The Evening Spider (30 page)

Northampton Lunatic Hospital

Northampton, Massachusetts

December 21, 1885

Y
ou are wondering, aren't you, Harry?

Did I really see it?

Did I see blood on my kitchen floor?

Did I see Matthew cut open what was once a small wound and make it large—digging deep into his leg with his hunting knife?

Did I see him collecting a puddle of blood in my best cake pan?

Did I see all of this a mere two days before Frederick Baines noticed the odd thing about his firewood from McFarlene? Three days before they found more stained wood and a stained shirt in the McFarlenes' woodpile?

If I could be certain of it in December of 1879, when I finally wrote of it in my journal, how was I not certain of it when it actually occurred, in the summer of 1878? And if I so often get lost in my memories now, what is to say which are real and which are not? From where I'm sitting, is it even possible to convince you? Here below the white balustrade with the wire covering, to keep us from throwing ourselves over.

I shall have to try.

Let me frame it this way—

In the fall of 1878, I was ill in a way I had never been before. Had I not dropped or thrown a goblet and not been able to remember
which
? Had I not been feeling unsteady and fatigued, seeing colored spots, fearing certain death and perhaps, as a result, not caring what was real and what was not, for it was all the same at the bottom of a cold and lonely grave?

The birth and the early days of Martha's life had clouded the memory into insignificance. My “rest” had made me uncertain of much that had come before it.

But in the months since, I'd grown stronger and more certain. I'd heard the lawyers on the Stannard side and the Hayden side talk of deceptions and planted evidence and corrupt witnesses and bumbling doctors. I'd considered the barn arsenic and the blood on Hayden's knife. I'd considered all of this and then considered my husband's ambition. And John McFarlene swinging at the end of a rope. My mind was now clear enough to consider all of these things in one related category.

And I was not Rosa Hayden. I would not cover up my husband's darkness. I was certain of my own mind, at long last.

I wrote about it, with clarity and certainty. I even wrote of my resolve to tell you about it, Harry. Not to shout it from the mountaintops or tell all of my friends or even a single newspaperman. Just to tell one soul, for now. On Christmas, when I saw you again. What might happen after that, I didn't know. I thought you might advise me. Or at the very least, share the burden of my secret.

But Matthew came to me with Dr. Graham before Christmas. Dr. Graham and two nurses and a strong young man with
whom I could not fight. I was stringing popcorn and berries when they all came through the door. The sun was setting, and Christmas was three days away.

We think it is best for you, Frances, to go with Dr. Graham. We think you need another rest.

They let me kiss sweet Martha before guiding me to that carriage with two sturdy and determined brown horses. They came for me in the evening so as not to make a scene in daylight. The trip took two days since we spent that night in Hartford. But I was here by that Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas to me, Harry. Here you are and now, at last, you know.

Haverton, Connecticut

December 20, 2014

A
fter Fonda was gone, I went upstairs and laid Lucy in the Pack 'n Play with two board books, two rattles, and a stuffed turtle. She grunted and then squealed at the turtle, so focused on its rainbow shell that she didn't seem to notice when I slipped out of the room with a flashlight.

On my way down the hall, I reached into the bathroom for a towel. Then I opened the storage space by its small door and ducked in. It felt colder than usual inside the space, as it had soaked in much of the cold from downstairs. I shined my light briefly on Florabelle and then quickly threw the towel over her and moved my light beyond her. The U-Haul boxes at her feet were from the most recent move to the house. The ones farther along the space—labeled in blue and green Sharpies—were from our move together before that. Those boxes had moved from our first apartment to our second to here without ever being unpacked.

I knew which box I was looking for. It was a banana box, slightly larger than most of these, with the square opening at the top patched up with duct tape. I remembered closing up my
copy of
Rights of Man
inside of there, between a couple of other books and a peacock-embroidered pillow my grandmother had made. I had never opened the box after I'd transferred out of Rowan, but I'd hauled it with me wherever I lived after that.

Chad was as much of a pack rat as I was, so he never asked what was in each box. He simply helped me move them from apartment to apartment to house as he did his own.

I moved farther into the dark, bent over, shining the flashlight across all of the boxes until I reached the one with the bananas on its side. It was on the floor with three boxes stacked on top of it. After moving those boxes, I set down the flashlight and lifted the banana box top.

Rights of Man
was three books down, beneath Henry David Thoreau and a smelly paperback of Sophocles' plays. Wendy's note was still wedged inside—where I'd left it. Where she'd left it. I held it close to the floor so I could read it by the slant of light from the flashlight.

The words made my legs wobble. I tried to sit on the floor, but there wasn't enough room. Half-kneeling, I let my knee settle in the banana box and rest on the peacock pillow.

A phantom hand.

Couldn't Fonda have been talking about Wendy's words? And couldn't that make these words bearable?

Back when I'd first discovered the note, I had had to make a decision, and the decision came down to this: Wendy had already caused devastation. She had put into my hands one extra piece of wood for the pyre and instructed me to throw it. I had chosen not to.

It seemed the decent thing to do. I'd hoped. And yet—it was Wendy's pyre. Her one chance at a pyre in all of eternity. Should it not burn exactly as she liked?

But then—there was the issue of her heart being weak, and her dying with a dose that most would've survived. And the fact that she had taken that dose while I was in the room—albeit asleep—instead of waiting until she was alone. Maybe she had not expected to die. Maybe those words were supposed to accompany a rescue, and to be discussed with great emotion by a hospital bed. In which case—they were not meant to devastate—not really. And were rendered moot by her miscalculation.

I would never know which was the case. I only knew that my name was on the note, and so the burden of it was mine alone. And that once the decision was rendered, I really could not change my mind weeks or months or years later.

A phantom hand.

Maybe. Maybe the phantom was anger, or illness, or pain? And she had not meant them? Either way, the note was mine
now. A stab in the heart meant for someone else—a burden I could accept because I was numb to it when I was nineteen.

But I was thirty-four now, and Lucy was crying.

I stood up at the sound of it and bumped my head.

“Coming, honey,” I called, rubbing my head and hunching over to make my way out. I tripped over the top of the banana box but managed not to fall.

By the time I reached Lucy, her face was a deep red and wet with tears. She'd noticed she was alone, and she was angry about it. I held her close to me and paced the room until her wails turned to gasps and then to sighs and then to silence. We stood together by the window and looked at the snow, the bare trees, and the smoke curling from the chimney of the house behind our yard.

“You'll like winter,” I said. “When you're a little older. We'll make snowmen and snow angels.”

And then I tried to think of something to add—something to enhance her vocabulary. I considered telling her that I always found the first snow bittersweet, but that seemed a creepy thing to tell an infant.

My cell phone rang, so I shoved Wendy's note into my jeans pocket to free up a hand to answer it.

“Where are you right now?” Wallace wanted to know. “The no-tell motel?”

“No. My house.”

“Oh. I'm happy to hear that. But what about the window?”

“I've patched it up with tape for now. I'm going back to the motel in a little bit.”

“Bummer. Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Well . . . no.”

Wallace was silent for a moment. “Have you had dinner?”

“Lucy has.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

I put my hand on my stomach. It had gone numb several hours ago. I'd trained it to be satisfied with coffee and occasional bites of baby food.

“Because I was thinking of ordering in,” Wallace was saying. “Chinese. And I have something I want to show you. Something
very
illuminating.
Exciting,
really. I'll go that far.”

“And I've got something to show you, actually.”

“You had time to do a little research today, then?”

“Yes. Is it possible we're going to show each other the same thing?”

“Why don't you come over here for a bite, and we'll find out? You don't want to go straight back to that sad little room yet, do you?”

Wallace's apartment was a spare and tidy little place. His open kitchen looked out to a living room with a glass table and a beige sofa and loveseat set that smelled like the inside of a new car. There was no television—and a distinct lack of clutter that I wasn't sure should make me jealous or sad.

“Lucy's looking quite well.” Wallace sat on the loveseat and made a silly face at her. “Her bruise is pretty much healed.”

“Oh . . .” I said, looking at it myself. I hadn't thought about it much all day. Probably because he was right. The bruise was almost gone. “Yeah.”

“I don't suppose she'll let me hold her again?”

“Well. She's had a weird day.”

“Me, too, Lucy,” Wallace said. “I should have known that a day that began at Sweetly's was going to be an unusual one.”

“Things got weirder after that?”

“Indeed they did. Ralph called me. He said he saw you and Lucy in the library, and it reminded him that he had something he wanted to show us. So he invited me home for a beer. You'd have been invited, too, if you'd answered your phone. Now, I don't normally have beer at three
P
.
M
., but that's Ralph for you.”

Wallace leaned over the coffee table and pulled forward a piece of paper that had been sitting there.

“Ralph said that after we all chatted, he couldn't get the name ‘Frances' out of his head. He felt he'd seen the name before, in his family's papers. So over the past few days he's been looking. And he found this. It's a copy, of course. He scanned this for me. It's a letter from his great-grandmother's many papers.”

Lucy noticed the weakness in my grip as I finished the letter and grabbed for the paper.

“Frances” was all I could say as I wrestled the paper out of Lucy's fist.

“It's her handwriting,” Wallace said. “Don't you agree?”

“Yes. Amazing.”

Lucy grunted in agreement, grabbing at the paper as I held it away from her.

“It was memorable to Ralph, in part, because of its reference to secrets. Now, we might not know exactly what those secrets are. But what I found remarkable about this letter—and what I thought you would appreciate as well—is that it shows that Frances actually got out of the asylum. Eventually. By 1886.”

The note should have been a revelation—a relief. I couldn't determine why it made me uneasy.

“Couldn't she have written this from the asylum, though?” I asked.

“And made reference to her freedom? I think not.”

I nodded, sliding the letter back onto the coffee table.

“We
might
know what Tessa's secrets are, actually,” I said. “I wasn't able to print out what
I
found, but do you have a laptop?”

“Of course,” Wallace said, fetching his computer from the kitchen.

I told him to access the Connecticut newspapers database—as I had done at the library—and search for Frederick Baines.

“Third article,” I said. “From 1885. Not the two 1878 ones from the McFarlene trial. You've already seen those.”

Wallace was silent for a moment, reading the article.

“Oh my,” he said.

“It makes me think the
F
in Ralph's note—the one he showed us last time—has got to be Frederick.”

“And you think that was a suicide note.”

“Something like it. Now, I don't remember the exact words, but—”

“‘
Righteousness is elusive. He was right and I shall follow him for my transgressions. It is all true what I confessed to you. For a pittance, I sold my soul and another's.
' Ralph's persistence has burned the whole thing into my memory.”

“And doesn't that sound to you like—”

“Yes,” Wallace said. “Like Frederick is feeling some guilt about the McFarlene trial. Oh, my.”

“So Edward Cowan—by then Tessa's husband, right?”

“I'm not sure of the exact dates, but yes, probably.”

“So Edward Cowan had something on the Barnetts after all. Not on the old man. But on his son. On Matthew.”

Lucy wriggled and whimpered uncomfortably. I began to circle around the room but found few distractions. On one wall, there was a mural of Wallace's family pictures.

“See the baby?” I whispered, holding her up to a photo of a cherubic toddler in red overalls, sucking on the handle of a hairbrush. “So Edward Cowan maybe blackmailed Matthew Barnett with this note.”

“Maybe. And maybe it wasn't the
note
itself that Edward
used to blackmail the Barnetts,” Wallace continued. “Maybe it was just information he had. If we believe, based on the note, that Frederick was feeling depressed and remorseful about helping to hang McFarlene. Perhaps he gave his cousin an earful before he did himself in. And then we see that two months later Edward Cowan got that wildly cheap land deal from the Barnetts. And Matthew Barnett was the only person in that family involved in the McFarlene case. So it stands to reason . . . The ‘pittance' came from Matthew—the young lawyer eager for his first big prosecutorial win. Doesn't it?”

Lucy put her wet little hand on my nose, then slid it down to my chin.

“Absolutely,” I said, still bouncing Lucy slightly. “The ‘pittance' might be money given to him to help falsify that firewood evidence in some way. Maybe put his own blood on it, who knows?”

“Hmm. A possibility.”

An electric
ding-dong
sounded, making Lucy's eyes pop.

“Ah!” said Wallace. “That will be our dinner.”

While Wallace answered the door, I thought about the possibility of Matthew Barnett and Frederick Baines falsifying evidence together. And then I considered the date of Frederick's death. November 1885. Not long after Matthew Barnett lost his “Coin and Clock” case.

A case in which a forged letter
almost
helped him. Had it not been exposed as a likely forgery.

Don't you know they were written by a phantom hand?

“Abby?” Wallace said, plunking the take-out bag onto his kitchen counter. “You seem deep in thought. What are you thinking?”

“It seems to me that fakery shadowed Matthew Barnett wherever he went,” I said slowly. “Did you ever think that
he
was the one who forged that letter in the case with the old lady and the stolen coins and stuff? And not the accused man's wife? That either he did it, or he got someone to do it for him?”