“Give yourself time,” Miss Howard returned. “And as for Nellie, everything she wrote about that wretched place in the World was true, and it took great courage to say it.”
“Yes,” Mr. Moore countered. “Almost as much courage as it took to marry that seventy-five-year-old millionaire of hers.”
Miss Howard’s eyes went thin, and she poised herself to strike. “Mr. Seaman is not seventy-five.”
“No. He’s seventy.” Marcus had said the words absent-mindedly; but a glance from Miss Howard was all it took to make him regret it. “Well, I’m sorry, Sara, but he is-”
“My God, it’s a miracle the human species still exists,” Miss Howard seethed, “with apes like you carrying it forward!”
“Children, children!” The Doctor clapped his hands. “We have far more pressing matters to deal with. It’s now Monday evening. How soon can we all be ready to depart?”
“Tomorrow,” Mr. Moore answered quickly, obviously dying to get up to the great American resort town of Saratoga Springs, where, as Miss Howard had said, gambling, whoring, and philandering had long ago pushed taking the waters out of the way to become the chief pastimes.
“Marcus and I’ll need a bit longer,” Lucius threw in. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble selling Captain O’Brien on the idea that we’re going along to watch your movements, Doctor, but it may take a couple of days to tie everything up-and, of course, there’s that little visit to Bethune Street to make.”
“Very well,” the Doctor answered. “Shall we say Thursday morning?” There was general agreement to this idea, and the Doctor grabbed for his copy of the Times. “We can take one of the paddle steamers as far as Troy, and from there the train to Ballston Spa. Moore, as for going on to Saratoga, you’ll have to arrange that yourself.”
Mr. Moore grinned wide. “That won’t be any trouble-they’ve put in an electric trolley from Ballston to the center of Saratoga. Fifteen or twenty minutes, and I can be standing in front of Canfield’s Casino.”
“I’m delighted for you,” Miss Howard mumbled, what you might call acidly. Mr. Moore just grinned at her.
“Stevie?” the Doctor said, and I snapped to it. “In the morning you’ll go down to the Twenty-second Street pier-see what embarks Thursday morning. Try for the Mary Powell, if she’s available-I prefer her private parlors, and she’s generally less crowded than the other day lines.”
“Right,” I said. “How many parlors?”
“We should need only one,” the Doctor said. “But get two in the event that the rain doesn’t subside. As to packing, I should recommend planning on a month’s stay, to be safe. Moore, I leave the hotel accommodations to you and Sara. All right, then, everyone-let’s waste no more time.”
At that we all left the room, and split up to start packing and preparing. The prospect of getting out of New York in midsummer quickly began producing its usual effect-relief and a giddy sort of joy-despite the disturbing things we’d learned from Mr. Rupert Picton: if we had to pursue the miserable case of Libby Hatch, it would be a sight more pleasant to do so in the green wilds of upstate New York than in the sweltering heat of Manhattan.
That, anyway, was what we thought at the time.
CHAPTER 27
Things were humming on Seventeenth Street for the next couple of days. We not only had to pack our things but board the horses and close up the house itself for what might be an extended absence. And then there was the job of finding somebody to look in on the place occasionally, somebody less destructive-and, hopefully, with a better command of English-than Mrs. Leshko. The Doctor eventually snuck an offer, through Cyrus, to one of the custodians at his Institute, a fellow he knew could use some extra money; and through the same agent, the man agreed. Luck was with us all the way around on this score, because when we told Mrs. Leshko we’d be leaving and that she wouldn’t be needed while we were gone, she said-or at least, as best we could tell she said-that such was just as well, being as she wasn’t going to be able to work for us anymore. It seemed that she and her husband had decided to head out west to try their luck opening a restaurant in a silver-mining town in Nevada. The Doctor, relieved that she’d spared him the job of firing her, gave her two weeks’ salary and a nice-sized bonus, to boot. But none of us was what you might call optimistic about the prospects of her actually selling her cooking. We tended to doubt that even miners got that hungry.
As it turned out, the Mary Powell was indeed making a day run up the Hudson on Thursday, and I was able to book us two private parlors. It continued to look like this was a wise precaution, being as the rain didn’t let up all through Tuesday. That afternoon Mr. Moore and Miss Howard-still bickering about the morality of the wild activities of Saratoga-came to the house at Seventeenth Street to wait with us for the detective sergeants, who’d gone downtown a little earlier to put Libby Hatch on notice as to what we knew about her. It was a nervous few hours that we spent in the parlor, with Cyrus trying to keep everybody calm by playing the piano softly. But despite his efforts, the building wind and rain outside seemed to say that some kind of calamity was on its way.
That particular fear, however, turned out to be uncalled for. The detective sergeants showed up at about five, in very relieved and slightly tipsy spirits. Their visit had gone as well as they could’ve hoped for: the mistress of Number 39 Bethune Street had once more tried to play coy and seductive with them, and had even invited them inside again-but they’d stood their ground and said their piece right there on the doorstep, with the rain and the runoff from the roof pouring down on them. They’d listed every important point that we’d devised, both false and true, starting with the declaration that the Police Department was aware of what she was doing and then moving on to our knowledge of her secret “hideaway” in the basement and the Doctor’s continuing to serve as a special consultant on the case. They’d wound up with the announcement that they’d figured out what’d happened in Ballston Spa three years ago and were on their way to confirm their suspicions. If anything happened to her husband in the meantime, they said, or if a baby answering Ana Linares’s description turned up dead somewhere, she could look forward to a date with the electrical chair at Sing Sing. It was true that few women got executed in the United States, they’d told her; but someone with her murderous record could definitely count on gaining entry into that select group.
Lucius described the woman’s reaction to all this. She’d gone from playing the coy temptress to forcing some tears and protesting her innocence, then moved on to saying that the detective sergeants just didn’t understand the “extenuating circumstances” of what she’d done (such being Lucius’s phrase, not hers). Finally, pure malevolence had made its way into those golden eyes. That was the only moment, both the brothers said, when they’d become truly unsure of what they’d started. They were, after all, in the heart of Hudson Duster territory and open to attack from the gang, assuming that Libby Hatch felt like having her boyfriend’s thugs tend to the matter and didn’t just shoot the pair herself. But the Isaacsons had warned her that plenty of people in the department knew where they were and what they were doing, and if they didn’t make it back to headquarters, nobody’d have any trouble figuring out why. When he and Lucius walked back to the cab they had waiting, Marcus said, he could feel the pure hatred coming from the doorway of Number 39, like bright sunshine on bare skin; then as they left they’d heard a loud slam of the door and a small cry of rage from inside. But they’d made it out of the neighborhood without any trouble, and had stopped on their way to the Doctor’s house only long enough to calm themselves down with a quick shot of rye and a short beer-a rare thing for Lucius-at the Old Town Bar on Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue.