The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [204]
“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