The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [288]
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.