Marcus was satisfied by this reasoning, but Mr. Moore still had his doubts; and Mr. Picton, though he knew they were taking the only sensible course, continued to feel a little cheated by not being able to secure a death sentence. But the Doctor insisted to all of them that the only thing what was truly important was for Libby Hatch to be put into a place where she’d never again have any contact with children-especially her own child. On top of that, knowing that her mother was going to be jailed for life instead of executed would only help Clara Hatch’s recovery, since the girl wouldn’t have to carry the enormous weight for the rest of her life of having played a part in sending her mother to the chair. Miss Howard stated that this was the best reason of all for making the deal; indeed, she said, considering what effect her mother’s execution might’ve had on Clara, she wondered why Mr. Picton hadn’t made life imprisonment for Libby his goal in the first place. This comment led to some pretty passionate statements from the assistant district attorney about the unknowable future, and how he couldn’t trust that some governor might not get suckered-say, twenty or thirty years down the line-by one of Libby’s effective performances into reversing the part of her sentence what specified that there was to be no parole. The Doctor and Miss Howard might have done a lot that day to explain her evil, he said, but they hadn’t done anything to remove it: only death could provide that kind of solution.
That set the Doctor off again, on the subject of how was science ever supposed to learn anything from criminals like Libby if the state went around frying and hanging them all; and this discussion, along with all others related to it, went on and on as the sun set beyond the train depot down the hill from Mr. Picton’s window. Finally, at a few minutes after nine, there was a knock at the door of Mr. Picton’s outer office. El Niño pulled the thing open, and in wandered Mr. Darrow and Mr. Maxon, the first looking curious but confident as he took in the scene around him, the second seeming, as ever, very nervous. With formal little movements El Niño showed the pair into Mr. Picton’s inner office, and we all stood up.
“Ah! Maxon, Darrow,” Mr. Picton said. “Good of you to come so late on a Sunday evening.”
“Quite a conference you’ve got going here,” Mr. Darrow said, glancing around at us all and nodding a polite greeting. “Having trouble planning your summation, Mr. Picton?”
“Summation?” Mr. Picton said, playing at surprise. “Oh! Great jumping cats, do you know, with all that’s happened today, I’m afraid I completely forgot about closing arguments! But then, I’m not entirely sure we’re going to need them.” He pulled out his pipe and clamped it between his teeth, looking very pleased with himself.
Mr. Maxon-who’d had a lot of run-ins with Mr. Picton in court, and was in a position to know when the man was up to something-started to look even more jittery than he had when he came in. “What is it, Picton?” he asked, pushing his pince-nez down tighter on his skinny nose. “What have you got?”
“What can he have?” Mr. Darrow asked with a chuckle. “The state’s closed its case in chief, Mr. Picton. I hope you didn’t make the mistake of saving anything for last-minute theatricals. Judge Brown doesn’t seem like the kind of man that’ll go for them.”
“I know it,” Mr. Picton answered. “And your colleague Maxon, there, knows I know it. So whatever I’ve ‘got,’ it must be something fairly good to warrant my asking you here tonight-don’t you think so, Maxon?” Mr. Maxon, unlike Mr. Darrow, seemed to take this statement straight to heart; and, pleased by that fact, Mr. Picton looked over to me. “Stevie? I wonder if you’d just run down and tell Henry to have Mrs. Hatch-I beg your pardon, Mrs. Hunter-brought up from her cell.”
“Got it,” I said, making for the door.
As I went out I heard Mr. Picton continuing, “Doctor, why don’t you stay in here with the three of us? The rest of you might just have a seat in the outer office-we don’t want to overwhelm the defendant, after all…”
After bolting down the hall, I dashed onto the marble stairs, taking them two at a time on my way down to the guard’s station in the entryway. Running to it without looking up, I began to say, “Mr. Picton wants-”
Then I saw who I was talking to. It wasn’t the guard Henry at all, but one of the other big men what’d watched the courtroom doors all through the trial.
“Where’s Henry?” I asked.
The man looked at me with a sour expression. “What’s it to you, kid?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. But what it is to Mr. Picton is he’s got orders for him.”
Looking even more irritated, the guard nodded toward a doorway behind him. “Henry’s downstairs. Guarding the prisoner.”
I heard the statement; I accepted it with a simple nod of my head, and never thought twice about it. But now, looking back across the gap of so many years, I find myself once again wishing desperately that something could have made me see what was going on.
“Well,” I told the guard, “Mr. Picton wants he should bring the prisoner up to his office.”
“What, now?”the guard asked.
“I don’t figure as he meant next Thursday,” I said, turning around and heading back to the staircase. “If I was you I’d get moving-they’re all up there waiting.”
“Hey!” the guard called after me, as I started up the stairs, “just remember, I don’t get paid to take orders from any kid!” Then he turned to go through the door behind him.
“You just took one, mug,” I mumbled, smiling as I got back to the second floor. “So go chase yourself.”
Back in Mr. Picton’s outer office I found that Cyrus, the detective sergeants, Mr. Moore, Miss Howard, and El Niño were all crowded around the closed oak door to the inner chamber. Cyrus had the aborigine up on his shoulders, from which spot El Niño was looking through a partly open transom, spying on what was going on among the three lawyers and the Doctor and trying to whisper his intelligence back to the others; the only problem was that his English wasn’t good enough to understand much more than half of what the men inside were saying.
“They are speaking of the girl, Clara, now,” El Niño whispered as I came in.
“What about her?” Miss Howard asked.
“Something-something-” El Niño shook his head in frustration. “The Señor Doctor is saying things I do not understand-some things about sickness, and about the mother-she who is the killer…”
“Oh, this is useless,” Mr. Moore said in frustration. Then he signaled to me. “Stevie, trade places with your friend. I want to know what the hell’s happening in there.”
I was about to follow the order when there came a knock at the outer door. Waiting for El Niño to get down off of Cyrus’s shoulders, I opened the thing, and found myself facing the guard Henry and Libby Hatch. Better than a week in jail hadn’t done anything to damage the way the woman carried herself-her black dress looked as crisp as it had on the night she got off the train-or to dull the devilish gleam in her golden eyes. I’d never been so close to those eyes, before, nor had them focused directly on me; and I found that their general effect was to cause me to back up, slowly and silently, until I near fell over the unused secretary’s desk what sat in that outer office. This reaction caused Libby to smile at me in a way what I hope never to see in another person, a way what brought Mr. Moore’s earthy language at the Café Lafayette back into my mind: you really couldn’t tell, from the look in her face, just what this woman might have in store for you. Love, hate, life, death-all of them, it seemed like, were very possible, so long as they served her purposes.
And from the proud way that she moved through the others to get to the thick door to the inner office, it was pretty clear that Libby Hatch felt like her purposes were being very well served, just at that juncture. She glanced at each of the silent faces before her and kept smiling, then started to shake her head, as if to say that we’d all been terribly foolish to even think about taking her on. Henry kept one hand on her arm (she wasn’t wearing any manacles, another fact what should’ve struck me as odd but didn’t) as he knocked on the inner office door and Mr. Picton told him to enter. He opened the door and indicated to Libby that she should go on in. He did this by way of a single look, the kind of quick, meaningful glance what only people who know each other very well use to communicate.