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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