The Evening Spider (13 page)

Haverton, Connecticut

December 12, 2014

T
he Haverton Historical Society was tucked behind the Congregational church on the Haverton green, in a severe brown saltbox house with a cranberry-colored door. I parked in its tight, maple-canopied lot and nursed Lucy briefly in the backseat, draping us with a receiving blanket. While I waited for her to finish, I tried Stephanie Barnett's number again. The call went straight to voice mail.

As I straightened my shirt and wiped Lucy's mouth, I thought I saw movement in one of the long, narrow windows of the brown house and hoped I hadn't flashed a nip.

I hadn't heard of this place until yesterday. That was when I'd called the Haverton Library to ask how far back their
Haverton Heralds
went, and the librarian told me the paper had only been around since 1951.

“Then how did Havertonians get their news . . . uh, say, in the late 1800s?” I had asked.

“Can you tell me exactly what you're looking for?” the librarian had replied.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I knew that Frances
Flinch Barnett's journal had left me with an uneasy feeling, and I wondered if I could find something more about her or her family in old newspapers or other historical documents.

“I'm actually a history teacher,” I'd said, hoping this would gloss things over nicely as it had with Patty.

“Wonderful,” the librarian said. “Now, what we
do
have is a compendium of all of the mentions of Haverton or Haverton news in other Connecticut papers from 1720 through 1960. Some folks doing genealogy research have found that quite useful. We have a copy here as well as one at the Haverton Historical Society. Are you familiar with the historical society? Have you contacted them at all? In addition to looking at that newspaper source, you may wish to speak with Wallace Bradley, the curator. He grew up in Haverton. Knows its history quite well. He's a little gruff at first, but when he hears you're interested in nineteenth-century Haverton, I'm sure he'll warm right up. He's quite a treasure. Worked at the Beinecke at Yale for many years. Volunteers at the historical society now that he's retired. Shall I give you his e-mail address?”

I approached the maroon door and wondered what “gruff at first” meant, exactly. Or how Mr. Beinecke-at-Yale would respond to an infant entering his historical space unannounced. I hadn't mentioned, in our brief e-mail exchange, that I'd be bringing Lucy along. I knew this was borderline Obnoxious Parenting, but I was too desperate to risk having to postpone until I could find a babysitter. I'd barely slept since I'd read the final entry of the journal. Besides, Lucy would probably be content and quiet in her Björn if I kept the trip short.

I wasn't sure if I should knock or walk right in, as there was no sign on the door. It had large black hinges and an old-fashioned
latch. As I reached to unlatch it, the door opened slightly, and an eager brown eye peered out at me.

“Abby?”

“Yes. Mr. Bradley?”

“Please.” He pulled the door open wide and stepped backward to let us in. He was so tall that he didn't fit into the doorframe. “Wallace. And . . . who is this?”

“This?” I said stupidly, pointing to Lucy's head.

“This. Yes. Indeed.” Wallace Bradley stepped to my side to get a view of Lucy's face. His thin legs were so long that he had to bend down awkwardly to attempt to meet her gaze. “Hello . . . you. Your mother hasn't told me your name yet.”

“Lucy,” I said, praying she wouldn't scream at the sheer oddity of his body language.

“You two have the same eyes,” he said to Lucy. I held my breath, expecting him to say something about Lucy's seashell bruise.

“Come in,” he said.

I followed Wallace into the house. The first room was cream white with olive wainscoting. The low ceiling made Wallace look like a giant as he led me to a table with narrow wooden chairs. The room's wide old floorboards—like the ones in my own living room—creaked as we moved.

“I'm sorry I don't have a more comfortable setup for you two,” Wallace said. “We like to keep things colonial, you see.”

“No problem.” The wicker seat of my chair squealed under my weight. Lucy's eyes widened at the sound but relaxed again as I patted her back through her carrier.

“So you said in your e-mail that you teach at Brigham? The girls' school, correct?”

I studied Wallace for a moment before answering. He had a craggy face, tempered by sedate oval eyeglasses with nearly invisible wire frames. His gray hair was longish in the back, but thinning slightly on top. Intentional hippie style choice? Or forgot-to-get-a-haircut of the absent-minded-professor variety? I couldn't tell.

“Um . . . yes,” I said. “Not this year. I took a leave of absence.”

“So you're researching for . . . graduate work?”

“No . . . this really is just a personal interest. I live in an old house in town, and I've grown kind of curious about the house's history. The house belonged to the Barnett family—I guess they've been—or were—in town for over a century.”

Wallace nodded. “The Barnetts. Yes. Which house? They owned several properties.”

“On Miller Avenue.”

“Oh. Yes! Shirley and Ed Barnett lived there.”

“You knew them?”

“Shirley and my mother were roughly the same age, growing up in Haverton. They were . . . acquaintances, let's say. I don't know if either would say they were friends. But I know of the family, and I believe I know the house.”

“Well, when I started asking Shirley's niece and nephew about the house . . . Do you know them?”

Wallace shook his head. I started to explain to him about the journal.

Wallace took in a breath and curled a forefinger over his lips. As he did this, I noticed a thin scar—or maybe it was just a very deep wrinkle—running from his nostril to his mouth. “Interesting . . . Did you bring it with you?”

I patted my big black diaper bag. The journal was in the very middle, wrapped in paper and cushioned by Pampers.

“Yes . . . I wanted to show it to you and see if you could direct me to any information about the woman who wrote it. Her husband's name was Matthew.”

“Matthew Barnett! Of course. I've come across Matthew Barnett's name in a few contexts—mostly legal. Particularly when I prepared a display about the McFarlene murder trial of 1878 . . . that involved a man stabbing his brother-in-law . . . well, this is exciting. I'm quite eager to see this diary.”

I bounced Lucy on one hip while I dug for the journal.

“And I'm eager for someone else to see it, actually,” I said. “First of all, there's the authenticity issue. I don't think Shirley Barnett's nephew would have any reason to mislead me about this thing. But beyond that, I'm really curious about some things this woman wrote. She was
very
interested in a particular murder trial.”

“The McFarlene murder? Here in Haverton?”

I shook my head. “No . . . I've never heard of that. This was a big case in New Haven. A young woman named Mary Stannard was murdered. A minister was accused. His name was . . .” I paused. Something like
Humbert Humbert,
wasn't it?

“Herbert Hayden,” I said, unwrapping the journal and placing it on Wallace's desk.

“Ah,” said Wallace. “I believe I've heard of that trial. Was Matthew Barnett one of the lawyers?”

Wallace's knobby hand crept toward Frances's journal.

“I don't think so. I looked that up, and his name is never mentioned in any of the articles about it.”

“Hmm.” Wallace's hand was on the journal now. “May I?”

“Sure. Flip past the recipes on the first few pages.”

Wallace opened the journal in the middle and began to read.

“I . . . um . . . became a little concerned with this lady when I got to the end of the journal,” I confessed. “It ends abruptly, and she's kind of preoccupied with arsenic.”

“Arsenic?” Wallace's head snapped up and a flap of his gray hair fell into his face.

“The Mary Stannard murder trial had a lot of testimony about arsenic, and this Frances lady . . . she got pretty into it.”

An ache crept up my chest as I spoke. Frances had written somewhat obsessively about arsenic and then stopped writing altogether. What had happened after that last entry?

“Oh.” Tidying his hair, Wallace looked at me, then back at the journal, and then at me again. I could tell he sensed that I was unsettled, but he desperately wanted to binge-read the words of a nineteenth-century Havertonian.

“Do you have a bathroom?” I asked, hearing a slight whimper in my voice.

“Certainly. Through that room and then to the right.”

The privacy of the spare little bathroom eased the urgency of my nausea somewhat. I stared at the white toilet and wondered how difficult it would be to puke over Lucy's head. The toilet seemed unusually low to the ground—perhaps to accommodate the small dimensions of this room? Or else the town custodian had an extra toilet lying around that had originally been intended for the elementary school and installed it here due to budget constraints. I imagined Wallace perched on it, his long legs folded up like a grasshopper's.

Stop that,
I hissed to myself. I was a mother now and presumably
should avoid immature thoughts of that nature. And yet I was here because of one big, fat immature thought, wasn't I?

Ghosts.

Lucy cooed, bringing my attention back to her. She seemed to be studying my expression in the bathroom mirror. I smiled.

“Hey there, cutie,” I said.

I took a deep breath and headed back to the main room.

“This is extraordinary,” Wallace declared as I approached his table. “What a find! You've read the whole thing, I assume.”

“Yes. Unlike the Barnett fellow who gave it to me, I think.”

“I'm so glad you brought this in,” Wallace said, still hunched over the journal.

“Well . . . sure. But I'm wondering about this lady . . . this Frances Barnett. I don't quite know what to think of her. And the journal stops rather suddenly. You'll see.”

Wallace kept reading.

“There are spots,” I said slowly, “where she disturbs me.”

Wallace looked up. “Disturbs you?”

“I mean . . .” I wondered if I was being too dramatic. “I just would like to know what happened to her. Because of some of the things she wrote.”

Wallace leaned back in his chair for a moment and then said, “Frances Barnett.”

He squinted at me and repeated the name under his breath before pushing back his chair and walking over to bookcases at the back of the room. He ran his hand along a series of black books with gold bindings, then pulled one out and muttered, “Hm, 1870 to 1875. No.”

He replaced that book on the shelf and pulled out the next one.

Returning to the table, he said, “Why don't you sit down?”

“I'll try,” I said, shifting Lucy's position on my chest. “She doesn't really like it when I sit.”

Wallace nodded, then began flipping through the book. “You see, we're lucky here in Haverton to have this series of journals . . . well, not really
journals
. Logs of patients and ailments of a Dr. Graham, who treated most everyone in Haverton at that time. I've really only skimmed through it—it's quite long, and rather dry reading, as he was very meticulous and treated patients here for nearly thirty years.”

Wallace continued flipping pages, muttering to himself. “Jonathan. Wheelock. Nathaniel. Barrows. Caldwell. Mary. No.”

He looked back up at me. “There are names in those logs that don't come up anywhere else. So they're a great resource for helping us learn who actually lived in Haverton and what everyday life was like. Especially when cross-referenced with other resources. I haven't read every single page of his log, but I've read through quite a bit of it.”

“I see,” I said.

“There are of course a few surnames that come up over and over. Porter. Caldwell. Barnett. Dr. Graham treated many of these families' illnesses and naturally delivered a lot of babies. So that gives us a good idea of who was married to whom. There are the vital records as well, of course, but sometimes there are holes there. Now, leaving that aside for a moment, there are some notes in Dr. Graham's journal that can be cryptic. There is one particular thing that comes to mind now that you . . . Ah! There it is. Right here. Do you see that?”

I leaned forward to read the entry, gently holding Lucy's head
at an angle that would not allow her to drool on the elegantly handwritten page.

22 December 1879. Frances Barnett. No improvement in condition. Dispatched to Northampton.

“Frances,” I murmured.

“Yes. Frances Barnett. Dr. Graham's notes were, as I said, very dry. So there's not a great deal that's memorable. But
this
note was, the first time I read it.”

“Why's that?” I asked.

Wallace sniffled and gripped his nose, closing his nostrils between his thumb and forefinger. He seemed to be deliberating what he was going to say next. “Well, you know there is no Northampton in Connecticut, don't you? But there is one in Massachusetts.”

“Right. Where Smith College is.”

“Yes . . . But of course, that is not where this patient would be going. There was, for well over a century, another institution in that community.”

“Uh oh,” I murmured, resenting Wallace slightly for keeping me in suspense.

“The state hospital. Now, they certainly had euphemisms in the nineteenth century, but not so much for mental illness. In Matthew and Frances Barnett's time, they called it the
Northampton Lunatic Hospital.
”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Can I see that?”