And all the while he was sniffing and clawing, sniffing and clawing, trying to find, it seemed, some way to move the rack.
How long it took me to understand what I was looking at I’m not sure; but however long, it was too long, because I should’ve gotten the point as soon as I saw that rack. After all, I’d had enough clues: the flower boxes on Sunday; the dismal backyard; the unhealthy kitchen; the spare front room, as hospitable as the barracks in the Boys’ House of Refuge; not to mention all the conversations about Nurse Hunter’s character what I’d been privy to. They were all part of a pattern, and so was that rack of preserves—but it took a half-crazed ferret to drive the idea home in my head:
“Wait a minute,” I mumbled, as I walked over to the rack. “Preserves? Who’s she trying to kid?”
I grabbed one of the jars off the rack and unscrewed the rubber-lined tin lid: looking down, I saw a thick layer of mold across the top of the contents. Making a sour face, I quickly screwed the top back on and tried another jar, only to find the same thing inside. I tried two more jars from different parts of the rack, and when I found them to be in similar shape, I just stood back for a second, pondering it. Then I looked down at Mike: he was still scratching away at the bottom of the rack, first in front, then around to one side, then to the other, never getting anywhere what with the concrete, but desperate to all the same.
“Unh-hunh,” I noised, stepping forward again. “Well, then …” I took a deep breath, laid hold of the corner of the rack, strained to move it away from the dividing wall, and—
And nothing. I tried again, putting my full weight into the attempt but gaining no greater result. I might as well have been trying to move the house. Looking around, I caught sight of the rusty garden tools and ran over to grab an old hoe. I tried to slide the lip of its blade into a narrow crevice between the back of the rack and the bricks. It wouldn’t go. I used the heel of my hand to jam it in and finally got a small purchase; but when I laid hold of the end of the hoe’s wooden handle and pulled it so that the blade would push the rack away from the wall, the tool snapped into two pieces. And it wasn’t the wooden handle that broke: it was the metal stem of the blade, half an inch of forged steel.
“What in hell…?” I mumbled, staring at the thing.
It was odd, all right; but I’d taken part in enough robberies in my life to know that when you were faced with a safe you didn’t have the tools to crack, you didn’t stick around to wonder why. I scooped up the still clawing Mike, who seemed to sense that he hadn’t done the job he’d been hired for and fought against me as I stuffed him back into the satchel and fastened it up good and tight. Going back to the stairs, I got halfway up them when—
Gunshots. I froze, already trying to figure how I was going to explain my presence in the basement. Then I realized: they weren’t gunshots but firecrackers, out on the street. They must have been right out on the street, too, judging by their volume. Sighing with relief and able to move again I reached over to shut off the basement light, then carefully moved on up to the door and opened it, the oiled hinges swinging silently.
Once in the front room again, I could hear the laughter of a bunch of kids out on the street. Then a few more firecrackers went off, their sound sharp and startling against the distant, dull thunder of the bigger fireworks over the river. I looked around quickly. We weren’t going to get the baby out that night, I knew that much, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave empty-handed. There had to be something …
I glanced at the secretary, and remembered what Marcus had said: if the Hunter woman had thought to cover the thing before she’d asked them in, it stood to reason that there was something that’d be of use to us in it. I grabbed my collection of picks out of my pants pocket and dashed over to it, getting the lock in the lid undone faster than even I’d thought I could’ve.
When I pulled the lid down and open, my first reaction was disappointment: there wasn’t anything but some letters in the desk’s little wooden slots, and a stack of papers on a worn-out blotter in front of them. Before locking the thing up again, though, I decided to overrule my thief’s instinct that such items were worthless, and picked some of the papers up to read—wisely, as it turned out.
At first they made no sense to me. The items on top were written on stationery from St. Luke’s Hospital: they were addressed to Elspeth Hatch, and they seemed to be a bunch of advisories concerning the condition of a child named Jonathan. Below these were a series of hospital admitting forms what seemed to pertain to the same child. And finally, there were a couple of old newspapers, all folded up and dating from two years before. I flipped back to the hospital admitting forms, not knowing what I was looking at or for, exactly: they were all too full of unreadable handwriting, all too complicated—
But then I made out a few words that stopped me cold. At the bottom of one form appeared the pretyped word DIAGNOSIS:—and next to it somebody had scrawled RESPIRATORY FAILURE, CYANOSIS.
That was enough for me. I took the whole stack of papers, stuffed them inside my shirt, and closed the secretary. I was sure that I’d found something, sure that I hadn’t wasted—
“Don’t you move, you little bastard!”
I did just as I was told. I’d been nailed before, and when you got a command like that it was generally best to follow it until you’d had a chance to see who and what you were up against. Putting my hands halfway into the air, I turned slowly toward where the growling, desperate, and somehow familiar voice had come from: the front stairs.
On them stood what must’ve been Micah Hunter. He looked to be in his fifties, and he was wearing a badly faded white nightshirt. Two bony white legs stuck out from its hem, and his grey, grizzled face—with a similarly colored, unkempt mustache—plainly bore the mad, foggy expression of a morphine jabber in full binge. He held what looked like a rifled musket unsteadily in his hands, and as I turned he stared at me in wild disbelief.
“You!” he said. Then he started to glance around nervously, and little whimpering sounds came out of his throat. “You …?” he repeated with less energy this time. “Where—where’s Libby? Libby!” He looked at me again, very afraid. “It can’t be—it can’t be you…. This ain’t the right house …” His voice got stronger, though no less frightened. “This ain’t the right house—and I already killed you!”
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 cu
pped 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 cheeked 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 Cornell Vanderbilt’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.”