I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(59)

“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.