The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  Oh, maybe tonight I’ll hold her tight . . .

  Roberta made her legs move. They creaked and shuddered like rusty old machine parts now, but she took one step, and then another. She knew that song. It was one of the songs they played on KPLI, on the Starshine Soap GI Afternoon, the show Uncle Van had listened to every day that played music from the war. It was called “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” and it had been playing on the radio that day, its sound echoing off the bare walls and the concrete floor, when she had opened the garage door.

  . . . when the moonbeams shine . . .

  It wasn’t a radio, or a record playing. It was a voice, coming from the trees—no, from the other end of the pitch—a snippet of sound just barely heard before it blew off in the wind. Roberta began to jog toward the others, fear jolting down her spine. She kept her eyes on the line of sweater-clad backs, huddled out of the rain, as her pace picked up and her legs moved faster.

  Uncle Van. Sitting on a chair in the garage, bent forward, the gun pressed to his sweating skin, that pretty song playing, Uncle Van weeping, weeping . . .

  She felt her words disappear, the blankness rising.

  Away. Just get away. Don’t think about it—just run . . .

  Ginny turned and looked at her again as Roberta entered the damp, woolly crowd of girls, inhaling the miasma of rain and damp sweat. “What took you so long?” she snapped.

  Roberta shook her head, numb. She remembered Mary Van Woorten’s story about Mary Hand haunting the hockey field, singing lullabies in the trees. Mary Van Woorten was standing a few feet away, unaware, her cheeks red with cold, her blond hair tied back in a neat ponytail, shifting from foot to foot like a racehorse waiting for a signal. Lullabies, she’d said, not popular songs.

  But Mary had sung a popular song this time. One just for her.

  Roberta clutched her stick, crossed her arms over the front of her sweater, and moved in closer to the rest of the girls, seeking warmth. She thought of her roommates again, their familiar faces, their voices, their bickering laughter. And then she made the words come out.

  “It’s nothing,” she said to Ginny. “Nothing at all.”

  chapter 5

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  Within a week the work had started at Idlewild, construction vehicles moving in alongside workers and trailers. The old, mostly broken fence was replaced with a new, high chain-link one, laced with signs warning trespassers. The view inside was obscured by trees, trucks, and the backs of Porta-Potties.

  As she waited for one of her many calls to Anthony Eden to be returned, Fiona finally made the drive to her father’s house, on a winding back road just outside the town lines. Fiona’s parents had divorced two years after Deb’s murder, and her mother had died of cancer eight years ago, still broken by her elder daughter’s death. Malcolm Sheridan lived alone in the tiny bungalow they’d lived in as a family, withdrawing further and further into the world inside his formidable brain.

  There were gaps on the roof where shingles had become detached, Fiona saw as she pulled up the dirt driveway. The roof would have to be done before winter, or it would start to leak. Malcolm probably had the money for it stashed somewhere, but the challenge would be finding it. Fiona was already running through the possibilities in her head as she knocked on the door.

  He didn’t answer—he usually didn’t—but his old Volvo was in the driveway, so Fiona swung open the screen door, toed open the unlocked door behind it, and poked her head into the house. “Dad, it’s me.”

  There was a shuffling sound from a back room, a creak. “Fee!”

  Fiona came all the way through the doorway. The shades were drawn on all the windows—Malcolm claimed he couldn’t work in bright sunlight—and the house smelled dusty and a little sour. Books and papers were stacked on every surface: kitchen counters, coffee tables, end tables, chairs. Fiona blinked, adjusting to the dim light after the bright fall day outside, and made her way across the small living room, taking note that the run-down kitchen looked as unused as ever.

  Malcolm met her at the door to the back room he used as his office, wearing chinos so old they were now sold in vintage stores and a plaid flannel button-down shirt. Though he was over seventy now, he still had some brown in his longish gray hair, and he still exuded the same vitality he always had. “Fee!” he said again.

  “Hi, Daddy.” Malcolm took her up in a hug that squeezed her ribs, then let her go. Fiona hugged him back, steeped in the complicated mix of happiness and aching loss that she always felt in her father’s presence. “I don’t see any food in the kitchen. Have you been eating?”

  “I’m fine, just fine. Working.”

  “The new book?”

  “It’s going to be . . .” He trailed off, his thoughts wandering back to the book he’d been writing for years now. “I’m just working through some things, but I think I’m very close to a breakthrough.”

  He turned and retreated into his office, and Fiona followed. The office was where her father really lived. This was where his mind had always been as Fiona was growing up, and since her mother had left, she suspected it was where his physical body spent most of its waking hours. There was a desk stacked with more papers, a Mac computer probably old enough to go into an Apple museum, and a low bookshelf. On the wall were two framed photos: one of Malcolm in Vietnam in 1969, wearing combat fatigues, posed on one knee in the middle of a field ringed with palm trees, a line of military trucks behind him; the other of Vietnamese women in a rice field, bent low over their work as four American helicopters loomed in menacing black silhouette above them. One of Malcolm’s award-winning photographs. Fiona was always glad he hadn’t had the other famous photo framed and posted; it depicted a Vietnamese woman gently wrapping her dead six-year-old son in linen as she prepared to bury him. Fiona’s mother had drawn the line at displaying that photo in the house, claiming it would disturb the girls to look at it every day.

  Does it ever bother you, one of Fiona’s therapists had asked after the murder, that your father was so absent when you were growing up? That he was never home?

  Seventeen-year-old Fiona had replied, How is Dad supposed to save the world if he’s sitting home with me?

  It wasn’t just the war, which was finishing as Malcolm’s daughters were born. It was the aftermath: the books written, the prizes won, the trips to Washington, the speaking tours and engagements. And always, with her father, there had been marches, protests, and sit-ins: women’s rights, black power, stop police brutality, abolish the death penalty. Malcolm Sheridan always protested, even well into the nineties, when the other hippies had long sold out and protests were no longer cool. He had wanted to save the world. Until Deb died, and all that protest spirit died with her.

  Now he stacked some of the papers on his desk. “I didn’t know you were coming. Some tea, maybe . . .”

  “It’s okay, Dad.” She felt a jolt of worry, looking at him. Did those broad shoulders, which had always been so powerful, look narrower, weaker? Did he look pale? “Did you go see the doctor like I told you to?”

  “Warburton? I don’t trust that old hack anymore,” Malcolm retorted. “He just prescribes whatever the pharmaceutical companies tell him to. Does he think I don’t know?”

  Fiona gritted her teeth. “Dad.”

  “Thank you, sweetie, but I’ll handle it.” He closed the document he was working on almost hurriedly, as if afraid she would read it over his shoulder.

  “When are you going to let me read the manuscript?” she asked him. He’d been working on a new book, about the 2008 financial crisis. The problem was that he’d been working on it for five years, with apparently no progress.

  “Soon, soon,” Malcolm said, patting her on the shoulder. “Now, let’s go to the kitchen and you can tell me about your day.”

  She followed him meekly into the kitchen,
where he fussed at the clutter on the counters, looking for the kettle. This was the way it always happened with her: stark courage when she wasn’t in her father’s presence, and lip-biting worry and lack of confidence when she was actually here, watching an old man make tea. There was too much history in this old house, too much pain, too much love. Her mother had bought that kettle, bringing it home one day in her station wagon after one of Dad’s royalty checks came in.

  Still, she blurted it out. “I’m working on a new story.”

  “Is that so?” Her father didn’t approve of Fiona’s chosen work, the stories about the right yoga poses for stress and how to make mini apple pies in a muffin tin. But he’d stopped voicing his disapproval years ago, replacing it with an apathy that meant he was tuning her out.

  Fiona looked away from him, at the old clock on the wall, pretending he wasn’t there so she could get the words out. “It’s about Idlewild Hall.”

  The water was running in the sink, filling the kettle, but now it shut off. There was a second of silence. “Oh?” he said. “You mean the restoration.”

  “What?” She snapped back to look at her father. “You knew about that?”

  “Norm Simpson called me—oh, two weeks ago. He thought I should know.”

  Fiona blinked, her mind scrambling, trying to place the name. Her father knew so many people, it was impossible to keep track. “No one told me about it.”

  “Well, people are sensitive, Fee. That’s all. What’s your story angle?” He was interested now, awake, looking at her from the corner of his eye as he plugged in the kettle.

  “I want to talk to this Margaret Eden. And her son, Anthony. I want to know their endgame.”

  “There’s going to be no money in it,” Malcolm said, turning and leaning on the counter, crossing his arms. “That place has always been a problem. City council has debated buying it from the Christophers three times since 2000, just so they can tear it down, but they never got up the gumption to do it. And now they’ve lost their chance.”

  Fiona suppressed the triumph she felt—Yes! He agrees with me!—and turned to open the fridge. “That’s what I think. But I can’t get Anthony Eden to return my calls, even when I say I’m writing for Lively Vermont.”

  The kettle whistled. Her father poured their tea and looked thoughtful. “I could make some calls,” he said.

  “You don’t need to do that,” she replied automatically. “Dad, it’s—it’s okay with you that I’m writing this?”

  For the first time, his face went hard, the expression closed down. “Your sister isn’t there. I told Norm Simpson the same thing. She’s gone. You sound like your mother, still worried every day that you’re making Deb unhappy.”

  “I don’t—” But she did. Of course she did. Leave it to her father to get to the heart of it with his journalist’s precision. Her parents had divorced two years after the murder, unable to carry on together anymore. Her mother had gone to work at Walgreens after the divorce, even though she had a Ph.D. She’d said it was because she was tired of academia, but Fiona always knew it was because Deb had been embarrassed by what she referred to as her parents’ nerdiness. She’d been uncomfortable with Malcolm’s fame as a journalist and an activist—twenty-year-old Deb, who had wanted nothing more than to fit in, be popular, and have friends, had thought she had all the answers. She’d been so young, Fiona thought now. So terribly young. The attitude had affected their mother, yet no matter how Deb had scorned him, Malcolm refused to apologize for the way he led his life.

  But when Fiona looked around their childhood home now, at the clutter and disorder that hadn’t been touched in years, she wondered if her father felt as guilty as the rest of them did. There had been arguments that year before Deb died—she’d been in college, barely passing her classes while she socialized and had fun. She’d been drinking, going to parties, and dating Tim, to their parents’ hurt confusion. Fiona, at seventeen, had watched the rift from the sidelines. And then, one November night, it had all been over.

  Still, Malcolm Sheridan was Malcolm Sheridan. Two days after she’d visited him, Fiona received a phone call from Anthony Eden’s assistant, asking her to meet Eden at the gates of Idlewild Hall the next morning for a tour and an interview. “I can’t do it,” she said to Jamie that night, sitting on the couch in his small apartment, curled up against him and thinking about Deb again. “I can’t go.”

  “Right,” he said. “You can’t go.”

  Fiona pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes. “Yes, I can. I can go. I’m going.”

  “This is the most ambitious thing you’ve ever written, isn’t it?” he asked. He’d finished a long shift, and they were sitting in the half-dark quiet, without even the TV on. She could feel his muscles slowly unknotting, as if his job kept him in some unbearable level of silent tension he could only now release.

  “Is that a dig?” she asked him, though she knew it wasn’t.

  “No,” he said. “But since I’ve known you, all you’ve written are those fluff pieces.” He paused, feeling his way. “I just get the feeling you’re a better writer than you let on.”

  Fiona swallowed. She’d gone to journalism school—it had been second nature to follow in Malcolm’s footsteps, and she was incapable of doing anything else—but she’d freelanced her entire career instead of working in a newsroom. She told herself it was because she could do bigger and better things that way. But here she was. “Well, I guess I’ll find out. They say you’re supposed to do something that scares you every day, right?”

  Jamie snorted. He was probably unaware she’d read that motto on a yoga bag. “It’s a good thing I’m a cop, then.”

  “Oh, really?” It was one of her hobbies to test how far she could push Jamie. “Directing traffic at the Christmas parade? That must be pretty terrifying.”

  In response, he dropped his head back, resting it on the back of the sofa and staring at the ceiling. “You are so dead,” he said with a straight face.

  “Or that time they were fixing the bridge. You had to stand there for hours.” Fiona shook her head. “I don’t know how you handle it every day.”

  “So dead,” Jamie said again.

  “Or when we get a big snowfall, and you have to help all the cars in the ditch—”

  She was fast, but he was faster. Before she could get away, he had pulled her down by the hips and pinned her to the sofa. “Take it back,” he said.

  She leaned up and brushed her lips over his gorgeous mouth. “Make me,” she said.

  He did. She took it back, eventually.

  * * *

  • • •

  Fiona stood next to the tall black gates to Idlewild, leaning on her parked car, watching Old Barrons Road. It looked different in daylight, though it was still stark and lonely, the last dead leaves skittering across the road. There was no movement at the gas station, no one on the hill. Birds cried overhead as they gathered to go south before the brutal winter hit. Fiona turned up the collar of her parka and rubbed her hands.

  A black Mercedes came over the hill, moving as slowly as a funeral procession, its engine soundless. Fiona watched as it pulled up next to her and the driver’s window whirred down, showing a man over fifty with a wide forehead, thinning brown hair, and a pair of sharp eyes that were trained on her, unblinking.

  “Mr. Eden?” Fiona said.

  He nodded once, briefly, from the warm leather interior of his car. “Please follow me,” he said.

  He pressed a button somewhere—Fiona pictured a sleek console in there, like in a James Bond film—and the gates made a loud, ringing clang. An automatic lock—that was new. A motor purred and the gates swung open slowly, revealing an unpaved dirt driveway leading away, freshly dug like an open scar.

  Fiona got in her car and followed. The drive was bumpy, and at first there was nothing to see but trees. But the trees thinned, and the d
riveway curved, and for the first time in twenty years she saw Idlewild Hall.

  My God, she thought. This place. This place.

  There was nothing like it—not in the Vermont countryside full of clapboard and Colonials, and perhaps not anywhere. Idlewild was a monster of a building, not high but massively long, rowed with windows that dully reflected the gray sky through a film of dirt. Brambles and weeds clotted the front lawn, and tangles of dead vines crawled the walls. Four of the windows on the far end of the building were broken, looking like eyes that had blinked closed. The rest of the windows grinned down the driveway at the approaching cars. All the better to eat you with, my dear.

  Fiona had last been here four days after Deb’s body was found. The police hadn’t let her come to the scene, but after they’d cleared everything away, she’d come through the fence and stood in the middle of the sports field, on the place where Deb’s body had lain. She’d been looking for solace, perhaps, or a place to begin to understand, but instead she’d found a litter of wreaths, cheap bundles of flowers, beer bottles, and cigarette butts. The aftermath of the concerned citizens of Barrons—and its teenagers—conducting their own vigil.

  The building had been in ruins then. It was worse now. As Fiona got closer, she saw that the end of the main building, where the windows were broken, actually sagged a little, as if the roof had fallen in. The circular drive in front of the main doors was uneven and muddy, and she had to take care to keep her balance as she got out of the car. She strapped her DSLR camera around her neck and turned to greet her tour guide.

  “I’m sorry about the mess,” the man said as he walked from the parked Mercedes toward her. “The driveway was overgrown, the pavement cracked and upended in parts. We had to have it redug before we could do much else.” He held out his hand. His expression was naturally serious, but he attempted a smile. “I’m Anthony Eden. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Fiona Sheridan.” His hand was warm and smooth. He was wearing a cashmere coat, in contrast to the jeans, boots, and parka she’d worn in preparation for touring a construction site.