It had taken only a day to get all this testimony in, and measured as a whole it represented, Mr. Picton said, further proof (not that we needed any) that Mr. Darrow was truly the master of arguing in the negative. Without ever putting his client on the stand (always a dangerous thing for the defense to do in a murder trial), he’d managed to tear apart the state’s assertions with logic what was so turned around-ass-backwards, even-that it seemed to make some kind of sense. Confused at first, the jury’d slowly become convinced; and all Mr. Picton’s desperate efforts to point out that it was plain verbal trickery to say that someone had to be innocent just because they were sane while the crime they were accused of was insane just made him look, as he’d said the night before, like the voice of an older age. Mr. Darrow’s reverse and negative logic had the feel of a new century, of modern thinking, and so, indeed, it was; but as Mr. Picton had also said the night before, being new didn’t make it any more honorable or respectable-just more effective with juries. Which in the end, I suppose, is the only thing what most lawyers have ever considered progress.
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?”