None of this, though, gave us any better idea of what we were going to do with our new ally. We didn’t particularly need anybody followed or rendered unconscious, at the moment, and he was bound to cause comment wherever he went in Ballston Spa-especially after I gave him the evening clothes I’d promised, which he put on right away. Strutting around like a peacock (he’d been right in supposing that the clothes would fit him), he looked ready to take on the world; but we all wondered if the world would be similarly prepared for him. Thinking for the moment of practicalities, a confused Mrs. Hastings put El Niño to work washing up the dinner dishes, a job what he took to with great good spirits.

As for the information Miss Howard and I brought back from Stillwater, it was duly posted on the chalkboard in Mr. Picton’s living room. Then we moved out onto the back porch to talk over the importance of the tale. It was no surprise to anybody that Mrs. Muhlenberg hadn’t known the full details of the Hatch case, being as she lived in a different township, which meant a different sheriff’s department-and small-town sheriffs were generally even less cooperative and communicative with each other than New York City police precincts. As for the poor woman’s refusal to testify, Mr. Picton informed us that such was no great loss, being as Saratoga County’s resident Solomon, Judge Charles H. Brown, was a stickler for trying every case on its own merits, and almost certainly wouldn’t have allowed any unproven allegations about something what’d happened ten years ago to reach a jury’s ear. The same held true for all the work we’d done in New York, which, our host firmly reminded us, hadn’t even resulted in an official police investigation. The case of Libby Hatch’s murdered children would have to be confined to just that; the only purpose Mrs. Muhlenberg’s story could serve would be to help us better understand the character of the woman we were dealing with.

What it offered us along these lines was further proof (not that we needed any) of just how clever our opponent was. The Doctor told us that Mrs. Muhlenberg’s little theory of how Libby’d killed her son, Michael, a tale what some might’ve written off as the ramblings of a woman driven half mad by grief, was very likely the truth: such substances as poison, taken by a nursing woman, can in fact pass on through her milk into whatever baby she’s feeding. As for the packet of black powder Mrs. Muhlenberg had found in Libby’s room along with the arsenic, the Doctor suspected that it’d been, to use his term, carbo animalis purificatus, Latin for “purified animal charcoal.” The rest of the world knows the stuff as “bone black,” and it’s commonly used as an antidote for many poisons-including arsenic. Libby’d probably kept it handy just in case she got impatient with her plan and took too high a dose of the arsenic herself. As for why she’d done what she’d done, we all knew the answer to that one by now: little Michael Muhlenberg had committed the lethal mistake of making it obvious that Libby didn’t have much in the way of maternal talents, and instead of just admitting as much and trying to find something else to do with her life, the murderess had concocted a situation in which she came off looking like a hero for her efforts to save a kid she was actually killing. It was the same pattern we’d identified in the cases of Libby’s “adopted” children, along with the babies at the Lying-in Hospital: the woman had been at her grim work far longer than any of us-except, of course, the Doctor-had suspected, or likely would’ve believed.

There was one bit of information what passed for a helpful clue contained in Mrs. Muhlenberg’s sorry tale: if Libby Hatch had been hiring herself out as a wet nurse, it meant that she had to’ve given birth to a child of her own, at some point. If Libby hadn’t been lying on the hospital forms we’d seen, and was now thirty-nine, then in 1886 she would’ve been twenty-eight, and said kid could’ve been anywhere from an infant to my age-although the fact that she’d shown up at the Muhlenbergs’ alone indicated that the child was probably dead (which came as no big surprise to any of us). But dead or alive, there had to be some evidence of his or her existence somewhere.

So Miss Howard and I would now be looking for more than just Libby’s parents, over on the east side of the Hudson: most probably, another child’s grave awaited us, too. The interview with Mrs. Muhlenberg had given us only a general idea of where to start our search-there was a whole string of small towns on the opposite bank of the river-and because of that we needed to get started as soon as possible. I think Miss Howard would’ve been just as happy to leave that night, but there was no way I was going anywhere in the dark again; besides, we owed El Niño his first night in the bed we’d promised him. Mr. Picton showed him to a room up on the top floor of the house, the two of them chatting like old chums as they went up the stairs: we’d been right in thinking that their vocal natures would make them friends from the start. As for what in the world would become of El Niño once the case was over, Mr. Picton said he wouldn’t at all mind keeping him on as a servant; it’d certainly give the citizens of Ballston Spa something to talk about. His fate happily decided in this manner, the aborigine dove into the moderately sized bed in his room like it was an ocean, pausing in his wild celebration only when Mr. Picton told him that Mrs. Hastings wouldn’t appreciate his rolling around in the bedding with my dress shoes on.

The Doctor decided that our new partner would continue to work with Miss Howard and me for the immediate future: it was impossible to predict what kind of new trouble our search for Libby Hatch’s origins would stir up, but it was safe to say that if we did run into more danger, El Niño’s talents would come in handy. This was an easy enough consideration to see and accept; what wasn’t so obvious, but would prove pleasantly true over the next two days, was just how amusing our companion would continue to be. As we scrounged around those villages on the east bank of the Hudson, with Miss Howard asking anybody and everybody she could find about the Fraser family, El Niño and I became better and better friends, clowning, laughing, and telling any troublesome or resentful locals we ran into just where they could take their small-town hostility. The aborigine’s fierce loyalty-now enthusiastically transferred to us, after years of being reluctantly given to the mean-spirited son of his original benefactor-caused Miss Howard to develop her own attachment to him, in a way what wouldn’t have been possible with your average American white male: there was no condescension or attempt at chivalry in El Niño’s approach to her, just simple respect for someone who’d done him a good turn.

We needed all the bright spirits we could muster during that first day of our search, for it produced nothing but negative answers to Miss Howard’s questions, and more moody, distrustful stares from the local population. The fact that we were pursuing a murderer didn’t seem to cut much ice with those people: we were, first and foremost, strangers, and no constructive goal of ours could remove that barrier. Wednesday night found us back at Mr. Picton’s with nothing to show for our efforts, but we got up before dawn on Thursday and headed out again, trying not to let frustration get to us. When sunrise did come, we were crossing the river on a small ferry, heading directly into the bright, harsh morning glare. It was a state of affairs what would’ve been sickening if it hadn’t been for El Niño, who lay in the back of the buckboard sharpening his kris and happily singing some song in his native tongue what he informed me was about morning in the tropical jungles that’d once been his home.

The rest of our morning was filled with more disappointment, as was our afternoon. Town after town, tavern after tavern, postal office after postal office went by, with Miss Howard diligently dragging herself into every establishment and asking the same set of questions about a family named Fraser. By the time the light started to turn golden, I for one was more than willing to acknowledge the hopelessness of our finding anything out before the grand jury convened: we didn’t even know, after all, if Fraser had been Libby Hatch’s original name, an alias, or the handle what the father of her first child had gone by. All we felt sure of was that somewhere-maybe in a completely different state-there was a grave with that first kid’s name on it; and as late afternoon wound on into early evening Miss Howard, too, began to think that maybe such was all we really needed to know, at least for the time being. If Mr. Picton found that he required more specifics concerning that portion of the woman’s life for the actual trial (assuming we got that far), we could keep trying to find them-and he could grill Libby about such matters on the stand, too. But more and more Miss Howard was starting to feel that Libby’s violence was as much a result of having been born a girl in an oppressive, hypocritical society as it was of any possible irregularities in her family life; and our fruitless, pressured search was starting to seem like a waste of time as a result. Needless to say, Miss Howard wasn’t one to put up with such a feeling for very long.