Looking over to see that Miss Howard, though out cold, was still breathing regularly, I raised my hands halfway up: any higher, and I would’ve revealed the Colt tucked into my pants. Believing that both the Doctor and I were going to do what she told us, Libby seemed to relax a little: she used one hand to straighten first her hair and then her dress, which I noted was the same red-with-black-lace job what we’d first seen her in. At that point her look of craziness gave way to something what might’ve almost passed for regret.
“Why?”she asked, looking at the Doctor.
“I should have thought that would be obvious,” he answered, keeping his hands up.
Before Libby could answer, a particularly loud round of hollering and screaming came rising up from the street, and she turned toward it. “Do you hear that?” she said. “That’s your fault-all of yours! None of this had to happen!”
“If we’d left you free to continue murdering children, you mean?” the Doctor asked.
“Murdering them?” Libby answered, now looking positively injured. “All I did, all I ever tried to do, was help them!”
The Doctor gave her a sideways glance. “I believe you mean that in some way, Elspeth Franklin,” he said quietly.
She nodded once, her golden eyes filling with tears; then she stamped a foot suddenly and angrily. “If you believe that, then why have you been hounding me like this?”
“Listen to me, Elspeth,” the Doctor went on. “If you surrender yourself, there may be a way to help you-”
Libby’s voice grew cold and mean: “Of course-in the electrical chair, you lying bastard!”
“No,” the Doctor insisted, still quietly. “I can help you. I can try to make the authorities understand why you’ve done these things-”
“But I’ve done nothing!”Libby hollered, full of new desperation. “Can’t you see that?” She paused, studying the Doctor’s face. “No. No, of course you can’t. You’re a man. What man could understand what my life has been like-why I’ve had to make the choices I have? Do you think I wanted any of this? It wasn’t my fault that it happened!”
I figured the only way I was going to be able to make a move for the Colt was to try to get the woman even more upset and off balance than she already was: so, though I knew the Doctor wouldn’t have approved, I began to taunt her. “Yeah? What about the kid you buried with the dog? Whose fault was that?”
“You be quiet!” she seethed, turning to me. “You’re not even a man-just a boy! All you understand are your own damned needs, your own damned wants! A woman probably worked herself raw raising you, and how did you ever repay her, except by spitting in her face? By disobeying, by whining, by-” Tightening her grip on her pistol, Libby glared at me hotter than ever with those gold eyes. “You want to know about the boy in the grave, do you? I didn’t ask for him, and I didn’t want him. I had a beau-a respectable boy, from a family that had a place in our world-the kind of boy I could have brought home to my mother, to show that I could-that I could-” Her voice starting to wander, Libby glanced down at the tarred roof for an instant. “He would’ve done anything for me. And I did do anything for him-but then his family found out, and they wouldn’t…” Quickly, she looked back up. “And I was left with his lying, dirty seed in me! It wasn’t wrong, to prevent the disgrace! What could it have been but a bastard-something else, something more, that I’d done wrong? So I did what was right-but I couldn’t even tell anyone!”
Seeing that my plan was having the desired effect, I kept pressing: “And when you shot Matthew and Thomas and Clara? I suppose you didn’t want to do that, either-your finger slipped on the trigger, or they asked you to shoot them-”
The Doctor was by now staring at me, perplexed and alarmed. “Stevie, what are you-”
I ignored him. “What about that?” I went on harshly. “How did you do the right thing there?”
Her breath now coming in quick heaves, Libby shouted, “It was better for them! Do you think I wanted to shoot them? It was better for them, to be finished with this world-”
“Yeah!” I shouted back at her. “Better so’s you could take their money and go off with your boyfriend the preacher!”
“Be quiet! Goddamn you children, can’t any of you ever just be quiet?”Swallowing hard, Libby tried without much success to get a firmer grip on herself. “You know what this leads to! I’ve warned you, and now I have to show you!”
Looking at me all of a sudden the way she must, I figured, have looked at all the children she’d killed just before the act, she raised her pistol into the air and brought it down on the Doctor’s head, causing him to tumble to the ground, still conscious but bleeding from a cut above his temple. Brutal as the deed was, it gave me all the time I needed: when Libby yanked the Doctor back up by his collar, she turned again to find me holding Miss Howard’s Colt with both hands and training its barrel on her.
“Okay,” I said, my own heart racing. “Now, you want to start killing people, you go ahead. But I promise-you’ll be the second one to go.”
CHAPTER 56
She was looking at me with the same expression what’d been on her face when Mr. Picton had revealed that we knew about the grave behind her family’s barn: surprise and shock. Again I got the feeling that she hadn’t been in such positions many times in her life; and that fact, I knew, might lead her to do some unpredictable things. But I had my own little dose of unpredictability up my sleeve, one what I was getting set to administer.
Her eyes dancing in fear and anger, Libby’s mouth first tightened up, then cracked open long enough for her to say, “I’ll kill him! I swear I will!”
I nodded to her. “I know,” I said. “Question is, do you wanna go, too?”
“What choice do I have?” the woman shouted back. “Damn you, you’re just like the others-you don’t leave me any choice!”
“I’ll give you a choice,” I said. “You let the Doctor walk over here, then you run. We won’t follow.”
The Doctor, still reeling a little from the blow to the head he’d taken, looked as confused as Libby Hatch. “Stevie, what are you saying?”
Once again I paid him no mind. “Well?” I said, keeping my eyes on Libby.
She did a little dance in her head with the idea, looking tempted. Then I got some unexpected help when Mr. Roosevelt’s voice boomed up from down in the street:
“They’re retreating! Lieutenant Kimball! Detail some of your men-I want Knox taken into custody!”
I let myself have a little smile just then. “You hear that?” I said, nodding toward the front edge of the roof. “Your pal Goo Goo’s beating it out of here. So what’s it gonna be? You gonna play smart and go with him?”
“How do I know you won’t follow me?” Libby asked.
The next part of my performance had to be the best: I took a deep breath, kept my eyes on hers, then said, “You can take this gun. It’s the only one we got.”
The Doctor wasn’t so dazed as not to understand that. “No!” he said. “Stevie, do not-”
But Libby cut him off: “You slide it over here first.”
I shook my head. “You let go. Let him take two steps clear. Then I will.”
“Stevie,” the Doctor insisted, “you can’t trust-”