As soon as Dev got into my car, he said, “Breaks, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, ruptures!” not in the lions-and-tigers-and-bears manner you might expect with such a grim list but gleefully and accentuating each word with a karate chop to the dashboard.
Unaccountably, it was exactly the right thing to say.
I’d been nervous on the drive from Edith’s house to Dev’s mom’s house. Not sweaty-palms, heart-clanging nervous; no high school orchestra warmed up inside my brain as sometimes happened. But my thumbs fluttered; my legs vibrated; three separate times, I caught myself humming a song that had nothing to do with the one coming through my car’s speakers. After ten miles of this, I was faintly exasperated with myself. By thirty, I had become the most irritating person I had ever met. And by the time I hit fifty, I was threatening to pull over and dump myself out on the side of the highway.
“You’re just lucky you’re driving,” I said aloud, “or you’d be gone, baby, gone.”
While it was true that I had spent a little face-to-face time with Dev at my nonwedding, it had been very little time, and for most of it, we’d been with at least one other person, so our attention had been divided, although looking back, I understood that the other people had been a minor distraction compared to the elephant in the room, the elephant being, of course, the fact that I could not possibly, in this lifetime or in any other, marry Zach. So when you factor in the other people and the elephant, Dev and I had almost not been together in real life that weekend at all.
Since then we’d been together on the phone, yes. In texts, yes. We’d been comfortable and jokey and chatty and even, once in a while, serious, more and more so with each conversation or exchange, until, by the time I pulled up in his mom’s driveway, we were very nearly back to the business of being the Dev and Clare of old, minus being in love, of course. Which is exactly why I was nervous because, as everyone knows, nothing makes you feel stupider than being familiar and totally at ease with a person over the phone, only to be stilted and shy and awkward when the two of you are finally physically in the same room. Or car. Cars are so much worse.
But Dev’s litany of bodily injuries turned out to be—if you’ll excuse the lame joke—just what the doctor ordered. “Breaks, contusions, abrasions, lacerations, ruptures!” and—poof—the awkwardness vanished.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said, starting the car.
“Br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face,” said Dev, more or less, and then again, “br rbs, clav. Cont, abr face!”
“Wow. This is going to be a long drive,” I said.
He said it again, loudly.
“Increasing the volume never helps in these situations,” I pointed out.
He said it again.
“You know what would help? Vowels.”
He rapped on the side of my head with his knuckles, lightly but not that lightly. “Clare. Pay attention.”
As I rubbed my head, he began to say it again, very, very slowly, but before he finished, it hit me. “Oh!” I said. “Oh, oh, oh!”
“Finally. Geez.”
“The shadow ledger! The stuff after the town abbreviations! She’s listing their injuries!”
“Yup,” said Dev.
“That’s wonderful! I mean, it’s awful. But how did it take you so long to figure it out?”
“And by that you mean, Way to go, Dev!”
“You start medical school in two months, at a fancy-pants school, no less. Correct?”
“What’s your point? And I would not call it ‘fancy-pants.’”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not 1910 and I’m not ninety-seven years old. For starters.”
We went on like this for very close to all of the four-hour trip. Somewhere in there, I noticed that Dev’s hair had grown out since the nonwedding and that he was back to doing the thing where he’d rake it impatiently off his forehead with his fingers as if it had fallen there just to annoy him; and, after we’d stopped to switch places, that he still drove with just one hand on the wheel despite all those years of my admonishing him about safety, safety, safety; and, when dusk fell outside the car where we sat talking, that his eyes, when he glanced over at me, matched the sky exactly.
Even though it was just after ten o’clock at night when we got to my parents’ house, everyone was there. Besides my mom and Gordon, there were Dev’s paternal grandparents, Ingrid and Rudy Sandoval, and Dev’s maternal step-grandparents, Ellie and Dr. B. Brown. They all lived in the same neighborhood, the one I’d moved to with my mother when I was eleven, the one in which Teo and Cornelia and their brothers and sisters had grown up, and the one Dev had visited so often that it was his neighborhood as much as anyone’s.
The first time I talked to Hildy about these people, and their children and their children’s children, and their various relationships to one another, she had pretended—very convincingly—to tear her hair out by the roots and had then thundered, “Enough! From now on they are ‘Leftover Night.’”
“What? No. Why?” I’d said.
“On the seventh day, God created Leftover Night! Except it wasn’t God. I think it was my dad or possibly my mom or maybe my older brother, Stephen. Anyway, in our house someone would cook dinner six nights out of seven, and on the seventh night, whoever’s turn it was would have to make a dish that used up all the leftovers from the other nights. So what we’d get was this mishmash of stuff that should absolutely not have worked, but somehow almost always did. That’s your family.” As usual, it was hard to argue with Hildy. From that moment on, we called them Leftover Night.
How bone-deep sweet it was to be with them, to sit at the big dining room table together eating the dishes they’d all brought to share, everyone running roughshod over one another in conversation, ending one another’s stories and sentences, mercilessly interrogating and forcing food on me and Dev. I met Dev’s eyes a couple of times across the table and could tell he was thinking what I was thinking: that it was good—as it had forever been and forever would be good—to sit at that table and be Clare and Dev, the doted-upon children, beloved by all these loud, teasing, bossy, outstandingly kind people.
After dinner, Dev and I took a walk around the neighborhood. It was well after midnight. The streetlamps burned, their blue-white glow pooling, at regular intervals, on the white sidewalks, but most of the windows of the solid, broad-shouldered, brick and stone houses were dark, their lawns spreading solemnly around them. A mailbox stood sentry at the end of every driveway. The big trees sang with cicadas. Dev and I knew every house. We knew every tree and all the places where their roots buckled the sidewalk. We’d known for so long we didn’t even realize we knew; it almost didn’t count as knowing. Every block of this place was jam-packed with the kind of memories you don’t have to conjure up because you are them. Here, nostalgia was rendered moot. Walking here, Dev and I could be fully in the here and now.
“It’s crazy what we’re doing, isn’t it?” I said, with a laugh. “Just heading off to Richmond, like we know where to look and what we’re looking for.”
“We’ll trust our instincts. Hey, I told you that scientists are taking intuition seriously, didn’t I? Have faith, Hobbes.” Then he shrugged and smiled down at the sidewalk. “But, yeah, it is a little crazy.”
“Fun, though,” I said, after a pause. “Even if we don’t find anything, it’s fun to be doing this.”
Dev walked along, looking straight ahead with his hands in his pockets, not saying anything for so long that I began to get nervous again.
“I mean, I think it’s fun to be doing this,” I said.
“Together,” said Dev, giving me a gentle—fairly gentle—elbow to the ribs. “Get it right. It’s fun to be doing this together.”
“Clare and Dev are on the case!” I said, shooting my fist in the air.
“Dev and Clare,” corrected Dev.
We kept walking.
“We’re lucky,” I said. “To have all of them. Our family. Even when we’re not with them, we have them.”
It was the understatement of the century, but I counted on Dev to know what I meant.
“They’re a constant,” he said. “Like pi. Wherever you are, pi is pi.”
“A constant. Like a turtle’s shell, a home you carry around with you everywhere.”
“That, too,” said Dev.
* * *
I was the one who thought of churches. Later, Dev would always say he was, but I was the one who brought up churches in the first place, and since we were all about intuition, even though I hadn’t specifically mentioned churches as a place to look for clues, the fact that I’d mentioned them at all was clearly my intuition subtly pointing us in the right direction. Or more or less the right direction.
We were driving through Richmond, following our intuition because that’s what we’d agreed to do and also because we didn’t exactly have anything else to follow, when I said, “There are a lot of churches in Richmond. It seems like on every corner, there’s a church.”
It was just a tossed-off comment, the kind of thing you say when you’re driving through an unfamiliar city searching for you-have-no-idea-what located you-have-no-idea-where. But about thirty seconds after I said it, Dev snapped into full-on ponder mode, brows knit, face still, lashes batting, eyes focused. I could almost see his brain working: holding an idea like a Rubik’s cube, turning and twisting it, click, click, click, until all its parts were in the proper place.
When I saw the last click happen and the tension leave his expression, I said, “Okay, give it to me. Not just the end result, but the whole train of thought.”
It was something we had always done, a way, maybe, to stand inside each other’s heads for just a moment. I remembered my own voice saying to Cornelia and my mom about Zach, “Sometimes, I think he won’t be satisfied until he climbs inside my head and lives there.” But this was different. Zach wanted to take possession, at least that’s how it felt; Dev and I just wanted to watch the machinery turn. “It’s like being inside a clock tower,” I’d told him once, and he’d replied, “Or like watching the doughnut machine at Krispy Kreme.”
“Okay. Sanctuary,” said Dev. “What’s the first thing that comes into your head?”
“A safe place,” I said. “A haven.”
“Same with my head. But I’m pretty sure—and I’m not great at Latin—but I think it comes from the word sanctuarium, and I think—arium means a container, like a terrarium is a container for a little piece of the earth, and sanctu means sacred. So a container for something holy.”
“Like the sanctuary of a church,” I said. “The part where the altar is.”
“Hey, whose train of thought is this anyway?”
“Sorry.”
“So where did I go next? Oh, right. Like the sanctuary of a church, the part where the altar is.”
I punched him in the arm.
“Ow. Okay, so maybe that’s the original meaning of the word, but now it also means—”
“A safe place. A haven. Like I said.”
“I thought it before you said it, but fine.”
“I said ‘churches’ before you thought any of this, but fine.”
Dev rolled his eyes. “Moving on. I’m just guessing but the word probably came to mean that because churches became safe havens for people.”
“Oh, oh, like Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church! In Philadelphia! I went there!”
“If that was a stop on the underground railroad, you just completely hijacked my train of thought,” said Dev, shooting me a baleful glance.
“Oh. No. Nope.” I shook my head decisively. “That’s not what it was. It was something—else.”
Dev heaved a very large sigh. “Anyway. Back in the fifties, before they had women’s shelters—at least, I don’t think they had them then or definitely not many—where would a battered woman go for sanctuary?”
“Yes! We should go look at churches,” I said, whacking the dashboard.
“It’s still a shot in the dark, just to walk in and ask if there’s anyone who remembers anything that might help us. But it’s less a shot in the dark than driving aimlessly around the city.”
“And what do we have to lose?”
“Nothing. Let’s do it. We’ll look up churches on our phones and just start.”
For the next three hours, that’s what we did, went to church after church, skipping the ones built after 1953, and asking the people we met there whether they knew anything that might suggest that the church was part of an organization, possibly secret, that helped abused women escape to safety. I suppose we could have called instead of going, which might have saved time but wouldn’t have felt nearly as much like an adventure.
By the fourth church, I’d mostly given up on finding out anything about Edith’s shadow ledger guests, but I liked the churches anyway. There were grand ones with domed ceilings and gold fixtures and dazzling stained glass; there were simple white clapboard ones with tidy box pews and no-nonsense wood floors; there were historic ones with brass plaques dropping names like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. We went to the church where Patrick Henry gave his “give me liberty or give me death” speech at the Second Virginia Convention, and both of us got the shivers imagining him there, burning with audacity and eloquence, as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington listened.
I loved the symmetry of the pews, with the aisle straight down the middle. I loved the vocabulary: apse, chancel, nave, pulpit. I loved the small, tucked-away chapels. I loved how stepping into each cool, hushed interior was immediately peaceful, like morning coffee at your kitchen table or sitting in your backyard watching the fireflies begin their light show in the lilac bushes along the fence. I loved how I could say these things to Dev and he smiled and only made fun of me a little but not like he really meant it.
Everyone was nice, and no one knew a thing about John Blanchard or Edith Herron or an underground railroad for abused women.
And then a secretary at an Episcopal church said, “We need more places like the one down the road. Everyone in danger should have a safe harbor, a sanctuary.”
Sanctuary.
Her use of the word set my intuition pinging, only faintly pinging because it was a completely reasonable, even obvious word choice, but a faint ping is better than no ping at all. I looked over at Dev, and after a second, he shrugged and nodded.
“Why not?” he said.
The Andrew Pfeiffer Women’s Center and Shelter had just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, which made it pretty old but not old enough for our purposes, and all the people who worked there had clearly been born decades after the 1950s, so, right away, it seemed like a dead end. A very, very good and worthwhile dead end, though, because the Andrew Pfeiffer Women’s Center and Shelter turned out to be a kind of clearinghouse for hope. In addition to sanctuary, the center offered mental health services, legal advocacy, a twenty-four-hour hotline, homework tutoring for children, and financial counseling. The staff there helped women get jobs and mortgages and go back to school. They even allowed dogs.
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 domestic 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.”