The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  “Maybe for someone, yes. For you?”

  “Don’t worry—I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”

  “You couldn’t handle it last night,” he said. “You were a basket case.”

  It had been sort of a strange episode, but she didn’t regret it. That trip to Old Barrons Road had shaken something loose. Idlewild had always loomed silently in the back of her mind, a dark part of her mental landscape. She’d done her best not to talk about it for twenty years, but talking about it out loud now was like bloodletting, painful and somehow necessary at the same time. “I’m better today,” she said, and she patted the table next to her. “Come sit down.”

  He sighed, but he stepped toward the table. Fiona watched with the surreal feeling she still got sometimes when she looked at Jamie, even now. A year ago she’d had a bad night—lonely, wallowing in self-pity and grief for Deb—and found herself at a local bar, drinking alone. Jamie had pulled up the stool next to her—handsome, muscled, glorious in a jaded way, a guy who looked like he’d been a college athlete before something had made him go as quiet and wary as a wild animal. Fiona had put down her drink and looked at him, expecting a line, waiting for it, but Jamie had taken his time. He’d sipped his beer thoughtfully, then put it down on the bar. Hi, he’d said.

  There was more, but that was all, really—just hi. Two hours later they’d ended up in his bed, which had surprised her but somehow fit her mood. She’d assumed it was a one-night stand, but he’d asked for her number. When he called her, she’d swallowed her surprise and said yes. And when he’d called her again, she’d said yes again.

  It didn’t make sense. Cops and journalists were natural enemies; they should never have mixed. And in many ways, they didn’t. Jamie didn’t introduce Fiona to his colleagues or take her to any of their social functions. She never went inside the station when she wanted to see him during work hours, waiting for him outside instead. He had introduced her to his parents exactly once, a chilly conversation that was over in minutes. On her part, Fiona had brought Jamie to meet Malcolm, but only because Malcolm had insisted. He’d been worried when he heard his daughter was dating a cop, even though he never intruded in her love life. The meeting had been awkward, and she still had no idea what the two men had made of each other.

  And yet Jamie’s job was part of the reason she liked him, as was the fact that he’d been born in Barrons and had it in his blood. With every relationship, she’d had the hurdle of explaining her past, explaining Deb, rehashing what had happened and why. Most men tried to be understanding, but Deb was always there, a barricade that Fiona couldn’t quite get past. She had never needed to explain with Jamie: He knew who she was when he approached her in that bar; his father had been police chief when Deb was murdered. She’d never had to tell him anything because he already knew.

  So, despite the difficulties, it was easy with Jamie. Easy in a way Fiona was prepared to sacrifice for. He was smart, quietly funny. What he saw in her, she was less sure of, and she didn’t ask; maybe it was the sex—which was particularly good—or companionship. All she knew was that she’d rather amputate her own arm with a rusty handsaw than have the where are we going? conversation.

  Now he sat next to her on the picnic table and folded his long legs. “You want something else,” he said matter-of-factly. “Go ahead.”

  “The Idlewild property,” she admitted. There was no point in prevaricating. “What do you know about it?”

  “I only know what’s common knowledge.”

  “Liar. You know everything. Start from the beginning.”

  Jamie’s father and grandfather had both been chiefs of police in Barrons. The Creels had been a vital part of this area for decades, and they knew every family in Barrons, from the richest on down. In a way that felt alien to Fiona, Jamie was dedicated to this place, and he had an intelligent brain that never forgot a detail when it came to his town. So she waited for him to call up the information from somewhere in his circuitry, and then he started talking.

  “Let’s see. Idlewild was built just after World War One, I think, for girls who were veterans’ orphans. It passed into different hands over the years, but enrollment went lower and lower. The Christopher family bought it when the school closed in 1979.” He didn’t glance at her when he spoke the family name of her sister’s killer, so she knew he was absorbed in the history. “The Christophers were buying land like crazy around that time,” he continued. “They planned to be real estate barons, I guess. Some of the properties they bought were profitable, and others were not. Idlewild was definitely in category two.”

  “Why?” Fiona asked. She knew some of this, but she let him talk.

  Jamie shrugged. “Everything they tried fell through. Partners backed out; funding disappeared. They couldn’t get anyone on board. The school has always been rumored to be haunted, which sounds silly when you’re talking about a development deal, but I think the Christophers miscalculated. The fact is, Idlewild has always scared the people here. No one really wants to go near the place. The Christophers had other deals that were making them rich—or richer, I should say—so they eventually focused on those and let Idlewild sit as a white elephant.”

  Fiona remembered Idlewild from when she was growing up—kids telling stories at sleepovers, teenagers daring one another to go onto the property after dark. She’d never really believed in ghosts, and she didn’t think any of the other kids did, either, but there was no doubt the abandoned remains of Idlewild Hall were unsettling. A crumbling portico, overgrown vines over the windows, that kind of thing. But for all its spookiness, it was just another place until the murder. “And then Deb died,” she prompted Jamie.

  “That was the end of the Christophers here,” Jamie said. “Their years as the most prominent family in Barrons were over. After Tim was arrested, his father, Henry, started pulling up stakes almost right away. By the time Tim was convicted at trial, the family had sold off what they could and moved to Colorado. They’re still there, as far as I know.”

  Fiona stared down at her hands. Deb had been so excited when she’d started dating Tim Christopher; he was tall, good-looking, from a rich and important family. Deb had never been happy as the child of middle-class intellectuals. “But they didn’t sell Idlewild.”

  “They couldn’t. The buildings are so run-down they’re nearly worthless, and the land isn’t worth much, either. The crash in 2008 didn’t help. The family must have been pretty happy when this new buyer came along.”

  “Margaret Eden,” Fiona said. “Who is she?”

  “That I don’t know.” Jamie gave her an apologetic smile. “She’s not local—she’s from New York. I hear she’s an elderly widow with a lot of money, that’s all.”

  “I want to meet her.”

  “Dad says she’s a recluse. Her son handles all of her business.”

  “Then I want to meet him.”

  “Fee.” Jamie turned toward her, twisting his body so he could look at her. His knee brushed hers, and she tried not to jump. “Think about what you’re doing,” he said. “That’s all I ask. Just think about it.”

  “I have thought about it,” Fiona said. She held up one of the files. “What I want to know is, why restore Idlewild Hall now? There can’t be any money in it.”

  “People still send their kids to boarding school,” Jamie said.

  “Around here? You know as well as I do what the average salary is in this part of the state. Who is sending their kid to an expensive boarding school, one that has already required millions to rebuild? Margaret Eden can’t be financing everything by herself. If she has investors, who are they? How do they expect to make money?” Money talks had always been one of her father’s tenets as a journalist. Someone, somewhere, is almost always making money.

  “You think there’s something else going on.”

  “I think that the place is a money pit. Maybe she’s batty, or
she’s being taken advantage of. Don’t you at least find it weird?”

  He stepped off the table and stood facing her again. “All right,” he admitted. “It’s weird. And it’s probably a good story. And no one has covered it.” He looked at her triumphant expression and shook his head, but his features had relaxed, and she knew she’d convinced him. “Let me know how it goes when you track down Anthony Eden.”

  “Anthony is the son?”

  “Yes. They live in one of the town houses on Mitchell Place—the big one on the corner. You could have found all of this stuff out yourself, you know.”

  “I know,” Fiona replied, and she felt herself smiling at him. “But it’s more fun to get information from you.”

  “I have to go back inside,” he said. He caught her gaze, and there it was, the arc of electricity between them that never seemed to quit. Fiona felt the urge to touch him, but whoever was watching them from the station windows—and there was almost certainly someone—would never let him live it down.

  “I’ll call you later,” she managed.

  “Maybe,” he replied. He took a step back, then turned and walked toward the station, giving her a wave over his shoulder. As he put his hand on the door, he stopped. “Tell your father,” he said. “Don’t let him find out from someone else.” And then he was gone.

  chapter 4

  Roberta

  Barrons, Vermont

  October 1950

  It was raining, a fine, cold mist descending over the hockey pitch, but still the girls played. At seven o’clock in the morning the sun was barely rising and the light was watery and gray, but the girls put on their thick uniforms and laced up their leather sneakers, then lined up beneath the eave outside the locker room with sticks in hand, waiting for the signal.

  This was Roberta’s favorite time. The quiet, the chill of the leftover night air, the cold seeping into her legs and her feet, waking her up. The trees around the edges of the pitch were black against the sky, and from one of them three ravens took flight, rising stark and lonely against the clouds. Their calls echoed faintly back to the girls as they stood, their breaths puffing, one girl coughing into her hand the only answering sound.

  Ginny Smith and Brenda Averton were the team captains, and they conferred quietly just outside the eave, the rain gathering in drops in Ginny’s frizzy hair. Roberta was good enough to be team captain—she was a better field hockey player than either Ginny or Brenda—but she had been at Idlewild for only a few months, and neither Ginny nor Brenda was budging. Roberta didn’t mind—all she wanted, really, was to play.

  “Team Seven,” Ginny said, turning to the girls, waving an arm, and trotting to one end of the hockey pitch.

  “Team Nine,” Brenda echoed, leading off the other half of the girls.

  There weren’t nine field hockey teams at Idlewild; the numbers came from the archaic team schedule, written in a pencil schematic and pinned to the wall of the locker room by some long-ago team captain, the graphite fading after years of display. Roberta was Team Nine, and she trotted after the other girls, stick in hand, as Brenda, her thick legs making an audible chafing sound beneath her hockey skirt, shouted strategy at them.

  Then, finally, she got to run.

  These were the elite field hockey players at Idlewild—the girls who chose the game as their class elective, the one part of the curriculum that was not mandatory. Twenty-two girls, no alternates, each with a stick except for the goalies. Though they’d seemed half-asleep a minute ago, as soon as the game began, they ran with teenage vigor, following the play of the ball back and forth over the field, circling, hemming, cutting one another off. There was no real reward for the winning team, no league that Idlewild could play in, no other schools to beat. Idlewild was an island on its own, just as it was in everything else, so the girls only played one another. Yet they still did it with all the energy of a team aiming for a championship.

  This was where Roberta’s mind stopped, where it all went away and she was just inside her body, every part of her moving in sync. There were no chattering girls on the hockey pitch, no cliques or alliances, no gossip or lies. The girls played in near silence in the gloom, their breath huffing, their expressions intent. She stopped feeling homesick, remembering her bedroom, its view out the window down their neat, tidy street, the quilt on her bed that her grandmother had sewn, the jewelry box on her dresser that her mother had given her as a thirteenth-birthday present. She hadn’t had the heart to bring the jewelry box with her to Idlewild, where it could get stolen by the other girls, strangers who could put their hands all over her private things in their shared room.

  Pat Carriveaux passed her the ball, and Roberta quickly handled it down the field, dodging girls coming at her right and left, her shoes squeaking and squelching in the grass. Her hair in its braid was soaked, the rain running down her neck into her collar, but the cool felt good on her heated skin. She circled the goal, but Cindy Benshaw made a fast move, leaning in to steal the ball nearly from the end of her stick, and Roberta jerked back to avoid tangling with her. Cindy ran with the ball, and Roberta steadied herself and ran after her.

  Now she was flying, her body fully warm, barely feeling her feet as they hit the ground, the breath raw and painful in her lungs. She was unstoppable. She no longer pictured the face of her uncle, Van, her father’s brother, who had come to live with them last year after his wife left him and he lost his job. Uncle Van, who had fought on the beaches of Normandy and now could not sleep or work, who carried a terrible scar down the side of his neck that he did not talk about, whose big, callused hands always seemed lethal, even when they were curled in his lap as he listened to the radio hour after hour. She did not think about how she had opened the door to the garage one day and found Uncle Van sitting there, alone, hunched over in his chair, how she had seen—

  The birds called overhead, and a spray of water hit Roberta’s face, mixing with the sweat rolling down her temples. Her body was burning, the sensation pure pleasure. She never wanted to stop.

  She had screamed that day, after she opened the garage door, and then she hadn’t spoken again. For days, and then weeks, and then months. She would open her mouth and her thoughts would shut down, a curious blankness overtaking her, wiping the words clean from her mind. Her concerned parents had taken her to a doctor at first, wondering if something was physically wrong. Then they’d taken her to another doctor, and finally—to their burning shame—to a psychiatrist. Roberta had sat through it all in numb silence. She knew that everyone wanted her to be her old self again, to do something, to say something, but all Roberta saw was the garage door opening, over and over again, and the blankness. She couldn’t explain to all of them that her words had left her and she had nothing to say.

  And so she’d come to Idlewild. Her parents didn’t know what to do with a stubborn teenage girl who wouldn’t speak, except get her out of the house. Roberta was silent for her first week at Idlewild, too, and then one day a teacher asked her a question and she answered it, her voice as rusty as an old bucket in a well. Her first words in months, spoken at this horrible boarding school that every girl hated so much.

  It had felt miraculous, saying those words, and yet it had felt natural, too. She had seen the garage door in her head less and less. And on the hockey field the garage door disappeared entirely and the quiet was the peaceful kind as her body took over.

  Brenda whistled through her teeth and called a break when the first half of the game ended, and the girls began to leave the field. Roberta dropped her stick for a moment and leaned down, her hands on her knees, catching her breath as the other girls trotted past her. Something caught the corner of her eye, a swish of fabric, and she turned her head, expecting to see another girl holding back as she was, but there was nothing there. She turned back and stared at the ground, panting. Her roommates were probably getting up now, shuffling with the other girls down the hall to the
communal bathroom, bumping into one another as they dressed for class.

  Roberta could talk when she was with her roommates. She’d grown used to them, had come to depend on their constant closeness, their little annoyances. She could picture them clearly now: Katie’s sultry beauty and I don’t care attitude, CeCe’s softer physique and trusting kindness, bone-thin Sonia’s toughness, which hid something damaged underneath. She could talk to these girls, in this place, yet when her mother had come to visit—alone, without Dad—Roberta had been tongue-tied and awkward, forcing her words again. Now is not a good time to come home, her mother had said.

  The movement came in the corner of her eye again, and now she straightened and turned. There was still nothing there. Roberta swiped at her forehead and temple, halfheartedly thinking that a strand of hair had gotten loose, though the movement had not looked like hair at all. It had looked like the swish of a skirt, moving as a girl walked past. She’d even thought she’d heard a footstep, though that wasn’t possible. The other players had all left the field.

  She turned to look at the huddle of girls milling beneath the eave to get out of the rain. Ginny gave her a narrow-eyed look, but didn’t outright command Roberta to get moving. Roberta felt suddenly rooted in place, despite the rain soaking her, despite her wet feet through the leather shoes, despite the sweat cooling uncomfortably beneath her wool uniform. Something was moving on the field—something she couldn’t quite see. And Ginny, looking straight at her, didn’t see it.

  There came a sound behind her, a quick, furtive footstep, and then an echo of a voice came from somewhere in the trees. Singing.

  Oh, maybe tonight I’ll hold her tight, when the moonbeams shine . . .

  The sweat on Roberta’s temples turned hot, and her arms jerked. She turned again, a full circle, but saw only the empty, rainy field. Ginny had turned away, and all the other girls stood quietly gossiping and catching their breath, their backs to her.