Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“And your-your people, there?” Franklin said, indicating the surrey.

“Hmm?” Miss Howard noised. “Oh. No, I wouldn’t worry about them. I won’t be long, anyway. I’ll save most of my questions for tomorrow, when your mother’s here.”

“Well, then-please, come inside,” Franklin said.

Giving us a quick glance and a nod what said to stay put, Miss Howard vanished into the little house, her host scraping the mud and manure off his boots on an old mother’s helper what was bolted to the stone steps outside the door.

“I don’t get it,” I said as they went in. “ This was where Libby Hatch grew up?”

“Doesn’t quite seem to match, does it?” Cyrus answered, as he got down off the surrey to stretch his legs. “But there’s never any way of knowing…”

“Señorito Stevie,” El Niño said to me, moving to put his bow away. “This man-he will not hurt the lady?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered, scratching my head.

“So,” the aborigine said with a nod, lying down on the back seat of the surrey. “Then El Niño will sleep.” Before closing his eyes, though, he picked his head up to look at me one more time. “Señorito Stevie-the path we are taking to baby Ana is a strange one, yes? Or is it only that El Niño does not understand?”

“No, you understand all right,” I told him, lighting up a smoke. “One strange path, is the truth…”

Miss Howard wound up spending just half an hour inside the Franklin place, but it was long enough to learn a few interesting little nuggets of information, ones she refused to tell the rest of us in the surrey until we’d gotten back to Mr. Picton’s house that evening and had collected around the chalkboard along with the Doctor and everyone else.

It seemed that the house we’d seen was very old, and contained only a few rooms-and out of these, just two were for sleeping. The Franklin brothers had shared one of them, while Libby had spent all of her childhood and early adult years sleeping in a small bed in her parents’ room. There’d been no dividing curtain or partition of any kind in this chamber, and so for most of her life Libby had lived with a total lack of privacy, a fact what the Doctor considered extremely important. Apparently both he and Dr. Meyer had done a lot of work concerning children who were almost never out of sight of their parents, and had discovered that such kids developed a whole batch of problems when it came time to deal with the outside world: they were generally short-tempered, viciously sensitive to any kind of criticism, and, as the Doctor put it, “pathologically afraid of embarrassment, almost to the point of what Dr. Krafft-Ebing has labeled ‘paranoia.’ ” And yet, underneath all that, these same types, when grown, could be strangely doubtful about their ability to make their own way in the world: they generally grew up with a strong need to have people around them, but at the same time they resented and even hated those people.

“We are not speaking of something precisely similar to violent physical or verbal abuse, of course,” the Doctor explained, as he began, for the first time, to fill in the section of the chalkboard what had been set aside for facts concerning Libby’s childhood. “But such a lack of privacy can produce many of the same results-primarily, the failure of the psyche to develop into a truly unified, integrated, and independent entity.” Again I thought back to Miss Howard’s words about Libby’s personality being broken, at an early age, into pieces what she could never reassemble, “It’s difficult to conceive of,” the Doctor went on. “The stifling horror of being forced to spend every waking and sleeping hour in the intimate, watchful company of some other human being, of rarely if ever knowing solitude. Think of the incredible frustration and anger, the sense of complete-complete-”

“ Suffocation ,”Cyrus finished for the Doctor; and I knew he was thinking back to the various babies what Libby’d done in through that very method.

“Precisely, Cyrus,” the Doctor said, writing the word on the board in big letters and underlining it. “Here, indeed, we have the first key that fits both the enigma of Libby’s mind and the apparent puzzle of her behavior-suffocation. But what did it lead to, Sara, in her early adulthood? Did the brother give you any idea at all?”

“There was one subject he was willing to discuss,” Miss Howard said. “Primarily, I think, because he didn’t want his mother to have to hear about it. It seems that Libby had a lot to do with boys, and from a very early age. She was extremely precocious, romantically and sexually.”

“Again, it’s logical,” the Doctor said, considering it. “Such behavior would of necessity be secret, and therefore private-yet it reflects her inability, her very frustrating inability, to achieve such privacy and independence on her own.” As he scribbled these thoughts, the Doctor added, “I don’t imagine, as a result, that she was particularly kind to the unsuspecting young men who became involved with her.”

“No,” Miss Howard answered. “Quite a heartbreaker, would be the most- charitable way to put it.”

“Good,” the Doctor judged, nodding. “Very good.”

Mr. Moore, who’d been sitting in the corner with a big glass pitcher full of martinis what he’d mixed for himself, let out a big groan at that; and the sound seemed to be echoed by the wail of a train whistle off in the distance. Listening to it, Mr. Moore held up a finger.

“You hear that, Kreizler? That’s the sound of this damned case getting away from us. It’s fading into the night, and what are you doing? Still sitting around with your blasted chalkboard, acting like there’s some way you’re going to think your way out of losing. We’re finished -who the hell cares why Libby Hatch is the way she is, at this point?”

“The eternal voice of encouragement,” Mr. Picton said, glancing over to Mr. Moore. “Have six or seven more of those foul concoctions, John, and perhaps you’ll nod off-then we can go on in peace.”

“I know it seems late in the race, Moore,” the Doctor said, lighting a cigarette as he studied the blackboard. “But we must do what we can, while we can. We must .”

“Why?” Mr. Moore grumbled. “Nobody wants the damned woman to be guilty, they’ve made that much clear. Who the hell are we carrying on for , at this point?”

“There’s still the problem of Ana Linares, John,” Lucius said.

Mr. Moore let out another grunt. “A girl whose own father doesn’t care if she lives or dies. She’ll probably have as good a chance with Libby as she would with him, the Spanish bastard.”

“I wasn’t actually thinking of Ana Linares, just now,” the Doctor said, his voice going very quiet.

“No,” Miss Howard said, “it’s Clara, isn’t it? How was she? I didn’t even think to ask.”

The Doctor shrugged, looking uneasy. “Bewildered. And not very talkative, though I don’t blame her for that. I promised her that this ordeal would help both her and her mother. It’s done neither-and now her terror at the memory of what happened three years ago is being matched by her fear of what will happen if her mother goes free. She’s not so young as to be blind to the danger she may be in if Libby is loose to take revenge on what she no doubt sees as a treacherous child who was the only witness to her bloody act.” Setting his piece of chalk down, the Doctor picked up a glass of wine and tried to take a sip; but he stopped in mid-action, as if he had no interest in any kind of relief.

“You can’t blame yourself, Doctor,” Marcus said. “The case looked solid. There was no reason to believe it would go this way.”