Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  “Mrs. Manders,” he said. “The mail has arrived.”

  I glanced at the small pile of letters in his lap. “It’s early.”

  “It comes when it comes,” he said.

  I gave him the ghost of a smile at that, and he returned it. This was how we’d learned to handle everything during the month we’d been in this place—buses, meals, guides, the post. It comes when it comes. It was a different sort of life, and not a bad one, though I found myself longing for England, something I hadn’t screwed up the courage to mention to him yet.

  I turned and looked out past the terrace. The cottage we’d rented was on the shore, and though it was rocky, and February here was cool, the sight and sound of the waves was an unceasing hypnotism—a cure, it turned out, for anything that ailed you. I had grown stronger in four weeks, and so had he. Far off in the water, fishing boats bobbed, moving busily about, and seagulls spun in the air overhead.

  “Do you want to know what the mail has brought?” I heard Alex say.

  I looked down at my feet and curled my toes. My body was alive with perfect satisfaction, every blood vessel and nerve. I felt no need to fidget or twitch, only to occasionally stretch and flex myself. There was no denying I was pleased as a cat, and the man sitting next to me was quite certainly the cause of it. I thought perhaps that his own pose, barely dressed in the cold and so still that he was hardly breathing, mirrored my own feeling. Here, in private and far from the world, we had no need to hide how in love we obviously were. The mail would change all of that. I could tell from the sound of his voice.

  “I suppose,” I replied.

  “I have received a letter from a man named Chalmers,” Alex said. “He works for the Home Office. He says he has a post for me that I am perfectly qualified for, but as it is of a confidential nature, he’ll have to speak to me about it in person.”

  My stomach dropped. I had not thought, in this peaceful place, that a few words from his lips could inspire such sudden fear. “Another assignment?” I made myself ask.

  “No,” he replied. “At home, in England. I made it clear in my last letter that my terms are not negotiable.”

  I swallowed and made myself look out at the water again. “I see.”

  “He encloses another letter, this one from an agent in London. There is a house that can be had for very good terms, in a desirable location. Due to my recommendation from Chalmers, he’s willing to hold it until I can make a decision.”

  “So that’s it, then,” I said, as the wind blew off the water and lifted my hair, bringing its salty smell. “We have to go back.”

  “You knew it would happen sooner or later, Jo,” he said gently. “It’s time.”

  “I know. It’s just—I don’t know what’s next.”

  “I know.”

  I turned and looked at him. He was watching me; I didn’t know how long he’d been watching me as I’d stared at the water. “Do you want to do it?” I asked him.

  His gaze did not leave me, and his expression did not flinch. “I want to talk to him, yes,” he said. “I want to see what he has to say.”

  “You said you want to be your own man.”

  “And I have been. But perhaps I can serve my country and be my own man at the same time.”

  I bit my lip. “And what about me?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. He waited patiently, knowing I would speak. “I enjoyed the photography,” I said, wondering why the words felt slightly embarrassing. “I found it freeing. I’d like to take it up again.”

  Not a single second of derision crossed his expression. “You’d like to be a photographer?”

  “No,” I replied, surprised at how easy the answer came. “I want to learn it and get a studio, and then I want to teach it.”

  Alex blinked, and his expression relaxed in that way that meant he was looking at something he liked. “You would be very good at that.”

  I did not mention that every thought, every plan I had for the future, was suffused with the hope for a child as if colored by a lens; he already knew. “I suppose London would be the best place to try it,” I said. “But that isn’t the only letter you received. There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  His jaw hardened, and the bitter exhaustion I’d seen in him came back into his eyes. No, I thought, feeling a beat of panic. Whatever it is, no, no, no.

  “There is another offer,” Alex said.

  “Don’t say it,” I said. “Don’t.”

  But he picked up the letter, a single sheet of unfolded paper. “Colonel Mabry has written me.”

  “And what does he want?”

  “Moscow,” Alex said, looking at the black ink of the letter, his gaze going cold and far away. “The terms are very generous.”

  “You’ve already explained to him that you can’t speak Russian,” I said.

  “Hans Faber, the German businessman, doesn’t need to speak fluent Russian,” Alex replied. “He only needs enough to get by on his business travels, which Mabry says I can easily learn.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Six weeks only, though of course there will be training beforehand and debriefing afterward.”

  “No.”

  “It’s been difficult to get true information about Lenin’s government. And there are rumors he has health problems. It’s important that we know the truth.”

  “No,” I said again.

  “I could do a great deal of good, Mabry says.”

  “You’ve already done a great deal of good. And you can do more of it in London.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and then he put the letter down on the small table next to him, placing his untouched cup of coffee over it so it would not blow away. “You’re right,” he said. “Whatever I do, it won’t be for Mabry, and it won’t be in the field.” He stood and held out his hand. I took it, and when I stood, he dropped my hand and stood back. “Let’s get dressed and go for a walk.”

  I followed him inside. When we emerged again a few minutes later, we crossed the terrace without looking at the letter on the table. We descended the steps and started over the rocky beach toward the water.

  When I stumbled, he took my hand again, and he did not let me go this time. Behind us, the wind tugged at the letter on the table. And I didn’t think of it again, as we rounded the curve of the shore, with the wind above us, the beach beneath our feet, and nothing else to do but to see where the world might take us.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What do you think draws Frances’s ghost to Jo? In what ways do you feel that Jo and Frances are similar characters? How do you think they are different?

  2. Do you believe in ghosts (or do you just enjoy reading about them)? Have you ever felt the presence of a ghost? How did it make you feel?

  3. Jo’s feelings for her mother are a mix of love and resentment. Do you think she treated her mother properly, or was there more she could have done?

  4. Jo had limited choices in her life when she met Alex. Do you think those limits were true to the time period? How are women’s choices different today?

  5. How did you feel about the scenes in which Jo and Alex met and married? Did you find them romantic, or did you think they were making a hasty mistake?

  6. Why do you think Alex made the choices he did? Do you think they were right or wrong? If wrong, what do you think he should have done? Are people’s priorities different in a time of war?

  7. Did you think Alex acted suspiciously when he came home? Was Jo right to be wary of him? What would you have done in Jo’s place in that situation?

  8. Did you have sympathy for the Forsyth family? Why or why not? Did your sympathies change over the course of the novel?

  9. Martin Forsyth marries because it is his duty to his family. Was this believable for the t
imes? Would this happen now?

  10. Were Jo’s visions of the mist and the leaves real, or did she imagine them?

  11. What do you see happening to Jo and Alex after the end of the book? Do you think they will be happy together? Did you find the ending satisfying?

  Don’t miss Simone St. James’s new novel of suspense. . . .

  Four lonely teenage girls become friends at a boarding school in Vermont in the 1950s. . . . In the present day, a journalist covering the restoration of the school uncovers a crime—and a haunting—that has long been buried and has disturbing echoes of the tragedy in her own life.

  THE BROKEN GIRLS

  Available in April 2017 from Berkley in trade paperback and as an e-book.

  PROLOGUE

  BARRONS, VERMONT — NOVEMBER 1950

  The sun vanished below the horizon as the girl crested the rise of Old Barrons Road. Night, and she still had three miles to go.

  The air here went blue at dusk, purplish and cold, a light that blurred details as if looking through smoke. The girl cast a glance back at the road where it climbed the rise behind her. She squinted, with the breeze tousling her hair and creeping through the thin fabric of her collar, but no one that she could see was following.

  Still: Faster, she thought.

  She hurried down the slope, her thick schoolgirl’s shoes pelting stones onto the broken road, her long legs moving like a foal’s as she kept her balance. She’d outgrown the gray wool skirt she wore—it hung above her knees now—but there was nothing to be done about it. She carried her uniform skirt in the suitcase that banged against her legs, and she’d be putting it back on soon enough.

  If I’m lucky.

  Stop it, stupid. Stupid.

  Faster.

  Her palms were sweaty against the suitcase handle. She’d nearly dropped the case as she’d wrestled it off the bus in haste, perspiration stinging her back and armpits as she glanced up at the bus’s black windows.

  Everything all right? the driver had asked, something about the panic in a teenage girl’s face penetrating his disinterest.

  Yes, yes— She’d given him a ghastly smile and a wave and turned away, the case banging her knees, as if she were bustling off down a busy city street and not making slow progress across a cracked stretch of pavement known only as the North Road. The shadows had grown long, and she’d glanced back as the door closed and again as the bus drew away.

  No one else had gotten off the bus. The scrape of her shoes and the far-off call of a crow were the only sounds. She was alone.

  No one had followed.

  Not yet.

  She reached the bottom of the slope of Old Barrons Road, panting in her haste. She made herself keep her gaze forward. To look back would be to tempt it. If she only looked forward, it would stay away.

  The cold wind blew up again, freezing her sweat to ice. She bent, pushed her body faster. If she cut through the trees, she’d travel an exact diagonal that would land her in the sports field, where at least she had a chance she’d meet someone on the way to her dorm. A shorter route than this one, which circled around the woods to the front gates of Idlewild Hall. But that meant leaving the road, walking through the trees in the dark. She could lose direction. She couldn’t decide.

  Her heart gave a quick stutter behind her rib cage, then returned to its pounding. Exertion always did this to her, as did fear. The toxic mix of both made her light-headed for a minute, unable to think. Her body still wasn’t quite right. Though she was fifteen, her breasts were small, and she’d only started bleeding last year. The doctor had warned her there would be a delay, perfectly normal, a biological aftereffect of malnutrition. You’re young and you’ll recover, he’d said, but it’s hell on the body. The phrase had echoed with her for a while, sifting past the jumble of her thoughts. Hell on the body. It was darkly funny, even. When her distant relatives had peered at her afterward and asked what the doctor had said, she’d found herself replying: He said it’s hell on the body. At the bemused looks that followed, she’d tried to say something comforting: At least I still have all my teeth. They’d looked away then, these Americans who didn’t understand what an achievement it was to keep all your teeth. She’d been quiet after that.

  Closer now to the front gates of Idlewild Hall. Her memories worked in unruly ways; she’d forget the names of half of the classmates she lived with, but she could remember the illustration on the frontispiece of the old copy of Blackie’s Girls’ Annual she’d found on a shelf in the dorm: a girl in a 1920s low-waisted dress, walking a romping dog over a hillside, shading her eyes with her hand as the wind blew her hair. She had stared at that illustration so many times she’d had dreams about it, and she could recall every line of it, even now. Part of her fascination had come from its innocence, the clean milkiness of the girl in the drawing, who could walk her dog without thinking about doctors or teeth or sores or scabs or any of the other things she had buried in her brain, things that bobbed up to the surface before vanishing into the darkness again.

  She heard no sound behind her, but just like that, she knew. Even with the wind in her ears and the sound of her own feet, there was a murmur of something, a whisper she must have been attuned to, because when she turned her head this time, her neck creaking in protest, she saw the figure. Cresting the rise she’d just come over herself, it started the descent down the road toward her.

  No. I was the only one to get off the bus. There was no one else.

  But she’d known, hadn’t she? She had. It was why she was already in a near run, her knuckles and her chin going numb with cold. Now she pushed into a jog, her grip nearly slipping on the suitcase handle as the case banged against her leg. She blinked hard in the descending darkness, trying to make out shapes, landmarks. How far away was she? Could she make it?

  She glanced back again. Through the fog of darkness, she could see a long black skirt, the narrow waist and shoulders, the gauzy sway of a black veil over the figure’s face moving in the wind. Boots that flashed beneath the skirt’s hem. The details were visible now because the figure was closer—only moving at a walk, but already somehow closing in, closer every time she looked. The face behind the veil wasn’t visible, but the girl knew she was being watched, the unseen gaze fixed on her.

  Panicked, she made an abrupt change of direction, leaving the road and plunging into the trees. There was no path, and she made her way slowly through thick tangles of brush, the dead stalks of weeds stinging her legs through her stockings. In seconds the view of the road behind her disappeared, and she guessed at her direction, hoping she was heading in a straight line toward the sports field. The terrain slowed her down, and sweat trickled between her shoulder blades, soaking into the cheap cotton of her blouse, which stuck to her skin. The suitcase was clumsy and heavy, and soon she dropped it in order to move more quickly through the woods. There was no sound but the harsh rasp of her own breathing.

  Her ankle twisted, sending sharp pain up her leg, but still she ran. Her hair came out of its pins, and branches scraped her palms as she pushed them from her face, but still she ran. There was no sound from behind her. And then there was.

  Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land . . .

  Faster, faster. Don’t let her catch you.

  She’ll say she wants to be your friend . . .

  Ahead, the trees were thinning, the pearly light of the half-moon illuminating the clearing of the sports field.

  Do not let her in again!

  The girl’s lungs burned, and a sob burst from her throat. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t. Despite everything that had happened—or perhaps because of it. Her blood still pumped; her broken body still ran for its life. And in a moment of pure, dark clarity, she understood that all of it was for nothing.

  She’d always known the monsters were real.

  And they were here.

  The girl look
ed into the darkness and screamed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BARRONS, VERMONT — NOVEMBER 2014

  The shrill of the cell phone jerked Fiona awake in the driver’s seat. She lurched forward, bracing her palms on the wheel, staring into the blackness of the windshield.

  She blinked, focused. Had she fallen asleep? She’d parked on the gravel shoulder of Old Barrons Road, she remembered, so she could sit in the unbroken silence and think. She must have drifted off.

  The phone rang again. She swiped quickly at her eyes and glanced at it, sitting on the passenger seat where she’d tossed it. The display glowed in the darkness. Jamie’s name and the time: three o’clock in the morning. It was the day Deb would have turned forty if she’d still been alive.

  Fiona picked up the phone and answered it. “Jamie,” she said.

  His voice was a low rumble, half-asleep and accusing, on the other end of the line. “I woke up and you were gone.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “So you left? For God’s sake, Fee. Where are you?”

  She opened her door and swung her legs out into the chilly air. He’d be angry, but there was nothing she could do about that. “I’m on Old Barrons Road. I’m parked on the shoulder, at the bottom of the hill.”

  Jamie was quiet for a second, and she knew he was calculating the date. Deb’s birthday. “Fee.”

  “I was going to just go home. I was.” She got out of the car and stood, her cramped legs protesting, the cold air slapping her awake and tousling her hair. She walked to the edge of the road and looked up and down, shoving her free hand into the pocket of her windproof jacket. Back the way she’d come, she could see the road sign indicating thirty miles to Burlington and the washed-out lights of the twenty-four-hour gas station at the top of the hill. Past the hill, out of her sight, she knew there was the intersection with the North Road, with its jumble of fast-food restaurants, yet more gas stations, and a couple of hopeful big-box stores. In the other direction, ahead of the car’s hood, there was only darkness, as if Old Barrons Road dropped off the face of the earth.