I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(60)
“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.