The Evening Spider (16 page)

Northampton Lunatic Hospital

Northampton, Massachusetts

December 20, 1885

A
nd that, my dear Harry, brings me to the arsenic.

Yes. I purchased arsenic. It wasn't long after I returned from hearing that young professor's testimony. About the octahedrons!

I confess: I wished to see them myself.

Martha was with me when I bought my ounce of arsenic at Fuller's General Store—along with ten buttons and a pound of butter.

Ma'am, it's customary for me to inquire why you are making this purchase,
said the gentleman behind the apothecary counter.

I recall keeping my eyes down while I explained.

My kitchen is overrun with mice, sir. And I don't like having cats about. I think they're bad luck to me.

Safer than this, though, ma'am. Is your baby crawling yet?

Not yet. I wouldn't buy it if she was, sir.

Very well. One ounce?

Yes, sir.

He packaged it twice and labeled it with big, commanding letters:
POISON.

I tucked the package into my coat and felt the terrible power of it all the way home. That evening, I put it in my oak box with the lock, and then inside my hope chest, beneath my wedding dress. So you see, it was safely stowed where it could not harm anyone. And I would like to tell you what else was in that oak box. There was a small square of white silk, a dead fly, a stick of pussy willow, and a collection of dried citrus rinds. Each was wrapped in its own paper package. I believe you, of all people, Harry, can guess what each of these items had in common? Each was something I wished to see up close, when I had the opportunity. I wasn't sure when that opportunity would arrive, but I was hopeful that it would. You had long since given away that old primitive microscope of our childhood. Nonetheless, life is long, and I had a brother in the biology department at Yale. Surely I'd have a chance to look more closely at these things—and others—sometime. That was the purpose of my queer little collection. I understood its oddity, and that is why I kept it a secret.

Haverton, Connecticut

December 12, 2014

I
t was dark when I pulled into the driveway. Chad approached the car as I turned off the engine.

“Where were you guys?” he asked, opening my door. “I was worried.”

“I just needed to get out for a while,” I said. “Since you said you wouldn't be home in time for supper, we ended up eating at the food court at the mall and just people watching.”

Chad peered into the backseat, where Lucy was dozing. “She ate food court food?”

“Uhh . . . no.” This question gave me pause, wondering if Chad was picturing me placating our tiny daughter with a Cinnabon. “She had breast milk and organic squash and pear baby food.”

“Did you know it's almost eight?” Chad whispered.

“Oh!” I feigned surprise.

“It's okay,” Chad said, unhooking Lucy's carrier from the car-seat base. “I have a surprise for you and Lucy.”

Chad led me to the living room, where a plump Christmas tree was set up in the corner. Our boxes of ornaments were shoved underneath. Chad set down Lucy's car seat by the couch.

“Oh.” I took off my jacket. “How sweet.”

“I put on the lights but wasn't going to plug them in till you got here. Figured we'd do the ornaments together.”

“Tonight?” I asked.

“Why not? And I got pfeffernuesse.”

“But you can't eat that.”

“Who cares?” Chad replied, and plugged in the Christmas lights. “I get to say pfeffernuesse
.
”

I glanced at Lucy, still asleep in her carrier.

“Are we doing this now?”

“Why not? Lucy seems pretty comfortable there. We can put her in the crib when we're done.”

Chad put on some Haydn string quartets because he knows I don't like Christmas music. I started to pull the boxes of decorations into the middle of the carpet.

“Sit with me for a minute before we start,” Chad said. “I need to tell you something.”

I nodded and took one of the boxes with me, opening it as I sat down next to Chad.

“Phil needs me to go to Chicago with him again for a few days.”

“Oh,” I said, unsurprised. I lifted up one of the ornaments from the box—a tiny knitted Santa hat with a jingle bell at its tip.

“It'll just be next week. I'll be home before Christmas. The twenty-first or twenty-second. But that's why I got this tree on the way home. I thought it might be nice to do this early, so we wouldn't be rushing and you and Lucy could at least enjoy a little Christmas spirit while I'm gone.”

He was talking fast. Maybe he thought I was going to chew
him out—even though we both knew this was beyond his control. This was his second business trip since Lucy's birth.

“It's okay,” I said, but I felt my chin wobbling.

I knew now that I would not—for some time, or possibly forever—be telling him all that I had learned about the house today. I had showed him Frances's journal the day I'd gotten it from Gerard, but I had not told him about some of the more worrying later entries as I'd read them. And now definitely wasn't the right time.

“We could ask your mother to come out and help,” he said.

Monty hopped up onto the couch and crept into Chad's lap.

I closed my eyes for a moment. “My parents already have their tickets for Christmas. They're coming on the twenty-third and leaving on the twenty-seventh. It would be stupid to have her do an additional trip.”

“It probably wouldn't cost her that much to change her ticket.”

Chad was now giving Monty such a deep, luxurious head scratching that Monty's head was tipped back blissfully, his eyes closed. Monty never came to me for petting anymore. He'd decided he hated me the day we came home with Lucy.

“I don't want to ask her to do that. Don't worry about it. I'll be fine.”

“Or my mother could come for part of it.”

I did my best not to give Chad a skeptical look. Chad's mom clearly thought breastfeeding was a weird hippie practice—and also seemed disappointed that I didn't bathe Lucy nightly. I loved Chad's mom on holidays and after two glasses of wine—anything beyond that was pushing it, and Chad knew it.

“I'll be okay. Really,” I said.

Chad's suggestion annoyed me, setting off a familiar sensation that I'd been fighting for five months.

It started the morning after Lucy was born. After everything was cleaned up and sewn up and we'd had a few hours of rest, Chad had gone down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to make a few more phone calls. While he was gone, Lucy stirred in her little plastic bed, so I hobbled over to her to pick her up. Her eyes fluttered open and stunned me.

I had the overwhelming sensation that I
recognized
her. Ignoring the searing pain in the lower half of my body, I picked her up and held her close to me. Her eyelids drooped again, and I stood there for several moments willing them to open again, swaying blissfully in anticipation.

Chad opened the door to the room, paper coffee cup in hand.

I got you a bagel 'cuz I bet the hospital breakfast sucks,
he was saying.

When I looked up, Chad seemed unfamiliar to me—his eyes as unrecognizable as Lucy's were the opposite. He could be any man in the world with his casual coffee and his talk of things sucking or not sucking.

Go away,
whispered a voice deep in my head.

The birth was still vivid in my head—the suffocating breathlessness of it, the graphically Sisyphean moments at the very end, and Chad's slack-mouthed horror in the corner of my eye.

GO AWAY.

The sentiment had revisited me several times in subsequent months, with fluctuating intensity and varying degrees of accompanying guilt.

Now the thought was confusing me, battling with an entirely different one:

Please don't leave me alone in this house.

“Abby?” Chad was saying now. “Are you crying?”

“No.” I sniffled and blinked and met his gaze. “I'm just a little tired.”

No, I wasn't going to worry him. The last thing we needed was for his insides to flare up again—to render him skinny and sad and unable to work. I was playing homemaker for just one year—as he was the sole breadwinner for just one year. Surely I could deal, on my own, with all of the home's little problems—the spoiled leftovers and unexpected guests.

“And hungry,” I added, hanging a tiny Santa hat over his ear and attempting a playful smile. “Feed me a pfeffernuss
,
darling.”

Northampton Lunatic Hospital

Northampton, Massachusetts

December 20, 1885

F
or a time, I forgot about my secret in the hope chest.

As the last delightful days of autumn left us, and November settled in, my girlish secrets faded into insignificance, and a heaviness came upon me. It was a familiar feeling—and one I did not wish to recognize. There was a nagging pull at my core, and distracting thoughts of blood.

With Matthew I tried to stay in exuberant spirits—to disguise my troubled state.

One time, I could not restrain myself. Over a roast chicken—a chicken I'd plucked myself, as Tessa had been engaged with the laundry—I began talking about Dr. Treadwell's corpuscles.

Matthew smiled gently at my use of such a technical word.

I do wish I could see one myself, under a microscope.

Oh, my dear Frances. Why would you wish to see such a thing?

To see up close this substance on which so much of life depends? Why would one not wish to see it?

I suppose . . . And yet I suppose I can appreciate something without the need to see it myself.

And yet you
had
the opportunity to see it yourself. So you have
the luxury of speaking of it so casually. Did they not bring slides of the corpuscles into the courtroom for the McFarlene trial?

Yes. Indeed. We used those resources as part of our evidence.

I wonder why John McFarlene did not create a better story to explain why there had been human blood on that wood and his shirt. Didn't he say it was probably from his wife slaughtering a chicken near the woodpile? Might he have at least said he accidentally cut himself?

There was too much blood for that to be a believable claim. Not without a significant wound to his person. Besides, he did not know that a scientist could tell the difference between chicken blood and human blood. He probably did not even know what a microscope was. Until it was too late to change his story.

Dr. Tipley's results were revealed rather late in the investigation, as I recall. Because Frederick Baines did not find that first blood-stained log till rather the last minute. Now, what has become of Frederick these days, Matthew? Does he no longer sell pumpkins? I haven't seen him in an age.

Perhaps he did not grow any this year. But yes. By the time Tipley gave his scientific testimony, McFarlene had already told the story of the chicken many times over.

The corpuscles told the true story.

Yes, darling. The corpuscles.

It often surprises me how unskilled people can be at hiding evil intentions.

It surprises you? Why?

Perhaps I've always paired deviance with cleverness?

That is folly, Frances.

I suppose you are right.

I suppose I am.

Haverton, Connecticut

December 14, 2014

L
ucy was crying—though not desperately, nor particularly loudly. She had a casual cry sometimes. More of a whine building on a sob, slow to cross over—though it always did, eventually. I slid reluctantly out of bed and lumbered down the hall.

I'd neglected to fully close the blinds the previous night, so she was awake with the morning light—sitting up in her crib, which I didn't realize she could do on her own. It was exhilarating—and admittedly, a bit unsettling—to see her that way, puffed up with such confidence in her own agency.

She was smiling a big, well-rested-baby smile. It wasn't until I was right next to her crib that I wondered,
Wasn't she just crying a moment ago?

And then I heard her cry again. Again that whining half-cry. But it wasn't coming from her mouth. It wasn't even coming from this room.

The baby in the crib was still smiling, her mouth unmoving. The baby in the crib, in fact, was not Lucy at all.

The next cry was more urgent. But where was it coming from? Not this beaming bald baby. The cry was, in fact, coming
from somewhere in the walls. The storage space where Florabelle lived, perhaps? Or somewhere else? With each cry, the location of its source seemed to switch.

Where
was
Lucy?

“Lucy!”

I woke up to an accelerated heartbeat and the sound of Lucy still crying. Chad was lying on his back, hands folded across his stomach.

“You really don't hear that, Sleeping Beauty?” I demanded.

“Monty?” he mumbled, moving a slow hand up and down his chest. “You're mad at me, Monty?”

“Jesus,” I hissed, slid out of bed, and stumbled to Lucy's room.

Lucy was lying on her back as I'd left her. The sun was coming up. I picked her up and settled into the rocking chair. She closed her eyes almost immediately. I breathed in her sweet warmth, which made the dream feel hazy and distant. We dozed together until Chad's alarm went off down the hall.