Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“You two can just stop acting like the whole thing’s over,” she said, sitting on the steps of the porch with a small kerosene lamp and a large map of New York State. “Darrow hasn’t even opened his case yet, for God’s sake-we’ve still got time to come up with something .”

“Oh? And what would that be?” Mr. Moore asked.

“Face it, Sara-you can’t fight the prejudices of an entire society, and a woman who’s as lethally cunning as this one, and one of the most vicious gangs in New York, and a legal wizard like Darrow, all at one and the same time, and expect to survive.” He turned to Mr. Picton, lowering his eyes. “No offense intended, Rupert.”

But Mr. Picton only saluted his friend with his pipe. “None taken, John, I assure you. You’re absolutely right-the man’s turned what should have been a disaster into a triumph. My hat’s off to him.”

“Yes, well, before you fall all over each other lining up to pay homage to that legal snake,” Miss Howard shot back, “do you mind if I suggest some further efforts to salvage our cause?” She looked back down at her map. “We’re still missing the one big piece-somebody who knows something about Libby Hatch’s family.”

“Sara,” Marcus said, pointing toward the court house, “that jury is not going to be very receptive to a psychological examination of Libby Hatch’s childhood context, just at the moment.”

“No,” Miss Howard answered, “and that’s not what I’m proposing. Don’t forget, she went to the Muhlenbergs as a wet nurse. She had to’ve had a child, and that child has got to be somewhere, either above or below the ground.”

“But you looked for days, Sara,” Lucius said. “You covered practically every inch of Washington County-”

“And that may be just where I went wrong,” Miss Howard replied. “Think about it, Lucius-if you were Libby, and you’d landed yourself the kind of job she had at the Muhlenbergs’, would you give them any way to check on the actual facts of your past?”

Before Lucius could answer, the Doctor asked, “What are you saying, Sara?”

“That she’s too smart for that,” Miss Howard answered. “If she left some secret behind in her hometown, or even if she only left her family behind, that family would probably have known things that Libby wouldn’t have wanted to get out, especially not to people who might hire her as a wet nurse. You’ve said it yourself, Doctor, the woman’s characteristic behaviors must extend back into her childhood. So Libby had to make sure that no one ever knew where she actually came from. On the other hand, she had to say she came from someplace that she could actually describe, someplace that she knew at least something about, to make her story hold water.”

“That’s true,” Cyrus said, considering it. “She would have covered herself, at least that far.”

“But she could’ve come from anywhere!” Mr. Moore protested.

“John, do try to listen for more than thirty seconds running,” Miss Howard spat back. “She couldn’t have come from anywhere. She was a woman who learned that the Muhlenbergs needed a wet nurse from an advertisement-that makes her local. She talked a lot about towns in Washington County-so she must have spent some time there. But if she was trying to conceal her roots, she didn’t actually come from Washington County-which means-”

Mr. Picton snapped his fingers. “Which means you may want to get back down to Troy, Sara. It’s the seat of Rensselaer County, which is to the south of Washington County-on the east bank of the river. And Stillwater sits directly across the water from the line that separates the two counties.”

Miss Howard slapped her map hard and set the kerosene lamp down. “Which is exactly what I realized five minutes ago,” she said, with a big, satisfied smile.

“It’s still a long shot,” Marcus said, shaking his head wearily. “And you’ll have to go tomorrow, which means missing-”

“Which means missing what?” Miss Howard cut in. “Darrow’s ‘experts’? Mrs. Cady Stanton? I know what they’re going to say, Marcus, and so do you. It’s obvious-maybe even gratuitous, at this point. But we do have to work fast. Cyrus, I could use you, if you’ll come-Stevie, too.”

“And El Niño to protect you!” the aborigine near shouted, getting caught up in Miss Howard’s enthusiasm.

“Naturally,” she answered, rubbing his bushy head. Then she looked to the Doctor and Mr. Picton. “Well?”

Mr. Picton paused and smoked, shrugging his shoulders. “Nothing to be lost, I suppose. I say go to it.”

“And you, Doctor?”

The Doctor looked at her with just the faintest trace of hope in his features; more, at least, than’d been there all night. “I’d say that you’re all going to need some rest. You’ll want to catch the earliest possible train, if you intend to have the full day in Troy.”

At that the four of us-Miss Howard, me, Cyrus, and El Niño-got up and headed for the screen door. We weren’t exactly confident, I couldn’t say that, but the prospect of actually doing something, instead of spending another day watching Mr. Darrow turn the Ballston court house into his private stomping grounds, was some kind of a relief, and I was glad to be included in the plan. The reasoning behind it did seem promising, too, even if the time we had to test it wasn’t much; and as we went into the house and up the stairs to our respective rooms, I took the opportunity to pay my own sort of compliment to Miss Howard’s brainwork:

“So,” I said, as we got to the second floor. “I guess being a ‘spinster detective lady’ leaves you plenty of time for thinking, anyway.”

I barely got into my room without catching a playful but well-aimed clip to the side of the head.

So began a new round of searching the Hudson Valley countryside, one what was both tighter in terms of schedule and less tedious in terms of method than all the riding around Miss Howard, El Niño, and I’d done before the start of the trial. We caught the first train to Troy the next morning, and managed to get to the Rensselaer County offices without too much trouble. Housed in a building what bore more than a passing resemblance to a bank, the offices looked out over a small park at the center of town, and from the windows in the records room the city didn’t look half so ugly as it had from the train. In fact, it had a sort of charm about it, or at least that particular part of it did. I suppose that impression could’ve just been due to the unseasonably cool weather and my thankfulness at not having to sit in the Ballston court house; whatever the case, I found that the first two or three hours we spent going through birth and death records passed pretty quickly. There wasn’t anybody else in the spacious room with us, except for a clerk whose biggest chore, besides fetching files for us, seemed to be staying awake. So we were able to talk and act pretty freely, a fact what quickly led El Niño (who couldn’t read English) and me (who wasn’t much use with official documents) to start clowning around among the chairs and tables, letting Cyrus and Miss Howard attend to the real work and only straightening up at those moments when we were told to roust the clerk and tell him to fetch another batch of files and bound records.

By one o’clock or so our horseplay had the aborigine and me pretty hungry, and we set out to find someplace to buy boxed lunches for everybody. Our behavior didn’t improve any as we went about this job, and on our way back to the county offices with the food we were taken aside by a cop, who, I think, was more bewildered by the sight of El Niño than he was interested in what we were up to. The bull walked us back to the county building, just to make sure our story held water, and told Miss Howard not to let us “run wild” in the streets. I had to resist the temptation to tell him that if such as what we’d been doing was his idea of “running wild,” he needed to spend some time in New York; after that he finally left, and we all went outside to the little park to eat.