The director was a woman named Selby Abbott; she was tiny, blond, wore dark jeans and a simple white shirt, had an aristocratic Tidewater accent, ramrod-straight posture, and the frankest, most unwavering gaze I’d seen in a long time. She could not have been nicer to us, but, even so, I got the feeling that Selby Abbott was someone with whom you would not want to mess.
After we’d introduced ourselves, and Selby had led us back to her immaculate office, she said, “Welcome to Andrew Pfeiffer, Clare and Dev. What’s your story?” and even though we hadn’t told our full story at any of the churches, I found, suddenly, that I wanted to tell it to Selby.
“Our story,” I said and paused.
“Go ahead,” said Dev.
So I told as efficient a version of it as I could—glossing quickly over the part about leaving Zach practically at the altar—and I was on fairly firm ground until I got to the part about the city abbreviations and our trip to Richmond because, as I described it all, out loud and to a complete stranger, I realized how flaky and impulsive it sounded, how much like a fool’s errand. But the crazy thing is that, while Selby had appeared fully engaged from the very start, when I got to the Richmond part, she leaned toward me, locked her attention in even harder, and when I’d finished, she said, “Oh. My. God,” not as in Oh my God, you two are idiots, thank goodness, but more like Oh my God, this is amazing.
“What?” I asked.
She opened a desk drawer, rummaged around for a few seconds, pulled out a brochure, and handed it to me.
“It’s Andrew,” she said, excitedly. “It has to be. Okay, maybe it doesn’t have to be, but I really think it is.”
The brochure was for the center’s thirtieth-anniversary gala and fund-raiser.
“Go to page four,” she said, “and read.”
Dev scooted his chair closer to mine, took one side of the brochure in his hand while I held the other, and, with our heads almost touching, we read.
The center had been started by an elderly woman and her friends. The woman was Lillian Pfeiffer, the widow of the Reverend Andrew Pfeiffer who had died just the year before. Reverend Pfeiffer had been a remarkable man, although almost no one realized exactly how remarkable until after his death, when Lillian finally told his story.
One day in the early 1930s, when Andrew was a young assistant rector, a woman and her son had come to his church. The woman told Andrew and his superior, the rector, that, beginning about a year after they’d been married, her husband, a wealthy man prone to wild rages, began to beat her. She told Andrew and the rector that the beatings were getting worse and that she feared for her life and for her son, who looked to be about nine or ten. She asked them to help her. Despite the terribleness of her story, the rector sent her back home to work on her marriage. Although Andrew never found out what became of the woman—and indeed did not even know her name—her story, her palpable fear and sadness, and, as she left, her air of utter hopelessness haunted him for decades.
Almost twenty years later, around 1950, when his and Lillian’s children were teenagers and he had a church of his own, Andrew became part of a secret relocation effort for victims of domestic violence. He organized a wide network of carefully chosen ministers and rabbis and other like-minded people who identified abused women and their children in their communities and sent them to Andrew Pfeiffer’s church. They would arrive in the dead of night and stay a day or two in a back room until a car came, picked them up, and took them far away, to safety. While Lillian knew the basics of what was happening, for her own safety Andrew never gave her details. She didn’t know the names of any of the other people involved; she didn’t know who the women were or where they came from or where they went when they left Andrew’s church. While she cooked food for Andrew to take to the women and children, she never set eyes on a single one of them.
Not until I came to the end of the story and heard Dev say, “Ow,” did I realize I’d been holding on to his free hand, squeezing it tighter and tighter as I read.
“Sorry!” I said.
I dropped his hand and, as he shook it out and flexed his fingers, with what I regarded as more drama than necessary, he said to Selby, “I’ll bet you’re right. It all fits. The time line is right. But did Lillian ever mention the names John Blanchard or Edith Herron? Like maybe it was John who picked the women up and drove them away?”
Selby shook her head. “She never mentioned names, at least not to the reporters who wrote the articles about Andrew, and if she mentioned them to my predecessor, I never heard about it.”
“Wait,” I said. “You never met her?”
“No. I didn’t start working here until 2000. I believe Lillian passed away in the midnineties.”
I sighed. “Oh, I was hoping we could talk to her.”
“Yeah,” said Dev. “She might have been able to tell us something, some little detail, that she didn’t tell the reporters.”
Selby’s face brightened. “Well, hey, her daughter Abby Stewart is on the board of the center. Why don’t you give me a cell number and I’ll see if she wouldn’t mind calling you? Would that help?”
I smiled. “Yes! That would be great, actually. Thank you so much.”
“Yes, thank you for everything,” said Dev. “No one would’ve blamed you if you thought we were crazy, and here you are going above and beyond.”
Selby clasped her hands under her chin. “Andrew Pfeiffer is kind of a household god around here.” She grinned and instantly looked about eleven years old. “Plus, I spent a good chunk of my childhood being obsessed with Nancy Drew. I just love a good mystery.”
“Ditto,” I said, laughing. “On both counts.”
Dev and I ate dinner at a Thai restaurant because it was the first place we came to that we could agree on, the only drawback to Thai being that we couldn’t share, since my philosophy about Thai food is that if your tongue doesn’t practically burst into flames while you eat it, it isn’t worth eating, a philosophy with which Dev adamantly—and wimpily—disagrees. When we’d eaten ourselves right to the edge of oblivion and were toddling out to my car, my phone rang—or vibrated actually—and I looked down at it expecting to see Zach’s name on the screen. During dinner, he’d texted four times, and each time, he’d written exactly the same words, ones that sent a chill up my spine and caused me to glance over my shoulder and at the restaurant’s big plateglass window, even though I knew what he wrote couldn’t possibly be literally true: I know you’re with him right now.
But this was a number neither my phone nor I recognized, area code 804. Abby Stewart.
Dev and I got inside the car and Abby Stewart let me put her on speaker, so that when she broke the news that she’d never heard anything about a John Blanchard or an Edith Herron from her mother, had never heard any names at all, Dev and I were able to be disappointed together.
“Even though this was all going on while I was in high school, I never knew a thing about it until after my dad died and my mom told me. I do know that my father was just a cog in the wheel, a big cog for sure—he took a lot of risks—but he wasn’t the one running the machine. He wasn’t the mastermind; another man had the idea and sought my father out, recruited him I guess you could say. When the women and children left my father’s church, not even my father knew where they were going. A car picked them up and took them away. My mother didn’t share that information with the reporters because she didn’t want them digging around, trying to find the guy. She only told me that he existed shortly before her death.”
“Who was it?” asked Dev.
We held our breaths.
“Someone with deep pockets,” said Abby Stewart. “My mother told me that my father never used his name in front of her, just referred to him as Mr. Big City. He was from someplace up north, she said. My father said he was a man with power and money and a load of rage. He’d channeled it toward doing good, obviously, but it was rage nonetheless. My dad said a man with that much anger must have had firsthand knowledge of domesti
c violence.”
“Do you know how long your father was part of this operation, this underground railroad?” I asked.
“Until the midfifties, I think. Fifty-six, fifty-seven. It ended abruptly. For reasons unknown to my dad or my mom, Mr. Big City just called the whole thing off. My dad felt guilty about stopping, but the tide was already turning. In the early sixties, my dad and other like-minded people began to establish shelters, small ones, and my dad spent the rest of his life working to educate his congregation and the public about domestic violence. He was a good man.”
“He was,” I said.
“And your mother was obviously a good person, too,” said Dev. “She helped establish the women’s center and everything.”
“She was tireless.” Abby Stewart chuckled. “And relentless about raising money to keep the place up. People used to say that Lillian Pfeiffer could squeeze money out of a stone.”
“Thank you for talking to us,” I said.
“It’s my pleasure,” she said. “I mean that. I haven’t talked about my parents much recently, although I think about them and miss them every day. I’m truly grateful for the chance to tell someone about them. Now, you have to promise to let me know if you find out anything else. And, oh Lord, let Selby know, too. You’ve got her interest piqued. That woman loves a good mystery.”
We promised. After we hung up, we sat for a minute, not talking.
“Rich, powerful. It doesn’t sound like John,” said Dev.
“I know.” I could hear how crestfallen that I know came out, but even so, my tone didn’t come close to conveying how let down I felt.
“Hey,” said Dev, tugging a lock of my hair. “We found out a lot on this trip, didn’t we? A lot more than I thought we would.”
I looked at Dev. Of all the people whose bubbles I hated bursting, Dev topped the list, but it seemed wrong not to tell him what I was thinking. I groaned.
“Okay, I hate saying this, but if I don’t say it, I might fret about it for weeks, and I might do that anyway, but since we’re in this thing together, I just think I should say it. What do you think?”
“Go for it,” said Dev. “We can at least fret together.”
“Well, isn’t it possible that Mr. Big City’s machine and Edith’s shadow ledger aren’t related at all? That it’s just a coincidence? There’s nothing here really to absolutely connect Edith or John to any of what we’ve dug up.”
“I agree that some kind of irrefutable proof would have been nice, and, sure, it’s possible that what you’re worrying about is true, but I don’t think so. Mr. Big City called it quits at right around the same time as Edith left and John got arrested. Everything fits too well. They were all in it together.”
Even though I knew Dev couldn’t be 100 percent sure of that, not as sure as he sounded, I felt relieved anyway.
“So Edith and John were other cogs in the machine. The shadow guests stayed at Blue Sky House for a night or two and then someone, maybe John, took them to wherever they went next,” I said.
“Probably not John, though,” said Dev. “It could have been, but it might have aroused suspicion, the police chief leaving town mysteriously on a regular basis. Mr. Big City probably sent a car to Edith’s house, too.”
“And Sarah and her baby? How do they fit? I mean, they kind of don’t. Sarah wasn’t from Virginia; she was a local woman; she had killed her husband; and she wasn’t written down in the shadow ledger. All of that makes her different from the others.”
“Okay, so Sarah and the baby weren’t part of Mr. Big City’s escape machine, not at first. Relocating her and her baby was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and I think it probably all unfolded a lot like John said it did in court.”
I nodded. “What he left out was that he and Edith had done it before; there was a system in place. They just slid Sarah and her baby into it.”
“You’d make Nancy Drew proud,” said Dev. He raised his palm, and I slapped it.
“You, too.”
But neither of us sounded especially happy. We should’ve been triumphant because Dev was right when he said we’d found out a lot. But mostly what I felt was deflated, even sorrowful.
“I think . . .” I began.
“What?” said Dev.
“Well, maybe this is it. We’ve figured out all we can figure out.”
He smiled and leaned over to bump my shoulder with his. “Unless you want to go scour every major northern city, looking for Mr. Big City.”
“Sounds fun, actually,” I said, then I sighed. “I just wish we’d learned more of Edith’s story.”
“We don’t know the middle part, all those years. I guess we’ll never know it.” Dev brightened. “But we know how it ended.”
My eyes filled with tears. “We know that whatever happened during those years, she survived it all. She lived on, even after leaving everything she knew behind. She became an amazing person.”
“And she left you her house,” said Dev.
“She was taking care of me, a woman she didn’t even know.” I wiped my eyes and smiled. “Like she took care of all those other women. She was worried about me, so she gave me a safe place.”
“A sanctuary.”
Outside the car, dusk had ended, and the summer night surrounded us. Pinprick stars floated above the trees edging the restaurant parking lot. I couldn’t find the moon.
“So this is where Edith’s story ends, I guess,” I said.
“With you,” said Dev. “You’re Edith’s happy ending.”
“Honestly, right now, I feel sad.”
“Hey, happy endings aren’t allowed to be sad.”
I suddenly understood that, yes, I was sad that we hadn’t found out all of Edith’s story, but that wasn’t the entire reason.
I wanted to ask Dev my favorite question. It was there, hovering above us, singing itself over and over, like a mockingbird, waiting for one of us to ask it, but what I realized right then was that if you didn’t have an answer to it, the question lost its magic. And if the answer were “Nothing,” “So what’s next?” became, in an instant, the saddest question in the world.
“I wish this weren’t over. I’ll miss—” I found I couldn’t look directly at Dev, so I stared out the windshield. “The search,” I finished.
After a few seconds, Dev said, “I’ll miss that, too.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Edith
December 1956
Before she noticed the smear of blood on his tan windbreaker, before he had spoken a single word, Edith knew, not exactly what he was going to say to her, but that whatever it was would change everything. Tranquil John, John of the steady voice and unflappable nerves, cerulean-eyed, eye-of-the-storm John stood on her porch, lips pale, weight shifting from foot to foot, hands rubbing together as if he were trying to warm them. Indeed, he was shivering, head to toe, shivering in bursts, as if electric shocks were running through him. And because it troubled her, the sight of him cold, and maybe also because she wanted to buy a moment, to postpone knowing whatever frightening thing he had come to tell her, she opened her front door wider and said, scolding him, “That flimsy jacket’s not enough for this weather. For heaven’s sake, come in.”
He came in and she shut the door behind him, but the shivering persisted. She saw the blood, then, a handprint like children make in school on his jacket, dashes of it on his white shirt, still a wild red, fresh blood, and panic shot through her.
“Oh, God, you’re hurt.” She reached toward him, but he stepped back, dodging her touch.
“I’m fine.” He stared down at the blood as if he were seeing it for the first time. “I shouldn’t have come. I don’t want to visit this trouble on you, but I didn’t know, I couldn’t think what else to do,” he said.
“Of course, you should’ve come,” she said.
He shook his head. “However this thing plays out, if you’re involved in it, you’ll be at risk. More than you’ve been so far.”
John pr
essed his hands to the top of his head, trying to calm himself. When he dropped them to his side, the shaking had abated, but he looked at her with stricken eyes. “You can say no, and, God help me, Edith, you should say no. Just say that one word, and I’ll go away and never mention this again.”
Edith remembered John on the beach in the pouring rain, how he’d found her wandering in the storm and brought her home, how he’d warmed her and talked to her and stayed all night.
“You’re my true friend and I’m yours,” she said. “Whatever you’re asking, I’m saying yes.”
“You can still say no after I tell you.”
“I won’t.”
Suddenly cold, she pulled her hands inside the cuffs of the sweater she wore, one of Joseph’s. Now that it was winter, she’d taken to dressing this way when she was home alone, her body cocooned, lost inside Joseph’s oversized clothing, safe and warm.
“I parked my car in the dark place down the street,” said John. “There’s a woman in it with a newborn baby. She shot her husband, not half an hour ago. The man’s dead, Edith.”
The rest of the miserable story tumbled out. By the time John was saying, “Anyway, I was hoping maybe you could do for her what you’ve done for the others,” Edith was already putting on her coat.
Her name was Sarah. For a woman who had recently given birth, for any woman, Sarah was thin—stark jawline, broomstick arms, her back a frightening relief map of bones—and more horribly hurt than any woman who had ever passed through Blue Sky House. John carried her from the car to Edith’s back door; Edith carried the baby, Steven, who did not cry but merely regarded her with his almond-shaped eyes.
Edith centered the baby on the cot in the corner of the room, as John placed Sarah gently on the bed, leaving the room immediately afterward so that Edith could examine her. Sarah’s face was ashen where it wasn’t bruised or bleeding, one eye purple, swollen shut, her throat, back, breasts, rib cage, arms, legs covered with bruises like ink stains, some of them new. Edith gently dabbed some ointment on her split lip. Edith heard a clattering sound outside and froze, but when John didn’t reappear, she assumed it was just the wind and went back to her examination. When Edith pressed carefully on Sarah’s abdomen, Sarah moaned.