The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 30

After getting back to Mr. Picton’s house and aboard his surrey, we began our trip to the Westons’ farm by heading over to the east side of town, where Cyrus (who’d volunteered to do the driving) followed Mr. Picton’s directions and steered us onto Malta Avenue, so named because it eventually turned into a road what led to a town of the same name. Just as soon as we were safely on this thoroughfare, Mr. Picton started asking for details about the Linares case and all the things we’d been through during the past few weeks in New York. It was all the Doctor could do to keep up with this rush of questions, especially as, in spite of their mad pace, they all cut right to the heart of the case.

Once we got back out of town, farms and woods took over the countryside around us again; and as I watched them go by in the late-afternoon light, I tried to imagine the scene of robbery and murder that Libby Hatch claimed had taken place on a road what couldn’t have been much different than the one we were traveling along. It was a beautiful setting, one what glowed gold and green the way the Hudson Valley will do during July; but all the same, it wasn’t hard to imagine violence scarring such a place, for they were lonely roads, those dirt tracks that led from small town to small town, with nothing but the occasional farmhouse for civilization. A clever criminal could’ve made quite a living off of them. Yet there were details of Libby Hatch’s story that just didn’t fit with the idea of a clever criminal. Even granting the isolated quality of the setting, things about the supposed attack just didn’t make sense, particularly not to anybody who’d spent time around murderers, thieves, and rapists, as I had.

Why did the “attacker” give up his assault, for instance, once he knew Mrs. Hatch didn’t actually have a weapon? And why kill the kids, but not the woman who could’ve identified him? And if he was so stupid or deranged as to be capable of such things, how could he suddenly become smart enough to escape a whole series of search parties what’d kept after him for days on end? No, it was obvious even to me that Libby Hatch had been banking on emotions and not reason taking over when her fellow townspeople heard her tale; and she’d been right, too, so far. But so far was only so far…

The Westons’ farm was a humble but successful enterprise located right off the Malta road about a mile and a half from Ballston Spa. They kept dairy cows and chickens, and grew vegetables to sell during the summer and fall. Mr. Picton told us that the couple’d never been able to have children of their own, and that when a pair of tragedies in town-one a train wreck, the other an illegitimate birth-had left two kids without families, the Westons’d taken them in. They’d done such a good and kindly job of raising them that Mr. Picton’d thought of a similar solution right away when it began to look like Libby Hatch wasn’t going to stick around to take care of little Clara. As we drew closer to the drive that led off the main road and up to the Westons’ rectangular, clap-boarded farmhouse, Mr. Picton told us that while we could speak freely around Mr. and Mrs. Weston, we’d have to be careful what we said in front of their kids: they weren’t aware of all of Mr. Picton’s suspicions concerning the Hatch case, and, given the nature of how rumors and news traveled in so small a town, we couldn’t risk them finding anything out until we were ready for it to become common knowledge.

Following this warning, Mr. Picton anxiously inquired as to why the Doctor’d been so determined to have me come along on the visit. “You’ll forgive my asking, I hope, Doctor,” he said. “And you, too, Stevie. I understand, of course, how crucial Clara’s reactions to Mr. Montrose may be-”

“Provided,” the Doctor interrupted, “that the Westons have not prejudiced her mind in that area.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Mr. Picton answered quickly. “I come out to visit Clara fairly regularly. The Westons, as I say, are aware of my suspicions about Libby, and though they’ve never said as much, I think that their years of taking care of her daughter have planted doubts about the woman’s honesty in their minds.” He paused, glancing at me. “But Stevie-what is his role to be?”

The Doctor looked at me with a smile. “Stevie, although he would be loath to admit it, has a unique and reassuring effect on troubled children. I’ve observed it many times at my Institute. And bringing at least one person who is not an adult will make us appear far less threatening, I suspect.”

“I see…” Mr. Picton replied.

“But tell me,” the Doctor went on, “has she really not uttered a word since the attack? Not a sound?”

“Sounds, occasionally, yes,” Mr. Picton answered. “But no words.”

“And what of written communications?”

“Again, no luck. We know that she has the ability-Mrs. Wright, the housekeeper, taught her the basics of both reading and writing. But Clara’s done neither since the attack. Doctor Lawrence and his colleagues attribute it to the spinal damage. You may not believe it, Doctor, but they actually told me that the injury must have had some kind of indirect effect on her entire nervous system!”

The Doctor almost spat in disgust. “Idiots.”

“Yes,” Mr. Picton said. “Yes, I must say, they never seemed to pursue the matter very energetically. Not that I’ve been able to do much better. I’ve tried every way I can think of to get her to tell me something, anything, about what happened. But no luck. I hope you have some experience getting people with such afflictions to communicate, Doctor-because this little girl is a hard case.”

Cyrus and I glanced at each other quickly, and then I turned around to stare straight ahead. Mr. Picton, of course, had no way of knowing what he’d just said, no way of knowing exactly what kind of bittersweet experience the Doctor did in fact have with getting through to people-and to one person in particular-who’d been written ofí” as unable to communicate with the rest of the world. For the Doctor’s lost love, Mary Palmer, had suffered from just such an affliction, and his efforts to find a way to communicate with her had formed the beginnings of the bond between them that had endured right up to her death.

“I… believe I know some techniques that may prove effective,” was all the Doctor said.

“I hoped you would,” Mr. Picton answered. “Indeed, I hoped you would. Oh, and one more request, Doctor: when you meet Clara, make a note of her coloring.”

“Her coloring?” the Doctor repeated.

“Her hair, eyes, and skin,” Mr. Picton went on with a nod. “I’ll tell you something you’ll find very interesting about it, on our way home…”

As we rolled up the Westons’ long drive, we caught sight of a thick-armed, middle-aged man and a boy who looked a little older than me standing on the edge of a piece of pastureland what was located between the house and a stream that ran at the base of a high wooded hill behind it. They were wrestling and struggling with a section of barbed wire, trying to mend it. On the other side of the house was a big vegetable garden, where a girl in her late teens and an older woman were weeding and tending to produce. Like the man and the boy, they were dressed in worn farm clothes and were going about their business with a kind of determination what was enthusiastic and a little frustrated at the same time. It was the sort of attitude I’ve seen in a lot of similar farmers, over the years: the manner of people who have to fight against everything that Nature and human society can throw at them just to get by, but who still have a strange love for a life lived so close to the land.

There was a fifth member of this little family, too, a girl who, I already knew, was just shy of nine years old, and who didn’t fit into the peaceful scene around her quite so comfortably as the others. Her dress wasn’t made for working: even with two good arms and hands, a kid her age wouldn’t have been able to do a whole lot of the kind of physical labor a place like that required, and it was obvious even from far off that this little girl couldn’t use but one of her upper limbs. She just sat at the edge of the garden with a doll and what looked like a big pad of paper in her lap, her good left hand going over the paper again and again with some kind of writing or drawing utensil.

The smell of manure started to hit us about fifty yards from the house, which was set close to a big brick-red barn. When they saw our rig drawing up, all five of the residents came ambling in from their chores, the little girl moving the slowest and most cautiously and needing to be nudged along by the woman. As they got closer, I could see that the Westons themselves looked to be in their forties or fifties, the deep creases in their leathery skin and the graying of their hair making any more exact guess impossible. They had broad, kindly faces, but that didn’t mean much to me: some of the worst people I’d ever come across in my life had been kindly looking foster parents-not a few of them farmers-who took in poor kids from the city and treated them like slaves, or even worse. But the two teenage kids looked happy and healthy enough, so I wasn’t too suspicious to start out with.

As Mr. Weston-Josiah, we discovered his name was-approached Mr. Picton, he glanced at me and Cyrus with a kind of concern that caused the pair of us to hang back a bit, away from the others.

“I took it as understood that there weren’t to be but one visitor, Mr. Picton, sir,” he said.

“Yes, Josiah,” Mr. Picton answered. “That being Dr. Kreizler, here.” Mr. Weston wiped his hand to shake the Doctor’s. “But the other gentleman and the boy are associates of his, and he feels that he may need them in order to accurately assess the situation.”

Josiah Weston nodded, not happily, exactly, but not in a hostile way, either. Then his wife spoke up: “I’m Ruth Weston, Doctor, and these are our children, Peter and Kate. And hiding somewhere around here,” she went on, pretending to search the area behind her skirt where Clara was hiding, “is another young lady…”

Clara didn’t make any move to reveal herself yet; and seeing this, Peter smiled and said, “We’ll get what we can finished while there’s light, Papa. Come on, Katie, and give me a hand.”

The pair of them went back off to the chore of mending the wire fence. They looked pretty cheerful as they did, and from this I figured that they had in fact been treated well during their years with Josiah and Ruth Weston. Once they were gone, little Clara started to appear from behind Mrs. Weston slowly, her pad of paper and doll tucked under her left arm and a bunch of pencils held tight in her left hand.

“Well!” Mr. Picton said, merrily but gently. He’d caught sight of Clara, but was glancing around as if he hadn’t. “Where is my little girl? I’d hate to think I came all the way out here only to find that she’s disappeared… no sign of her? All right, then-thank you, anyway, Ruth, but I suppose we’ll just have to head back to town.”

Mr. Picton started to walk back toward the surrey, and then Clara rushed out from her hiding place to tug at the tail of his jacket with those parts of her thumb and forefinger what weren’t engaged in holding the pencils. As she did, I got my first really good look at her (though in fact it was my second overall, since I’d seen her likeness in the group photograph hidden in the secretary at Number 39 Bethune Street); she was a skinny little thing, with light brown hair gathered into one big, wide braid at the back of her head; eyes of a color similar to the hair (though, I noted uneasily, a touch more golden); and pale skin with very rosy cheeks. Like most kids who’ve seen things at an early age that nobody should ever have to, Clara’s skittish movements were echoed by the pitiable nervousness of her silent face.

Turning around in mock surprise, Mr. Picton smiled wide. “Why, there she is! She appears out of nowhere, does this one, Doctor, and never will teach me the trick! Come and meet a friend of mine, Clara.” Still clutching the tail of Mr. Picton’s jacket, the little girl followed him over to the Doctor. “Dr. Kreizler, this is Clara. Clara, Dr. Kreizler works with hundreds and hundreds of children in New York, the city that I’ve told you I once lived in. And he’s come all this way-”

“All this way,” the Doctor interrupted, giving a meaningful smile to Mr. Picton that said he’d take it from here, “to see your drawings.” He knelt down to look her in the face. “You like to draw very much, don’t you, Clara?”

The girl nodded; but it was much more than just a nod, we could all see that. It was a kind of request, too: a wish, you might say, that the Doctor would ask her more. And the funny thing was that, though Cyrus and I were continuing to stand back, we understood the moment better than either the Westons or Mr. Picton did: for we’d seen the Doctor use the trick on many other kids at his Institute. Drawing, painting, molding clay, they were all some of the quickest ways to get a little girl or boy who’d survived something that they plain and simple couldn’t speak about to begin to communicate. That was why the Doctor kept so many kinds of artistic materials in his consulting room at the Institute.

“Yes, I thought you might,” the Doctor went on, slowly lifting a finger to point at Clara’s clenched little fist. “Because you have so many pencils. But no colored pencils.” He put on a troubled look, then brightened. “Did you know that there are such things as colored pencils, Clara?”

The light brown eyes went very big, and Clara shook her head to make it pretty obvious that, though she hadn’t known there were such things, she’d certainly like to have some.

“Oh, yes. All the colors you can imagine,” the Doctor answered. “Tomorrow I’ll bring you some from town-because you really do need colored pencils to draw things as they actually are, don’t you?” Clara nodded. “My friends and I sometimes draw, too,” the Doctor said, indicating Cyrus and me. “Would you like to meet them?” More nods followed, and then the Doctor signaled us over. “This is my friend Stevie,” he said, pointing to me.

“Hey, Clara,” I said, smiling down at her. “Does your friend draw, too?” I pointed at her doll, to which Clara shook her head hard and thumped her pencils against her chest. “Oh, I get it-drawing’s your game. Let her find her own way to have fun.” Clara’s shoulders began to move up and down; and then a scratchy sound what could’ve passed for a small laugh got out of her throat.

Finally, it was time for the big test: the Doctor pointed at Cyrus. “And this is my friend Mr. Montrose,” he said.

For about fifteen seconds, Clara stared up at Cyrus with a face what was plain impossible to read. Something was going on in that head of hers, that much was clear-and while none of us could yet say just what said thing was, it was obvious from the way that Clara stood her ground calmly that it was not terror. But it should have been: if any piece of Libby Hatch’s complicated story was true, if anything like the infamous attack by the mysterious black man out on the Charlton road really had happened, then when that little girl looked up at Cyrus, she should’ve taken off for the hills, or at the least for the safety of her foster mother’s skirts.

But she didn’t.

Finally Cyrus smiled kindly and bowed. Hello, Clara, he said, his voice sounding especially deep and soothing. “You know, when I was a little boy, I drew a picture of a wonderful house.” He knelt down to look into her eyes. “And do you know what the strange part of it is?” Clara studied Cyrus’s face hard and then shook her head slowly. “The strange part is that I live in that house now-it’s the Doctor’s house.” Clara pondered that for a few more seconds; then she held her drawing pad up to Cyrus.

On it was scratched a rough picture of the Westons’ farmhouse. Cyrus grinned, and Clara once again let that strange little noise out of her throat. “Well, well,” Cyrus said quietly. “So it’s happened to you, too.”

None of us ever found out whether Cyrus had caught a glimpse of what was on Clara Hatch’s pad of paper before he said what he did to her, being as, in that slightly amused, slightly mischievous manner that he sometimes exhibited, he always refused to tell us. But it really didn’t matter. The important thing was that, at the moment he told Clara his little story, you could just feel trust start to flow out of the girl: sticking her pencils under her arm with her other belongings, Clara turned away from Cyrus and took the Doctor by the hand, a move what caused Ruth Weston to gasp and Josiah Weston to put a hand to his mouth in amazement. The girl then led him over to Mr. Picton, put the Doctor’s fingers to her doll’s chest very carefully, and glanced up to give Mr. Picton a questioning look.

Mr. Picton slowly started to smile. “Why, yes, he said quietly. “Yes, Clara. I’m sure that the Doctor will know how to make your little girl feel much better. That’s his job you see, to make children feel better. Perhaps you should take him inside, and show him what’s wrong.”

The girl took the Doctor’s hand again, but before going anywhere she looked up to Mrs. Weston.

“Of course,” the woman said, reading another question in the little face. “I’ll go with you. Maybe some of your other friends could use the Doctor’s help, too.”

The three of them walked toward and then into the house.

“That’s the damndest thing,” Mr. Weston said quietly, scratching his head. “Three years she’s been here, and I’ve never seen her take to a stranger that way.”

“As I told you, Josiah,” Mr. Picton answered. “Dr. Kreizler is no ordinary visitor! Alone in his field, you might say-and his field is made up of cases like Clara’s. Well, then-Stevie? Cyrus? Shall we go inside, too?”

Cyrus nodded and began to move toward the door with Mr. Picton and Mr. Weston. But I stayed where I was. “If you don’t mind, sir,” I said, “I think I’ve pretty well served my purpose here. Unless there’s anything else, I’d like to get out to the old Hatch place and see what the detective sergeants are up to.”

Mr. Picton gave me a slightly puzzled look. “It’s over three miles from here, Stevie.”

“Yes, sir. But I’m used to walking. I can find my way.”

Mr. Picton nodded. “All right. We’ll see you back at my house, then.”

I looked to Cyrus, who signaled the okay to me with a little nod. Starting to run down the drive, I suddenly remembered what manners I had, and turned to call, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Weston!”

“What?” the man answered, still sort of stunned by what he’d witnessed. “Oh-yes, and you, too, son!” he called with a small wave, as he continued to guide Mr. Picton and Cyrus toward the house. Once they were inside I took off at top speed, waiting ’til I was well out of sight of the farm to light up a cigarette.