Chapter 18 of 20Two Hours East

The only thing standing between Maeve Higgins and the loss of her job was a name she did not have.

David Chen had the votes to remove her as director of the Oakhaven Heritage Gardens. The eleven letters in her office safe proved the town's founder was an impostor, and eleven sheets of paper would never move a board. She needed a person. Someone alive, who could stand in front of the trustees and say out loud, "My mother told me this."

Saturday morning, the reading room of the Oakhaven Historical Society smelled of old paper and of the coffee Maeve had carried up from the Sheetz on Route 11. The Society occupied the second floor of the old bank building on the Town Square, and Clara Bellweather had propped every window open with whatever came to hand — a brick, a Virginia Magazine of History, a phone book from 2011. Below, the Saturday market filled the square with tents and dogs and a fiddle player working his way through "Wildwood Flower."

Clara had been there since eight. It was twenty past nine, and two of the three doughnuts were already gone.

"Where do we begin?" Maeve asked.

"We began four hours ago. Sit down."

Maeve sat. Clara squared a printout on the table and turned it to face her.

"Eleven women named Abigail worked as nurses in Baltimore in 1930. Nine were private duty. One was at Johns Hopkins. One was at the Maryland State Hospital."

"And the eleventh?"

"The eleventh sold hats downtown. She is not relevant." Clara tapped the page. "Abigail Ruth Miller. Twenty-four years old, born in Hagerstown, boarding at a nurses' home on West Fayette Street. Occupation: nurse, Maryland State Hospital."

Maeve set her coffee down without drinking any of it. "That is the institution where Elspeth Thorne died."

"The same institution, in the same years. I pulled the 1920 schedule as well. Abigail Miller, fourteen years old, living with her parents on Potomac Avenue. Father a machinist for the railroad. Two younger brothers. It's a whole life, sitting in a folder."

"How certain are you it's our Abigail?"

"Certain enough to have printed it. Not certain enough to stake your job on."

"Then we need a second source."

"Do you have one?"

"I have Martha." Maeve took out her phone.

The desk at Willow Creek put her through without asking twice. Martha Hartwell Vance answered on the third ring, in the same unhurried voice she'd used in her sitting room that Tuesday.

"Maeve. Is everything all right?"

"Everything's fine. I'm at the Historical Society with Clara Bellweather. We've been looking for your friend Abigail, and I believe we've found her. Abigail Ruth Miller, from Hagerstown. A nurse at the Maryland State Hospital."

The line went quiet long enough that Maeve checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.

"That's Abby," Martha said. "She trained there and never left. She used to say the state of Maryland paid for the roof and she paid for the rest."

"Did she marry?"

"Never. She kept her own name and her own money and let people think what they liked about it."

"Martha, did Abigail have children?"

A longer pause. "She had a boy. Late. Everyone told her she was foolish at her age, and she went ahead anyway. Thomas. She named him for her father."

Maeve's pen stopped on the page. "Do you know what became of him?"

"No. She stopped writing to Florence in the nineties. I hoped he was somewhere, living a good life. I never knew."

"Thank you, Martha. May I call you again?"

"You may."

The Baltimore marriage index ran from 1930 to 1960 and listed no Abigail Miller, which closed one door. The state death index closed another: Abigail R. Miller, died in 1994 at eighty-eight, in Baltimore. After that Clara went quiet the way she did when she was working, and Maeve went downstairs for the database password.

Ellis, a Roanoke College junior who worked the front desk on Saturdays, was taping a poster to the glass.

"Does the Society still pay for the records site?"

"Renews in June. The board argues about it every year." Ellis smoothed the tape flat. "Password's under the keyboard. The copier takes quarters. There's a roll in the drawer."

"Thank you."

Upstairs, Clara typed with two fingers. The 1950 census, released to the public in 2022, had been indexed by volunteers who spelled names the way they heard them, and Abigail Miller had been entered three different ways before Clara found her on the fourth try: Abigail R. Miller, forty-four, head of household, practical nurse, private duty. And beneath her, in the same rented rooms, Thomas A. Miller, age one.

Maeve read the line twice. "One year old in 1950."

"The Baltimore birth index gives Thomas Allen Miller, November 1948." Clara wrote it in her notebook. "That makes him seventy-five."

By one o'clock the market had folded its tents and the square sat empty except for the fountain. Clara switched to the county records site, and Maeve stood at the window with her cooling coffee while a woman in an apron sold the last of the rhubarb at three dollars a bunch. A boy in a Cub Scout uniform carried a folding table toward a van. None of it had anything to do with 1924.

Then Clara said, "Thomas Allen Miller."

"Say it again."

"Baltimore to 2004. Then a house south of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Purchased in 2007. One owner, one address, no gap in the tax rolls. He has lived there seventeen years."

Maeve did the arithmetic on the map in her head. "Two hours," she said. "Two hours east."

Clara wrote a number on a slip of paper and pushed it across the table. "Landline listed in 1998, dropped in 2009, listed again in 2016 as a cell. It's him."

The slip sat between them — an address Maeve could type into the car's navigation and a telephone number she could dial from where she stood.

Maeve folded the paper once and put it in her jeans pocket. Then she took it out again, read the number, and laid it flat on the table.

"He has no idea," Clara said. "His mother may never have told him a thing. She was a nurse who kept other people's secrets for a living, and then she kept her own for sixty years."

Maeve picked up her phone.

"Today?" Clara asked.

"He is seventy-five and I am out of other ideas."

The fiddle player had gone home an hour earlier, and a man in a canvas hat was stacking chairs on the square. Maeve entered the number one digit at a time, too carefully, the way she did things when her hands wanted to hurry. Then she pressed the green button and put the phone to her ear.

Then it rang.