Free The Evidence Against Her by Robb Forman Dew

for Columbus, where he kept rooms at the Curtis Hotel while the legislature was in session, and Catherine Claytor grew restless in the waning hours of that Sunday afternoon in September. Edson followed worriedly in her wake as she drifted from room to room through the tail end of the day. At supper, when she was lost in some remote musing all her own, he became overly animated in anxiety, and when he knocked his water glass off the table, Agnes and the other two simply kept their heads down, but Catherine didn’t take much notice. “Just leave it, Edson. Don’t cut yourself. Mrs. Longacre will get Betsy to take care of it in the morning,” she said, and her older three children were—each one separately— ashamed to have felt a clutch of panic when the glass had shattered on the carpet in a series of subtly ringing, fragile little chinks.
    And, in fact, Agnes swept it up after she cleared the table, because she knew that Mrs. Longacre didn’t like any of the Claytors much except her father and perhaps Edson. Agnes never let herself browse for long in that particular region of her own deep shame. It had been she, when she was nearly ten years old, who had been so inept at taking care of Edson that when her father arrived home earlier than usual late one afternoon he had come into the house looking for his wife and had found Agnes desperately trying to quiet the baby. Agnes had been trying to coax Edson quiet through the bars of his crib, sitting back on her haunches to be at his level, holding up offerings of toys, but he had only turned his head back and forth frantically, with loud whoops of angry despair. Finally she had climbed into the crib with him, meaning only to rock him, because she wasn’t tall enough to lift him over its high sides, but she had resorted to a desperate jostling as his crying crescendoed in direct proportion to her efforts to calm him.
    She hadn’t even heard her father come up the stairs and had let out a shriek herself as he had clasped her by her upper arms, lifted her straight up over the railings, and set her on the floor. He had leaned down close to her face. “What are you doing to the baby, Agnes? What in the world are you doing? Where’s your mother?”
    Agnes didn’t know why she had been taking care of Edson at that moment or where her mother had been. She only remembered that her father had scooped the baby out of the crib, holding him with one arm, and taken hold of her own arm once more just above the elbow so that she straggled along with him down the stairs and out the front door. They went along the frailly established dirt path across the yard, catty-cornered over the field and through the vegetable garden of their old house, where the farm manager, Jerome Dameron, lived with his family, which included his mother-in-law, Mrs. Longacre. She was alone in the kitchen snapping peas when Dwight Claytor rapped at the back door.
    “We need some help up at our house, Mrs. Longacre,” her father said. That’s all Agnes remembered: the precision of each word as her father spoke in a soft, courteous, but chillingly brisk voice, and she never forgot Mrs. Longacre’s lengthy, inquiring, pursed-mouth scrutiny as she took a long look at Agnes and the baby.
    It was Mrs. Longacre who taught Agnes, and her brothers, too, when they were a little older, just the right way to make their beds so that the sheet didn’t come loose in the middle of the night. And it was she who tore all the bedclothes off any child’s bed left unmade and dropped them for that child to find in a tumbled heap on the floor as she made her morning rounds through their rooms, straightening up and putting away the ironing that Betsy Graves left each evening in the pantry. It was Mrs. Longacre who was appalled when the Claytor children came trundling into the front hall with their shoes still muddy, and it was she who, Monday through Friday, imposed as much regulation as was possible on Mr. Claytor’s