I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(47)

Just as I was about to say I’d type everything up, go to the library or a coffee shop or something and send it to him, Dev said, “What if you take pictures of the relevant pages with your phone and text them to me? That’ll save you some work and save us some time.”

I let out my breath, even though I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it.

“Good idea,” I said.



In the end, over the course of a week, we only got three phone calls between the two of us, but they were enough. We confirmed what I’d known in my bones to be true: the shadow guests were real and had stayed in Edith’s house.

One man had been nine, and he remembered getting up early and coming downstairs before his parents woke up. There was a girl sitting in a chair reading a book. She was about his age, maybe a little younger, with dark, curly hair. He remembered that she was embarrassed about her dress because it wasn’t pretty and was too big for her. She told him that the dress was “borrowed” and that all her own pretty clothes were back at home. He remembered her mother showing up and telling her to shush, and he wondered why her mother seemed mad when all the girl had done was talk about her dress. According to the shadow ledger, the girl’s name was Elaine and her mother’s name was Dottie.

Another man, nearly ninety years old but sharp as a tack, had stayed with his family at Blue Sky House three times. He described Edith as quiet and gracious, the kind of person who could produce a bucket and spade out of thin air for the children to take to the beach and who packed a hell of a picnic lunch. On the third visit, he and his wife, Anne, woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone “sobbing her heart out,” so Anne had gone down to check on Edith. But when she got to the first floor, Edith was standing in the living room, dry-eyed and composed as ever. She told his wife that a guest staying in the downstairs bedroom had had a nightmare but that everything was all right now. By the time his family came down to breakfast the next morning, the guest was gone. According to the shadow ledger, the guest’s name was Kitty.

Another woman had been around fifteen when her family spent a weekend at Blue Sky House. A chronic insomniac, she’d been unable to sleep and was lying awake when she heard doors opening and shutting on the floor below. Worried and curious, she’d crept down the stairs to see what was happening and saw a woman with two black eyes—terrible looking, swollen almost shut—standing in the kitchen. She remembered being surprised because she hadn’t thought there were any other guests staying there. The next day, she expected to see the woman at breakfast, but even though the girl could hear someone moving around in a back room on the first floor, the woman never appeared. When the girl told her mother about the woman and her black eyes, her mother decided that Blue Sky House must attract a lower class of guest than she’d thought, and they never went back. That shadow guest’s name was Mary.

During that week, Dev and I talked every night, about what we’d taken to calling the Blue Sky House mystery (“Pure Nancy Drew,” I told Dev, gleefully) and about other things, too. I even told him about my breakup with Zach, although I knew he’d probably heard much of the story already. I hadn’t realized how deeply I’d missed this when Zach and I were together: putting my phone on speaker and letting Dev’s voice be my company.

The night he told me the story of the woman with two black eyes, I went to bed, tossed and turned, switched the light on and off, tried to read twice with no success, until I was struck so hard by an idea that, even though it was well after midnight, I called Dev.

Before he could even eke out a sleepy hello, I said, “What if Sarah weren’t the first? All this coming and going in the middle of the night or early morning. That girl wearing borrowed clothes as if she’d left in a rush and hadn’t had time to pack. The two black eyes. The shadow ledger is obviously keeping a secret. It’s kept it all these years. What if the secret is that John Blanchard and Edith were running some kind of escape route, an underground railroad for battered women?”

Out of breath, I waited.

“You might be right,” said Dev. “Clare, I bet you’re right.”

My eyes burned, my mouth trembled. When I touched my cheek, I discovered I was crying.

“I think I am,” I said.

“Are you crying?” asked Dev.

“It’s just that—well, I’m lying here in her house, you know? And I’m thinking who does something like that? Because it would have to have been risky, right? Back then, in the fifties, especially. And I met her, this brave person who did this thing, and I talked to her and now I’m in her house, this house that she gave me that all those women and children passed through, and I miss her so much. I wish she were here, so I could talk to her and—and do something nice for her, give her something, and I will never be able to.”

“Maybe you are,” said Dev, slowly. “It could be that this is what Edith wanted, for you to find out her story. Maybe this is the thing you’re giving her.”

Startled, I wiped my eyes and considered what he’d said.

“Do you think it matters, though? Edith is dead. Can it possibly matter when she’s not here to know about it?”

And Dev said, “Yes.”





Chapter Seventeen

Edith





June 1954