The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [206]
After a long pause, Miss Howard gambled a question: “And how soon did your son begin to have problems with his health?”
Mrs. Muhlenberg nodded her head again, slowly. “So. You do know about Libby…. Yes, he got sick. Colicky, we all thought at first, nothing more than that. I could calm him, and did, as much as possible—but I couldn’t feed him, and being with Libby always seemed to make him worse. Hour after hour of crying, for days on end…. But we didn’t want to let the girl go—she really had been so desperate for the work, and she was trying so hard. But before long there was no choice. Michael—my son—just didn’t respond to her care. We decided that we had to find someone else.”
“How did Libby take the news?” Miss Howard asked.
“If only she had taken the hews!” Mrs. Muhlenberg answered, her voice still soft, but passionate and heartbroken, too. “If only we’d made her take it, and forced her to go…. But she was so crushed when we told her, and begged so earnestly for one more chance, that we couldn’t help giving it to her. And things did change, after that. Things did change…. Michael’s health took a turn—for the better, we thought at first. His fits of crying and colic calmed, and it seemed as if he was accepting Libby’s care. But it was an evil calm—a sign of illness, not happiness. A slow, wasting illness. He lost color and weight, and Libby’s milk passed through him like water. But it wasn’t water. It wasn’t water …”
Things were quiet for so long that I thought that maybe Mrs. Muhlenberg had fallen asleep. Finally, Miss Howard glanced at me with a question in her face, but all I could do was shrug, in a way what I hoped showed her how much I wanted to get the hell out of that house. Miss Howard was after something, though, and I knew we weren’t going anywhere ’til she got it.
“Mrs. Muhlenberg?” she said quietly.
“Mmm? Yes?” the woman answered.
“You were saying …”
“I was saying?”
“You were saying that it wasn’t water—Libby’s milk.”
“No. Not water.” We heard another sigh. “Poison …”
I shifted in my chair nervously at the word, but Miss Howard just kept pressing: “Poison?”
The dark head rocked up and down. “We had the doctor in many times, but he couldn’t explain what was happening. Michael was ill—terribly ill. And then Libby’s health began to suffer, too. That made the doctor think it must’ve been a fever, some kind of infectious illness that my son had passed on to her. How could we have guessed …” Her foot started to move nervously again. “I was suspicious. Call it a mother’s instinct, but I couldn’t believe that my son was infecting Libby. No—I was convinced that she was doing something to him. My husband said that I was so careworn I was becoming unbalanced. He said that Libby was exposing herself to danger to help Michael. He made her sound heroic, and the doctor did, too. But I grew more convinced every day. I didn’t know how she was doing it. I didn’t know why. But I began to sit with them when she fed him, and soon I refused to leave him alone with her—ever. But he never got any stronger. The illness grew worse. He was wasting away, and she was getting weaker, too….
“Finally, I went into her room one day when she was out taking the air. I found two packets in her dresser. The first contained a white powder, the second a black one. I didn’t know what they might be, but I took them to my husband. He didn’t know what the black powder was, but he had no doubts about the other.” Mrs. Muhlenberg seemed scared to go on,