Because the front rooms of the house were dark, Mrs. O’Shea decided not to knock, since no one appeared to be home. As she was turning to leave, she heard what sounded exactly like a hungry newborn’s cry. Perplexed and concerned and not at all idly curious, she proceeded to look, not only through the front windows, but, leaving the porch and walking around the outside of the house, through all the first-floor windows, and it was as she was standing on an overturned bucket, peering through the back window that she saw, through the open door of a bedroom, what appeared to be a woman lying on the bed. Edith was leaning over the woman applying what appeared to be ointment to the woman’s face. This sight so startled Mrs. O’Shea that she lost her balance and fell off the bucket, which clattered against the side of the house. Abashed at the possibility of being discovered peeping—even though of course she’d only had the best of intentions—she ran away, darting just one quick glance over her shoulder to see what she thought was the outline of tall, lanky Chief Blanchard in the window.
Although John did not catch sight of Mrs. O’Shea’s exiting the property and found no evidence of anyone outside, he knew that someone might spot his car if he left it on the street for too long, so he wanted to get Sarah and her child out of Edith’s house as quickly as possible. He knew that it would be only a matter of time before his fellow police officers found the body of Elliot Giles and began to search for the dead man’s wife and child. As soon as Edith finished tending to Sarah’s wounds, John Blanchard took Sarah and baby Steven away in his car. The next morning, after dropping them off at what he hoped was a safe location, he came back to Antioch Beach.
The morning after the shooting, Elliot Giles’s cousin, Roger, arrived with his wife and three children at the Giles residence for a scheduled visit and found the house locked and apparently empty, despite all three cars being in the garage. Over the next few hours, Roger Giles repeatedly called the residence from a phone at a local restaurant but never got an answer, and, finally, concerned and frustrated, he called the police. When the officers arrived on the scene, they discovered Elliot Giles’s body and immediately began searching for Sarah and the baby. Because Mrs. O’Shea had not yet come forward, no one knew of Chief Blanchard’s possible connection to the case. Also, at the time, Sarah was not yet officially a suspect but a missing person. One theory, proposed by Chief Blanchard, was that she and Steven had been kidnapped.
The morning of December 12, 1956, Mrs. O’Shea read about the case in the paper, put two and two together, and contacted the police about what she’d seen, giving her statement to one of John’s fellow officers. As soon as he learned what she said, John turned himself in, admitting he had helped Sarah and her baby get away, and telling them that Edith had played no role in their disappearance.
When the police went to question Edith, they found a Closed sign on the door of Blue Sky House, and Edith and her car were gone. At the trial John testified that Edith was a deeply private woman who had suffered a terrible personal loss, and he speculated that she’d left town, not to avoid police questioning, since she knew nothing about the death of Elliot or about Sarah’s and the baby’s whereabouts, but because Sarah and her condition had upset her and she wanted to get away for a few days. When she did not return and the police, despite assiduous searching, could find no trace of her, John surmised that either she had no idea they were looking for her or that, to avoid unwanted attention and because she had no information that would help in the police department’s search, she had decided to stay away until everything had blown over.
At the insistence of the powerful Giles family, the trial took place quickly, less than a month after John turned himself in, and everyone expected it to end quickly as well, with the jury finding John guilty and a judge throwing the book at him at sentencing. But somehow—and no one knew how, since, as far as anyone knew, he was neither rich nor well connected—John had snagged himself a top-notch lawyer from a fancy New York City law firm called Wickham-Flaherty, and Randolph Flaherty had left no stone unturned in John’s defense. He paraded in witness after witness to attest to Chief Blanchard’s courage, work ethic, kindness, and overall nobility of spirit, while another stream of witnesses spoke of Elliot Giles’s jealous rages, his violent streak, and what Randolph Flaherty called his “small, twisted, shriveled soul.”
Reading through the newspaper reports of the trial, I noticed a shift in perspective, a gradual turning of the tables. Headlines went from “Police Chief Turned Jail Bird” and “Police Chief John Blanchard Refuses to Give Up Murderess” to “John Blanchard Sacrificed Himself to Save Woman and Baby.” One editorial admired his implacable demeanor and steady blue eyes and called him saintly; the president of the local PTA wrote an eloquent letter to the editor titled “Sarah Giles Did What Any Mother Would Do!” that ended with the words “God bless Chief Blanchard!” By the end of the trial, John was being regarded as a hero by many local folks and, instead of the fifteen- to twenty-year sentence that the press had seemed sure of at the trial’s start, he was given four to six years. I didn’t learn how long he’d actually stayed in prison, but none of the legal experts the paper had interviewed seemed to think he would be made to serve the whole term. After the sentencing, an unnamed source at the police department disclosed that, while both Sarah Giles and Edith Herron were considered to be “at large,” the department had let its search for them drop.
“We all hope,” the anonymous source said, “that wherever those women are, they’ve found peace and a safe haven.”
The library was almost empty. The sky outside the periodical room window had turned to plum and smoke. Twilight. Closing time. I set down my pencil, gathered up my stack of notes—a final rustle—and summoned the memory of Edith in her gardening clogs, clear-voiced and assured, candid and wise and kind, standing firmly on the earth despite her cane, and I felt positive that she had found peace and a safe haven. I hoped that Sarah and her son had, too.
Chapter Fifteen
Edith
Winter 1953
Later, when Edith tried to pinpoint what it was about George Graham that made him stand out from everyone else in the sandwich shop, she realized that, despite his cardigan sweater and lack of tie, the folded newspaper tucked under one arm, it was his utter lack of casualness. Upright posture. Hair immaculately cut, slicked back, impervious to sea breezes. A face like chiseled marble with serious dark eyes. An expensive watch he glanced at more than once, in the manner of one accustomed to being justifiably impatient and to having his daylight hours neatly carved up into important appointments.
Maybe this, the fact of his difference, is why she, who hardly talked—truly talked, not just chatted politely—to anyone apart from John Blanchard, talked to him, a complete stranger in a sandwich shop. The shop itself was the sort of place she rarely went, overpriced, catering to tourists, and just a stone’s throw away from the fanciest hotel in town, but that day, a Saturday in late November, she had woken up and felt the urge to be out in the world, to sit in a place with other people. A week later, after she met George Graham for the second time, she would wonder if this unprecedented urge had been the hand of fate pushing her out the door and into that sandwich shop, and even though she would try to laugh off this idea, dismiss it as silly and overly self-involved, she could never fully convince herself that it was wrong.
She asked him what he was reading about. What she actually said was, “Excuse me for interrupting, but you look so engrossed in that paper. If you’re reading something interesting, could you please tell me what it is? I’ve forgotten to bring any reading material of my own, so I’m all at loose ends.” It came across as forward, flirtatious even, and unlike anything she would normally say, but she didn’t feel mortified. Instead, for the first time in ages and for no reason she could explain, she felt young, a young woman, out and about and lingering over lunch. Young and open and unguarded. When the man set his paper on the table and met her eyes, she smiled.
“Are you?” he said.
/> “Well, yes. It’s been so long since I’ve been to a restaurant that I’d forgotten how dull it can be to eat alone in this town.”
“You live here, then? Just for the summer or all year round?”
“All year. I run a guesthouse, although I’m a little short of guests at the moment. After October, business slows down.”
“You run it by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
For a moment, Edith considered telling him why she was going it alone, but somehow, she didn’t want to bring up Joseph’s death. It had been more than a year since anyone had seen her as anything other than a widow, and even though she would sooner have cut off her arm than forsake Joseph or betray his memory, she felt uncompelled to share her personal history with this stranger whose business it surely was not. For the space of that conversation, she allowed herself to put away her story of loss. She felt bare and stark without it, like a tree without leaves, but also lighter.
“Sometimes, it’s interesting,” she said. “Often, it’s not particularly. Busy, yes, for which I’m grateful, but not exactly fascinating. My mind gets restless.”
That last sentence just slipped out. She had said the same thing to John Blanchard just the other evening during one of their front porch conversations, but, unlike this man, John was a friend, a friend who, for the sake of Edith’s reputation, kept mostly to the peripheries of her little world—the porch, the backyard, occasionally but only in broad daylight, the kitchen table—but a friend nonetheless, the only one she had. She waited to see if this man would laugh or be taken aback by her odd statement, but he simply said, “So what do you do with it when it does?”
And, just like that, she was off, telling him about her canoe trips, her hikes through the pinewoods at the water’s edge, her new interest in bivalves.
“Did you know that scallops can swim?” she asked.
Now, he did laugh. “I can’t say that I did. But then mostly I prefer my bivalves on the half-shell, with a dollop of cocktail sauce. Where did this curiosity of yours about the natural world come from?”
And again—off she went. Her father, her upbringing, her years spent nursing, her love affair with solitude, her abject failure at making cocktail party conversation.
“I never would have guessed that,” deadpanned George (midway into the conversation, they had remembered to introduce themselves, and from that point on, were on a first-name basis).
“Surprisingly, describing the particulars of how a mussel attaches itself to a rock doesn’t go well with canapés,” Edith said, with a sigh. “Which is probably why I’m not exactly rolling in invitations.”
“Nonsense,” said George. “All my life, I assumed mussels did it the same way barnacles do. It’s even possible I thought mussels were barnacles. Now, tell me again about those silky fibers.”
And Edith did. On the walk home, she went back over the conversation in her mind. Look at me, she thought, walking around in the afternoon sun smiling to myself like a crazy person. Her fingers slid inside the neck of her shirt to touch the two wedding rings she wore on a gold chain, remembering the night after Joseph’s funeral, how she’d taken off her ring because she couldn’t bear to see it on her hand when he no longer wore his. It occurred to her that she hadn’t even noticed if George had been wearing one. It hadn’t mattered. Edith had not been flirting. She had merely talked to George Graham the way a woman talks when she knows she will never see the other person again. For that hour, she had felt like a normal human being. It had been a reprieve, a tiny space of time in which she’d floated, unencumbered. For that hour, she could have been anyone.
Six days later, he called.
He wanted to reserve a room at Blue Sky House for the following night. Business, he said. She wondered what sort of business a man like that—perfectly cut trousers, watch like something out of a Fifth Avenue window—could possibly have in her little beach town in the off-season. Her first impulse was to say she was booked for that night, but since late October, she’d had so few guests—one traveling salesmen, an elderly couple who liked the beach in cold weather—that she could not afford, despite her frugal ways, to turn anyone down. So she told him yes in as brisk a tone as she could summon, and it wasn’t until she went to write his reservation down in her leather-bound ledger that she realized her hands were shaking.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, she scolded herself, he’s not coming to see you. You spoke with the man for an hour, mostly about mussels. Don’t be ridiculous.
But the beauty of their conversation in the sandwich shop, the reason it could be light and playful, the reason it had worked, was the fact that she had been certain it would never happen again. Immediately afterward, Edith had slipped back into her accustomed loneliness, skirting around the edges of human interaction. Even John Blanchard had stayed away, as if he’d known she needed time to recall whom she was and how she was meant to live out her days in the wake—and she would be forever in the wake, this she knew—of Joseph’s death. Somehow, John was the exception, her only friend; maybe because he’d been Joseph’s friend, he’d slipped easily into her days, undemanding, reassuring, always keeping the right amount of space between them. Being with him was as easy as being alone, and sometimes, on piercingly lonely days, easier. With John, her devotion to Joseph was a given. And George Graham, who would be in her house, her and Joseph’s house, in a matter of days did not even know Joseph had existed.
Except that George had known. She found that out, as she found out so many things, not fifteen minutes after he arrived at Blue Sky House. This time, there wasn’t even a pretext of casualness. George stepped purposefully over her threshold in a suit and shirt that had obviously been custom-made for him (even she, with her careless fashion sense, could see that), holding a leather bag so exquisite, it probably cost as much as her car, as if he were attending a business meeting instead of spending a night in a modest little house. As it turned out, this made sense, since a business meeting is what more or less took place at her kitchen table. The second he sat down—his back so straight it didn’t rest against the chair, his hands touching at the fingertips, teepee-like—Edith, in her old wool pants and sweater, felt at a distinct disadvantage.
If Edith had worried that George would expect playful banter again, she needn’t have. He began, as she later imagined he began all business negotiations, by throwing her off-balance.
“Mrs. Herron, I should tell you right off that our meeting in the coffee shop was no accident. I sought you out deliberately.”
His words were strange, but his tone was genial, and Edith was too surprised to feel alarmed or even to notice that he’d called her “Mrs. Herron” when she had never told him she’d been married.
“What do you mean ‘sought me out’? You mean you saw me in the coffee shop and decided to approach me? But I’m the one who spoke first.”
“No, I mean I came to Antioch expressly to speak with you. I intended to simply knock on your door. My excuse was going to be that I wanted to put relatives up at a local hotel or guesthouse and needed to see if yours would be appropriate. But when you came out of your house and started walking, I got out of my car and followed. I was about to start up a conversation when you saved me the effort.”
Edith felt her pulse quicken. She moved her chair a few inches away from the table, and with her eyes, measured the distance from where she sat to the front door. It was only five o’clock, not even verging on dusk, yet. Surely, if she screamed, someone would come.
“You followed me?” she said, keeping her voice steady.
He smiled. “Please. I meant no harm then and don’t now. A while back, a young assistant at my workplace mentioned this town and your guesthouse specifically. He and his family stayed here for a week last summer. He told me how pleasant it was, how tight a ship you ran. It surprised him that a woman could run a business so efficiently. He said you were smart, and he described your house to me in some detail. He told me that
you were a young widow, a former nurse, who had opened a guesthouse after the death of her husband. By the way, please accept my condolences.”
Edith ignored this. “You’re saying you knew all of this about me when we spoke in the sandwich shop?”
“I did.”
“Why? Why did you seek me out? Why didn’t you tell me you’d come to town in order to meet me?”
“First, I needed to see if you would do.”
First. What could be second, then? Her imagination raced toward multiple possibilities, each scarier than the last. She pushed her chair back and stood up, her breath stammering inside her chest. “I think you should go.”
“Let me explain. Please.”
Edith shook her head and started for the door. “You should go now.”
She gripped the doorknob, but her hand froze, refused to work. A frightened sob started in her throat.
“Edith, I don’t hurt women,” George Graham said, speaking quickly. “I save them from men who do. Or I try to, at least. Not by myself, of course. I rely on other people, good people, people who believe women should feel safe in their own homes. People who can keep a secret. I was hoping you could be one of them.”
Even though she had no idea what he meant, his voice was so urgent and earnest that it stopped Edith in her tracks. She didn’t yank the door open and run out. Instead, keeping her hand on the doorknob, she turned around to face him.
“What does that mean?”
“Come, sit back down at this table with me, and I’ll tell you. When I’m finished, if you want me to leave and never come back, I swear to you I will honor that.”