Because of his job, John was mostly, however grudgingly, granted the benefit of the doubt, but Edith knew that even he wasn’t gossip proof. Joseph had told her his story: divorced after a brief marriage, his wife a restless type who should never have gotten married to anyone, least of all steady, quiet John, a few years spent living with his widowed sister and her little girl until a couple of years ago when she met a tourist at the boardwalk, married him, and moved away. Single, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with an unshakable aura of quietude and the ability to deflect flirtation like those new Teflon pans, the women in the town regarded him as either utterly dreamy or the dullest man in the world. How much of this he realized Edith wasn’t sure, but she did know that, while he’d sit on the screen porch or at the backyard table and talk for an hour, he steadfastly and politely refused her invitations to come inside the house.
On the first anniversary of Joseph’s death, it was John who found her.
Telling herself for weeks beforehand that it would be just another day, that Joseph would be no more lost to her on that day than any other, Edith had planned a short visit to his grave, a bouquet of flowers from the garden he’d planted and a little box of seashells in her hand, and nothing more. This she stuck to, sitting on a folded blanket she’d brought, running her hand over his gravestone, tall and white among the old pocked and tilted ones, and telling him about that morning’s canoe trip, how the shy, mica-thin gibbous moon had hung in the sky right along with the freshly risen sun, reminding her of the two of them; about the little girl guest from the week before who could, at three and a half years old, read from the newspaper; about how Edith had matted, framed, and hung his photographs of her so that she could remember being seen through his eyes every day; about the basket of apples someone had left on her doorstep; about how her love for him didn’t just abide but grew, fanning like a vine over the walls of the house he’d given her, sending tendrils into every corner of her life.
She stayed dry-eyed and composed, feeling that he was there with her, listening, searching for signs that she was all right. This feeling lasted all day. She came home to her silent house, glad she hadn’t scheduled any guests for that day, grateful to be alone. But then, after midnight, the grief rose, many-winged, inside her chest, beating at her ribs, bruising her from the inside out, so she ran out into the rain that had started a few hours before, ran across the highway, and onto the empty beach. Until she felt the wet sand under her soles, she didn’t realize she’d forgotten shoes. For a moment, she felt like a crazy person, her last lucid thought before she became one. For hours, she paced the water’s edge, sobbing, shouting, and swearing into the noise of the waves.
By the time John found her (she never learned how he knew she was there but assumed someone had called to report a lunatic loose on the beach), she was quiet, dazed, sodden, shivering, raw-throated, her hair like seaweed down her back, her thin shirt transparent.
“Here now, here now,” he said.
He draped first his jacket then his arm over her trembling shoulders and gently led her to his still warm, still running car, and drove her home. For the first time since Joseph had died, John came inside.
“Wait here,” he said, and she stood in the kitchen, holding on to the counter to steady herself, until he came back with a towel, some wool socks, Joseph’s old dark green, cable-knit sweater, and the quilt from the first-floor bedroom. He held the sweater up like a mother dressing a child and dutifully she ducked her head into it; then he walked her to one of the fireplace chairs, wrapped her in the blanket, and asked her to sit, while he built a fire. She put the socks on herself, and once the fire was truly going, he helped her dry her hair.
Then, he sat a few feet away, not in Joseph’s chair, but in one he brought in from the kitchen and, in his kind, low, level voice, began to talk. About growing up in Baltimore, about baseball, about his attempts, after his sister moved away, to make bread and piecrust, about the history of Antioch Beach. Gradually, Edith’s shivering stopped, the chill and achiness seeping from her body, the firelight dancing over her face, until her bones seemed to grow soft and pliant as candle wax, and she believed she had never been so grateful to be warm. John’s voice kept on, long and even as a horizon. In time, it grew fainter. At some point, she interrupted its flow to say thank you. When she woke up, morning lit her windows, and John was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
Clare
The first morning I woke up in Edith’s house, a neighbor named Louise Smits showed up at the front door with a pie. Blueberry peach with a lattice-top crust, insanely aromatic, and so fresh out of the oven that she had to use oven mitts to carry it to my house from her own at the other end of the street. Considering it was barely nine o’clock, I figured she must’ve gotten up at the crack of dawn to start baking, and I was touched and grateful. Even when I began to suspect her visit was less welcome wagon and more reconnaissance mission, which happened within the first two minutes, I remained touched and grateful because I was a pie girl from way back, and Louise Smits’s pie was an especially glorious one, purple and gold bubbling up between the latticework like molten heaven. Plus, I had a pretty wide curious streak myself, especially when it came to Edith, and Edith was what Louise had come to discuss.
When we’d dispatched the pie to the kitchen counter, and Louise had refused my offer of coffee (I’d brought two grocery bags of provisions—and, when it came to provisions, coffee topped my list—and had spent no small part of the morning fiddling with the old-fangled electric percolator until it produced a drinkable brew), we sat at Edith’s kitchen table to talk. Talking turned out to be Louise’s talent. If talking were a sport, Louise would’ve been a marathoner. I don’t think she took more than two breaths during the entire conversation.
“Now, are you a relative of Edith Herron? Ever since we heard that a young woman had inherited this house from her, we’ve been speculating as to who you might be. A granddaughter was the most common guess among those few folks left around here who even remember Edith existed, although from the looks of you, I’d say more like great-grand. You can’t be far out of your teens, now can you? Of course, I never did hear that Edith had a child at all, much less a great-granddaughter. As a matter of fact, I never heard she’d gotten remarried, though of course you don’t have to be married to have a baby, not these days, and I guess not even back when Edith would’ve had hers, although heaven help the girls who went that route. Edith might have, though. She was just that different from the rest of the women in this town, according to my mother. The truth is I never heard much about Edith’s fate after she left town. For one thing, my family moved away right after Edith did, December 1956. We were in the process of packing when we heard she’d gone. We went to Arizona for my father’s work. From beach to desert, just like that. We rented our house instead of selling, which turned out to be lucky for me. I just moved back to town two years ago, mainly because of my grandchildren. They’re up in New York, but they love this place. But even when I lived here, I was just a young girl when Edith took off for God knows where. I don’t remember even so much what she looked like because at that age, girls are all caught up in their own worlds, but I heard about her back then, from my mother and her friends, or overheard I guess is the more accurate term. I gathered that everyone expected Edith to leave after her husband died, and no one, not a soul, ever thought she’d open a guesthouse. A woman on her own with all those people, total strangers, male and female, coming and going. Made you wonder, I guess. Although according to my mother, Edith was head over heels for her husband, before he died and after, too. My mother said no woman should be that wrapped up in another human being, let alone a man. So are you?”
Startled, I said, “Am I wrapped up in a man?”
Louise laughed. “Well, we’ll save that question for another time. But I meant are you her great-granddaughter?”
“No. Honestly, I hardly knew her. I was stunned when I heard she’d left me this house. We met briefly just
a few weeks before she died.”
“Must’ve been some meeting.”
Louise leaned toward me, her eyes alight with questions. But even though I’d told my and Edith’s story to Joliet, I found I didn’t want to do the same with Louise. She was gregarious and friendly enough but somehow not the kind of person you wanted treading with you on anything like sacred ground. Even having her in Edith’s house felt a little uncomfortable. So all I said was, “Yes, it was.”
When it became obvious I wasn’t going to elaborate, Louise, without taking a deep breath or clearing her throat or any other ordinary preamble to a lengthy monologue, took off full speed ahead.
“But if the folks here thought her opening a guesthouse was scandalous, I can only imagine how they reacted when the real scandal hit. Since the whole affair only came to light after we’d moved, I never got all the details. My mother surely got filled in by some of her friends back home, but she never shared the information with me, probably thought the story wasn’t fit for children’s ears, and then my mother, poor woman, died when I was only fourteen—car accident—so I never did get grown up enough to hear much. My father remarried after about a year or so. A very nice woman. I called her Marjorie but she became a true mother to me. Not that I didn’t miss my mother, of course. Did and do. But anyway, for me, the story of the scandal kind of died with Mom, and by the time I moved back here, this town was so built up and different that most of the old-timers were long gone. I know it involved covering up a murder, though, and the downfall of an officer of the law. I think I do sort of remember the man in question. Tall man. Well respected. At least until the scandal. I’m not sure how Edith was involved, but it had to be something, well, disgraceful, didn’t it? For her to just up and leave the way she did. I get the idea that people thought she’d come back when it all blew over, but she never did. I don’t know that anyone heard from her ever again. And, now, look at this: here you are, not even a blood relative, living in her house.”
“A murder?” I said. “Whose murder?”
“I don’t know. After I moved back here and saw this house and got my memory a little jogged, I asked around a bit, but either no one had heard or they weren’t telling. As I said, looks like there’s no one much left around here who lived through that time period. It was all such a long time ago, and I heard a lot of the families my family knew sold their houses for big money back at the start of Antioch becoming a major resort town instead of just a nice, quiet beach town. You know, you could do that.”
“Sell, you mean?”
“This place has been kept up beautiful, and it’s a desirable location. Not right on the beach, but I’m sure you could get a nice amount for this place.”
Until Louise Smits told me this, I hadn’t realized just how very much I wanted to keep the house. I shook my head.
“I won’t sell it. I don’t even know how long I’m staying. I’d been thinking a week, but even if it turns out to be longer, I have to go to school in September. I can’t imagine selling this house, though. I think Edith would have wanted me to keep it.”
Louise looked skeptical, but she said, “Well, that’s good then. There’s something sad about an empty house.” She smiled at me. “Maybe you’re this house’s fresh start, Clare. And I don’t know if you’re in need of a fresh start, but maybe this house is it. Isn’t that a nice thought?”
“Yes,” I told Louise Smits. “It really is.”
* * *
The Antioch Beach library was like something out of a good dream, if you’re the kind of person who dreams about libraries, which I am: pale gray stone with a peaked roofline; a Gothic arch wooden door with spear-shaped, wrought-iron hinges, dull red and very churchy; a cool, high-ceilinged interior full of long windows, the smell of books, row upon row of shelves, and lots of rustling. The rustling—part page turning, part whispering, part shushing, part quietly shuffling feet, part just the books and people breathing—is so much my favorite part of any library that it’s possible I imagine more rustling than is actually there. In any case, to my ears, this library was like a dovecote, like a forest in autumn, like a roomful of dancers in tutus.
The woman working in the tiny periodicals room had two sets of glasses, one on her nose, one on top of her head, both on beaded chains around her neck and the no-nonsense expression all librarians worth their salt maintain up until the moment you ask for help finding something, at which point they turn beatific and actually seem to emit light. The name on her desk’s nameplate read simply Pat, which struck me as perfect.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I was wondering if you might have issues of the Daily Bee from December of 1956 through maybe March of 1957?”
Her severe expression softened right on cue, but she raised her eyebrows and said, “The Daily Bee is a daily. That’s one hundred twenty-one newspapers.”
“Really?”
Pat raised her eyebrows again. “You’re welcome to do the math yourself.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean I doubted you. I was just picturing one hundred twenty-one newspapers. Because it’s a lot of newspapers.”
“It is.” She smiled and—ping—for a split second, a halo appeared around her head; at least I’m pretty sure it did. “Luckily, two years ago, we received a grant to convert all the papers to digital.” She gestured toward a small bank of computers in the back of the room. “Come. I will show you.”
Mostly relieved but a tiny bit disappointed—because I’m one of those who likes the feel of paper in my hands—I thanked her and in no time—click, click, click—I was immersed in the winter of 1956/1957 and, after hours of reading, backtracking, and note taking, I pieced together the story of the arrest and trial of Antioch Beach Chief of Police John Blanchard.
According to John Blanchard, on the night of Monday, December 10, 1956, even though he was technically off duty, due to a rash of reported car thefts, he was in his car patrolling Birch Grove Street, along which the grandest houses in town—summer homes of wealthy Philadelphians and Delawareans, bankers, politicians, heirs to a chemical company fortune—stood in a row, when he heard a single gunshot. Seconds later, as he attempted to ascertain the source of the sound, before he had time to call in a report of the shot, a woman in a dressing gown staggered out her front door, a baby—a boy, Steven, born exactly one week earlier on December 3—clutched to her chest. The moon was full that night, and when the woman, Sarah Giles, got close to his car, Chief Blanchard could see that she was badly injured, bent almost double, her face battered and bleeding, her neck ringed with red marks, soon to become dark bruises, as if she’d been throttled. When he got out of his car and approached her, she told him that her husband, drunk and enraged, had threatened to kill both her and the baby, had struck her repeatedly with his closed fist before pushing her down a flight of stairs, and that, as he thundered toward the nursery where the baby slept, Sarah had dug out the gun she’d hidden under a chair cushion weeks before and shot him dead.
John Blanchard was familiar with the family. Elliot Giles was the son of wealthy banker turned Pennsylvania state senator Robert E. Giles. While the elder Giles was a pillar of the community, handsome Elliot had the reputation of being charming but reckless and easily angered, a ladies’ man who had surprised everyone three years earlier by marrying a young teacher whom he had bumped into, literally, on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since then there had been rumors that all was not well within the marriage, and John Blanchard had himself responded to two calls from the Gileses’ neighbors reporting shouting, banging, and other unsettling noises coming from their house. But each time, when he arrived on the scene, all was quiet and Elliot had apologized profusely, saying the first time that a visitor to their home had made unwanted advances toward Sarah and Elliot had had to dispatch him and the second time that he had had one too many Manhattans, had gotten angered by a baseball game he was listening to on the radio—damn Phillies—and had knocked some furniture around. Neither time did John see Sarah Giles, but,
both times, he had a “bad feeling” about her well-being, a feeling on which, to his sorrow, he did not follow up.
Because, on that fateful December night, he believed Sarah Giles was telling the truth about killing her husband to save her own life and that of her infant and because he felt concern that a jury might not see the situation in the same light, he made the split-second decision to help her get away and to start a new life free from abuse and fear. He took her inside, and while she dressed, he packed, as best he could, clothes and supplies for her and the baby. Then, he urged her to get into his police cruiser, and because her injuries seemed severe, he took her to the home of Edith Herron, owner of Blue Sky House and the widow of his good friend Joseph Herron. While he was unhappy to involve Edith in his plan to relocate Sarah and her son, his options were limited, and he knew Edith to be not only a former nurse but a thoughtful, trustworthy person. Although he gave Edith no information about the situation and refused to answer her questions, she quietly did what she could for Sarah.
While she was tending to Sarah’s wounds, Mrs. Stella O’ Shea, who lived at the other end of the street, entered the screened porch at the front of Edith Herron’s house. At the trial, Mrs. O’Shea testified that she’d seen John’s car parked “near Edith’s house” (although he’d been careful to park it down around the corner, not directly in front of her house) and, concerned about Edith, who lived “without a man to protect her and with complete strangers coming and going,” had decided to check to make sure all was well. Certainly, the swirling rumors about Edith having more than just a friendship with the police chief played no role in her decision to investigate, since Mrs. O’Shea “never listened to that kind of idle gossip.”