Our curiosity most definitely roused, we all got up to follow Mr. Picton to the front door; and as we went, I noted that his agitated manner had a sort of infectious quality, being as we were all starting to move and talk in a much quicker and jumpier way. All of us, that is, except the Doctor, who moved steadily and curiously through the front hall, his mind clearly focused on the matter of Libby Hatch but possessing enough spare energy to try to figure the riddle of our host, too.

It was pretty apparent from the size of the houses on Ballston Spa’s High Street that it had been favored by the gentry of the town for many generations. There were joints that were even bigger than Mr. Picton’s place; and those what were smaller generally made up for the deficiency by being very old and bringing to mind, with their simpler but still refined styles, the days when white men had first put the power of the Kayaderosseras behind their moneymaking schemes. Some of the trees around the newer houses were young, but there were enough thick, shady old-timers to give testimony to the age of the land that the town was built on; and as I studied those stout maples, oaks, and elms, I again began to feel very sorry that what must’ve once been a beautiful stretch of landscape should’ve been turned into a homely little mill town. Yet that same feeling of sadness and waste made the place a peculiarly fitting spot in which to be talking about a woman like Libby Hatch.

“Until shortly before the birth of her second child,” Mr. Picton said as we left his front yard, “Libby was the same mercurial woman the town had come to know over time. But then, suddenly, she changed-drastically. She seemed to become nothing short of a loving mother and doting wife, happy in a situation that most women wouldn’t have wished on their worst enemy.”

“Isn’t it possible,” Miss Howard said, “that she might have been just what she seemed, Mr. Picton? No one ever knows the intimate facts of a marriage except the couple themselves, after all. Perhaps she really had learned to care for the old man.”

“Don’t listen to her, Rupert,” Mr. Moore threw in. “She’s just trying to rationalize her pal Nellie Ely’s marriage to that old fossil Seaman.”

If we’d all known Mr. Picton a little better, I’m sure that Miss Howard would’ve belted Mr. Moore right then; as it was, she gave him one of her more deadly looks.

Mr. Picton chuckled a bit. “To tell you the truth, there’s a part of me that would like to agree with you, Miss Howard.”

“Sara,” Miss Howard said, her look changing with typical speed to a very engaging smile. “Please.”

Though caught up in his story, Mr. Picton flushed and stuttered a bit. “Why, I-I’m honored!” he said. “And you must call me Rupert, Sara-unless of course you dislike the name. Some people do. I’ll answer to almost anything, as Moore will confirm. However, I digress! Yes, Sara, if I could believe that Libby Hatch had ever actually cared, on the deepest level, about either her husband or her children, I would be far less haunted by this case. But you tell me what you think of the facts that follow. About two and a half years after her second son was born, Libby’s mood again changed overnight. One day she was the same pleasant, engaging citizen whom people had gradually grown to accept; the next, she had reverted to her old self. Worse, really: she became a scowling, seemingly desperate ball of nerves. No one could explain it-until word got around that Daniel Hatch was mortally ill.”

“Did that come as a surprise?” the Doctor asked. “He must have been close to eighty by then.”

“True,” Mr. Picton answered. “And as a result, it did not come as a surprise, but rather served to explain why Libby’s behavior had become so agitated. She was, apparently, deeply distressed over the fate of the old miser that she and she alone had found a way to love.”

“If anybody feels a little moist,” Mr. Moore said, “that’ll be Rupert’s sarcasm.”

Laughing once, Mr. Picton nodded. “All right, I confess, I was and remain utterly skeptical. But I later learned that I had reason to be. You see, old Hatch suffered through a prolonged illness, punctuated by two severe attacks. Yet when I came to assemble a chronology of the period, I discovered that Libby’s pronounced change in mood had preceded the onset of the illness. So it was not concern for his health that rattled her so badly.”

“Mr. Picton,” Marcus said, asking the question that was in all our heads, “just what kind of ‘attacks’ were they that Mr. Hatch suffered?”

Mr. Picton smiled. “Yes, Detective. They were heart attacks.” As the rest of us received this news silently, our host stopped walking and reached into his jacket pocket. “After I got your messages, John, I went out to the old Hatch place. It’s falling down, now, and the garden’s terribly overgrown. But I was able to find this…”

Out of his pocket Mr. Picton brought a withered but still very distinctive-looking flower.

“Digitalis purpurea,”Lucius announced quietly. “Purple foxglove.”

“Oh, it wasn’t easy to kill him!” Mr. Picton said, in a tone that you might almost call excited. “Hatch was a strong old coot, and as I’m sure you know, Detective, digitalis induces many toxic side effects if given in doses that are insufficient to produce fatal overstimulation of the heart.”

Lucius nodded as we all started walking again. “Nausea, vomiting, blurred vision…”

“He held on to life almost as tightly as he’d held on to his money,” Mr. Picton went on, in the same energetic tone. “Lasted some three months, before she could finally get enough of the stuff into him without any of the servants noticing.” At the sound of his own words, Mr. Picton’s smile shrank up and his voice grew quieter. “The poor, unpleasant old soul. No one should have to go like that.”

“There was never any suspicion cast on Mrs. Hatch?” the Doctor asked.

Mr. Picton shook his head. “No. Not given the way she’d always acted toward her husband. But as it turned out, Hatch had been less fooled by his wife than had most of the town. She received virtually nothing in his will.”

“Who’d he leave it all to?” Mr. Moore asked. “The children?”

“Just so,” Mr. Picton said. “In trust, until they achieved their majority. And he named the local justice of the peace-not his wife-as trustee. Libby was to receive only enough money to support the family. Apparently, Hatch had become quite bitter about something toward the end. But his actions were foolish, because the arrangement of the estate only put the children at terrible risk.”

“Meaning that if anything happened to them,” Miss Howard said, “the fortune would pass to her?”

“Yes,” Mr. Picton answered. “And, bitter as he obviously was, I don’t think even Hatch knew what his wife was really capable of-ah! Here we are.”

We’d reached the front of what Mr. Picton later told us was called the “new” court house, being as it’d been occupied for less than ten years. It wasn’t a particularly interesting-looking building, just a big, gabled mass of stone with a square tower rising out of one corner; but my guess was that, whatever the architectural types might think of its design, as a jail it was probably top of the line: the walls were ponderously thick, and the bars across the cell windows in the basement were strong enough to contain even a seasoned escape artist.

“Well, with any luck at all, this will be our battleground before long!” Mr. Picton announced, looking up at one of the four clock faces what were set into each side of the tower’s roof and pulling out his watch to check it against the bigger time piece. Then his silvery eyes moved steadily around our group, taking, it seemed to me, the measure of each of us in turn. After that he smiled. “I very much wonder if you know what you’ve gotten yourselves into…”