective path.

“What-what are you saying?” Mr. Grose asked. Then he looked to Sheriff Dunning. “Phil, does he mean-?”

The sheriff just gave Mr. Grose a long and serious stare. “I’d let him finish, if I were you, Horace.”

As the crowd quieted, Mr. Picton-no longer quite so testy as he’d been-finished his statement: “We have physical evidence that will demonstrate the woman’s guilt, we have a powerful motive that will be supported by witnesses, and we have an eyewitness to the shooting. This office would not take action on a matter like this with anything less.”

Mr. Picton paused, still looking like he expected some kind of an outburst from the crowd; but all he got was a sudden cry of “Jesus H. Christ!” from one man at the back of the herd, who immediately turned and started running down toward the trolley station. As he went, I caught enough of a glimpse of his face to be able to identify him:

It was the waiter who’d taken care of us at Canfield’s Casino. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he’d been sent by his boss to find out the latest developments in the case, so that odds on the trial could be posted at the Casino for those of Mr. Canfield’s clients who didn’t get enough satisfaction out of roulette, poker, and faro. But the man obviously hadn’t been ready for what he’d heard, and judging by how fast he beat it to the trolley station, I guessed that Saratoga’s true gamesmen were going to be able to get some very long odds on a conviction from Mr. Canfield starting that night.

As for the rest of the crowd, they just continued to stand and stare blankly at Mr. Picton, in the same sort of way that people all over town had stared at us when we’d brought Clara to the court house that morning: they were still resentful, all right, but added to the resentment now was the kind of confusion that an angry cow feels when it’s been smacked in the forehead with a shovel. It didn’t seem like most of them even knew what to do with themselves, until Sheriff Dunning stepped out in front of Mr. Picton.

“That all, sir?” the sheriff asked.

“Yes, Dunning,” Mr. Picton answered. “You’d better break them up-there’s nothing more to say.”

“Nothing more to say?” It was Mr. Grose, his voice now very different than it had been before: the pompous arrogance was all gone. “Picton,” he went on quietly, “do you realize what you’ve already said?”

Mr. Picton nodded, very seriously. “Yes. I do, Horace. And I’d be grateful if you’d print it in full in tomorrow’s edition.” His silver eyes moved out over the crowd as he smoked. “This isn’t a matter for sidewalk debate, ladies and gentlemen. The town of Ballston Spa and the county of Saratoga will be forced to search their souls, in the days to come. Let’s hope we can live with what we find.”

With that Mr. Picton turned and came back inside, while Sheriff Dunning and his men gently started to break the crowd up. Closing the court house door slowly, Mr. Picton then approached the Doctor.

“Well,” he said, “as you suspected, Doctor, we’ll have no disturbances-yet.”

The Doctor nodded. “The sinister phenomena implied by this crime resonate far deeper in the human soul than anyone can immediately grasp. You’ve been struggling with them for years now, Mr. Picton-the rest of us, for weeks. And the townspeople? Simple anger wasn’t to be expected, at this point. Confusion will dominate for a time-perhaps a great deal of time. That will work to our advantage. For there is much to do before our antagonist arrives. And when she does, we may find that popular confusion will give way to something distinctly uglier…”

The Doctor led us over to join the Westons, and then we set out as a group-minus only Mr. Picton, who had a lot of paperwork to take care of-to make sure that the family got home safe.

On our drive back to town from the Westons’ farm, the Doctor told us about what had happened during the grand jury’s proceedings. Though an emotional tale, it wasn’t a particularly complicated one: Mr. Picton had carefully laid out most of the physical evidence we’d assembled, and then gone on to paint, with Mrs. Louisa Wright’s help, a picture of Libby Hatch as a fortune hunter and a libertine, a willful, wanton character who, if she hadn’t been directly responsible for her husband’s death, had certainly expected that she was going to profit by it. When it had become clear that her children stood in the way of that profit, Mr. Picton’d stated flatly, Libby had attempted to eliminate them. The Doctor told us that Mr. Picton’s language had been so persuasive-and, true to Mr. Moore’s prediction, so fast and overwhelming-that it’d seemed like many members of the jury were convinced of his argument even before Clara Hatch had been called to testify. And when the girl had taken the stand, Mr. Picton’d asked her only four questions:

“Were you in your family’s wagon with your mother and your brothers on the night of May thirty-first, 1894?” The answer had been a not-so-easy “Yes.”

“Did you see anyone else during your ride home?” Answer: a firm “No.”

“Then you were shot by someone in the wagon?” To this Clara’d just nodded.

“Clara, was that person your mother?” A good minute had gone by before the girl could cope with that one; but steady looks of reassurance from the Doctor, and of love and support from Josiah and Ruth Weston, had given her courage, and finally she’d whispered, “Yes.”