Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Jay
Phoebe slides into the chair beside mine. “Cathy McCormick was Smitten Kitten. Is Smitten Kitten. Cathy McCormick became Catherine Crawford. How is this possible?”
“This is …” I don’t know what word to use. “A huge coincidence?”
Phoebe’s eyes lock with mine. “No coincidence is this big.”
She’s right. “Is this serendipity?”
“A happy accident?” She presses her fingers to her temples. “My mind won’t stop racing.”
“I get it.” My voice sounds shook, and I don’t care. “But …”
She shoots me a glance. “But what?”
“What do you hope the letter says?”
She picks up the envelope on the table. “We can’t open it.”
“Right, no. We can’t.” I’m still dealing with every hair on my body standing on end, so I can’t make the dots connect. “Why can’t we?”
“Because we know it belongs to Catherine Crawford. It’s none of our business anymore.” She pauses, then adds, “Right?”
“Right,” I say, making my voice firm.
She picks it up again, holding it by its edges, lightly running her thumb over the corner with the stamp. It’s a map of the Mississippi River labeled “Great River Road” with a five-cent mark. It’s pristine, no postmark. “The woman I’ve been rooting for in these letters, the person I was offended on behalf of, is Catherine Crawford. All these weeks, and I’ve been trying to help my actual nemesis, except it turns out …”
“Your villain has an origin story?”
She gives a small laugh. “Worse. She might not even be a villain.”
That makes me smile. “She is scary.”
“She is now,” Phoebe says. “Or maybe that’s how her grief comes out. Maybe the picture we get of her through Dear Heart—Buck—is the real one. Which makes me feel awful about all the vengeful thoughts I’ve had toward her.”
“You’re giving her grace. I admire that.” When Phoebe looks like she’s about to argue, I add, “Give yourself grace too.”
She nods and falls silent, her forehead wrinkling as she slips into deep thought, tracing the edges of the envelope.
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
“Learn the rest of the story. Is it weird to care even though I know it’s Catherine now?”
“It would be weirder if you didn’t.”
“I want to fill in the gaps. Get the rest of the story. We know they got married. She’s clearly loved art and history her whole life. I hope she got her master’s and the big house and still got as much time at the Sutton as she wanted with her kids in a stroller, and a nanny too, if that’s what she wanted.” She pauses, then so quietly I barely hear her, she says, “I hope it was happy. ”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “Me too.”
“We need to get these back to her.” She straightens, and I can almost see the gears in her head speed up. “Catherine said she was driving back to Boston this morning. We can get these to her before she goes.”
“Is it that urgent? You could mail them to her.”
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You think after all this I would put these in the mail?”
Yeah, that would be dumb. “Suggestion withdrawn.”
“Besides, wouldn’t you want these back the minute you knew they’d been found after they’d been missing for who knows how long?”
“I would. Are you going to email her and hope she checks it before she gets on the road?”
She shakes her head. “She said she was staying in a hotel. Where do you think Catherine Crawford would stay while she’s in town? The only place she would stay?”
“Ah, the Spring Manor.” It’s the nicest hotel in town. Phoebe’s already doing a voice search for the phone number.
“Hello,” she says. “Could you put me through to Catherine Crawford’s room, please? No, I don’t know the number.” She mouths, on hold , then nods and adds, ringing .
“Catherine, hi, it’s Phoebe Hopper. No, nothing’s wrong. In fact, it might be the opposite. I was wondering if I could meet with you before you leave for Boston. I’ve found something of yours I’d like to return.” A pause as she listens. “I’d probably better show you in person. Yes, Serendipi-Tea will work. Yes, an hour. See you then.”
“Am I invited? I don’t want to assume. I know your dynamic with Catherine is tricky.”
“Are you invited ? You are essential. And now I need to get the other letters.”
“You want me to meet you at Serendipi-Tea?”
She looks uncertain. “If you want to? But I see old Sam Brown is face out again. Do you want to come with me to grab the letters and tell me about New Jersey on the way?”
I know nothing is settled between us. I know we’re still at the outer perimeter of big things that have almost been said but are still unspoken. I know it’s impossible to predict how Catherine will take this, and I know Phoebe is taking a risk by showing up to meet Catherine with me by her side.
But yeah, there’s nothing I’d rather do than run a thirty-minute errand with Phoebe and tell her what I found. Is that a love language? Being really into each other’s random history investigations?
I just say, “I’d love to.”
We climb into her car, and she says, “So, New Jersey,” as she reverses out of the driveway.
“Goldmine,” I say. “Or it is if you think old letters no one else cares about are gold.”
“Obviously,” she says.
“I figured. It turns out that what made Samuel Davis Brown tick more than greed was revenge. I don’t know if it makes him a better person, but it makes him more human. You ever hear of the Pine Robbers?” I ask.
“No.”
“I only have because my dissertation was all about dirty dealings during the Revolutionary War. The Pine Barrens—as in barren landscape—was a subregion in New Jersey that no one cared about before the war. But during the war, it became a thieves’ wood, basically, where Loyalists hid and wreaked havoc, mostly as marauders.”
“How have I never heard about this?” she asks. “It sounds like the kind of thing we should have at least twenty big Hollywood movies about.”
“Most of what we know about them came down through accounts from local historians, novelists, and folklorists. It’s only been over the last fifty years that more academic scholarship has come out. Researchers have gone back through and matched those wild stories against primary sources like court records and church registries, and now a better picture is emerging. But it was one of those things that, in the end, only truly impacted the locals, since it stayed a criminal refuge long after the war was over.”
“Fascinating,” she says.
I love that she means it. “Anyway, I’ve known about the Pine Robbers for a long time. What I didn’t know is that Samuel Davis Brown was one of their leaders.”
She gives a satisfying gasp and listens as I tell her about the wealth of information I gleaned from his letters, all of which I was able to read and photograph. We pause only long enough for her to leave me idling in front of The Serendipity while she runs in and returns minutes later with the rest of the Smitten Kitten letters.
By the time we park at the tea shop, I’ve wrapped up the story of how old Sam had forbidden his oldest son, Samuel Junior, to join the war, but young Sam defied his father and was killed in his first skirmish with the British—by a malfunctioning musket provided to him. Old Sam had professed to be a patriot, but he’d done some heartbreaking calculations to measure the worth of his son’s life.
“He came up with a number that represented what young Samuel would have earned had he lived a full life. Then he organized the theft of supplies meant for the Continental Army, determined to rob back what he felt was blood money for the loss of his son.”
“That’s so tragic,” she says as she turns off the car. But she doesn’t move to get out. “No one ever knew old Sam was that bitter? No one guessed what he was up to?”
I shake my head. “Not for three whole years. He wrote to his cousin about how he wore young Sam’s death as a badge of honor, told people he was privileged to lose his son to a just cause, at least more just than some of the senseless ways other people died. But he wrote how beneath all that, he seethed because he saw young Sam’s death as just as senseless as a farming accident or sickness. He stole from the army to make himself feel like he had some control in the world, before he was finally caught stealing a shipment of cannonballs from an ironworks in Elizabeth meant for the forces in Yorktown.”
“No,” she says. “That would have been catastrophic.”
I nod. “Had he succeeded, our side would most likely have lost the whole war.”
“Wow.”
She’s still not making any move to get out of the car, and I wonder if she’s nervous.
“Interesting that I finally found out why he did it through letters,” I say. “Letters are a theme lately, aren’t they?”
She looks at the tea shop. “We need to go in.”
“We do.”
She gets out, and I follow suit, letting her take the lead. She has undercurrents to navigate with Catherine, and I’m not qualified to pilot.