by Lisa Unger
“What about blood evidence?”
“Nothing visible. We’re going to do some Luminol later tonight. So we’ll see. Meanwhile, Eleanor Ross is expecting us at four, says we can speak to the twins then … with her lawyer present, of course.”
“Of course,” said Lydia and Jeffrey in unison, exchanging a look in the sideview mirror.
“I didn’t tell her about the warrants I’d be bringing to search their belongings at the apartment and at the hotel. I gotta admit, though, Lydia, it seems a little crazy to think those kids had anything to do with it.”
“Stranger things have happened. People use kids as pawns in all kinds of games. Some sicker than others.”
She could think of a number of cases she’d come across where children had committed or been used in the commission of heinous crimes. Roger Jeffers, a middle-aged New Orleans tax attorney, used his ten-year-old son to lure other young boys out of community pools and parks, then made him watch while he sodomized and then murdered them. Even the Cheerleader Murders case, the first that Jeffrey and Lydia worked together, had involved a teenage girl. Fifteen-year-old Wanda Jane Felix, who’d been tormented and humiliated by the victims, helped her mother to abduct and mutilate the girls in retaliation … though Mrs. Felix had done the actual murders. Then there was twelve-year-old Randy Crabtree, who sold raffle tickets door-to-door to raise funds for his school soccer team. When one eleven-year-old boy who was home alone claimed not to have a dollar to buy a ticket, Randy forced his way into the house and beat the child to death with a coaxial cable. Kids, they were growing up so fast these days under the careful tutelage of sick adults. True, the twins were young. But they were old enough to follow orders. Children made loyal and diligent little soldiers, eager to please, their only knowledge of right from wrong hand-fed to them. Okay to murder, bad to tell anyone about it.
They pulled off the smaller highway that they’d been on since they’d exited the Interstate and followed the signs to Main Street. Unlike some upstate New York towns that prided themselves on their quaint, gentrified downtown areas lined with pretty, well-kept buildings, sweet cafés, and trendy boutiques, Haunted looked as though someone had dumped it on the side of the road in the seventies and forgot to come back and pick it up. It wasn’t dilapidated as much as it appeared to be the victim of determined and persistent apathy.
The Taurus cruised up a street riven with potholes. An old woman hobbled along the sidewalk and took a turn into a bakery that didn’t have a name-bearing sign. The word BAKERY was painted in a fading baby blue on the storefront window. There was a hardware store and a barbershop, complete with the requisite red, white, and blue pole beside the door. The Rusty Penny was a diner that from the street looked utterly empty except for a bored-looking waitress reading a paperback at the counter. All the buildings were painted the same slate gray and seemed to blend into the sky around them. Some hardened and brown snow edged the sidewalk, though most of yesterday’s snowfall seemed to have melted away. They stopped at a light, though there was no other traffic except a decrepit red Chevy pickup behind them. It felt like they waited an inordinately long amount of time before the light changed again.
“Cheerful little burg,” said Ford. “Where should we start?”
“Let’s find the library,” said Lydia. “Drop me off there, then you and Jeff can go off and talk to the local police. See if anyone from 1965 is still around and willing to talk.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The librarian at the Haunted Public Library was as leathery and dusty as an old unabridged dictionary. Directed there by a gas station attendant who looked like he was high on something, they’d found it about ten minutes north of Main Street. As luck would have it, the local police station was just a quarter of a mile down the same road, visible from the parking lot of the converted old Protestant church-cum-library. Lydia would have expected to be treated with distrust and suspicion in a small backward town like Haunted; anyway that’s what she’d always heard about small towns. But the few residents they’d encountered—the kid at the gas station, the waitress at the Rusty Penny where they’d stopped to pick up some truly vile coffee—had seemed to barely register their existence. In fact, they seemed to barely register their own existences. The librarian was another story.
Lydia had been inside a few small town libraries. She’d expected a few shelves of bestsellers, some back issues of Reader’s Digest, and the archives of the local paper. She’d expected a gray institutional place with faux-wood shelving and bad carpet, fluorescent lights and the sour smell of apple juice spilled during a particularly riotous story hour. What she found was a musty old place, dimly lit. A heavy oak information desk with a gold-plated sign reading WELCOME TO HAUNTED PUBLIC LIBRARY, MARILYN E. WOODS, HEAD LIBRARIAN seemed to act as a sentry against entering. Two banker’s lamps with rich green glass shades sat atop the desk, casting a warm yellow light. Behind the desk, Lydia could see row after row of richly varnished oak shelving, stacked high with what looked like leather-bound volumes with gilt-edged pages. A staircase led to a gated loft, where more volumes could be seen behind glass. Off to the right was a cozy sitting area, where red brocade overstuffed chairs stood imperiously beside a long table the same varnished oak as the shelves. It was the kind of library Lydia would have expected to see at an Ivy League university or in some Gothic mansion.
“Can I help you?”
Marilyn E. Woods looked as though she had been born to be a librarian. She was a tiny woman, frail about the shoulders but with a long, graceful neck. Her graying hair flowed in thick curls down her back, a few strands pulled back from her face with a barrette. Her skin was as pale as moonlight. Wire-rimmed spectacles sat atop a beakish nose; the eyes beneath were dark and searing, wrinkled at the corners but glittering with intelligence and curiosity. She wore a simple black long-sleeved empire waist dress, and a jade amulet hung from prayer beads around her neck. She had an aura of belonging where she was, as if she were as much a fixture of the library as the oak shelves.
“This is a public library?” Lydia asked stupidly, the sign right in front of her.
“That’s what the sign says,” the woman said with a courteous smile and interested eyes.
“It’s just that Haunted doesn’t seem like an especially wealthy town. And this is a beautiful library.”
“It’s a public library funded by a private trust, actually,” said Marilyn, her smile widening as though Lydia had just said she was beautiful. The smile took about ten years off her face.
“Mind if I take a look around?”
“Not at all,” she said, hitting a button under the desk. A soft buzzer sounded and a low gate to the side of the desk opened. “Is there something I can help you find? I’ll warn you, most of the books you’ll find are reference materials that don’t leave the library. Some first editions of local New York writers, historical texts, old maps, genealogies of some of our more prominent families. I do have some shelves toward the back with some ‘popular’ titles.” The word popular seemed to stick on her tongue and then get spit out as if it tasted bitter. “And I can order most anything you need from one of the larger libraries if you have a library card. But I don’t think you do, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
The whole place smelled like wood and leather and Lydia walked up and down the shelves looking at the beautiful volumes there. She traced a finger along the bindings and thought she caught the slightest scent of lemon, as if the books had been dusted with Pledge.
She came to a narrow staircase that crept along the wall, the mahogany banister polished until it gleamed in the light. A small plaque at the bottom of the stairs announced that Haunted historical texts and genealogies were kept above and were for reference only, not to leave the library. Lydia looked around, expecting the librarian to leap out from the shelves and forbid her to go any farther. But she didn’t and Lydia jogged lightly up to the next landing. It was hard to believe that a town so small and innocuous co
uld have so many volumes dedicated to its town history and the people who lived there, but there were at least ten floor-to-ceiling shelves lined across the room and stuffed with leather-bound volumes. Lydia looked around for a light switch but didn’t find one. She made do with the low light that traveled up from the floor below and scanned the shelves. She went to the shelf marked Q-T to see what might exist on the Ross family and walked along that row, squinting her eyes and leaning in close so that she could read the bindings. Toward the end of the shelf, she found a book entitled Hiram Ross: Son of the Founding Fathers. She pulled it from its place and moved over to a table close to the landing where the light was a bit better.
She sat and opened the book. The book was in pristine condition and the now-familiar scent of lemons seemed to waft from its pages. She perused the table of contents and found a chapter entitled “Descendants,” then flipped to that page. What she found was a careful chart, dating back to Hiram’s great-grandparents, continuing through his marriage to a woman named Elizabeth Rye in 1856, who died early, before her twenty-second birthday, just a few years later in 1859. Less than a year later, Hiram remarried to a woman named Eleanor Hawthorne, who bore him a son and a set of fraternal twins, one boy, one girl. The chart covered several pages, reaching all the way to three generations later, to Eleanor and Paul Ross, twin daughter and son of Hiram’s great-great-grandson. The chart ended at Eleanor’s marriage to Jack Proctor, with no mention of Julian’s birth or Jack’s death. Lydia scanned back through the marriages and saw that Eleanor had been telling the truth, that the husbands of the Ross women seemed to die all within a few years of the birth of their children.
“What are you looking for exactly?” said the librarian, poking her head up from the stairs and flipping on a light from someplace Lydia couldn’t see. Lydia’s heart leapt, but she managed not to show it.
“How long have you worked here?” asked Lydia, not looking at her.
“Just over thirty years,” she said.
“Did you grow up here?”
Marilyn seemed taken aback by the personal nature of her questions. She hesitated, then answered.
“Why yes.”
“Does the name Ross mean anything to you?”
Marilyn laughed a quick, uncertain laugh and seemed to back away a few steps. “The name Ross means something to everyone in this town. Something different to everyone.” Lydia turned her eyes from the book. Marilyn looked as if she might turn and scurry away, but she didn’t.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Marilyn asked finally.
“I’m looking for information on Eleanor Ross and her murder trial back in 1965. And anything else you can tell me about the Ross family.”
A strange expression crossed the woman’s face, some combination of conspiratorial pleasure and fear, the desire to talk and the knowledge that she shouldn’t.
“I know the librarian can be the hub of almost any small town,” Lydia flattered, remembering how well Marilyn had responded to the compliments to her library. “And I can see I wasn’t wrong in coming here before going anyplace else.”
“Who are you?” asked Marilyn again, moving in closer to her.
“I’m Lydia Strong. I’m a writer interested in the case.”
“Oh, of course,” the librarian said, covering her mouth and the smile that bloomed there. “I should have recognized you. I’ve read every one of your books.”
Lydia smiled. The librarian had climbed the rest of the steps and now stood beside her, glancing at the book open in front of her on the table. Lydia held out her hand, which Marilyn grabbed and shook enthusiastically.
“Will you help me, Marilyn?”
The woman could barely conceal her excitement, but she recovered well and took on her previous air of authority. “Well, it depends on what you’d like to know. I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot you won’t find in these books.”
Lydia followed Marilyn back to her office behind the information desk and sat in a plush sofa. Marilyn offered tea, and when Lydia accepted, she walked from the office and was gone for a time. Lydia looked around the small space, made smaller by the heavy wood paneling and large oak desk lit by the same style banker’s lamp that had sat on the desk out front. Marilyn’s degrees hung behind her desk: there was a bachelor’s in English literature, a master’s in library science, as well as a second master’s in American history, all from Syracuse University. Lydia stood up to inspect them more closely.
Marilyn’s desk was predictably spotless and impeccably organized. A small pile of manila folders was stacked flush against the far corner of the desk, ten identical Uni-Ball black ink pens stood in a leather cup: A cup of tea, still steaming, sat on a coaster. A small, sectioned tray contained rubber bands and paper clips. An unfinished game of computer solitaire when Lydia accidentally touched the mouse. She must be bored to tears, thought Lydia as the librarian returned with a cup of dark oolong tea with cream and sugar.
“You said this library was funded by a private trust?” asked Lydia, sitting back down on the sofa and placing the tea on the end table. Marilyn jumped up to place a coaster beneath the cup and then sat back down.
“Yes, from the estate of one of the original settlers of this town, a man named Thomas Hodge. He is the ancestor of a woman who still lives in Haunted, a woman named Maura Hodge.”
She paused a second and then took a sip of her tea.
“Does your visit have something to do with the recent murder of Richard Stratton?” Marilyn asked.
“It does,” Lydia answered simply, not offering any additional information.
Marilyn nodded and a look of uncertainty crossed her features, as if she were unsure now that she wanted to offer Lydia what she knew. But after a moment, she began to speak. “The Rosses’ ancestors, originally from Holland, settled Haunted back in the 1700s. The land, obviously, was virtually wrested from the Seneca Indians, who are just one of the tribes that existed in this region before colonization. Mainly trappers and farmers, the settlers flourished here in the ‘New Netherlands.’ ”
Lydia smiled politely, not exactly interested in a history lesson. The woman must have read it on her face. “I know it seems like I’m starting a long way back, but I think it’s relevant to what you want to know,” she said.
“Please, go on,” said Lydia. “It’s fascinating.”
“By the beginning of the early 1800s the Rosses were by far the wealthiest farming family in the North. They also owned the largest number of slaves. In fact, before slavery was abolished in 1865, New York had the largest number of slaves of any northern state.”
She paused here and took another sip of her tea, looking at Lydia over the rim of the mug, gauging her reaction.
“The Rosses were notoriously brutal to their slave workers. In particular, Hiram Ross, Eleanor Ross’s great-great-great-grandfather, was rumored to have beaten and even murdered his slaves. Beatings, of course, were not unusual. But actual murder was rarer than you might think because slaves were extremely valuable. A strong young male could be worth as much as twenty-five hundred dollars, which in that day was an extremely large sum of money, as odious as it is to talk about human life in such a way.”
Lydia nodded her agreement and understanding. She felt cold suddenly and had the sense that the history lesson was about to get ugly.
“Anyway, Hiram Ross was hated and feared by just about everyone who knew him … his slaves, his fellow farmers, even his family. He was a thief, a liar, and, if rumor was to be believed, a rapist and murderer. He was believed to have fathered a great many children by his female slave workers; children who grew up to be his slaves, as well.”
Marilyn was by this time leaning forward on her chair toward Lydia, her face animated by the story she was telling. Lydia’s interest was piqued, as well.
“Now, Elizabeth Ross, Hiram’s wife, was not exactly a saint herself. In fact, she herself was carrying on an affair with one of the slave workers, a man named Austin Steward. They were bo
th young, no older than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and they were supposedly truly in love. Hiram was no fool and he learned soon enough about the affair. The story goes that one night, while he was supposed to be away selling the season’s crops, he came home early to find the two in the throes of passion on the parlor floor.”
Lydia could imagine the two lovers entwined on the floor of a grand parlor, the light from a full moon bathing their naked bodies. She could see a man enter and stand at the doorjamb, watching, his face contorted in anger, rage flowing through his veins.
“Hiram was obviously enraged,” Marilyn went on. “And Elizabeth, whether out of terror or cowardice or both, claimed that Austin Steward had raped her.”
Lydia could see the young woman, moving away from her lover, maybe gathering her clothes around her, hiding her naked body from the gaze of the two men … her lover and her husband, the circumstances having made them both hostile strangers to her.
“Austin was also married, to a young Haitian slave named Annabelle Taylor. Of course, that was her slave name. There are no records of her true Haitian name that I’ve been able to find. Hiram took Austin and Elizabeth out to the shack where Austin and Annabelle lived with their five children. He pulled those children out of their beds and asked Elizabeth again if she was having a willing affair with Austin or whether he had raped her. He promised to kill a child each time she lied. She lied five times. And Hiram killed all five children with a shot to the head while Annabelle and Austin looked on, restrained by Hiram’s slave drivers. Naturally, Austin was arrested and hanged. And Elizabeth, it’s said, went quite insane. She died of the flu the next winter.”