Mr. Darrow hadn’t yet closed his case, and he could theoretically call Libby Hatch to the stand on Monday if he wanted to; but there really wasn’t any reason for it. Her little performance when Clara’d been on the stand had been more effective than any testimony she might give about how much she cared for her children; and allowing Mr. Picton a shot at her during cross-examination (the state wasn’t itself allowed to call the defendant) could only lead to trouble. No, from Mr. Darrow’s point of view it was better to keep her where she was: the teary-eyed widow and loving mother at the defense table, whose life had been scarred by terrible losses and tragedies, and who, for all her heroic attempts to overcome a sea of troubles, was now being persecuted by a state government embarrassed by its failure to solve an old and savage crime and an alienist bent on restoring his reputation.
It wasn’t hard, then, to see why the news we brought back from Troy offered so little in the way of consolation to our friends: the question of what in her past had made Libby Hatch the woman she was today, or on the night she’d shot her three children, appeared to be a ship what’d already sailed. As Marcus had said the night before, the jury was past caring about any psychological explanations of what context had produced a normal, sane girl who would one day be capable of murdering her own children; in fact, they were past believing that she had murdered her children in the first place, and if we tried to introduce such testimony we’d just be grasping at air. The only useful thing, it seemed, that might come out of the search was if Libby had committed some other violent act during the years before she’d gone to the Muhlenbergs’ and we could find some way to tie that act to the present proceedings.
That possibility seemed pretty remote, though, to everybody—everybody except, again, Miss Howard, who just refused to give up on whatever horse she was riding until it was good and dead. And so early Saturday morning she had the four of us who’d made the Troy trip up and aboard Mr. Picton’s surrey. (The Doctor’d wanted to come along, but he felt a personal responsibility to head out to the Westons’ farm that day and see how Clara was doing.) The town of Schaghticoke was located about half a dozen miles inland from the east bank of the Hudson, which meant another ferry crossing and another monotonous ride through farm country what wasn’t much different from the territory we’d covered in Saratoga and Washington Counties. We arrived in the place to find that the locals were getting a few big fields ready for the Rensselaer County Fair, a fact what made the general atmosphere, along with the attitudes of the town’s residents, more cheery than they likely were ordinarily: we didn’t have to ask but a few people about the Franklin farm before we found one helpful old soul who gave us very exact instructions on how to get there.
The spread lay to the east of the town, alongside a shadowy back road what was painful to travel, and what made Miss Howard and me figure that we were on our way to yet another gloomy house haunted by the ghosts of past violence and tragedy. You can imagine our shock, then, when we came around one bend in the bumpy road to find ourselves faced with a couple of very well tended cornfields on our left, and some cow pastures with newly strung wire fences on our right. Most surprising of all was the sight, between the cornfields, of a small but pleasant-looking little house, its clapboards bearing a fresh coat of white paint and its neatly clipped lawn bordered by pretty little flower patches.
We turned up the short drive to the house, seeing no sign of life at first, but then finally spying a man in overalls walking from the house to a large green barn what was hidden behind one of the corn fields. He looked to be about forty-five or so, and seemed a decent, friendly enough type: as he spread chicken feed from a bucket around to a group of hens what were clucking in the barnyard, he made some pleasant, maybe even affectionate little noises, smiling as he watched the birds scurry around to peck at the food. Watching him, I pulled the surrey to a stop in front of the house.
“We’re in the wrong place” was all I could say.
Miss Howard just studied the scene for a few minutes, looking troubled; then she got down off the buckboard and moved up to a gate in the white picket fence what bordered the front lawn.
“Stay here,” she said, passing through the little gate in the fence. El Niño didn’t much like the idea of her going to talk to the unknown man in the barnyard by herself, but I told him to just relax, pointing out that she was almost certainly carrying some kind of firearm. All the same, he produced his little bow and one of his short arrows from inside his dinner jacket (he’d rigged the lining of the garment to accommodate his weapons) and kept a steady eye on what went on across the yard.
“Excuse me!” Miss Howard called as she reached the corner of the house. At the sound the man turned and, smiling pleasantly, trotted on over to where she was standing, which was just within earshot of the rest of us.
“Hello,” he said, setting his bucket down and wiping his hands on his overalls. “Something I can do for you?” Looking past Miss Howard, he caught sight of the rest of us in the surrey; and though I don’t think the sight of two black men made him feel exactly easy, he didn’t seem to get overly nervous about it.
“I hope so,” Miss Howard answered. “My name is Sara Howard. I’m an investigator working with the Saratoga County District Attorney’s office. I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. George Franklin.”
The mention of the Saratoga D.A. also didn’t seem to rattle the man as much as it should have, certainly not as much as it had the other people we’d visited in the area. The fellow’s eyes grew puzzled, but he didn’t lose his smile completely. “They’re my folks,” he said. “Or were. My father died five years ago.”
“Oh,” Miss Howard answered. “I am sorry. And your mother?”
“Over in Hoosick Falls, visiting my brother and his wife,” the man answered. “They’ve got a store there. She won’t be back ’til tomorrow afternoon, I’m afraid. What’s this all about?”
Matching the man’s pleasant tone, Miss Howard asked, “Would you be George Franklin, then? Or Elijah?”
The man cocked his head in surprise. “Looks like you know all about us, miss. I’m Eli—that’s what I’m called. Is there something wrong?”
“I—” Miss Howard glanced back to the rest of us, looking like she wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. “Mr. Franklin—if I may ask, have you had any communication from your sister recently?”
“Libby?” For the first time, a cloud seemed to pass over Eli Franklin’s features, and he glanced at the ground uneasily. “No. No, we haven’t any of us heard from Libby for—well, for quite a few years, now.” When he looked up again, the fellow wasn’t smiling anymore. “She in some kind of trouble?”
“I’d—really rather discuss the matter when your mother’s here,” Miss Howard answered.
“Look,” Franklin said, “if there’s something my mother needs to hear, I think you’d better let me be the one to tell her. What’s Libby done?”
“You assume she’s done something?” Miss Howard asked curiously. “Why not that something’s been done to her?”
Franklin’s eyes got wider with surprise as he considered this possibility. “Has something happened to her? Is she all right?”
“Mr. Franklin …” Miss Howard folded her arms, her green eyes focusing right in on the man’s brown ones. “I’m afraid I have to tell you that your sister is right now on trial in Ballston Spa. On a very serious charge.”
Franklin absorbed this news, what should have been pretty rattling, with much less alarm than I would’ve thought possible. “So,” he said, after a few silent minutes. “So that’s it.” His voice wasn’t outraged or even stunned, just sort of—well, sad was the only way to put it. “What happened? There’s a man mixed up in it, I guess. Is he married, something like that?”
“Something like that,” Miss Howard lied coolly, figuring, I knew, that she was likely to get more information out of the farmer if she went along with his assumptions instead of telling him the truth. “Why? Was she ever in that sort of trouble b
efore?”
“Libby?” Franklin grunted. “When it came to men, Libby was always in trouble.” Looking away and making a little hissing sound of disappointment, Franklin said, “So why are you here? Are we going to be called into court? I don’t see why—”
“No,” Miss Howard answered quickly. “Nothing like that. I just thought that perhaps you and your family could provide us with some information about your sister’s past. She’s rather reluctant to talk about it herself.”
Franklin shook his head. “Nothing surprising in that, I’m afraid,” he said. “Well… you probably should wait for my mother, if that’s the kind of thing you want. She’ll know more than I can remember. You could come back tomorrow—”
“Oh, we’ll come back,” Miss Howard answered quickly. “But if you could just tell me a few basic facts.” She turned to walk across the lawn toward the door of the little house. “Have you always lived here?”
“Yes,” Franklin answered; then he caught himself. “I’m sorry—can I get you anything? Something to drink, maybe, or—”
“Yes, that’d be very nice of you,” Miss Howard said. “I’m afraid it’s been a long, dusty drive.”
“And your—your people, there?” Franklin said, indicating the surrey.
“Hmm?” Miss Howard noised. “Oh. No, I wouldn’t worry about them. I won’t be long, anyway. I’ll save most of my questions for tomorrow, when your mother’s here.”
“Well, then—please, come inside,” Franklin said.
Giving us a quick glance and a nod what said to stay put, Miss Howard vanished into the little house, her host scraping the mud and manure off his boots on an old mother’s helper what was bolted to the stone steps outside the door.
“I don’t get it,” I said as they went in. “This was where Libby Hatch grew up?”
“Doesn’t quite seem to match, does it?” Cyrus answered, as he got down off the surrey to stretch his legs. “But there’s never any way of knowing …”
“Señorito Stevie,” El Niño said to me, moving to put his bow away. “This man—he will not hurt the lady?”
“I don’t think so,” I answered, scratching my head.
“So,” the aborigine said with a nod, lying down on the back seat of the surrey. “Then El Niño will sleep.” Before closing his eyes, though, he picked his head up to look at me one more time. “Señorito Stevie—the path we are taking to baby Ana is a strange one, yes? Or is it only that El Niño does not understand?”
“No, you understand all right,” I told him, lighting up a smoke. “One strange path, is the truth …”
CHAPTER 49
Miss Howard wound up spending just half an hour inside the Franklin place, but it was long enough to learn a few interesting little nuggets of information, ones she refused to tell the rest of us in the surrey until we’d gotten back to Mr. Picton’s house that evening and had collected around the chalkboard along with the Doctor and everyone else.
It seemed that the house we’d seen was very old, and contained only a few rooms—and out of these, just two were for sleeping. The Franklin brothers had shared one of them, while Libby had spent all of her childhood and early adult years sleeping in a small bed in her parents’ room. There’d been no dividing curtain or partition of any kind in this chamber, and so for most of her life Libby had lived with a total lack of privacy, a fact what the Doctor considered extremely important. Apparently both he and Dr. Meyer had done a lot of work concerning children who were almost never out of sight of their parents, and had discovered that such kids developed a whole batch of problems when it came time to deal with the outside world: they were generally short-tempered, viciously sensitive to any kind of criticism, and, as the Doctor put it, “pathologically afraid of embarrassment, almost to the point of what Dr. Krafft-Ebing has labeled ‘paranoia.’ “And yet, underneath all that, these same types, when grown, could be strangely doubtful about their ability to make their own way in the world: they generally grew up with a strong need to have people around them, but at the same time they resented and even hated those people.
“We are not speaking of something precisely similar to violent physical or verbal abuse, of course,” the Doctor explained, as he began, for the first time, to fill in the section of the chalkboard what had been set aside for facts concerning Libby’s childhood. “But such a lack of privacy can produce many of the same results—primarily, the failure of the psyche to develop into a truly unified, integrated, and independent entity.” Again I thought back to Miss Howard’s words about Libby’s personality being broken, at an early age, into pieces what she could never reassemble. “It’s difficult to conceive of,” the Doctor went on. “The stifling horror of being forced to spend every waking and sleeping hour in the intimate, watchful company of some other human being, of rarely if ever knowing solitude. Think of the incredible frustration and anger, the sense of complete—complete—”
“Suffocation” Cyrus finished for the Doctor; and I knew he was thinking back to the various babies what Libby’d done in through that very method.
“Precisely, Cyrus,” the Doctor said, writing the word on the board in big letters and underlining it. “Here, indeed, we have the first key that fits both the enigma of Libby’s mind and the apparent puzzle of her behavior—suffocation. But what did it lead to, Sara, in her early adulthood? Did the brother give you any idea at all?”
“There was one subject he was willing to discuss,” Miss Howard said. “Primarily, I think, because he didn’t want his mother to have to hear about it. It seems that Libby had a lot to do with boys, and from a very early age. She was extremely precocious, romantically and sexually.”
“Again, it’s logical,” the Doctor said, considering it. “Such behavior would of necessity be secret, and therefore private—yet it reflects her inability, her very frustrating inability, to achieve such privacy and independence on her own.” As he scribbled these thoughts, the Doctor added, “I don’t imagine, as a result, that she was particularly kind to the unsuspecting young men who became involved with her.”
“No,” Miss Howard answered. “Quite a heartbreaker, would be the most—charitable way to put it.”
“Good,” the Doctor judged, nodding. “Very good.”
Mr. Moore, who’d been sitting in the corner with a big glass pitcher full of martinis what he’d mixed for himself, let out a big groan at that; and the sound seemed to be echoed by the wail of a train whistle off in the distance. Listening to it, Mr. Moore held up a finger.
“You hear that, Kreizler? That’s the sound of this damned case getting away from us. It’s fading into the night, and what are you doing? Still sitting around with your blasted chalkboard, acting like there’s some way you’re going to think your way out of losing. We’re finished—who the hell cares why Libby Hatch is the way she is, at this point?”
“The eternal voice of encouragement,” Mr. Picton said, glancing over to Mr. Moore. “Have six or seven more of those foul concoctions, John, and perhaps you’ll nod off—then we can go on in peace.”
“I know it seems late in the race, Moore,” the Doctor said, lighting a cigarette as he studied the blackboard. “But we must do what we can, while we can. We must”
“Why?” Mr. Moore grumbled. “Nobody wants the damned woman to be guilty, they’ve made that much clear. Who the hell are we carrying on for, at this point?”
“There’s still the problem of Ana Linares, John,” Lucius said.
Mr. Moore let out another grunt. “A girl whose own father doesn’t care if she lives or dies. She’ll probably have as good a chance with Libby as she would with him, the Spanish bastard.”
“I wasn’t actually thinking of Ana Linares, just now,” the Doctor said, his voice going very quiet.
“No,” Miss Howard said, “it’s Clara, isn’t it? How was she? I didn’t even think to ask.”
The Doctor shrugged, looking uneasy. “Bewildered. And not very talkative, though I don’t blame her for that. I promised her t
hat this ordeal would help both her and her mother. It’s done neither—and now her terror at the memory of what happened three years ago is being matched by her fear of what will happen if her mother goes free. She’s not so young as to be blind to the danger she may be in if Libby is loose to take revenge on what she no doubt sees as a treacherous child who was the only witness to her bloody act.” Setting his piece of chalk down, the Doctor picked up a glass of wine and tried to take a sip; but he stopped in mid-action, as if he had no interest in any kind of relief.
“You can’t blame yourself, Doctor,” Marcus said. “The case looked solid. There was no reason to believe it would go this way.”
“Perhaps,” the Doctor said, sitting down and putting his glass aside.
“And may I remind everyone again—” Miss Howard said. But she got only that far before Mr. Moore let out another big groan.
“Yes, yes, we know, Sara, it’s not over yet! My God, don’t you ever get tired of that saw?”
“If you mean don’t I wish it would end so I’d have a good excuse to sink to the bottom of a glass and live there, John, then no,” Miss Howard snapped. “It’s true that we may not have gotten very much information today—but the mother must know more, and she returns tomorrow. So will we.” She looked to the Doctor. “Will you come with us? I’m not sure I’ll know all the right questions to ask.”
From somewhere deep, the Doctor managed to stir the final traces of what passed for encouragement. “Of course,” he said, putting his hands on his legs and then standing up. “But now, if you all don’t mind, I think I’ll retire before dinner. I’m not particularly hungry. We don’t need to be at the Franklins’ until the afternoon, you say, Sara?”
“That’s right.”