“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 before?”

“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.