“I suppose we have to,” Miss Howard answered. “We’ve come this far.”
We didn’t bother to get back into the buckboard, but walked the three blocks or so to the building with the sign, which did in fact reveal that an establishment what could get away with calling itself a “tavern” in that town (but that in New York wouldn’t have amounted to more than a cheap dive) was located inside. I wasn’t at all sure how smart it was for a woman and a kid to head into a place like that alone, and I think Miss Howard could read the worry in my face: she pulled out her pearl-handled revolver and let me get a glimpse of it.
“Ready?” was all she said, as she slipped the gun back amongst the folds of her dress.
I nodded to her, though I was still plenty nervous. “Okay,” I said, and then I pulled open the screen door of the old clapboarded building.
The room inside reeked of all the usual stenches—beer, booze, smoke, urine—but, being as it also sat on top of a nice dead part of the Hudson, rotten river water got into the mixture, too. There was a long bar and a pocket billiard table, and the joint was lit (or something like it) by a half-dozen kerosene lamps. About twenty men were scattered around, only a few of them talking or doing anything at all, other than staring at the walls and out the windows with the dead eyes of hardworking characters engaging in the only recreation they’d ever known or were ever likely to know: sitting and nursing a stiff drink. As’ll happen in such places in such towns, they all turned toward the door at the same time when we entered; and it was a bit of a surprise for us to see, standing at the corner of the bar, the same man we’d been talking to not three minutes earlier. Whatever Libby Fraser’d done and been in that town, it was powerful enough to make a big, tired man run a long, roundabout route at what must’ve been a flat-out pace so’s to be able to warn his pals that there were strangers in town asking questions about her. Miss Howard nodded in the man’s direction. “Hello,” she said quietly; but the man just turned back to the bar like he’d never seen us before. Not sure of her next move, Miss Howard looked to me.
I waited for the low mumbling in the room to start up again before I said, “The bartender,” very quietly. We found an empty space at the far end of the bar, then waited for the thin, sour-faced man behind it to come our way. He didn’t say anything, just looked at Miss Howard coldly.
“Good evening,” she said, trying the common pleasantries again. But they didn’t work any better this time around: the man just kept staring at here. “We’re trying to find out some information—”
“Don’t sell it,” the bartender answered. “Got drinks. That’s all.”
“Ah.” Miss Howard considered that for a second, then said, “Well, in that case, I’ll have a whiskey. And a root beer for my friend.”
“Got lemonade,” the man answered, turning the cold stare to me for a second.
“Okay, so lemonade,” I said, not wanting the mug to know he was making me nervous.
It took the bartender only a few seconds to fetch the drinks, and as Miss Howard laid down some money, she said, “We don’t expect the information to be free …”
But that just seemed to frost the bartender even more: his eyes got thin, and he leaned over the bar to her. “Now, you listen to me, missy—” All of a sudden every man in the place was staring at us again. “You already been told that there ain’t nobody in this town that’s going to talk to you about Libby Fraser. She ain’t the smartest, person in the world for anybody to talk about—including strangers.”
Miss Howard glanced around the dark, dirty room quickly, then asked, “I don’t understand. What is it that you’re all so afraid of?”
A flutter of dread went through me: we weren’t in the kind of place where you wanted to go accusing men of being cowards. But oddly, the bartender didn’t leap straight down Miss Howard’s throat, nor did anybody else who’d heard the question. They just kept staring steadily, and finally the bartender, in a hushed voice, answered, “Fear’s nothing but common sense sometimes. So’s keeping your mouth shut. And after what happened to the Muhlenbergs—”
“The Muhlenbergs?” Miss Howard repeated; but the bartender caught himself, realizing he’d said too much.
“Just finish up your drinks and get out of here,” he said, walking down to the other end of the bar.
“Can’t you at least tell us where these people live?” Miss Howard asked, pushing our luck. “I don’t think you understand, we’re conducting an investigation that may result in the woman’s being brought up on serious criminal charges.”
Everybody in the room just stayed silent. Then one mug in a corner whose face we couldn’t see said, “They live in the old yellow house at the south end of town.”
“You shut the hell up, Joe!” the bartender growled.
“What for?” the man in the corner said. “If they’re gonna go after the bitch—”
“Yeah?” said the man we’d spoken to on the street. “And what if they don’t get her, and she finds out you were part of their trying?”
“Oh …” It wasn’t much more than a scared whisper; but it was the last we heard from the fellow in the shadows.
“I ain’t gonna tell you again,” the bartender said. “Finish your drinks and leave.”
The smart move seemed to be to follow the order, being as the atmosphere in the place was becoming very uncomfortable. Fear was having its usual effect on ignorant people, making them antsy and prone to violence; and I figured that we’d best be getting back outside, and maybe back out of town altogether. Miss Howard, unfortunately, saw things differently. When I tapped her shoulder and then started toward the door, she did follow; but as we reached the end of the bar, she paused one more time to look at the collection of faces in the room.
“Is every man in this town afraid of her?” she asked.
Knowing that she was now definitely going beyond what those boys would accept quietly, I fairly pushed Miss Howard out the door and then on toward the buck-board, though she wasn’t very happy about it: she wasn’t a woman to back down in the face of male bullying or threats, and the behavior of the men in the bar had only made her more determined to stick around Stillwater and find something out. Because of that, we didn’t end up moving north and out of town again when we got back on our rig, but kept going south, until we rolled up to an old, run-down house. The place might have been yellow at some point in time, but now it was just a mass of dead climbing plants and peeling paint. The faint light of a lantern could be seen through one window, and once or twice the silhouette of a person passed in front of it.
“We going in?” I asked, hoping that maybe there was still some way Miss Howard would change her mind.
“Of course we’re going in,” she answered quietly. “I want to know what the hell happened here.”
Nodding in what you might call resignation, I got down off the buckboard, then followed Miss Howard past the broken-down little fence what ran around the overgrown front yard. We got to the front door, and Miss Howard was about to knock; then I made out something in the darkness away to the side of the house.
“Miss,” I said, nudging her with my elbow and then pointing. “Maybe you want to look over there …”
Turning, Miss Howard followed my finger to take in the sight of some black ruins in the lot next door. They were obviously the remains of another house, being as two crumbling chimneys stood at either end; and even by the faint light of the moon we could see a couple of cast-iron stoves and some bathroom fixtures—a tub and a sink—lying in the rubble. There were young trees and shrubs growing in the midst of it all, indicating that the fire what had destroyed the place hadn’t occurred any time recently.
All in all, the scene called to mind the old Hatch place in Ballston Spa very quickly.
“So…” Miss Howard whispered, taking a couple of steps away from the door and studying the grim wreckage. It seemed to me like we were both thinking the same thing: maybe those boys in the tavern had been right to be so fearful.
>
“Wouldn’t want to’ve been in that house,” I said quietly. “Fire like that’d be pretty tough to survive.”
“Impossible, I’d think,” Miss Howard answered, nodding.
But as it turned out, she was wrong: something had survived that fire. Not just something but someone—and we were about to meet her.
CHAPTER 36
All we ever saw of that dark little house on the south edge of Stillwater was the front hall and the sitting room; but the memory of those spaces is burned so deep in my brain that I could probably re-create them right down to the thousand tiny cracks that were spread out through the walls like so many dying blood vessels. For the purposes of this story, though, it’ll be enough to say that we were let into the place, after knocking, by an old Negro woman, who looked us over with an expression what said that they didn’t get many callers in that house, and that such a state of affairs suited them just fine.
“Hello,” Miss Howard said to the woman, as we stepped inside the door. “I know it’s late, but I was wondering if either Mr. or Mrs. Muhlenberg might be home?”
The old black lady gave my companion a hard, slightly shocked look. “Who are you?” she asked. But before Miss Howard could answer the question, she took care of it herself: “Must be strangers hereabouts—there ain’t no Mr. Muhlenberg. Hasn’t been these ten years or more.” Miss Howard took in that information with a slightly embarrassed look, then said, “My name is Sara Howard, and this is”—pointing to me, she tried to find an explanation what would wash in the situation—“my driver. I’m working for the Saratoga County district attorney’s office, investigating a case that involves a woman who once lived in this town. Her name then was Libby Fraser. We were told that the Muhlenbergs had some contact with her—”
The old woman’s eyes went wide and she held up an arm, trying to herd us back outside. “No,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “Unh-unh! Are you crazy? Comin’ around here, askin’ questions about—you just get out!”
But before she could shoo us back into the night, a voice drifted out from the sitting room. “Who is it, Emmeline?” a woman asked, her voice cracking roughly. “I thought I heard someone say … Emmeline! Who is it?”
“Nothin’ but some lady askin’ questions, ma’am,” the old woman answered. “I’m sendin’ her away, though, don’t worry!”
“What kind of questions?” the voice answered—and as it did, I took note of what the Doctor would’ve called a paradoxical quality in the thing: the sound itself indicated someone of about the black woman’s age, but the tone and pacing of the words were very sharp, and seemed to come from someone much younger.
The woman at the door filled up with dread as she sighed and called out, “About Libby Fraser, ma’am.”
There was a long silence, and then the voice from the living room spoke much more quietly: “Yes. That’s what I thought I heard…. Did she say she’s from the district attorney’s office?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then show her in, Emmeline. Show her in.”
Reluctantly, the black woman stepped aside to let me and Miss Howard wander down the cavelike hall and into the sitting room.
You couldn’t have put a color to the cracked walls in that chamber, or to the patches of ancient paper what still clung to a few small spots on them. The furniture what was clustered around the heavy table that held the lamp was also in a state of decrepitude. The dim yellow light of the lamp’s small, smoky flame spread toward but not into the corners of the room; and it was in one of those corners that our “hostess” sat on a ratty old divan, a handmade comforter covering her legs and most of her body. She was holding an old fan in front of her face, slowly moving it to cool herself; at least, that was what I thought she was doing. And so far as it was possible to tell, there wasn’t another soul in the house.
“Mrs. Muhlenberg?” Miss Howard asked quietly, looking into the dark corner.
“I didn’t know,” the scratchy voice answered, “that the district attorney had taken to employing women. Who are you?”
“My name is Sara Howard.”
The head behind the fan nodded. “And the boy?”
“My driver,” Miss Howard said, smiling to me. “And my bodyguard.” She turned back to Mrs. Muhlenberg. “It seems I need one, in this town.”
The shadowy head just kept nodding. “You’re asking about Libby Fraser. She’s a dangerous subject …” In a sudden rush, Mrs. Muhlenberg took in a big gulp of air with a moan what would’ve raised the hackles on a dead man. “Please,” she went on after a few seconds, “sit…”
We found two straight-backed chairs that looked a little sturdier than the other items in the room, and tried to settle in.
“Mrs. Muhlenberg,” Miss Howard said. “I confess that I’m a little puzzled. We—I—certainly didn’t come here looking for trouble. Or with the intention of offending anyone. But it seems that the mere mention of Libby Fraser ‘s name—”
“You saw what’s left of the house next door?” Mrs. Muhlenberg cut in. “That used to be my house. My husband’s, actually. We lived there with our son. The people of this town don’t want to see their own places reduced to charred brick and ashes.”
Miss Howard absorbed that for a few seconds. “You mean—she did that? Libby Fraser?”
The head started to nod again. “Not that I could ever have proved it. Any more than I could’ve proved that she killed my child. She’s much too clever …”
The mention of another dead kid, coming in a town and a house like that, had me ready to dive through the sitting room window, get onto the buckboard, and whip our little Morgan until we were all the way back to New York. But Miss Howard never flinched.
“I see,” she said, in a low but firm tone. “I think you ought to know, Mrs. Muhlenberg, that Assistant District Attorney Picton is preparing an indictment against the woman you knew as Libby Fraser for murder—the murder of her own children.”
That brought another one of those pitiable gasps from behind the fan, and one foot at the end of the divan began to shake noticeably. “Her own—” The foot suddenly grew still. “When? Where?”
“Three years ago—in Ballston Spa.”
Still another gasp floated our way. “Not the shooting—the one they said was a Negro?”
“Yes,” Miss Howard answered. “You know about it?”
“We heard rumors,” Mrs. Muhlenberg said. “And a party of men searched the town. Those were Libby’s children?”
“They were. And we believe she killed them. Along with several others in New York City.”
A different sort of sound now came from behind the fan; and after a few seconds I made it out as hoarse sobbing. “But why should I be shocked?” Mrs. Muhlenberg finally said quietly. “If any woman could do such a thing, it would be Libby.”
Leaning forward, Miss Howard put all the sympathy she was capable of—which was a very great deal, especially when she was dealing with a member of her own sex—into her next question: “Can you tell me what happened here, Mrs. Muhlenberg? It may help us in our effort to prosecute her.”
There was another pause, and then the soft sobbing stopped; but the foot started twitching again. “Will she be executed?”
Miss Howard nodded. “It’s very possible.”
Mrs. Muhlenberg’s voice now filled with a kind of relief, maybe even excitement. “If she can die—if you can bring that about—then yes, Miss Howard. I’ll tell you what happened.”
Very quietly and carefully, Miss Howard produced a pad and a pencil, ready to take notes. As Mrs. Muhlenberg launched into her tale, the old black woman left the room shaking her head, as if listening to the story was more than she could stand.
“It was a long time ago,” Mrs. Muhlenberg began. “Or maybe it wasn’t, to most people’s way of thinking. The late summer—1886. That’s when she came to us. My husband’s family owned one of the mills here in town. We moved into the house next door right after our marriage. It had been his gr
andmother’s. Oh, it was a beautiful place, with wonderful gardens leading down to the river…. The caretaker of the estate lived in this house then. That summer our first child was born. Our only child. I was unable to nurse him, and we advertised for a wet nurse. Libby Fraser was the first applicant, and we both found her charming.” The small gasp of a dead laugh punctuated the statement. “Charming … I always thought, to tell you the truth, that my husband found her a little too charming. But she was desperate for the work, desperate to please—desperate in every way. And I sympathized with that. I sympathized …”
After a long pause, Miss Howard gambled a question: “And how soon did your son begin to have problems with his health?”
Mrs. Muhlenberg nodded her head again, slowly. “So. You do know about Libby…. Yes, he got sick. Colicky, we all thought at first, nothing more than that. I could calm him, and did, as much as possible—but I couldn’t feed him, and being with Libby always seemed to make him worse. Hour after hour of crying, for days on end…. But we didn’t want to let the girl go—she really had been so desperate for the work, and she was trying so hard. But before long there was no choice. Michael—my son—just didn’t respond to her care. We decided that we had to find someone else.”
“How did Libby take the news?” Miss Howard asked.
“If only she had taken the hews!” Mrs. Muhlenberg answered, her voice still soft, but passionate and heartbroken, too. “If only we’d made her take it, and forced her to go…. But she was so crushed when we told her, and begged so earnestly for one more chance, that we couldn’t help giving it to her. And things did change, after that. Things did change…. Michael’s health took a turn—for the better, we thought at first. His fits of crying and colic calmed, and it seemed as if he was accepting Libby’s care. But it was an evil calm—a sign of illness, not happiness. A slow, wasting illness. He lost color and weight, and Libby’s milk passed through him like water. But it wasn’t water. It wasn’t water …”