“He’s worst in the evenings,” she said. “My husband, Henry. The evening isn’t a good time for him.”
“He was very polite to us,” Anna said.
“But his mind is wandering. He forgets. He imagines he’s back home in Munich, where he grew up. We changed our name to Stone years ago, but he forgets even that.”
Oscar said, “Would you like us to come back tomorrow?”
Anna was surprised at Oscar’s solicitous tone, something she hadn’t heard from him before.
She said, “No, no. Please come in. If we sit quietly with him in the parlor while we talk he will probably be fine. But he’ll speak German to you, please be aware.”
Anna might have told her that she spoke German, but she didn’t want to draw more attention to herself. Instead she said, “He was wounded in the war?”
“July of sixty-one, at Bull Run.”
“My brother died at Bull Run,” Anna heard herself say.
Both Jack and Oscar turned to look at her. Maybe it was the tone of her voice, or the fact that she had yet to tell Jack anything about Paul.
In the parlor Jack lowered his head to speak softly into her ear. “Is this too much, then?”
Anna answered Jack by taking a seat on a sofa that creaked with age. The cushions were ancient but carefully mended at the corners and backed with embroidered antimacassars.
While Oscar tried to make himself comfortable with a chair far too small for his bulk, Anna watched Mr. Stone, who sat in a rocker by the window with a small dog in his lap. He was talking to the dog in a way he might have talked to an old friend or a brother who simply didn’t talk very much. She heard him mentioning a carriage going down the street with a single piebald horse, a neighbor who seemed to have forgotten his hat, children chasing fireflies in the new dark.
The dog seemed to understand it all, looking obediently where his attention was directed. His tail gave a thump whenever a name was mentioned, as if to comment.
Oscar was saying, “Now, I believe you said that you left to visit your sister on the day before Mrs. Campbell’s death. Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right. In Albany.”
“That’s a long way to go for a one-day visit. You’d almost have to turn around and come back within a few hours. You were home on Thursday morning?”
A little color had begun to creep into her face, but she nodded.
“Did you go to the train station with Mrs. Campbell and her sons that Wednesday?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was hoarse now, and she cleared her throat. “To help with the boys. Why do you ask?”
“Mrs. Stone,” Oscar said. “Where are the boys you helped Mrs. Campbell hide away?”
The room was completely silent but for the ticking of the mantel clock. Anna, as surprised as Mrs. Stone seemed to be, watched the older woman’s face flush and then drain of all color. Her fingers were working in her skirts, gathering the fabric and then smoothing it, again and again. Jack and Oscar waited patiently, nothing to read from their faces, no judgment or disapproval.
Mrs. Stone cleared her throat again. “What do you mean?”
“I would like to know where the Campbell boys are. Archer, Steven—”
Mr. Stone turned toward them.
“Kommen die Buben heut’ abend?” There was real excitement and pleasure in his expression. “Kommen die Buben endlich?”
“Nein,” said his wife. “Noch nicht.”
Below shaggy eyebrows the blue eyes lowered in disappointment. “Schade,” he said. “Montgomery, die Buben kommen immer noch nicht.”
“My husband loves those boys,” Mrs. Stone said, a little stiffly. “He asks for them every day, many times. I can’t explain to him.”
“What can’t you explain?” Oscar asked.
“That they are gone away. That they won’t be back. I tell him but he doesn’t believe me.”
“Because he expects to see them again,” Anna suggested.
Oscar asked again, quite gently. “Mrs. Stone. What happened to the boys?”
She gave a sharp shake of the head and lowered her chin to her chest. When she looked up again she said, “Which one? Which one do you want to know about? Let’s start with Steven. Nobody at the inquest asked where the older boys were when the baby was coming into the world. If they had asked me I would have said. I would have told God and man about those poor boys.
“Because they were right here with us, with me and Henry. Junior and Gregory were playing with a puzzle in the kitchen and I was tending to Steven. He had bloody stripes on his legs and bottom and his back too, and it wasn’t the first time, wasn’t going to be the last, either. Their father used the buckle end of his belt to beat them with. The scars will last those boys a lifetime. And poor Junior—”
She sat back, breathless, her mouth pressed hard.