The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 24

I’ve had a lot of peculiar things said to me in my life, but none to top that. The poor old fool genuinely believed that he had killed me, too, that much was plain from the desperate fear that was all over his drug-ridden face. But why he should have believed such a thing, I had no idea.

Then another batch of firecrackers went off out in the street, and Micah Hunter spun round, holding his musket toward the front door. “So!” he said, determination replacing some of his fear. “You ain’t alone, reb!” He shouldered the musket, looking ready to do battle with whoever came through the door. “Well, come on, you bastards-”

“Hunter!”

Both Hunter and I snapped our heads round to the hallway, out of which had boomed Detective Sergeant Marcus’s voice. “Hunter!” Marcus called again through the kitchen window, causing the old man to grow fearful once more. “Stand down, soldier! That’s an order!”

“Captain?” Hunter mumbled. “Captain Griggs?”

“I told you to stand down, man! You’re wounded-unfit! We don’t need you, soldier-back to the hospital!”

“I-don’t understand…” Hunter glanced at me again, then around the house quickly. “Where’s Libby? I ain’t well!”

“Go on!” Marcus insisted. “Put down the weapon and get back to the hospital!”

“But I…” Hunter let the gun drift to his side-

And that was all I needed. Like a shot I was back into the hallway, racing toward the kitchen window. Old man Hunter screamed something after me that I couldn’t make out, but nothing could’ve stopped me from slipping back through those bars like so much water. Marcus helped me through, and then cupped his hands to give me a boost back up onto the brick wall: I was a ways beyond professional pride, at that point. I used the rope to get back down into the alleyway, then grabbed the end that was still on that side of the wall. Looking around quickly, I found a water pipe with a spigot standing nearby. I tied the rope off onto it, then whispered “Go!” Marcus’s boots scratched against the wall as he climbed up top, and then he pretty much just let himself fall to ground on the other side, the studs on the boots hitting the concrete alleyway hard and, to judge by the look on his face, painfully.

“Pull it over!” he said, from which I took it that he’d untied the other end of the rope. I gave it a yank, and it came over with a whipping sound. Coiling it up around my arm quickly as we ran back to the open rear window of the stables, I handed the thing to Marcus, who stuffed it away in his satchel. Then we got through the window, closed it, and jumped back into the calash and under the tarpaulin, both of us breathing as hard as little Mike.

“What do we do?” I asked, the quick heaving of my chest making it hard to whisper.

“Shh!” Marcus answered. For a long few seconds we just lay there listening. Some dogs were barking in the yards behind the stables, and in the far distance we could hear Micah Hunter yelling away, though his exact words were still impossible to make out.

“I think we’ll be all right,” Marcus finally said. “The people around here must be used to that kind of thing from him. We can’t panic.” He pulled out a watch and checked it. “Lucius should be here within half an hour. Just catch your breath and try not to move.”

I followed the order, taking in deep gulps of air as I stroked the confused Mike through the leather of the satchel. “Shit,” I finally said, when I could do it quietly. “I think the old maniac really might’ve shot me.”

“It was the fireworks,” Marcus said. “And the morphine. My bet is, she gives him a hell of a dose before she leaves at night. If you get woken up during the first couple of hours after a strong injection like that, you’re generally pretty delusional. He seemed to think he was back in the war-and you were some Confederate kid he’d shot, somewhere along the line.” Marcus paused to take in air. “What about the baby?”

“Long story,” I said. “She’s down there, all right-I don’t think we’re wrong about that. But getting to her’s going to be tough. Maybe impossible. The rack of preserves is some kind of mechanical doorway, and it won’t give. I found some other stuff, though-”

I clammed right up when I heard a soft tapping on the side of the calash. “Stevie? Marcus?” It was Detective Sergeant Lucius. “Are you in there?”

“Yes,” Marcus answered. “And we’re all right.”

“I heard shouting,” Lucius said. “From inside. What happened?”

“Later,” Marcus whispered. “Get us out of here!”

“What about the girl? Did you find her?”

“Lucius! Get us out of here-now!”

In a few seconds the calash started to roll out toward the front of the stables. Lucius paused to pay the attendant, and then it was out onto the street, turning left: he’d rightly decided to head uptown along the river, as far from the Dusters’ joint as possible. Within half a block he had Frederick up to a nice clip, and when we felt the carriage turn right, Marcus and I figured it was safe to come out from under the tarpaulin.

The sky above the Hudson was still blazing with fireworks, and there were groups of people all along the waterfront watching them. But we didn’t pause for any sightseeing, just kept cantering forward toward Number 808 Broadway. Lucius was full of questions, but Marcus told him to hold them all ’til we got there. I undid my satchel to see if Mike was okay, and found him peering up at me, still very agitated but otherwise fine. With that, I took a deep breath and leaned back on the seat of the calash. Bringing the stolen papers out from inside my shirt, I handed them to Marcus, then lit up a cigarette and offered him one.

We were both bitterly disappointed about how things had worked out; and because of this, the warm welcome we received from the others-whose disappointment could not have been much less than ours-when we got back to Number 808 was all the more appreciated. I think that both Marcus and I, in mulling over what had happened, had forgotten just how much more wrong things could have gone. But the relief what was clear in the faces of all our friends served as a reminder. Miss Howard offered me a big hug that lifted me clear off the ground, while the Doctor put an arm around my shoulders and near squeezed them through to each other, smiling all the while. The fact that we hadn’t succeeded was obviously far less important than the fact that we’d survived-and seeing that thought reflected in all their faces, in turn, made it much easier to talk about the break-in.

The Doctor’d ordered supper from Mr. Delmonico and had it brought down to our headquarters, a fact what put the joy of life back into Marcus. As for me, I was deeply grateful that the Doctor had not only ordered me a plain-grilled steak and fried potatoes but’d had Mr. Ranhofer send along a few fillets of raw beef for Mike, too. Mr. Moore’d set all the food out on the billiard table, buffet style: there were olives and celery, anchovies on toast, pheasant and guinea fowl (complete with ornamental feathers), foie gras aspic, lamb chops, lobster and shrimp salad, rice pudding, small meringues with fruit, Neapolitan iced cream, and, of course, bottles of champagne, wine, and beer, along with root beer for me. As the adults all got platefuls of their luxurious fare, I retreated into my windowsill with my steak, the beef fillets, and Mike, who proved to be almost as hungry as yours truly. One by one the others made their way over to the big chairs and desks with their suppers and drinks, and as they did we all started to go over the strange events that Marcus and I had just been through, a process what began with the two of us laying out the basic facts and ended with Marcus handing the papers I’d lifted over to the Doctor. As he did, I saw for the first time a bit of a cloud float into Dr. Kreizler’s features.

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Marcus said, opening up some windows to let the warm evening breeze come into the place, along with the sounds of celebration from the street. “From what I could see, those documents may be the evidence we need to demonstrate a pattern in this woman’s behavior.”

“That may be, Marcus,” the Doctor said, going over the papers. “I cannot yet tell. But what they most certainly will do-or rather, what their absence will do-is let Nurse Hunter know who broke into her house, and why.”

“Well, come on, Kreizler,” Mr. Moore said, carefully setting an overloaded plate onto an arm of one of the easy chairs. “If our visit on Sunday wasn’t an open declaration of hostilities, I don’t know what would be.”

“It is not hostility toward us that concerns me, Moore,” the Doctor answered, still reading the hospital reports. “It is the possibility that our attempts to rescue the child may eventually be interpreted, in Nurse Hunter’s mind, as the child’s fault. That is her peculiar ability, to turn responsibility for all that goes wrong-in her own life as well as the lives of the children she touches-back onto the children themselves.”

The Doctor turned to a new sheet of paper as the rest of us absorbed that disturbing notion; then his eyes suddenly went very big. “My God…” He quickly set his plate aside so that he could tear into the stack of documents faster. “My God…” he repeated.

“What have you found, Doctor?” Miss Howard asked for all of us.

But the Doctor only looked to Marcus. “How many of these letters did you read?”

Marcus shrugged, gnawing on a lamb chop. “Just enough to get the general idea: a child named Jonathan was in her care, and went through several cyanotic episodes. The last one was fatal.”

The Doctor pounded a finger on the stack of papers. “Yes. But the relationship was not that of nurse to patient. This last admitting form reveals the child’s family name: ‘Hatch.’ He was Jonathan Hatch. Her own son.”

Even my jaw dropped at that one, and I thought right away about the series of photographs of babies and children that I’d seen in the secretary at Number 39 Bethune Street.

“She was not a nurse at St. Luke’s,” the Doctor went on. “She brought the child in as a patient. Three times.”

Marcus just sat there, the lamb chop bone dangling from his hand. “But-I just assumed…”

The Doctor waved him off, the motion of his hand saying “Of course, of course” as clearly as his voice could have. He kept on reading and digging: Then his voice went shocked again. “Good Lord-she lists her place of employment as One West Fifty-seventh Street.”

Mr. Moore’s wineglass hit the floor with a crash. “Christ!” he said in shock. “That’s Corneil Vanderbik’s house!”

Cyrus was still struggling with the first bit of new information. “But I thought we’d decided that the woman was incapable of having children.”

The Doctor just kept waving his hand. “True, Cyrus. And there’s nothing to say that she-wait. Here.” He’d grabbed the newspapers that were at the bottom of the pile and handed them to Cyrus. “See what sense you can make of these.”

His mouth full of pheasant, Cyrus picked up his plate with one hand and took the papers with the other, moving to one of the desks, where he could both read and eat.

The Doctor kept his eyes on the hospital reports. “Each of the events conforms precisely to the pattern described by the nurses at the Lying-in Hospital. Every time that the woman-described here as ‘Mrs. Elspeth Hatch’-arrived at the hospital, the child Jonathan, eighteen months old, was already choking and cyanotic. Each incident occurred in the middle of the night-the mother claimed to have been awoken by the sound of his gasping, and rushed to find him unable to breathe. The first two letters are quite dramatic: ‘Had you, Mrs. Hatch, displayed any less alacrity in bringing the child into professional hands,’ writes the attending physician in the initial communication, ‘he should most certainly have expired. Your anguish as you waited to learn of his fate was, according to our staff, most touching to behold.’ Who in God’s name wrote that?” As Dr. Kreizler read on, I remembered that he’d often worked with colleagues who were attending physicians at St. Luke’s. “Hmm… ‘Dr. J. Langham.’ I don’t know him.”

“He should go into dime novels,” Mr. Moore said, wiping up the wine and broken glass that covered the floor by his chair with a napkin. “Does it say anything more about Vanderbilt?”

“No,” the Doctor answered. “But she was apparently living in a flat near Fifty-seventh Street-that’s why she took the child to St. Luke’s. The hospital was still located on Fifty-fourth Street at the time. Here are some more statistics. Under ‘Age,’ she writes ‘Thirty-seven.’ ‘Occupation: Day maid.’ ‘Place of birth: Stillwater, New York.’ ” The Doctor looked up. “Anyone?”

“Upstate?” Lucius tried.

“There isn’t a great deal of ‘downstate’ from here, Lucius,” Miss Howard said with a smile. “I know the town, Doctor. It’s on the upper Hudson, near Saratoga.” She cleared her throat proudly and took a small bite of food. “Exactly, if anyone cares to remember, the area in which I placed her by her accent.”

“Congratulations, Sara,” the Doctor said. “Let’s hope you are as successful with the next set of mysteries. Cyrus? Any luck with those newspapers?”

Cyrus didn’t answer. He’d stopped eating altogether, though he was only halfway done with his food; and he was staring at the old, yellowing newsprint as if he were reading about his own death.

“Cyrus?” the Doctor repeated. When he turned and saw the look on the man’s face, he immediately got out of his chair and rushed over to him. “What is it? What have you found?”

Looking up slowly, Cyrus seemed to stare right through the Doctor. “She’s done it before…”

Mr. Moore asked, “What do you mean? Done what?” But the rest of us were silent, having gotten the point of what Cyrus was saying, though not wanting to.

Cyrus touched the papers and turned to Mr. Moore. “There’s four clippings here. The first three are from the Journal and the World. They all contain stories about a kidnapping, in May 1895. A couple named Johannsen-they owned a grocery store on East Fifty-fifth Street, and had a son, Peter. Sixteen months old. The mother was attacked on a side street, when she was bringing the baby home alone. The boy was taken, and no ransom note was ever received.”

As Cyrus said all of this, the Doctor grabbed the newspapers hungrily and began to scan them. “And the last paper?” he asked.

“A copy of the Times,”Cyrus answered. “Two months later. It lists a death notice-for Jonathan Hatch. Age, eighteen months. Survived by his loving mother…”

“Libby,”the Doctor finished. Then he waved an arm at Lucius. “Detective Sergeant-on those forms there should be a physical description of the child-”

Lucius ran over and picked up the hospital forms. “Description, description…” he mumbled, going through the things. “Here we are, description.”

“What do you have for hair and eye coloring?” the Doctor asked.

“Let me see-length-weight-ah! yes. Eyes: Blue. Hair: Blond.”

“Typical Scandinavian coloring,” the Doctor murmured. “Not that it’s conclusive, at such an age, but-” He slapped his hand down. “Why does she keep these? As trophies? Or as mementos?”

Holding a little more raw beef in front of Mike’s mouth and watching him grab it away and then rip into it, I said quietly, “She’s got his picture…”

The Doctor looked my way. “Indeed, Stevie?”

I turned to him and nodded. “It was in the secretary. Little blond boy. Blue eyes. Picture looked pretty recent. I mean, compared to-”

I stopped, suddenly realizing what you might call the implications of what I was about to say.

“Yes, Stevie?” the Doctor asked quietly.

“Compared to the others,” I answered, looking out the window to the dark churchyard below and suddenly feeling cold. “She’s got more. A couple of individual kids-babies, like the Linares girl and this one. Then there’s a picture of three other kids, all together. They were older.”

Again, there was silence for a second; then Mr. Moore mumbled, “You don’t think-not all of them…”

“I don’t think anything,” the Doctor answered, walking to the chalkboard.

“But that-” Mr. Moore went for another drink. “I mean, the whole idea, it’s-”

“Unnatural.” Marcus had said the word, and I turned to find him looking at me. He was remembering, I was sure, that moment when we’d first found ourselves in the dead, dismal yard at Number 39 Bethune Street.

“I really do urge you to dispense with that word,” the Doctor replied quietly. “All of you. It isn’t worth the breath its utterance requires, and it distracts us from the more important result of this encounter. We have opened one door, only to find ourselves faced with many more.” Picking up a piece of chalk, the Doctor set to work on the board. “We have a host of new leads-and, quite probably, new crimes-to pursue. The worst of this business, I fear, lies ahead of us.”

Everybody’s appetite seemed to slack off quite a bit with that realization-everybody’s but Mike’s. Slowly becoming aware of his noisy chewing, I looked down to see him sitting in my lap, gnawing away, happy as he probably knew how to be. I put my finger behind his ear and scratched at his soft fur.

“Next time you get to feeling sorry you’re a ferret and not a person, Mike,” I muttered, “I want you to remember all this…”

The Doctor turned around to find a collection of blank, depressed faces, and, sensing that motivation was dwindling away, he marched back over to his plate of food and his wine and picked them up.

“Come, come,” he said, maybe more cheerfully than he felt. “This meal is entirely too good to waste, and none of you will be able to work on an empty stomach.”

Mr. Moore looked up in bleary confusion. “Work?”

“Certainly, Moore,” the Doctor answered, eating a bit of foie gras on a toast point and taking a sip of wine. “We have now catalogued the information we gained from this little escapade. It remains to be interpreted. When our adversary returns home, she will doubtless realize what we have been about and adjust her movements and actions to it. Time therefore presses, now more than ever.”

“But, Kreizler,” Mr. Moore said, unconvinced. “What’s there to interpret? We can’t get the Linares kid out, not without tearing the house apart. We still can’t go to the cops. And once this woman, whatever the hell name she’s using, tells Goo Goo Knox what’s happened, we’ll all have to spend our nights ducking attacks from the damned Hudson Dusters! Now, what the hell do you think we’re going to do that’s going to change any of that?”

Lucius was holding his face in his hands, and it was sinking between them. “The woman has covered herself awfully well, Doctor. Just as Sara said the other day.” He lifted his head and pulled out a handkerchief, starting to wipe sweat from his brow but soon giving up. “I realize this point’s been made before, but… the Beecham case was so much more-direct. He was challenging us, and there were things that we could grab on to, points that we could proceed to and from, with some kind of logic. But this… every time you think you’re getting somewhere, you find out something new that changes the entire picture.”

“I know, Detective Sergeant, I know,” the Doctor answered quickly. “But remember one essential difference between this case and our last: some hidden part of Beecham desperately wanted to be stopped.”

“The sane part of him,” Mr. Moore said. “So are you saying this Libby Hatch is insane? Because if she is-”

“Not insane, John.” The Doctor went to the board and wrote the word SANE under the woman’s names, then underlined it. “But characterized by so severe a lack of self-knowledge, of self-awareness, that her behavior becomes incoherent enough to seem insane, sometimes. On the other hand, she can often be quite coherent-as you have all pointed out, this time she has managed to shield her actions very well.”

Marcus looked up. “This time?” he echoed.

“Mmm, yes,” the Doctor answered as he sipped his wine. “This time.” He drew a large box under the section of the board labeled THE WOMAN ON THE TRAIN and proceeded to label the box PAST CRIMES. Then he wrote the numbers 1 through 6 underneath the label. Next to the number 1 he scratched PETER JOHANNSEN, 1895: KIDNAPPED, MAY, BECAME JONATHAN HATCH; DIED ST. LUKE’S HOSPITAL, JULY. SUFFOCATED. “And indeed,” the Doctor went on, stepping back, “why should she not have been ready this time? She has certainly had enough practice. If we are interpreting the elements presented to us correctly, I think we can assume that all of the children that Stevie saw in the photographs-at least six, by my count, and perhaps more-were believed by the Hatch woman to be her own-either because they in fact were, or by way of still more kidnappings. And we can be just as certain that they were her victims.”

“She keeps pictures of children she’s murdered in her house?”Mr. Moore said.

“Don’t sound so shocked, Moore. After all, we have already posited that she does not hold herself responsible for their deaths-her mind will not allow it. In her view, they die despite her, not because of her-they are wanton, imperfect, defective children who defy her tireless maternal efforts to nurture them.”

“We’ve granted all that, Doctor,” Miss Howard said, herself sounding a little downcast; and she was always the last person to show flagging spirits. “But how can it help us here? I mean, practically speaking? How can we use it to rescue a child whose father has no interest in rescuing her-who, in fact, dispatches his macabre family servant to warn us against rescuing her?”

The Doctor turned to her quickly. “And so what should we do, Sara? Drop the case? When we know that the girl will die, and soon? And when we have no idea what the political repercussions of that death may be?”

“No.” Miss Howard spoke quickly, battling herself as much as the Doctor. “But I just can’t see any way into the thing anymore.”

Moving over to crouch by her, the Doctor took Miss Howard’s head in his hands. “That’s because you’re thinking like yourself, Sara-directly, in a straight, linear fashion. Think like her. Be indirect. Oblique. Even devious.” He picked up her plate and handed it to her. “But above all, eat.”

“Doctor-” Marcus, who had managed to finish his dinner, stood up, pointing at the board with his bottle of beer. “I think I understand. We-Stevie and I-when we were at their house, we saw things. And we started to understand things. About her, I mean. She may have planned this crime well, but-that doesn’t change the fact that she’s not the most capable of women, in many other ways.”

“I’ll say,” I threw in. “You shoulda seen their kitchen-I wouldn’t eat in it for love or money. And the yard-it’s like a cemetery.”

“Go on,” the Doctor said, encouraged.

“Well”-Marcus took a deep pull off his bottle-“It seems inconceivable that a woman like that could pull off six separate crimes as effectively as this one. And we also have to remember that part of what seems like her ‘skill’ here was just luck. If she had no idea who Ana Linares was, then she couldn’t have known that the child’s father would refuse to look for her or go to the police. So, in fact, she has made mistakes-we just can’t do anything about them. But that doesn’t stop us from pursuing her elsewhere-in the past, I mean.”

“Oh, this is perfect,” Mr. Moore moaned. “The case has fallen to pieces, and now Marcus thinks he’s H. G. Wells. Well, when you build your little time machine, Marcus, we’ll all pile in and-”

“No. Wait, John.” Miss Howard’s green eyes had gotten their usual glitter back, and she sat up. “He’s right. She must have slipped up somewhere in the past-it’s just that no one was looking for it, at the time. If we hold off on the Linares case for now, and dig around in some of these other deaths-then we can come at her from a blind side.”

“After all, Moore,” the Doctor agreed, “look at the new leads we have obtained. We now know where the woman comes from. That is crucial, and must be explored-for all such killers manifest some sort of aberrant behavior early in life. And we are nearly certain of the crime she committed before the Linares kidnapping. It was dismissed as a natural occurrence at the time, but if we interview the doctors involved, and review the matter in light of what we now know, we have a very good chance of changing that interpretation.”

Mr. Moore had been listening to all this carefully, and I could see he wanted to keep arguing; but something seemed to come into his head. “Sara-did you say that her hometown’s near Saratoga?”

Miss Howard’s face screwed up at the disconnected nature of the question. “Stillwater? Yes, it’s about fifteen miles southeast of the Springs, more or less. Right on the river. Why, John?”

Mr. Moore thought about it for a second, then held up a finger. “I’ve got a friend. He used to work in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. But he grew up near Saratoga. A few years back he had to leave New York, and he’s now working in the D.A.’s office up there. Ballston Spa’s still the county seat, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Miss Howard answered with a nod.

“Well,” Mr. Moore went on, “if this Hatch woman did cross any legal lines up there, Kreizler-then Rupert Picton is the man for us to talk to. A born prosecutor, loves to dig up dirt.”

“There, you see, John?” The Doctor lifted his glass. “How difficult was that? And let’s not forget-we have established a link between the woman and the Vanderbilts at the time of the last murder. It must be investigated.”

At the mention of the great family’s name, Mr. Moore’s face turned evilly gleeful, like a boy with a box of matches. “Yes, and I want in on that one,” he said. “Cornell Vanderbilt, that pious, pompous old-I want to be there when we tell him his day maid spent her off-hours kidnapping kids and suffocating them!”

“Let’s not flat-out jump to conclusions, gentlemen,” Lucius said. “We have just one possible homicide, at this point, along with two definite kidnappings.”

“Oh, I know that and you know that, Lucius,” Mr. Moore said. “But Vanderbilt doesn’t. I want to tweak his nose, that-”

“You’ve made your point, John,” the Doctor interrupted, “and you shall be there when Vanderbilt is interviewed. One final question remains.” Starting his normal pacing of the floor-a signal, somehow, that we’d beaten back the moment of doubt and were going to proceed with the job-the Doctor took to shaking his chalk in his free hand. “We know that Libby Hatch-as I think we should now refer to her-almost certainly will reach a fatal crisis with Ana Linares. I also believe, after hearing Stevie and Marcus’s story about the condition of her husband, that she is slowly killing him with morphine, in such a way that his death will be viewed as a result of his own degeneracy-thus gaining her the kind of sympathy and admiration she seems, from all accounts, to crave. There are collateral benefits to his demise, as well-inheritance of both his pension and what I suspect is his house, not to mention the removal of any obstruction to her activities with Knox. The pressing question is, how can we forestall these events? If we continue to conceal ourselves from her, she will believe we are beaten. If, on the other hand, we make her aware that we are investigating her past-”

“Then she won’t feel safe to murder again,” Miss Howard finished. “At least, not until we have left her alone.”

“Are you talking about a direct statement to her, Doctor?” Lucius said. “I’ve got to remind you of what John said about the Dusters: if she knows we’re after her, she’ll tell Knox to turn them loose on us.”

“Which is why you shall make the declaration, Detective Sergeant. You and Marcus. And not in our name-in that of your department. We may in fact be prevented from making this an official inquiry, but there’s no reason why she should know that, is there? You need not present any warrants or indictments, only the simple statement that the department is aware of her past actions and will be watching her future movements. If you create the impression that you are speaking in an official capacity, she will pass that impression on to Knox. The Hudson Dusters, while violent, are neither ambitious nor suicidal. One very much doubts that they will jeopardize either their freedom, their access to cocaine, or their status as romantic Bohemian idols for anyone’s sake, including that of Knox’s paramour du jour.”

Marcus looked to his brother. “He’s got a point.”

“Far more than a point,” the Doctor answered, collecting the newspapers and hospital documents and holding them up. “We now have her past. Or pieces of it, at any rate. That is what we have been missing-some hint of what lies behind the current behavior, some ‘way in,’ as Sara puts it. Until now we have been crippled, primarily by the lack of any guidance from my own profession, which, like the rest of our society, suffers from a myopia which prevents us from seeing that a woman, a mother, can be capable of such crimes. And so we have moved haltingly, unsteadily, trying to know things about this particular woman that each of us, in some recess of our own minds, wishes was unknowable and untrue. Oh, we may have had her physical image, and evidence of her most recent destructive behavior, but how much could we truly read into that? Now, however, we have specific details of her past-keys. And we must not hesitate before using them.”

“Except, perhaps, Doctor”-Miss Howard suddenly rose and looked my way-“to take a moment to acknowledge the person whose bravery got us here.”

She held her wineglass up-to me. I shifted uneasily as the others then turned. Discouragement was gone from their faces and had been replaced by confidence, readiness-and smiles. One by one, they each held up their glasses and bottles; and I don’t mind saying, it made me nervous as hell.

But I was smiling a little, too.

“To Stevie,” Miss Howard went on. “Who’s done what none of us could have done,” she continued, “because he’s lived what none of us have lived.”

The rest of them all said, “To Stevie!” together, took big sips of their drinks, and then came at me in a wave.

I just looked at Mike and then out the window, as uncomfortable and as pleased as I can ever remember being.

“Okay, okay,” I said, shielding myself with my hands from their displays of affection and appreciation. “We got work to do, remember…”