“How about I make a quick visit? Just to be sure you’re safe,” my mother said when she called later that night. “I heard about the Facebook thing.”
I sighed. “From Dev?”
“From Cornelia who heard it from Hildy who heard it from Aidan who heard it from Dev.”
“I only heard it from Dev an hour ago,” I grumbled, sounding exactly like my fourteen-year-old, privacy-deprived, indignant self.
The next day, when my mother arrived, in a whirlwind of sunglasses and linen and knife’s-edge pleats and blondness, I ran out so fast to throw myself into her arms that I nearly mowed down a squirrel. When she’d managed to untangle her elegant limbs from my hug, she took off her sunglasses and smiled, and I was struck for the hundred-millionth time by how my mother would have looked exactly like Grace Kelly if only Grace had bothered to be just a teensy bit more polished.
After we carried in her sleek overnight bag and the four tons of groceries she’d brought, I gave her a tour of the house, which I’d begun to think of as my house, although somehow this didn’t seem to make it any less Edith’s. My mother oohed and ahhed and ran her hand along some things and gazed at other things and got solemn and expressed reverence in all the right places. We made sandwiches and picnicked at the beach and then went for a long walk on the sand, during which my mother in her black one-piece swimsuit, raffia sunhat, and a silk sarong knotted around her hips with the same nonchalant, maddening perfection with which she knotted scarves around her neck, turned the heads of men—and plenty of women—a third her age, a phenomenon she noticed not one whit.
That evening, she treated me to the best table at the best restaurant in town. We sat on the bayside deck, feasted, and watched the sunset outdo itself, no doubt turning on the magnificence for my mom, who clapped and called out “Bravo!” just as it hit its rose-gold, magenta, and blue-opal peak.
We talked and talked. She already knew about the Mystery of Blue Sky House, of course, but I told her again anyway, filling in all the details and updating her on the recent Richmond developments.
When I was finished, and we were forking up strawberry pie, my mother smiled and said, “You and Dev always did love to puzzle things out together.”
“He’ll tell you that he solved all the hardest parts, but really it was me,” I said.
“I suspect you solved them together. Two heads are better than one, especially when they’re your and Dev’s heads.” She paused then said, gravely, “I’m glad you two are back on track. We’re all glad.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Just as long as you—all of you—are clear as to exactly which track we’re talking about.”
“You’re friends, I know.” My mother blinked, innocent as a baby. “But why do we need to rubber-stamp your and Dev’s relationship—or any—as one definite, limited thing?”
“I don’t know about any,” I said. “But this one is rubber stampable. Trust me.”
“I trust you. Now, if only you could learn to trust yourself.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re such a good girl, and I love that about you. But what if you put aside what’s appropriate or expected or even noble—and you know how I like nobility—forget rules and rubber stamps and boundaries and just follow your instincts?”
“Are you going to start in about how brain scientists are taking intuition seriously these days? Because I’ve heard that one.”
“From someone very smart, I expect,” she said. “Who has lovely gray eyes and your best interests at heart.”
“They’re blue-gray, actually,” I said.
“Ah,” said my mother, infusing that single syllable with so much complicated meaning that the only thing to do was ignore it. “Anyway, rubber stamp notwithstanding, I’m glad you two are having fun.”
“Had fun,” I said, wistfully. “I guess I’m suffering a little postadventure depression right now. I wish it weren’t over. It somehow doesn’t feel over. But it is.”
“Maybe it’s not. The world is big and life is long. You never know,” said my mother, giving a shrug that managed to be chic and wise and jaded and careless all at once. It was the kind of shrug for which words like insouciant and urbane were created.
And even though I did know, my mother’s shrug was so persuasive that I allowed myself to have a tiny bit of hope.
Later, back at Blue Sky House, we sat on the living room rug with glasses of wine, and I opened the boxes of Edith’s and Joseph’s photographs, including a few I’d never actually gone through.
“These are marvelous. I love the exuberance of his, the way she seems like a wild bird or a goddess. Clearly, he worshipped her. But I think I like hers of him even more; they’re so personal and intimate that I almost feel guilty looking at them. Who knew a photo of the back of someone’s head or the inside of his wrist could be so passionate?” said my mother.
“I know,” I said, reaching for a stack of photos from one of the previously unexamined boxes. I shuffled through them and then laid them out, one by one, in front of me on the rug.
“Hey!” I said. “These aren’t Joseph.”
“Are you sure?” said my mother.
“This man is dark haired, too, but much slimmer, narrower in the shoulders. Joseph was a big, muscular guy. And the—I don’t know—tenor of them is different from the Joseph pictures.”
My mother slid over to look, but after a glance, she scooted back to her own patch of rug and the Joseph photos she had arrayed before her. “I see what you mean. Those are clever, arch. I prefer these.”
This new batch contained fragments of a man, as did the photos of Joseph, but even though they were just as close-in, they were somehow much more distant. Cooler in mood, more full of angles and straight lines, more full of things rather than focusing on the curved, pliant, warm-blooded terrain of skin and sinew. A man’s hand holding a glass, his nails smooth, his shirt cuff almost blindingly white, an odd signet ring—flat, dark, square stone, heavily carved sides—glinting on his left pinkie. Fingers holding a wool fedora by the brim. A polished wingtip with a slice of sock-covered ankle. Tip of chin, glimpse of neck, knot of tie. Knuckles of a hand that gripped the oval handle of a leather bag, a hint of a name—unreadable—stamped in what looked like gold beneath the handle. Blurred man in a suit standing at the back window, elegant shoulders, dark hair. Dark, I noted, so not John. I remembered reading in the newspaper articles about the trial that John Blanchard was blond.
When I turned the photos over, I saw that each had a faint G.G. penciled in the right-hand corner with a date underneath. I was right about the photos not being of Joseph; all of them were taken during the winter and spring of 1956 when Joseph had been dead for over three years. I took out the daylight ledger and examined the entries spanning that time period but found no one with the initials G.G. Then, I went further back and there it was, many months earlier: George Graham. Nothing more. It was the only entry in the entire ledger with no address. If George Graham had come back during the winter and spring of 1956, he hadn’t come as a paying guest.
I went back to the photos. Could this man have been Edith’s lover? It was true that the photos had an air of detachment, but the person in them would have had to have known she was taking them. He and Edith had to have been familiar with each other for her to get so close to him.
“These clothes and shoes and things,” I said. “They look expensive. And formal, not the kind of thing people typically wear for a beach trip, even in winter.”
“Let me see,” said her mother, holding out her hand.
“Yes, tell me what you think. You’re the style star.” It was true; even with her reading glasses resting on the tip of her nose, she looked ridiculously glamorous.
I restacked the photos and handed them to her.
She stopped on the one with the oval-handled leather bag, set the photo on the floor, and tapped it with her long forefinger.
“Mark Cross,” she said.
“You mean the name stamp
ed on it?” I said. “You can read that? But I thought the man’s initials were G.G.”
“Mark Cross is a leather goods designer, very expensive. It shut down in the 1990s but was resurrected a couple of years ago. In its new incarnation, the company reissued a lot of its older, classic designs. That’s why I recognize this duffel; it was one of the reissues.”
“Is the company based in a particular city?” I asked. “Maybe a northern city?”
“There was a store on Fifth Avenue. No longer there, but back in the 1950s I’m pretty sure it would have been.”
My mother continued to look through the other photos, but I held on to the Mark Cross one, my heart starting to beat hard.
“Okay, Mom, what if G.G. was Mr. Big City? I mean, maybe it’s a long shot, but he was here; Edith knew him well enough to take all these photos; assuming he’s George Graham, he came the first time not long before the first shadow ledger guest arrived; and Edith either didn’t know his address or was keeping it a secret. Also, the lawyer who represented John Blanchard came from an upper-crust New York firm, and doesn’t it seem likely that if John, one of the cogs in Mr. Big City’s machine, got in trouble while being a cog, Mr. Big City would do whatever he could to get him out of it?”
“Oh, my God,” gasped my mother.
“I know! It really could be him.”
But when I turned to look at her, her gaze was riveted on a photo in her hand.
“Mom? Did you hear what I said?”
She looked up at me, staring absently through her glasses, and shook her head.
“No, no, I didn’t. Sorry. But, oh, Clare.”
She turned the photo she held around so that I could see it. It was the one of the man’s hand holding the glass.
Wide-eyed, her voice so breathless I could barely hear it, my mother said, “The ring. Clare, I know that ring.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Edith
December 1956
For the first eight hours of the journey, Edith made things happen. She pressed the gas pedal, and the car accelerated. She pressed the brake, and the car rolled to a stop. She drove through towns, noting their names, the dark gas stations, the church steeples piercing the sky. She drove along deserted roads and watched her headlights carve a tunnel of light for the car to travel through. She passed stands of trees, roadside motor inns with partially burned-out signs. She spoke words of reassurance to Sarah, who lay propped up with a pillow and wrapped in blankets in the backseat, her baby in her arms. She ate a sandwich. She stopped twice, briefly, to stretch her legs, change Steven’s diaper, consult her road atlas, and check on Sarah, who both times eked out a smile and a hoarse, heart-cracking “I’m fine.” Edith grew impatient, wanting to go faster, stick to bigger roads, take a straighter shot, but the only priority greater than getting to where they were going as quickly as possible was not getting caught along the way, so she reasoned with herself, stuck assiduously to the speed limit and to her winding, circuitous route.
But just as the sun came up, things began to happen to Edith. The world outside the car windows changed, wavering like a heat shimmer, leaning in to press against the sides of the car or circling around it like a carousel. And the car began to drive itself, hurtling along at fifteen miles an hour, crawling at forty, or sitting motionless as the buildings and road signs and trees rushed by it in a blur. To keep herself awake, Edith began to sing, and the songs chose her instead of the reverse. Sometimes, she sang without knowing she sang, talked without topic or direction. When she stopped at a gas station, she told the attendant that Sarah was her sister who had recently been in a car accident, that they were going to visit relatives in Maine; she babbled brightly on about blueberries, lobster, bears, and moose, until the attendant said, “You seem a little fatigued, ma’am. Might want to check into a motel and get some sleep,” and she said, “As soon as we get to the next town, I promise we’ll do just that.” She didn’t keep the promise, but she came close, pulling the car into a motel parking lot and lying down across the front seat.
Four hours later, a sound woke her. She thought at first it was the baby crying, but it was Sarah, groaning in pain. When Edith turned around, the sight of the woman knocked the wind out of her like a punch. Sarah’s eyes were unfocused, her face glazed with sweat, and she trembled as if an invisible person had her by the shoulders and were shaking her until her teeth rattled. Edith got into the backseat, coaxed water and aspirin down Sarah’s throat. With great effort, she kept her voice low and soothing, but fear was charging through her, beating out a loud prayer inside her head: Just let her live, just let her live, just let her live, I’ll do anything if you just let her live.
In the end, that fear is what saved Edith: jolting her out of her fog into an acute, raw wakefulness, sharpening her senses, jerking her attention back on track whenever it began to stray. And Edith believed forever after that it was the baby who saved Sarah. Quiet for the first two-thirds of the trip, as his mother grew sicker, he transformed into a bundle of steely will, of raucous demand, his throaty, mechanical cries making the air inside the car pulse like a migraine as he insisted on his own survival over and over and over. Even when his mother muttered, delirious with fever, wild-eyed as an animal, or when she seemed to slide into and out of unconsciousness, some tiny, clear piece of her remained to hear him, to hear him and to answer. When Sarah was too weak to hold her head upright, she pressed her son into the curve of her body with an unflagging grip. When she no longer seemed to know where she was, she lifted her shirt and nursed him.
By the time they got to the border checkpoint, Edith was so tired that, for a panicked moment, she forgot the words George had told her to say to the guard, but just as she was rolling down the window, she remembered.
“We’ve come all the way from Latrobe to visit our northern cousins,” she said, smiling.
After a quick glance at Sarah and Steven in the backseat, the guard delivered his line: “Latrobe? Isn’t that where the banana split was invented?”
“It is,” said Edith, with a sigh of relief. “It is, indeed.”
Because of the indirect route, the trip took over twenty-four hours, so that it was dark when they arrived at the safe house. Edith didn’t know what she’d been expecting—a mansion? A fortress?—but the sight of the farmhouse set back from the road in a copse of maples took her by surprise. It was so ordinary, so peaceful with its mailbox, its brick walkway, its gabled roofs, its amber porch light, its shaded windows like closed eyes.
The young doctor who lived there came out to meet them. He’d been expecting them. “Oh, Lord,” he said at the sight of Sarah. “I’ll need to get her to the hospital tonight.”
At Edith’s alarmed expression, he said, “Don’t worry. There are people there who know, who help. Friends. My mother is a friend, too. She’s waiting inside.”
The next half hour moved around Edith like a dream. She handed over the baby. She heard bathwater running, saw clean pajamas draped over the back of a chair, smelled bread baking. But, reeling with exhaustion, without bathing or eating or changing her clothes, still wearing her winter coat, she tumbled onto the bed and slept.
When she woke up, it was the afternoon of the following day.
The doctor’s name was Thomas Farley. His mother introduced herself as May.
Edith took a bath in a claw-foot tub as big as a rowboat, sinking into the steaming water up to her chin. The air smelled of talcum powder and rosewater, and Edith wished she could stay right there all day, cradled and weightless, the hot water coaxing the ache and stiffness from her muscles. She washed her hair and dressed in the clothes she’d hastily packed, another of Joseph’s sweaters and a pair of blue jeans. Examining her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she shook her head and said, “Aren’t you a sight,” and then, following the fragrance of bacon, she went down to find May.
When she walked into the kitchen, May turned, spatula in hand. She was diminutive, pink-cheeked from the hot stove, her gray hair cr
opped. She should have been a cute old lady but somehow she wasn’t. May gave Edith a fleeting once-over, and then, without remarking on her appearance, turned back to the stove, where an egg danced in a skillet. She flipped it in a glory of sputtering and said, grinning, “I know it’s almost four o’clock, but I figured it was breakfast time for you.”
“Thank you,” said Edith. “I’m ravenous and that smells like heaven. But how is Sarah?”
“After you eat,” said May, sternly. “And no rushing. I can only imagine what you’ve been through, driving all that way through the cold and dark with a sick woman and an infant. First and foremost, your body needs nourishment.”
She placed a plate of eggs and bacon and fresh buttered bread before Edith, and then stood watching while she ate it. For all her kindness, there was something commanding about May, rooted there in her kitchen, keen-eyed and upright and stalwart, like a soldier or a lighthouse. Not until Edith had eaten every bite—and it didn’t take long—and May had taken her plate away and brought her a mug of tea thick with cream did she sit down next to Edith at the table, fold her hands before her, and say, “About Sarah.”
“Is she all right?”
“Not yet,” said May, shaking her head. “She’s got a rough road ahead of her. They had to take out her spleen, and that’s a long recovery all by itself, but she’s got an infection as well, which has sent her into shock. An infection without a spleen to help fight it off . . . well, I won’t sugarcoat it; Thomas is worried sick.”