“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.