Chapter 19 of 20What Was Her Name

Her job was on the board's table, and the only thing Maeve Higgins had to set against it was a bundle of letters nobody in Oakhaven believed. Thomas Miller was the last name on her list. He lived two hours east, south of Fredericksburg, and if he shut the door on her, she had nowhere else to go.

Memorial Day traffic on Interstate 66 crawled — campers, boats, a pickup hauling a riding mower. The Forester's air conditioning quit somewhere past Marshall, so she cracked the windows and let the heat in. Cicadas hummed in the pines along the shoulder, a sound she hadn't heard since she was a girl, and the smell of hot asphalt and cut hay came with it. At a Sheetz outside Warrenton she filled the tank, watched the numbers climb to $3.47 a gallon, and called Clara from the parking lot.

"Are you there yet?"

"Twenty minutes out."

"Did he sound willing on Saturday?"

"He sounded like a man who was about to hang up." Maeve capped her coffee. "His mother never married. He's seventy-five. He's the only person alive who might remember her."

"Then be careful how you hold it," Clara said. "People guard their mothers longer than they guard their money."

She paid inside, and the kid at the register slid her receipt across the counter. "Pumps are prepay today, hon. Busy weekend."

Route 1 ran past car lots and a Food Lion and a church with a Memorial Day wreath on the door. The house sat at the end of a gravel drive — a brick ranch with green shutters and a dogwood that had already gone by. A hound slept on the porch steps and lifted his head without standing up. Maeve knocked twice.

The man who opened the door was tall and lean, in a short-sleeved shirt with a pen clipped in the pocket. He looked at her the way a man looks at a bill he has no intention of paying.

"Mr. Miller. I'm Maeve Higgins. We spoke Saturday."

"I know who you are." He didn't move. "I looked you up. You run a garden."

"The Oakhaven Heritage Gardens, yes."

"Then I don't see what you want with my mother."

"She was a nurse at the Maryland State Hospital."

"That's no secret. It's on her stone." He folded his arms. "But I don't talk about that place. You're not the first person to drive out here with a folder under her arm."

"I'm not a reporter." Maeve kept her hands at her sides. "Ten minutes. If you'd rather I leave after that, I'll go."

He weighed it longer than it deserved, then stepped back. "The dog is Roy. Don't touch him until he asks."

The porch had two aluminum chairs and a ceiling fan turning without moving much air. He didn't offer her anything and didn't sit for the first minute. When he did, he kept his back to the door and his hands on his knees.

"Go on, then."

"In 1924 a woman was committed to that hospital in Baltimore. She was young, she was rich, and the two people she trusted most signed the papers. While she was inside, another woman took her name and her money." Maeve paused. "That family built half of Oakhaven. My gardens came out of it too."

"That's a story," he said. "What does it have to do with Abigail Miller?"

"The patient wrote letters. Eleven of them, every one addressed to your mother." Maeve took the copy out of her bag and held it, still folded. "They were sewn into the spine of a botany book your mother gave to a friend. Florence Hartwell. Her family sold the book at an estate sale, and it ended up on my desk."

Thomas's jaw worked. "Florence." He was quiet a moment. "She sent me a card every Christmas until she died. Mama's letters to her ran three pages, and half of it was tomatoes."

"I didn't know that."

"No. You wouldn't." He shifted in the chair. "So tell me what you want."

"The record corrected. And my job." Maeve set the copy on the arm of the chair between them. "I won't pretend otherwise. There's a board that would like to be rid of me."

"The record corrected," Thomas repeated. "For a woman who's been dead since before I was born."

He studied her for a while. Then he said, "What was her name?"

"Elspeth Thorne."

Thomas took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt, slow, and put them back on. "Well," he said. "There it is."

He stood and held the screen door. "Come in. It's hotter than a skillet out here, and I want to sit where the tea is."

The kitchen smelled like dish soap and roasted peanuts. There was a photograph on the refrigerator, held by a magnet shaped like a peach: a young woman in a nurse's cap, squinting into the sun. He poured two glasses of sweet tea and set one in front of Maeve without asking, then sat down across the Formica.

"She died in 1994," he said. "Thirty years ago this spring."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be accurate." He turned his glass a quarter turn. "She came down here from Hagerstown and never went back. Thirty-one years at that hospital, and she would not talk about it. Except when she did."

Maeve unfolded the letter and slid it across the table.

He read it twice. The second time he moved his finger under the words, the way a man reads a language he used to speak.

"Dear Abigail," he said. "Nobody's called her that in thirty years."

"Did she ever mention one patient she couldn't put down?"

Thomas squared the page's corners on the table, which was answer enough. "One," he said. "The one she called Miss Thorne."

He left the kitchen, and she heard him in the hall, opening a closet door and shifting boxes.

He came back with something small and dark in his hand — a book the size of a paperback, bound in brown leather gone soft at the spine, with a broken clasp.

"My mother kept a private journal," he said, and set it on the table between them. "Forty years of it. I've read the first third and the last page, and that's all I can manage. She wrote about one patient she never forgot."

Maeve looked at the little book and did not put her hand out.

"You can read it," Thomas said. "But only here. In my house."