The Inn at Hidden Run

by Olivia Newport

  “Samuel Davies.” The knot in Eliza’s throat was thick. “I don’t know what to say. You honor me.”

  “Samuel Strickland Davies,” he said. “My adoptive parents mean a great deal to me as well. After college I stayed on at Howard University and went to medical school.”

  “Oh my.” The glass in Eliza’s hand shook until she set it down. “You are a physician?”

  “I am. The Lord blessed me with my wife, Bertha, a nurse, and we moved to Atlanta, where there aren’t nearly enough doctors for colored people. Recently we opened a practice in Meriwether County. We have a little boy, and I hope someday he will go into practice with me and eventually take over.”

  “A boy of your own! What’s his name?”

  “Canfield.”

  “Oh Sam.”

  “If you hadn’t found me and made sure I got to Canfield that afternoon, Miz Eliza, perhaps I would not have lived even another day.”

  She could not brush away the truth of his statement.

  Then he grinned. “We also have a daughter. Brand-new, just six weeks old. We call her Eliza.”

  “Sammy.” Her voice hushed.

  “For years I’ve wanted to see you,” Sam said, “and thank you and tell you I’ve had a good life. I don’t take it for granted. I intend to spend it making sure other people get the help they need, the way I got the help I needed. I promise my children will learn that their opportunities come with responsibilities to a cause greater than themselves. And they will know I learned that from you.”

  Eliza’s cheeks were damp. “I only did what the Lord asked of me. ‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’”

  “Micah 6:8.” Sam sipped his tea. “I wanted to bring the family, but Bertha insisted the baby is too little.”

  “She sounds like a wise woman. Next time,” Eliza said. “Don’t wait thirty years, and bring little Miss Eliza Davies of Meriwether County, Georgia, to meet old Miss Eliza Davies of Shelby County, Tennessee.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Jillian had chosen a seat in the living room that gave her a view of the front door, both of Meri’s parents, and her brother. As far as she knew, Canny was the only one with keys to the car, but if he got over the sidewalk confrontation when Nolan interfered with his effort to chase Meri, there was no telling what he’d do. She wasn’t taking any chances. Making them comfortable, as her father put it, included keeping them in her line of sight.

  Juliette drank her to-go coffee after all. All three of them riffled around in their briefcases. Jillian picked up a genealogy magazine.

  “Have you tried calling him?” Michael asked after twenty minutes of this awkward arrangement.

  “He’ll call me if he has news.” Jillian flipped a page. Soon any decent hostess would offer lunch, or at least a snack. She couldn’t risk having Canny decide to go out in search of food. And other things. But even cheese and crackers would mean leaving Canny unattended. She could ask Juliette to help her, like keeping a hostage to motivate her son to think twice about how he behaved or any ideas about taking off.

  Where would he go? He wouldn’t have a clue where to look for Meri, and he was the one most determined not to leave without her.

  She glanced at her phone, willing there to be a text from her father.

  Nothing. Maybe he didn’t have a clue where to look for Meri either. Maybe he’d found her but was unpersuasive. Maybe he was still making the case for her return.

  Ring!

  Michael slapped a book shut. “She wanted us to go. Maybe we should. If we leave now, we could still catch our plane and get back to our obligations.”

  “No, sir.” Canny set his jaw. “Not without Meri. We came for her, and we’ll go home with her.”

  She’s not an antique up for auction. Jillian did well not to drop her head into one hand and shake it. Surely not every big brother was like this.

  “We’ve waited this long.” Juliette barely glanced up from the professional journal she was reading through a pair of silver-rimmed glasses. “We should wait for Meri and stay together, even if that means rebooking our flights.”

  Three people, three opinions. The tension heated from simmering to a low boil.

  “I need some air.” Canny pushed his briefcase off his lap. “I’ve got calls to make anyway.”

  Really? Would he be making calls if he were driving to Denver right now with his family listening in? Whatever. Maybe he was finally coming to terms with rebooking their flight. Jillian closed her magazine as Canny stepped out to the front porch. At least the curtains were wide open, so she didn’t have to be obvious about arranging them in order to keep track of his movements.

  Juliette and Michael remained in separate corners of the living room reading separate stacks of printed materials pulled from their separate briefcases. Jillian dropped her magazine on an ottoman and wandered to the end of the hall, ducking around the corner toward her office but close enough to the main hall to keep an eye on Canny. She pulled out her phone and pressed the speed dial number for Kris Bryant.

  “Big favor,” she said when Kris answered.

  “Lucky for you, things are a little slow on Mondays.”

  “Long story and no time to tell it,” Jillian said, “but I need a serious care package. Some of Carolyn’s candy, a couple of quarts of ice cream, and a selection of sandwiches from Ben’s Bakery. Fancy ones.”

  “Now I’m a lunch delivery service?” Kris said.

  “Did you miss the part about no time to tell the story? Food for six. Urgent.”

  Jillian clicked off, but before she could stuff her phone back in her pocket and return to the living room, it buzzed.

  “Hi, Nia.”

  “What’s going on over there?” Nia said.

  “The Big Chill of Chaos. Have you seen my dad?”

  “Leo said he was here but was mysterious about where he was going.”

  “Well, if you see him again, it means everything will come to a head soon.”

  “And Meri?”

  “Wish I could tell you.” Canny was wandering closer to the edge of the porch than Jillian would have liked. “Gotta go.”

  She returned to the living room. “I took the liberty of calling for some lunch to be brought in. I’ll just let Canny know.”

  “We could have gone out,” Michael said.

  Not a chance. “It’s no trouble,” Jillian said.

  She stepped out onto the porch. “Everything all right?”

  “I think you know it’s not,” Canny said.

  At least he wasn’t shouting.

  “I have a light lunch coming. Thought you might like to know, since you and your dad missed breakfast.”

  “Thank you.” Canny gestured toward the cushioned double-wide wicker chair. “Is it all right if I just sit out here to wait?”

  “Of course. I’ll keep you company. I have to watch for the food anyway.”

  No sneaky business. He was entirely too polite, and the chair he selected wasn’t fully visible from inside the living room. Jillian smiled and sat in the rocker. They didn’t have to talk, but she wasn’t losing another Davies when she hoped her dad would turn up with Meri any minute.

  Jillian couldn’t remember living anywhere else, other than her college years in Denver, which never truly felt like living away from home. She came home practically every weekend, and met her dad for lunch in Denver a couple of times a month. But this year, at age twenty-eight, marked the halfway point. Half of her life with her mother, and half of her life without being able to tell her mom about her day, or bad dates, or hard decisions, or work triumphs, or secret aspirations.

  The rest of her life without her mother present.

  She didn’t want that for Meri, not when she had a living, breathing mother right there, inside the front door. A mother who had traveled all this way for some reason, even if she couldn’t quite decide what it was.

  Nolan’s car turned into the dr
iveway.

  “Where’s Meri?” Canny demanded.

  “She needs some time.” Nolan came up the porch steps. “Are the others inside?”

  Jillian nodded and moved toward the door.

  “What do you mean, she needs some time?” Canny followed Nolan and Jillian inside and announced, “He didn’t bring Meri.”

  “Wasn’t that the point of going after her?” Michael looked up from his papers.

  “She has to come back on her own terms,” Nolan said. “I’m hopeful.”

  Jillian sucked in a corner of her mouth. Hopeful, but not certain.

  “Who’s that out there?” Juliette nodded out the window.

  “Oh, the food!” Jillian returned to the door and slipped out to meet Kris.

  “What is going on?” Kris handed her two paper sacks.

  “You may have heard Meri’s family is in town.” Jillian peeked into the bag of bakery sandwiches.

  “I did.”

  “It’s complicated. Thanks for doing this. I promise more explanation later, but I have to get back in there.”

  “Whatever, girlfriend. One of the tubs is chocolate chip cookie dough, and the other is strawberry cream. Meri likes it. Maybe it will help with whatever is going on in there.” Kris reached around Jillian’s full arms to push open the door before bouncing back down the steps.

  “Why don’t we have something to eat?” Inside, Jillian caught her father’s eye and headed toward the dining room. “It’s not my dad’s cooking, but it’s pretty good.”

  Nolan took some plates from a cabinet, and Jillian unpacked the bags. Kris had added salads to the sandwiches, a better option than the chips Jillian had expected.

  “The ice cream goes into the freezer for later,” Jillian said. “I’ll grab a pitcher of tea.”

  The spread was casual but sufficient, and the timing was perfect. Thickly stacked sandwiches—a choice of meats and vegetarian options—and salads created plenty of busy work. Canny’s and Michael’s lack of breakfast had caught up with them, and their mouths were too occupied to ask the questions dripping in everyone’s minds.

  Then the door opened with a slow, tentative groan.

  Meri stepped in.

  The room stilled.

  Nolan stood up. “Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come on in. There’s a seat beside Jillian. I’ll clear up a little while you settle in. Then we’ll talk.”

  Nolan glanced around the table, his tone and features forbidding anyone to light into Meri.

  Under the table, Jillian squeezed Meri’s knee in what she hoped felt like reassurance. She may have pinched too hard. The Davies family glanced at each other, occasionally settling a gaze on Meri for a few seconds. When they did, she looked away.

  In her lap, Meri turned her phone toward Jillian.

  A text from Pru. YOU’VE GOT THIS. AND DON’T FORGET WHO HOLDS you.

  Nolan returned with bowls and the ice cream. Jillian arranged Carolyn’s candy on a couple of small plates.

  “We’re all here. The first thing I want to say is thank you. This is an important time for your family, and you’re all at the table—literally.” Nolan met Meri’s eyes. “We have strawberry cream. I know you like that. It’s a good place to start, right?”

  She nodded, and he dished a couple of scoops into a bowl for her. Then he passed the quarts around for the others to make their own selections while he talked. Jillian slipped out to grab a folder from her office with the handwritten notes summarizing her findings and a few other items.

  “I’m going to put out a few simple principles to guide us,” Nolan said. “First, we are not here for anyone to win. We are here to listen and learn. Second, we will set and maintain a respectful tone. Third, we will work on understanding the varied interests at play. That means no one is forcing anyone to do anything. And fourth, I hope you will all agree that our goal is reconciliation.”

  Go, Dad. Mr. Mediator.

  “So in the interest of listening and learning, we’ll start with Jillian explaining her findings about the genealogy of your family.”

  Jillian sat up straight with her notes on the table. “I understand that both sides of the family tree have many medical branches, and I would be happy to look further into the Mathers side with a little more time. So far I’ve explored the Davies side. Michael, in addition to the Canfield name coming down through male members of the family, Meri’s middle name, Eliza, is a family name, correct?”

  Michael nodded. “I have a sister Eliza, and my father had an aunt Eliza.”

  “And before that?”

  Michael shrugged.

  “I think you’ll be surprised how that name entered your family. And what do you know about the origin of Canfield?”

  “I suppose it meant something in the beginning. Then these things just become tradition in the family. That’s how it works in the South.”

  “I see that a lot,” Jillian said. “People name a baby to honor a particular person without knowing the depth of connection to the family line.”

  “Are you saying you know where these names—Canfield and Eliza—came from?” Meri asked.

  “Yes! And they essentially entered your family at the same time.”

  “Were you right about what you told me about Canfield?” Meri said.

  “Wait,” Canny said. “Meri already knows what you’re going to say?”

  Jillian held up one finger. “Not really. I shared a vague line of investigation with her. But I needed substantiation.”

  “But you were right,” Meri said.

  “Yes, but not at all in the way I imagined.”

  She had everyone’s attention now.

  “Genealogists often begin with census information. The Canfield who died in infancy appeared in the 1930 census, and then the 1940 census shows all his siblings. Meri, that includes your grandpa Thomas and great-aunt Muriel that you’ve told me a little about, as well as your great-aunt Eliza.”

  “She wanted to be a doctor,” Michael said, “but it wasn’t an easy thing for a black woman in the 1950s. According to my father, when she got pregnant, it seemed like the final obstacle. We gave Meri her name with the hope that Meri would be the one to fulfill that dream.”

  Meri stirred her melting ice cream. “She used to say it would be so much easier for me now. I was little. I didn’t really know what she was talking about.”

  “Keep going, Jillian,” Nolan said.

  “I went back to the 1920 census. Michael, when you said that your grandfather had practiced with his father in Meriwether County, that helped a great deal in knowing where to look. I wondered if the same was true the next generation back—that Samuel Davies had been in Meriwether County.”

  “Was he?” Michael asked. “I don’t think I ever really knew.”

  “He was,” Jillian said. “And in addition to his son Canfield—your grandfather—he had a daughter named Eliza. He had two other children, Franklin and Elijah. I haven’t found much on Franklin, but it looks like Elijah went north and became a doctor in Chicago.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Michael said.

  “This is slightly interesting,” Canny said, “but I’m not sure what it really has to do with anything. Is there a point?”

  “I’m getting there,” Jillian said. “Old censuses are not easy to navigate, even with all the paid access I have, without specific information like where the person might have lived at the time the census taker came to do the interview in person. Without that, you have to read a great deal of handwritten notes and abbreviations.”

  “Jillian was up all night working on this,” Nolan said.

  “I looked at census data, physicians listings, medical schools listings—such as they were—county records, marriage licenses. Birth records from the late nineteenth century were not standard and give little help.”

  “The point?” Canny said again.

  “I find Samuel Strickland Davies in the 1910 census listed in Me
riwether County, married to Bertha Calhoun, with two children, Canfield and Eliza, and practicing medicine. But I don’t know where he was in 1900, the time of the previous census. Not in Meriwether County.”

  “He could have been anywhere,” Juliette said.

  “Right. Which makes the search really hard without more information. He married Bertha in Atlanta in 1904, but he wasn’t in Atlanta in the 1900 census either.”

  “So where did he come from?” Meri asked.

  “I haven’t filled in all the gaps yet, but I turned to the best clue I had. Why did he name his son Canfield?” Jillian let the question hang. “My hunch was that he was orphaned during the 1878 outbreak of yellow fever in Memphis and placed in the Canfield Asylum, which took in dozens of children.”

  “I’m named for an insane asylum?” Canny glanced at Meri. “Pretty sure that’s worse than being named for a county.”

  “You’re named for a legacy.” Michael’s correction was swift. “Both of you are. Let Jillian finish.”

  “It wasn’t an asylum for the mentally ill,” Jillian said. “It was an orphanage. You can imagine how much of the record keeping survived. Memphis was a disaster zone. People of means abandoned the city, leaving the poor—mostly the blacks and a lot of Irish immigrants—with a rampant epidemic, a destroyed economy, and a flailing, overwhelmed medical system. When all was said and done and the epidemic was over, people caring for the orphans did their best to find homes for them, but this took some time.”

  “I have a feeling we’re getting to the reason you woke me up so early this morning,” Nolan said.

  “We are!” Jillian grinned. “Genealogists are a tight bunch. The ones with access to the best information are often on the ground in local places, where historical records are carefully preserved. We network at conferences and in online groups, because we know we need each other. I found an index on the internet of archived documents housed in Memphis. That’s not unusual. Lots of museums or universities do that. But I couldn’t be sure what they were without seeing them, so I called someone in Memphis basically in the middle of the night. She went into the small historical museum where she works in the archives and got eyes on some correspondence.”