The Evening Spider (32 page)

M
ary Stannard was brutally murdered in Rockland, Connecticut, on September 3, 1878. The Reverend Herbert Hayden, a local minister, was tried for the murder in late 1879. The
New York Times
articles quoted herein are real, as are accounts of the words spoken in the courtroom, including the scientific testimony of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Edward Salisbury Dana, and the other Yale professors. Dr. Johnson, however, had unnamed assistants working with him on his stomach experiments—and there I inserted the fictional Harry Flinch, Frances's twin brother.

Arsenic under the Elms: Murder in Victorian New Haven,
by Virginia A. McConnell, is an excellent resource for readers who wish to read more about the case.

The Northampton Lunatic Hospital was a real institution that opened in 1858. Between 1864 and 1885, the superintendent was Dr. Pliny Earle, who instituted a program of intensive work therapy (considered by some to be slave labor, as under Earle's leadership the institution's farm turned a profit). My fictional Frances Flinch Barnett would have been a patient during his term as superintendent. Dr. Earle kept very detailed records of the management of the hospital, and I have tried my best to make the details about the conditions of that hospital as accurate
as possible. According to most sources, conditions steadily worsened after Earle's departure, due in part to overcrowding. The hospital was renamed Northampton State Hospital in the early twentieth century, and remained open until 1993. It was demolished in 2006.

Haverton, Connecticut, however, is not a real place. The McFarlene murder trial is also fictional.

Many thanks to: Ross Grant, Lisa Walker, Laura Langlie, Carrie Feron, Nicole Fischer, Elise Bernier-Feeley, and Nicole Moore.

Meet Emily Arsenault

EMILY ARSENAULT
is also the author of
The Broken Teaglass, In Search of the Rose Notes, Miss Me When I'm Gone,
and
What Strange Creatures.
She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.

Your previous novels are mysteries, and this is more of a ghost story. Why the change of genre?

I never really considered myself a mystery writer. My first few novels just happened to have murders or mysterious deaths in them.
The Evening Spider
is a book that happens to have a ghost in it. I wanted a little change of pace, but still wanted to stay generally within the “suspense” category. I believe ghost stories were what really made me a reader when I was a kid, so it's my first literary love, in a sense. I always wanted to try writing one eventually.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Sometimes. I believe in them when I am alone in my house at night. Then the next morning I always talk myself out of it. I think that's a pretty common experience. There is a personal element of this story because I believed there was a ghost in my house when my daughter was a baby. It started when she was a few months old. Like Abby, I would hear a very human-sounding shushing sound on her monitor sometimes just as I was waking up to the sound of her crying. My house is relatively old (built in 1900), but I hadn't really gotten a “haunted” feeling from it before my daughter was born. The creepy experiences tapered off around her first birthday. Maybe
our ghost just likes babies and doesn't care much for toddlers.

How did you learn of the Mary Stannard murder, and why did you want to write about it?

My maternal grandmother was a Stannard, and her family hailed from the same part of southern Connecticut as Mary Stannard. I didn't know about the Mary Stannard murder until recently, however. Oddly, I grew up hearing that an ancestor of my grandmother's had been hanged in New Haven for poisoning her husband in colonial times. A few years ago, I asked my mother for specifics. She said she thought the woman's name was Mary Stannard. I casually Googled something like “Mary Stannard New Haven poison,” and all of this information came up about a very different case—in which a Mary Stannard was the victim, not the murderer. It was in the late nineteenth century, rather than the seventeenth or eighteenth. I asked my mother if the story could have gotten mixed up over the years. She said no—she'd also heard of the nineteenth-century Mary Stannard murder over the years and had probably just confused the names in her head. I'm still not sure of the veracity of the colonial-era story—but in any case, I got hooked on the Stannard-Hayden case pretty quickly. I found the
New York Times
and
New Haven Register
accounts fascinating. It is a very sad and disturbing case.

Of course, I still wonder if there is a family connection. A second cousin of mine who has done some genealogy research claims not to have found a direct connection between Mary's family and ours. But I think there is some connection. I hope this is not too creepy a thing to say, as my mother will surely read this—but there is a picture of Mary Stannard that was often in the newspapers, and I think it looks a great deal like pictures of my mother at the same age.

How did you research the Northampton Lunatic Hospital?

I went to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, which isn't too far from Northampton. At the time, the hospital was still standing, and I heard of students sometimes going to the site to get their Halloween jollies. Though I never visited the place myself, I'd hear about it often both then and when I moved back to western Massachusetts later. I was curious about it but didn't have much reason to research it until after I started this novel. I did most of my research in Forbes Library (Northampton's public library, where they have a wonderful collection and a librarian devoted to local history). The most helpful resource I used was
Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century: The Early Years of Northampton State
Hospital.
I also read many of the annual reports of Pliny Earl—the superintendent of the hospital from 1864 to 1885.

This is a ghost story and a half-historical novel—but it is also a book about new motherhood. Did your own experiences as a mother inform the novel?

To a point, yes. I do think that early motherhood did some interesting things to my brain—some positive and some negative. My postpartum experience wasn't as dramatic as Abby's. Ghost notwithstanding, I never took doors off hinges or hired a medium or fled my home in the middle of the night. But I think that something that happens to Abby—and that I experienced as well—is that once you become a parent, your perspective changes. I know it is a cliché, but I was surprised that it turned out to be true! Moments from your childhood and adolescence are seen in relief, in a sense. You suddenly see everything through the protective parental lens, and it can be terrifying.

Have You Read?
More by Emily Arsenault

For more books by Emily Arsenault check out

WHAT STRANGE CREATURES

The Battle siblings are used to disappointment. Seven years after starting her PhD program—one marriage, one divorce, three cats, and a dog later—Theresa Battle still hasn't finished her dissertation. Instead of a degree, she's got a houseful of adoring pets and a dead-end copywriting job for a local candle company.

Jeff, her so-called genius older brother, doesn't have it together, either. Creative and loyal, he's also aimless, in both work and love. But his new girlfriend, Kim, a pretty waitress in her twenties, appears smitten. When Theresa agrees to dog-sit Kim's puggle for a weekend, she has no idea it will be the beginning of a terrifying nightmare that will shatter her quiet academic world.

Soon Kim's body is found in the woods, and Jeff becomes the prime suspect.

Though the evidence is overwhelming, Theresa knows that her brother is not a murderer. As she investigates Kim's past, she uncovers a treacherous secret involving politics, murder, and scandal—and becomes
entangled in a potentially dangerous romance. But the deeper she falls into this troubling case, the more it becomes clear that, in trying to save her brother's life, she may be sacrificing her own.

MISS ME WHEN I'M GONE

Author Gretchen Waters made a name for herself with her bestseller
Tammyland
—a memoir about her divorce and her admiration for country music icons Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton that was praised as a “honky-tonk
Eat, Pray, Love
.” But her writing career is abruptly cut short when she dies from a fall down a set of stone library steps. It is a tragic accident, and no one suspects foul play, certainly not Gretchen's best friend from college, Jamie, who's been named the late author's literary executor.

But there's an unfinished manuscript Gretchen left behind that is much darker than
Tammyland
: a book ostensibly about male country musicians yet centered on a murder in Gretchen's family that haunted her childhood. In its pages, Gretchen seems to be speaking to Jamie from beyond the grave—suggesting that her death was no accident—and that Jamie must piece together the story someone would kill to keep untold.

IN SEARCH OF THE ROSE NOTES

Eleven-year-olds Nora and Charlotte were best friends. When their teenage babysitter, Rose, disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the girls decided to “investigate.” But their search—aided by paranormal theories and techniques gleaned from old Time-Life books—went nowhere.

Years later, Nora, now in her late twenties, is drawn back to her old neighborhood—and to her estranged friend—when Rose's remains are finally discovered. Upset over their earlier failure to solve the possible murder, Charlotte is adamant that they join forces and try again. But Nora was the last known person to see Rose alive, and she's not ready to revisit her troubled adolescence and the events surrounding the disappearance—or face the disturbing secrets that are already beginning to reemerge.