Edith found herself breathing hard, on the edge of tears, but she wouldn’t break down. She gathered herself. “I understand that you worry about me,” she said, softly. “I do so appreciate that. But I’m fine. Nothing is going on here that shouldn’t be; I promise you that.”
For a moment, they stood staring at each other, Edith balanced on the fine line between evasion and confession, John between personal loyalty and the law. If they slipped, it was anyone’s guess onto which side each would land, but for that hour of that night, anyway, they held steady.
“I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Edith,” John said, fiercely, and then he spun around and left, allowing, for the first time, the screen porch door to bang shut behind him.
For the next week, Edith neither saw nor heard from him. She had put him in a terrible position; she knew that. John took his job seriously, and his reputation as a police chief was golden, unassailable, a fact he cherished. Beyond that, deeper even than that, he was honest to the core, hopelessly honest, he’d once told her, laughing; even as a kid, even to get himself out of sticky situations, he was fundamentally unable to lie. But you aren’t asking him to lie, she told herself, you’re only asking him to look the other way. In her heart, though, she understood that for a man like John Blanchard, the two amounted to the same thing. For that whole week, Edith fluctuated wildly between serenity born of the rock-solid faith that he would choose friendship over duty and desperate panic that he would not. In the dark moments, raw-nerved and fearful, she waited, her entire body tensed, for disaster, disgrace, ruin to knock at her door.
What happened instead was this. One morning, a week after John had left and slammed the door behind him, a package appeared on her porch. No stamps, no note, just a neat bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Edith brought it into the house and opened it at the kitchen table. Inside were two boxes of gauze pads, three rolls of bandages, three rolls of bandage tape, and a large tube of antibiotic ointment. Edith dropped into a kitchen chair, put her face in her hands, and wept, not only out of relief but also shame at how she had underestimated John. He hadn’t chosen to simply look the other way; he hadn’t even chosen friendship, not really, because a stranger’s damaged face had surely weighed in the balance as much as his affection for Edith, probably more. John had considered all his options, and despite the risks, despite all it would cost his conscience, and she knew it was a great deal, John had chosen to help.
Chapter Eighteen
Clare
“You want to hear something amazing and also amazingly annoying?” demanded Hildy.
“Who would say no to that?” I said.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Hildy. “The barista at the Sweet Bean, for instance, the one with the Andrew-Jackson-twenty-dollar-bill hair? He had no interest whatsoever. Actually, if it is a possible thing to have negative interest, and I mean aggressively negative interest, this guy did. I asked him the same question I just asked you, and before the words were fully out of my mouth, you could just feel the apathy coming off him like—” She groped around for the proper simile.
“Fumes?” I suggested.
“Radioactivity. When it came to apathy, he was a—whatdayacallit—isotope.”
“I don’t think all isotopes are radioactive.”
“Ah, but you don’t know, do you? You know who would know?”
I groaned. “Yes.”
“Dev, that’s who. Where is that Dev when you need him?”
“I know where you’re going with this,” I told her.
“Where?”
“Where you always go with it.”
“Face it, Clairol. He’s the lox to your bagel. The gin to your tonic. The Fig Newtons to your cheddar cheese.”
“Nobody, not a single human in the history of the world except for you has ever thought for even one second that those last two things go together.”
I could hear the shrug in her voice when she said, “It’s essentially the same as apple pie and cheddar cheese.”
“No. No, it is not.”
When I go too long without actually talking to Hildy—or more important, having her talk to me, hearing her actual words in her actual semiblaring, semimusical in-the-manner-of-bagpipes voice—my soul starts to wilt.
“You’re talking to him, again,” she said, smugly. “Practically every night.”
“How would you know that?”
“Aidan was just here visiting me, and he happened to call Dev, and I happened to grab the phone out of his hand.”
“And Dev happened to mention that we’d been talking?”
Another audible shrug: “There may have been interrogation involved. Just a tad.”
I considered explaining to Hildy that Dev and I were just friends, until I remembered that I’d explained this to her at least three hundred million times before to absolutely no avail.
“So are you going to tell me or not?” I said.
“Tell you what?”
“The amazing and amazingly annoying thing,” I said.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“I’m changing the subject back, which isn’t the same thing.”
“Fine,” Hildy said. “So Aidan starts his new job in Washington, D.C., next month, and he asked me to move there.”
“Oh! My! God!” I screeched. “Move with him? Like live with him? Like you’d live together?”
“You’re literally hurting my ear.”
“Screw your ear. Are you?”
“He’s renting this apartment, and he said he’d like it if I’d live there with him, but he also said if that idea falls under the heading of moving too fast, there’s another apartment for rent in the same building, and if it makes me more comfortable, I could live there.”
“So does it?” I said.
“Does it what?”
“Make you more comfortable.”
“Hell, no,” said Hildy.
I tossed my head back and laughed with pure, giddy, reckless joy. “This is my lifelong dream!”
“You haven’t known me your whole life.”
“Of course I have, and probably before that, too,” I scoffed.
Universal truth: some people you’ve known since birth and you’ve just barely met them; others you’ve known for four years and they’ve been your friend since before you were born.
“True,” said Hildy.
“But how is this amazingly annoying? It’s not. It can’t be.”
“Because: Washington.” She slapped the word down like a piece of raw liver onto a butcher block.
“You don’t like Washington? It’s nice. Where in Washington?”
“Some square or circle or something. But nice or not nice, George Washington was a man. I live in Ann Arbor, the only damn city in the country that’s named after a woman instead of a damn man, and Aidan wants me to move. From Ann to a man. Ms. Arbor is turning over in her grave, damn it,” she said. I heard a pounding sound; Hildy’s fist hitting the table. I’d recognize her pound anywhere.
“You’re maintaining that there was actually at some point a woman named Ann Arbor?” I asked.
“Yes. She founded the city. Or something.”
“I think Ann was the name of the wives of the two men who founded the city, neither of whom had the last name Arbor. Although even that might just be speculation.”
“Regardless.”
“And anyway: Charlottesville,” I said.
“What?”
“The town where my parents live, where I moved when I was eleven. It’s named after a woman. Princess Charlotte who became Queen Charlotte when she married George the Third.”
“Hmm.”
“And there’s a nearby town named Louisa, named after I have no idea, but it must’ve been a woman, right?”
“Possibly.”
“And actually, the whole state of Virginia is named after Elizabeth the First,” I said. “Elizabeth the Virgin Queen.”
“Now, that’s getting kind
of personal, isn’t it?” said Hildy.
A light clicked on inside my head, the kind with a dimmer switch, dialed down to dim.
Char, Lou, Rich.
“Char, Lou, Rich,” I murmured.
The light got brighter.
“Char, Lou, Rich!” I cried.
“What the hell?” said Hildy.
“Hildy, hold on, just hold on, okay? I’ll be right back.”
I leapt out of the living room chair I’d been sitting in and ran to where the shadow ledger lay open on the kitchen table. I grabbed the notebook I’d been using and a Ticonderoga pencil and started writing: Roan, Char, Fred, Port, NNews, Lou, Hamp, Lynch, Rich, Rich, Rich . . .
The light flared bright as a full moon. I grabbed my phone.
“Hildy, listen! Roanoke, Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, Portsmouth, Newport News—God, if Newport News had been a snake, it would have bitten me—Louisa, Hampton, Lynchburg. Richmond! Richmond! Richmond!”
“Good Lord, you’ve lost your mind,” said Hildy.
“It’s Virginia,” I sang. “They all came from Virginia! Hildy, I love you, and I’m so glad you’re moving to Washington to live with Aidan, Aidan whom I could not love more, and I will call you back and explain everything, but I have to go call Dev.”
“Of course, you have to call Dev!” said Hildy, pounding the table again. “You’d be crazy not to always, always call Dev. But call me back so I know you haven’t been dragged off to the loony bin, the special one for people who can’t stop shouting Richmond, okay?”
“I promise.”
“I love you, too,” she said.
“Richmond!” I yelped and hung up.
* * *
We decided I would pick up Dev in Wilmington on my way home.
When I’d called him to tell him about my Virginia brainstorm, once my words stopped tripping over themselves and he could understand what I was saying, and after the rousing round of verbal high-fiving that followed, he said, “So what’s next?” And as soon as he said this, I realized “So what’s next?” was my indisputable, hands-down, all-time favorite question. I had not prior to that moment even considered having a favorite question, but at that second, I knew that I did have one, and this was it. It was so game, so chummy, and it just smacked of hope. If “So what’s next?” had a face, I would’ve kissed it on both cheeks.
“Well, I can try to find out if either John Blanchard or Edith had a Virginia connection,” I said. “One of the newspaper articles I read said that John was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to Antioch Beach as a young man. I could look up Blanchards in Baltimore and ask whomever I find if there’s a Virginia branch of the family he might have visited, I guess, although it’s a fairly common name. It could take a while to track someone down. And I haven’t stumbled upon anything about Edith’s life before she came to Antioch Beach. I might still. There are some of her locked boxes that I’ve opened but not gone through yet. Some of them were like specimen boxes or something. They had butterflies and other bugs inside, pinned and labeled in Edith’s handwriting. One had leaves, pretty crumbled by now. One had shells. The rest of them seemed to just have photographs in them, some hers, some Joseph’s. Should I start with the boxes?”
“Clare,” said Dev. “What if we just go?”
“To Virginia?”
“Sure. We could stop and see your parents and my grandparents, have dinner or whatever, maybe do a little poking around Charlottesville, and then—boom—go.”
I laughed, not because Dev had said something funny, but just because I was happy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed aloud out of sheer happiness, but however long it had been, it had been too long.
“Okay, but go where? We should narrow it down,” I said, “because there are a lot of towns on that list. I mean, I have time, but I’m guessing you don’t. You have to work at the lab, right?”
“Yeah. I can probably take one day off, not more than that, though. But listen, Richmond is mentioned more than once, and it’s the biggest city in the shadow ledger. What if we just go there? Today’s Wednesday. I can tell them tomorrow that I need Friday off; you’ll swing by and pick me up tomorrow night, and we’ll head down. Do you want to do that?”
When Dev gets excited about something, his enthusiasm doesn’t just flow, it billows, burgeoning in every direction like the ocean, and I have never been able to resist letting it carry me along. I had no idea what we would do once we got to Richmond. I would have said that the whole enterprise would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, except that I wasn’t sure what the needle would even be, but, right then, in the middle of all the billowing, Dev could have suggested that we head to Madagascar (where I’ve actually always wanted to go) or to the bottom of the Mariana Trench or to a random Walmart (where I never, ever want to go), and I would, without hesitation, have said yes.
“Yes!” I said.
This time, Dev was the one who laughed.
“Good,” he said. “Perfect. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
The next morning, so early that it was still dark, not nighttime dark, but that grayish, cat-soft dark that happens long after the frogs and bugs stop singing but before the birds start, when the sunrise is still hovering a few notches below the horizon, I got up, threw on some clothes, and went for a walk on the beach. As I set off across the deserted highway, a silver hook of moon still hung in the sky, but by the time I set foot on the sand, it was gone.
Tonight, I would see Dev for the first time since the Saturday afternoon when I had walked into Zach’s hotel room and spectacularly blew to bits our wedding and Zach’s heart and at least a little of mine, too. And that weekend had been the first time Dev and I had seen each other since another Saturday afternoon a few months earlier, one that had been far quieter, far less well attended—just the two of us, no family or friends to bear witness—but equally emotion-fraught, so confusing and painful that almost as soon as it was over, I had gathered up our entire conversation, crumpled it up, and shoved it to the very back of my mind, where it had stayed ever since.
But that morning, with our trip to Virginia just a few hours away, I decided it was time to pull it into the light, spread it out before me, and face it once and for all because my and Dev’s friendship had never been the same after that Saturday afternoon. We had hardly talked in the months between the two Saturdays, and the few times we had, the thing I’d shoved into that dark corner of my mind, as much as I’d tried to pretend it wasn’t there, had come between us. In recent days, as we’d talked about the Blue Sky House mystery, we’d inched closer to each other and to the friendship we used to have, but that balled-up, shoved-away Saturday was still there, and I wanted it gone.
Here’s the thing: I lied when I said I could never resist being carried away by Dev’s enthusiasm. There was one time, just one, on a freezing Saturday in January, a week and a half into the new year, when I resisted.
Zach had found out just two days before that his father was dying, and, despite their rocky relationship, he had taken the news hard. Vulnerable, shaky, as twitchy as a squirrel, more fragile than I’d ever imagined him being, he had begged me to come with him to the lake house in Michigan for the bedside vigil, and I had agreed, a decision I didn’t even quite regret later, after the trip—and Zach—had turned into a nightmare, because it was just a fact that no one with a shred of compassion could have possibly refused him.
The day before we were scheduled to leave, for the first time since Zach had gotten the news about his dad, I was alone in my apartment, drinking coffee loaded with milk, eating toast buttered all the way to the edges the way I liked it, and trying to store up the solitude and the sweet, sweet quiet, knowing I was sure to need both in the days to come, when I got a text from Dev. It said: Hey, Clare, I’m standing outside your apartment building, of all places. And, because, for my entire life since I’d met him, seeing Dev was always a million times better than not seeing him, I texted back: Why are you standing outsi
de texting instead of walking through my front door?
About five seconds later, he knocked, and I opened the door, and, for the next minute and a half or so was so busy being happy to see him—pulling him inside, hugging him, and saying things like wow and yay—that I didn’t notice immediately how drawn and serious he looked. And pale. Dev’s coloring generally tended toward a sort of fawn and russet combination; I could only remember seeing him truly pale on a few occasions, and one of those was when his maternal grandmother died. Dev pale scared me.
“Hey, why do you look like that?” I demanded, holding him at arm’s length.
“Genes,” he said. And then his accuracy-loving self couldn’t resist adding, “Not exclusively, obviously.”
The fact that he didn’t throw in a few details about epigenetics or the effect of environment on phenotype or whatever worried me almost as much as his wan cheeks.
“Seriously,” I said.
“How do I look?”
“Hunched. Mushroom-colored. With blue circles under your eyes.”
He smiled a tired smile.
“Extremely handsome, in other words.” He rolled his shoulders a few times, wincingly. “I had this brainstorm at 4:00 a.m. and just sort of jumped in the car. I guess I’m a little tired.”
“Hold on,” I said. “You drove here? From Charlottesville? Today? Isn’t that like a nine-, ten-hour trip? And what are you doing having brainstorms at four in the morning anyway?”
“It was a brainstorm, Clare. You don’t plan brainstorms. They just hit and you just get caught in them. Hence the word storm.” He gave a wry shrug. “Although this front had been moving in for a while; I just tried to ignore it.”
“Could you stop being metaphorical already and tell me what’s going on?”
“Okay, but can I maybe sit down first?”