Mr. Picton paused and smoked, shrugging his shoulders. “Nothing to be lost, I suppose. I say go to it.”
“And you, Doctor?”
The Doctor looked at her with just the faintest trace of hope in his features; more, at least, than’d been there all night. “I’d say that you’re all going to need some rest. You’ll want to catch the earliest possible train, if you intend to have the full day in Troy.”
At that the four of us-Miss Howard, me, Cyrus, and El Niño-got up and headed for the screen door. We weren’t exactly confident, I couldn’t say that, but the prospect of actually doing something, instead of spending another day watching Mr. Darrow turn the Ballston court house into his private stomping grounds, was some kind of a relief, and I was glad to be included in the plan. The reasoning behind it did seem promising, too, even if the time we had to test it wasn’t much; and as we went into the house and up the stairs to our respective rooms, I took the opportunity to pay my own sort of compliment to Miss Howard’s brainwork:
“So,” I said, as we got to the second floor. “I guess being a ‘spinster detective lady’ leaves you plenty of time for thinking, anyway.”
I barely got into my room without catching a playful but well-aimed clip to the side of the head.
So began a new round of searching the Hudson Valley countryside, one what was both tighter in terms of schedule and less tedious in terms of method than all the riding around Miss Howard, El Niño, and I’d done before the start of the trial. We caught the first train to Troy the next morning, and managed to get to the Rensselaer County offices without too much trouble. Housed in a building what bore more than a passing resemblance to a bank, the offices looked out over a small park at the center of town, and from the windows in the records room the city didn’t look half so ugly as it had from the train. In fact, it had a sort of charm about it, or at least that particular part of it did. I suppose that impression could’ve just been due to the unseasonably cool weather and my thankfulness at not having to sit in the Ballston court house; whatever the case, I found that the first two or three hours we spent going through birth and death records passed pretty quickly. There wasn’t anybody else in the spacious room with us, except for a clerk whose biggest chore, besides fetching files for us, seemed to be staying awake. So we were able to talk and act pretty freely, a fact what quickly led El Niño (who couldn’t read English) and me (who wasn’t much use with official documents) to start clowning around among the chairs and tables, letting Cyrus and Miss Howard attend to the real work and only straightening up at those moments when we were told to roust the clerk and tell him to fetch another batch of files and bound records.
By one o’clock or so our horseplay had the aborigine and me pretty hungry, and we set out to find someplace to buy boxed lunches for everybody. Our behavior didn’t improve any as we went about this job, and on our way back to the county offices with the food we were taken aside by a cop, who, I think, was more bewildered by the sight of El Niño than he was interested in what we were up to. The bull walked us back to the county building, just to make sure our story held water, and told Miss Howard not to let us “run wild” in the streets. I had to resist the temptation to tell him that if such as what we’d been doing was his idea of “running wild,” he needed to spend some time in New York; after that he finally left, and we all went outside to the little park to eat.
Once we were back in the records room Cyrus quickly struck gold, in the shape of a small, beat-up book what listed births and deaths for a town with the peculiar name of Schaghticoke during the years 1850 to 1860. Searching for any entry containing the unusual name “Elspeth,” Cyrus found one not under the name “Fraser,” but “Franklin,” which had been the father’s handle. It was the mother who, it seemed, bore the name Libby Hatch had used when she moved to Stillwater.
“Do you mean they weren’t married?” Miss Howard asked Cyrus, as we all gathered around to look over his shoulders at the faded pages of the record book. “Libby’s illegitimate?”
Cyrus shrugged. “That might explain a few things about her behavior. And it ought to be easy enough to confirm. Stevie, wake our friend up”-Cyrus threw a thumb in the direction of the dozing clerk-“and tell him we’ll need the marriage records for the same town, covering, say, the ten years previous to-what’s the date of her birth? March eighteenth, 1858. Ten years previous to that.”
“Got it,” I said, running over to the clerk’s counter and rousting him by banging my hands on the surface of the thing, where he’d nestled his lazy head on a few books. Grumbling and cursing as he got to his feet, the mug dragged himself off to fetch the requested item, which turned out to be another small, dusty record book. I ran it back over to Miss Howard, who sat beside Cyrus and quickly started examining it, looking for any mention of people named either Franklin or Fraser.
“Here it is,” she said, after about ten minutes of searching. “Formalization of a common-law marriage-George Franklin and Clementine Fraser, April twenty-second, 1852.”
“There’s two other children listed here,” Cyrus said, still going over his volume. “George Junior, born September of 1852, and Elijah, born two years later.”
“Well,” Miss Howard said, looking almost disappointed, “there goes the bastard theory. It looks as though she simply adopted her mother’s maiden name as an alias when she left home.”
“And how do we find out when that was?” I asked. “Supposing we can’t locate the parents, I mean.”
“We know that she was working for the Muhlenbergs in 1886,” Miss Howard answered. “We could check the 1880 census-that’ll narrow things down a bit.”
“On it!” I said, heading back over to the clerk’s counter. The man heard me coming this time, and jerked his head up before I had a chance to give him another start; and when he reappeared from some faraway corner behind the counter, he evened things up some by dropping an enormous book onto my hands. Yelping as I grabbed the thing and turned to carry it away, I mumbled, “Nothing like a government job for improving your sense of humor, hunh?” then went back to the others.
From the 1880 census we learned that Libby Hatch had in fact still been living with her family in that year, when she would’ve been twenty-one. We also learned that George Franklin’s occupation had been “farmer” (no thundering shock), and that the two Franklin boys were also still living at home, where they worked as hands for their old man. The only other question what we figured could be answered in the records office was whether or not Libby’d ever been married while she was living in Rensselaer County: another check of wedding records, though, came up blank, leaving us wondering if she’d taken the vows in some other county in the years between 1880 and 1886, or if the kid we knew she must have given birth to had been born out of wedlock. We got no help with this last mystery from the birth records for those years, which didn’t mention anybody named either Franklin or Fraser bringing any babies into the world; and so, with all those questions still hanging in the air, we returned our pile of books and files to the clerk and headed back to the train station.
We caught the four o’clock local back to Ballston Spa, and the trip turned out to be a pretty merry and exciting one, given the information we’d come up with. True, there was every chance it would lead nowhere: it was impossible to say what the fortunes of the Franklin family had been in the years since 1880 (I still thought the odds were even that Libby’d done the whole bunch in), but at least now we had a legitimate place to start a reasonable search. Anxious to let the Doctor and the others know all this, we raced up the hill from the Ballston train depot to the court house once we reached town, only to find that court had already adjourned. So it was on down to Mr. Picton’s house at what became a dead run, to spread the word that hope for new information wasn’t dead yet.