After breakfast that morning, in a small locked box under the sink in the kitchen, I found the ledgers. It’s how the world works sometimes I guess: you spill your coffee, go searching for a sponge, and find a mystery instead.
There were two of them, one leather bound and official looking, the other just a regular black-and-white marbled-cover composition book, the kind with which, I must admit, I have harbored a lifelong obsession. (Jokingly but also not, Dev used to give me one, along with a box of Ticonderoga pencils, every Christmas, and the sight of the two together—a perfect pairing if ever there was one—never failed to satisfy completely a little part of my soul.) Both ledgers were full of the same almost typewriter-like printing I’d found on the back of Edith’s photographs, so clean and precise that, even though the blue ink was faded, I could read every word. Sitting at the kitchen table in a pool of brilliant morning sun, being careful to keep my coffee at a safe distance from the ledgers, I dug in.
I started with the leather one, which turned out to be a list of the people who had stayed at Blue Sky House, their names—including the names and ages of each child, if there were any, and, in the case of a few entries, the name of the family’s dog with its breed noted in parentheses, which made me adore Edith even more—the dates they’d stayed, and their home addresses. Most came from Delaware or from neighboring states, but a handful lived in places as far-flung as Ohio, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. At the tail end of most of the entries, she’d written what seemed to be reminders to herself, things like Youngest child cannot eat eggs, Fond of watermelon, Tea instead of coffee, Afraid of the dark; needs a night-light, and Smokes dreadful cigars but thankfully only outside; put ashtrays on the screen porch, evidently preparing for the possibility that the lodgers would return. I treasured the bits of Edith’s personality that shone through: the plain, clear printing, not a curlicue in sight; the meticulous entries, every one with the same format, no cross-outs or misspellings (the woman even spelled dachshund right on the very first try, a feat I never pull off myself), every comma in place; her thoughtful, almost tender documentation of her guests’ loves and fears and allergies; and, above all, the hope, on page after page, that they would all come back someday.
The ledger’s brown silk ribbon still marked the page with the final entry, the last guest: November 15–17, 1956; Betty Brownmiller; 715 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Early bedtime, hot milk. All the remaining pages were blank, and I wondered, a little sadly, if Edith had known when she wrote those words that Betty would be the last guest ever to stay at Blue Sky House.
Except that what I’d learn from the last page of the next ledger is that she wasn’t the last guest.
Even before I got to that page, I’d started calling it “the shadow ledger.” The shadow ledger and the daylight ledger are what the two became inside my head. The shadow ledger’s entries were made in Edith’s same, now familiar printing and carefully dated, but that’s where the similarities between the two ended. Where the daylight ledger was clear and direct and businesslike, the shadow ledger was cryptic and oblique and intimate; where the daylight ledger was complete, the shadow ledger left almost everything—everything practical—out. No last names, no addresses. I even heard the words of them differently as I read: the daylight ledger spoke in Edith’s voice, crisp and bell-like; the shadow ledger whispered.
Margaret. Roan. Cont chk. Auburn hair, pale, skinny inside her big wool coat, freckles like sprinkled nutmeg across her nose.
Kitty. Farm. Bns bck, arms. I. Bergman cheekbones, husky laugh, nightmares.
Alice. Port. Br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face. Sang lullabies, voice like an angel, oval nails. Carolyn. Dimples, topknot. Johnny. Drove a toy truck over the floors and up the walls.
Janet. Hamp. Br tooth, cont face. Knitted while she talked, the needles clicking, dove-gray bobbed hair, sweater with acorn-shaped buttons. Peggy. Sixteen, pointed chin, ballerina posture down to her turned-out feet, fierce brown eyes that bode well for her future.
Carol Joan Dotty Ginger Linda Mary Joyce . . .
Rich NNews Char Rich Lou Fred Lynch Norf . . .
Abr chk Cont arms Br rad Cont nck Cont trnk Eardr rup . . .
Swan’s neck blue-black hair talks with hands swore a blue streak tall dry humor red lipstick yellow braids Raggedy Ann doll math homework chewed nails green eyes penciled eyebrows loves movies loves baseball spoke in whispers . . .
While much of what I read was code-like, inscrutable, what I could understand was so vivid it seemed to breathe. I found myself turning the pages gently, as if they were precious, as if they might dissolve under my fingertips, causing all the people in them to be lost. The daylight ledger had been interesting, but the shadow ledger made me feel that I was discovering something momentous, like the guy who found King Tut’s tomb; one minute you’re poking around in some rubble, and the next, you’re opening a door to a roomful of gold. A few times, in the middle of reading, I felt so excited that I had to go out and walk around in the backyard. Distracted by wonder and confusion, it’s a miracle I didn’t step off the edge and fall straight into the canal.
My first theory was that the shadow ledger was a more personal version of the daylight one, Edith’s private take on the guests, an aside, like notes jotted down in the margins of a book. So when I’d finished reading the shadow ledger through once, I opened both ledgers and compared the two, entry by entry, date by date. But it didn’t take long for that first theory to crash and burn because, for one thing, the daylight ledger began more than a year before Edith made the shadow ledger’s first entry, and after that, while sometimes the dates matched up, the names never did.
It was as if Edith ran two guesthouses, one for people with full names and houses on specific streets in specific towns that they’d go home to, and another one for ghosts, mostly female ghosts. Only they weren’t ghosts. Ghosts didn’t have fierce eyes or freckles; they didn’t love baseball or sing lullabies. I thought of Edith’s photographs, how one, small, chosen fragment of Joseph could evoke a whole man and a world of love between the photographer and her subject. In Edith’s hands, the shadow ledger guests, despite being nameless and rootless, apparently untethered to the ordinary world, became exquisitely human. And what I believed, what seemed clear to me, was that Edith loved them, too, although not the way she loved Joseph, of course. What I kept picturing was Miss Clavel from the children’s book Madeline: Edith, doing her duty, watching over, keeping track, not turning off the light until everyone was safe.
* * *
I called Dev.
I almost didn’t because even though I’d maintained my cool through the roller-coaster ride of my dead-of-night conversation with Zach, the next day, I kept coming back to the part where he’d accused me of rebounding with my high school sweetheart. That accusation hit home, just a bit, not because I wanted to rebound with Dev or with anyone—God knows I felt as wrung out and done with romance as I ever had and, anyway, when it came to romance, Dev was definitely and forever off the table—but because what had started the day I’d sat at that enormous, glossy conference table with the equally enormous, glossy (in spirit anyway) Eloisa Dunne and learned that Edith had given me a house, was an adventure. A true blue, strange, astonishing, bona fide adventure. And the person who’d always had adventures with me, my longtime partner in crime (or what passed for crime for two hopelessly goody-two-shoes kids) was Dev Tremain.
I hadn’t actually spoken to him since the wedding that wasn’t. He’d followed up his wedding-cake-devouring photo with a text that simply read, I’m here if you need, you know, wisdom or whatever. And by whatever, I mean anything. But you knew that already, and then he proceeded, apart from the occasional goofball text, to keep his distance, Dev having always been a person who got, without being told, when a person needed a little space. The night of the day I found out that Edith left me her house, when I was still too stunned to talk about it with anyone apart from my mom, who’d been with me when I got the news, Dev s
ent a text that said: So get this: this guy I met last week in the sandwich line at Wawa? He just bequeathed me an island. A small one but still: A WHOLE ISLAND. I laughed, out loud no less, and texted back: Always with the one-upsmanship. To which he responded: Wait. Are you saying you inherited something (far less impressive than an island) today, too???
Even though I can see how some people wouldn’t like it (he was my ex-boyfriend after all), I’d always found it comforting, Dev’s and my being part of the same information pipeline, his knowing things about me without my having to tell him. Even though we hadn’t talked about it, I was sure he knew I was staying at Edith’s house, just like I knew he was working in a lab at UPenn for the summer, ate lunch at a North Philly falafel place every single weekday, and on Sunday afternoons, played on a men’s basketball team that included his former high school biology teacher and his best friend (and my best friend’s kind-of-but-not-really-at-least-not-yet boyfriend), Aidan. Neither of us found it weird, and neither of us ever did much with the information we had. We just knew stuff about each other’s lives. It was how it was, how it had always been.
But, anyway, I almost didn’t call him because I didn’t want to give even the tiniest bit of credence to Zach’s rebound accusation, until it hit me how stupid and childish this was. What the hell, Clare? You what? Don’t want to give Zach the satisfaction? I said to myself. He won’t even know. But then I reminded myself that Zach’s knowing or not knowing wasn’t the point. The point was that Dev was my friend.
He answered by saying, “You would not even believe what I’m eating right now.”
“Falafel.”
“Not falafel. The greatest falafel in the world.”
“The greatest falafel in the world is in Philadelphia? What about the entire Middle East? What about the falafel in Baghdad?”
“Better.”
“What about Dubai? I bet they have really great falafel in Dubai.”
“Not this great.”
“Is it the tahini?”
“It’s the tahini, the falafel itself, the taboon bread. It’s everything.”
“Can’t you just say pita like a normal person?”
“Who would say pita when they can say taboon bread?”
“Everyone.”
“Anyway, it’s not really a pocket. A pita is all about the pocket.”
“Can we stop talking about your lunch now?”
“Yeah, sure, stop when I was winning.”
“Winning the conversation about your sandwich?”
“You had no comeback to my pita pocket observation. It was painfully obvious.”
“You’re painfully obvious.”
“And we end with another classic Clare Hobbes counterinsult!”
“Turning your own words against you. You’d think you’d know better by now than to argue with the likes of me.”
“You’d think I’d know better by now.”
“I never think you know better.”
“True.”
“Can you just shut up at this point? Is that possible?”
“Yes.”
“Dev, listen.”
“Listening.”
“This morning, I spilled my coffee and went looking for a sponge because I thought maybe Joliet had left one, Joliet like the city not like the Shakespeare heroine—she’s the woman who cleans the house—and so anyway, this morning, coffee, everywhere, so I went looking under the sink for a sponge, and boom.”
“Boom?”
“Yes. But it really started before that when the nosy neighbor mentioned the murder and I went to the library, which was the most consummately perfect library ever with this amazing red door and full of rustling like I like, and I sat there and read through nearly a hundred and twenty-one copies of the Daily Bee, and I had to do some piecing together and it took me hours, although thank God they had all the newspapers digitized a while back, and, when I was finished working, I looked up and was surprised to see it was dark outside, and my eyesight was doing that underwater thing that comes from staring at a computer screen for too long, but it was all worth it because the story, Dev, it was amazing. Do you have time to hear it? Like is your lunch break almost over? Because I can call back later.”
“Did you say murder?”
“Yes.”
“I can stay later at the lab if they need me to. Tell me now.”
I told him everything. My conversation with Joliet; my conversation with Louise Smits; the two canoes; Joseph’s photos of Edith; Edith’s photos of Joseph; the marriage certificate; the obituary; the story of Elliot Giles’s murder, of John Blanchard’s trial, and of the disappearances of Edith Herron and Sarah Giles; the blue ceiling, the percolator, everything. I ended with the ledgers, opening them up and reading Dev a few entries from each.
After I finished, Dev was quiet for a while. I could feel the wheels turning inside his head, and even without seeing him, I knew exactly the expression he had on his face.
Finally, he said, “I guess we’re thinking the shadow guests were real people? She couldn’t have been, I don’t know, taking notes for a book she was writing or something? Or maybe they were just people she met someplace else, like at the beach or in a restaurant or someplace, not people who stayed at her house?”
“I never thought of that. I guess it’s possible they weren’t guests or even real people at all, but I think they were. There are the dates, for one thing, placed a line up from the guest’s name, just the way they are in the daylight ledger, and the two ledgers were together, in the same box, like they were the same sort of thing. A pair.”
“A pair,” he echoed. “Okay, that’s true. Plus, she makes reference to lullabies, right? And nightmares. There are at least two guests with ‘nightmares’ at the end of their entries. Which seem to indicate that Edith was with them at night. People just don’t sing lullabies or have nightmares out in public, and since Edith owned a guesthouse, chances are they were guests.”
“Yes, also—” I stopped, my cheeks flushing.
“Also, what?”
“Okay, not to sound crazy, but they just feel real to me, real and like they were here, in this house. Maybe it’s the details Edith includes that bring them to life for me, but I look around and picture them so clearly, here on the first floor where there’s a tiny bedroom, where I bet they slept. I see them knitting and running a toy truck across the floor and singing to a baby. There are these two chairs by the fire, and I can see women sitting there, the firelight on their auburn hair or blue-black hair or—” I sighed. “So, yeah, it does sound crazy.”
“Not to me, not really. Brain scientists actually take intuition pretty seriously these days. And even if they didn’t—”
“Even if they didn’t, what?”
“I take you seriously.”
“Well, thanks,” I said, sincerely flattered.
Dev cleared his throat. “So let’s go ahead with the idea, at least for now, that the people in the shadow ledger were real guests who stayed at Edith’s house, but who, for some reason, warranted a different ledger and a different, harder-to-understand kind of entry notation. They were like an undercurrent, this flow of shadow guests, or like Edith’s own little parallel universe.”
I started smiling at let’s go ahead with the idea, and as the excitement mounted in his voice, I pumped my fist in the air and shouted a silent, celebratory Yes! Because he was back, my adventuring partner, gung ho to grab my hand and jump with me, feetfirst, into mystery.
“Shoot, if only we could find them,” I said. “Those shadow guests. Some of them, especially the kids, are sure to be alive someplace. But there’s just not enough information to go on.”
“No, but listen, listen,” said Dev. “Some of them weren’t there alone, right? There were other guests, daylight guests, whose stays overlapped with theirs.”
“Yes. A lot had overlapping dates,” I said. “More in the summer than in the winter, when she probably didn’t get that many regular guests. The shadow ledger g
oes on for about three years, and I haven’t counted, but I’d say there were twenty or more times when the daylight guests and shadow guests overlapped.”
“And we do have information on those guys, the daylight guests. What if we get in touch with them, and find a way to ask them if they remember other guests being there? Then, we’ll know for sure that there were two sets of guests.”
“Oh, wow, right,” I said, catching on. “And who knows? Maybe they’ll remember something about those guests, something that might give us a clue as to why they were shadow guests. What made them shadowy instead of daylit.”
“It’s definitely worth a shot. We shouldn’t expect too much, though. Some of them won’t live at those addresses anymore. Some of them, honestly, might not live, period. And if they’re still around, they’ll be pretty old. They may not remember much from way back then. But you know what? Some of them had families, so maybe the kids will remember something, if we can track them down.”
“How, though? Should we do one of those reverse-search things online? We can put in names and addresses and try to find phone numbers or e-mail addresses. It’s kind of a stalkery thing to do, but we could.”
“We could,” said Dev, “but we could also just write letters. Blue Sky House is in Delaware, and I’ll bet a lot of the addresses are pretty close by. Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Philadelphia, or around there. We could say, I don’t know, that you inherited a house that used to be an inn and are trying to learn more about its history. Not a lie, just not the whole truth. Most of the letters would either get where they’re going overnight or in a couple of days. We could give the people our cell-phone numbers. They could call us if they have any information.”
“A fair number are Delaware addresses, and most of those are Wilmington, actually, where you live. I even recognized one or two of the street names.” I had a thought. “Hey, you might even know some of the people, Dev. Or their kids or their kids’ kids. For a city, Wilmington’s a pretty small town.”