For their part, Lucius and Cyrus were teamed up for the job of going back to the old Hatch place on Monday and turning the house upside down in a search for any additional clues. Miss Howard and I drew the assignment of trying to learn everything we could about the facts of Libby Hatch’s mysterious past, a journey what would begin with another visit to Mrs. Louisa Wright, move on to the little town of Stillwater (where we knew Libby’d lived for a time), and then take us God-only-knew where. As for the Doctor, he would, of course, continue to work with Clara Hatch: we couldn’t hope for an indictment, Mr. Picton repeated, unless the girl could be made to answer at least simple yes-or-no questions before the grand jury.

The Doctor and Cyrus left for the Westons’ farm that afternoon just after lunch, while Mr. Moore walked down to the Presbyterian church and Mr. Picton returned to his office. They’d all returned, though, before there was any sign of progress from the card table in the parlor. Hour after dreary hour ticked by with no indication of success; but then, at about six-thirty, Lucius finally shot out of his chair and started to scream like a madman, a move what the rest of us decided to take as a hopeful sign.

Collecting around the card table, we soon learned that our hopes were well grounded. Not only did the spacing of the bullets’ grooves and lands (there were seven of each, spiraling to the left) match the barrel of the Colt perfectly, but at the same spot on each of the slugs there was another mark, so small that it’d taken hours to identify. It turned out to’ve been left there, said Marcus, by a tiny nick in the steel of the pistol’s barrel, just inside the muzzle. This mark would make the ballistic testimony what the detective sergeants (or anybody else) gave carry that not-conclusive-but-still-million-to-one weight we’d been looking for: even if you accepted the idea that another Colt.45-caliber Single Action Army model might have the exact same pattern of grooves and lands as ours did, the notion that it would also have exactly the same defect in the barrel was pretty hard to swallow. So it looked like a very big corner had been turned, and the jaws of our complicated trap were starting to close tighter.

Mr. Picton was so confident, in fact, that he announced that he intended to schedule the grand jury hearing for the following Friday; only five days away. As we discovered the next morning, however, our host’s boss, District Attorney Pearson, didn’t share his assistant’s confidence: when Mr. Picton told him about his plan, Mr. Pearson declared that he now intended to move his vacation, which he’d been planning to take in two weeks anyway, up a week-and that he wouldn’t be back until the whole “unnatural” business of the Hatch case was over. Mr. Picton, for his part, didn’t seem at all concerned about this: he merrily said good-bye to Mr. Moore and Marcus (who were set to leave for New York at noon) and then withdrew into his office, at which point the rest of us split off to pursue our separate tasks.

For Miss Howard and myself, the first order of business was a visit to Mrs. Louisa Wright’s house over on Beach Street. It was an odd place, located so near the Schafer greenhouses that it existed in a sort of continuous daylight, being as there wasn’t an hour of the night when some part of the giant floral plant wasn’t artificially lit up. Because of this Mrs. Wright-a pleasant-looking but tough-talking lady in her fifties whose husband had died during the Civil War, when she was still young-had her windows covered with particularly heavy curtains and drapes, what made the house as quiet as the grave. A clock on her parlor mantel was the main source of noise, its steady ticking seeming to cry out that life was slipping by. The many pictures of Louisa Wright’s young husband what decorated the house completed the funeral home feel of the joint.

Mrs. Wright served us tea and sandwiches in the parlor, very content, it seemed to me, to get even further involved in our pursuit of Libby Hatch-and when she heard that she was going to be called as a witness before a grand jury investigating the matter, her contentment seemed to grow into positive satisfaction. As will (with any luck) become clear soon enough, what the old girl had to say about Libby Hatch, Reverend Parker, the Hatch kids, and the death of old Daniel was very revealing, and reinforced all the things she’d originally told Miss Howard about the case. Because of this, when Miss Howard and I left the house at about three to head over to the livery stable and hire a rig for our trip to Stillwater, we were in very optimistic spirits.

We engaged the same buckboard-pulled by the same little Morgan stallion-what had brought us back from the old Hatch place on Friday, and the first part of our ride east and south, while not exactly luxurious, was made quick and easy by the steady-spirited horse. Unfortunately, the rig itself proved a lot less reliable: just after we turned onto the road what ran alongside the Hudson, we threw a rear wheel with a jarring, nasty crash, and while the collapse didn’t damage either the wheel or the rig, it did mean that we were stuck on the side of the road for a couple of hours, until a passing farmer who was carrying some heavy rope offered to give us a hand raising the buckboard and getting the wheel back on. This process took another couple of hours, and then we had to slowly follow our Good Samaritan back to his farm, where he had the tools to make sure that the wheel stayed in place. Miss Howard gave the amiable if not very talkative man five dollars for his help, and then we decided that, being as we were slightly closer to Stillwater than we were to Ballston Spa (though we were a good distance from both places), we’d keep heading south and try to at least begin our second assignment of the day.

By the time we pulled into Stillwater, the sun was setting on the small town, which didn’t consist of a whole lot more than a couple of industrial works on the river and several blocks of houses running inland from the waterfront. The town was considerably more depressing than most of the places we’d seen in the area: it was tough to say just what those factories produced, but there was a general feel of dirtiness and degradation all over the village, of the variety what was usually associated with bigger cities. Even the Hudson, usually clear and inviting this far north, seemed to bear a film of filth in this stretch of its run. The fact that nobody was out on the streets didn’t do much to improve the cold, forbidding air of the town; and as the sun began to set much faster very soon after our arrival, both Miss Howard and I began to wonder out loud if we’d made the right decision about which way to turn after getting our wheel fixed. Of course, the fact that we knew Libby Hatch had once lived in this dismal little backwater didn’t improve our impression of it any, either.

I drew the buckboard to a halt in a spot what looked like it might be the center of town (though there was still not a soul to be seen), and then we got down and started to wander about, figuring that eventually we’d bump into someone who could tell us something about the place. Finally, after failing to spot any activity for some ten minutes, we heard a door open across the street from one of the riverfront factories, and saw a man come out of one of the small, shacklike houses what lined the block. Miss Howard called, “Excuse me?” to this character, at which all of his heavy, six-foot frame seemed to jump about a foot into the air. We walked quickly over to where he was standing, and as we got nearer he looked around anxiously and straightened himself up a bit, like maybe he thought we were either the law or religious types.

“Excuse me,” Miss Howard said again as we reached the man, “but we’re looking for some information about someone who used to live here. Is there anyone we could talk to? I know it’s late, but-”