The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  He was sitting at his own laptop at the kitchen table, wearing worn jeans and a gray T-shirt, when she came in. There was a single light on overhead, the rest of the apartment in darkness. He didn’t look up from the file he was reading when she closed the door behind her. “You eat?” he said. “There are leftovers in the fridge.”

  She dropped her things on the table across from him and hesitated. She hadn’t eaten. He knew that. She probably should, but her brain was buzzing with everything she’d found, and she wanted to get to it.

  Jamie looked up at her as if reading her mind. “Eat, or this doesn’t get done,” he said.

  She sighed. “Fine.”

  He waved her away and went back to his file. She knew exactly how he felt. She dug in the fridge and found pasta and meat sauce, cold. She dumped some into a bowl, added a spoon, pulled two beers from the six-pack, and walked back to the table.

  “Who’s first?” she asked, sitting down and sliding his beer over to him.

  “I’ll go.” Jamie cracked his beer and took a drink. “Sonia Gallipeau, age fifteen, was reported missing in early December 1950. She was an Idlewild student with no local family. She left to visit a great-aunt and great-uncle in Burlington. She left after a day without their permission—ran away. She got on the bus back to Barrons. She never got there, and she was never seen again.”

  “So it is her,” Fiona said. “Not just a borrowed blouse.”

  “It seems so, yes.” Jamie riffled through his stack of papers. “We have no trace of dental records and no trace of any living relatives. The great-aunt and great-uncle are long dead, no descendants. So at this point we can’t match her, even with DNA.”

  Fiona took a bite of her cold pasta. “Where was she last seen?”

  “Burlington, getting on the bus, by the ticket taker.”

  “What did the bus driver say?”

  “No one interviewed him. No one even found out his name.” Jamie pulled an old folder out of his pile and held it up. “You see this? This is the missing persons file.” It had two or three pieces of paper in it, tops. “She was a boarding school girl, and she was fifteen, so she was presumed a runaway. Case closed.”

  “Who reported her missing?”

  “The headmistress at Idlewild. One Julia Patton.” Jamie put the file down again. “She died in 1971, so that’s a dead end. I can’t get a line on Idlewild’s student records, because the school has been closed for so long. And Anthony Eden won’t return my calls.”

  “Aha.” Fiona held up her spoon. “That’s where I come in. He returned mine.”

  Jamie shook his head. “Of course he did.”

  “It pays to have a nosy journalist on your side,” Fiona said. “But in this case, it’s a dead end. Because get this: According to Anthony Eden, there are no Idlewild student records.”

  Jamie sat back in his chair. “They’re gone?”

  “Disappeared when the school closed, and were most likely destroyed. Sixty years of records.”

  “That’s going to make things harder.” He scratched at his beard for a second, dismayed. “Do you think Eden is lying?”

  “Maybe,” Fiona said. She took another scoop of the pasta. “It’s always possible. But I can’t see the angle. He wants this squared away fast, not drawn out. I can’t picture him carting dozens of moldy old file boxes out of there and hiding them. And I can’t figure what he would be covering up, since this happened before he was born.”

  “Neither can I. But I’m going to run a check at local storage places to see if he’s rented a space. That many records would need room.”

  That was fine with her. She’d promised Anthony to handle the story quietly, not to keep him immune from police probing. “What else did you find?” she asked Jamie.

  “We did a basic check on the name,” he replied. “She was only fifteen, so there wasn’t much. No medical or dental that we could find. She’d never been in the system before, as either a juvenile delinquent or a runaway. And no birth certificate, either—she wasn’t born here.”

  That surprised her. They were a few hours from Quebec, and French names were not that uncommon. “She was from Canada?”

  Jamie shook his head. “France.”

  Damn. Damn. She should have thought of that angle, instead of assuming and looking locally. Never make assumptions, her father admonished in her head. “You found immigration records?”

  He nodded, his expression haunted. “She came in 1947.”

  It hit her. Arriving from France in 1947, age twelve, no family. “Shit,” she said. “You mean she was a refugee.”

  “Yes.”

  She put down her spoon and rubbed her fingertips over her eye sockets, thinking. “So Sonia spent her childhood in France during the war. Nazi-occupied France. She lost her parents, her family. And she came here, only to—”

  “Only to be murdered and dumped in a well,” Jamie finished for her.

  They were silent for a minute. It had happened over sixty years ago, but something about it was still nauseating, as if she could smell that rotten stench from the blackness of the well once again. She pressed her fingers harder, then dropped her hands. It was done; Sonia Gallipeau was dead, no matter how unjustly. She couldn’t change it, but maybe she could do something about it. “What about her records from France?” she said to Jamie. “Can you get those?”

  He was sitting back in his chair, staring blankly at his laptop screen as if it might give him answers. He listlessly picked up his beer and drained it. “I’ve put the request out,” he said. “It’ll take a day or two. The only reason I was given permission to do it at all was in case she had living relatives in Europe that we can inform. Maybe someone, somewhere, was left to look for her.”

  Fiona stared at him. She knew how a small police force worked, and she knew even more now that she’d spent a year with him. “How long do we have?” she asked.

  Jamie shook his head. “Not long. We don’t have many detectives, Fee, and there was a murder in Burlington last week. We can spend some resources on it, but this girl has no family, and the likelihood is that whoever did this is dead.”

  “But it’s a murder,” she protested. “Once the coroner confirms it, it’s an open case.”

  “A cold one. Cold before we even touched it. We’ll do our diligence—we’ll investigate. But our resources are limited. There are fresh cases we have to work. If nothing comes up quick, we move on.”

  Fiona realized she hadn’t touched her own beer yet. She cracked it open and took a drink. “Can your father help?” Jamie’s father was a retired chief of police, and he still had cronies in the department who held considerable sway.

  “I already asked him,” Jamie said. “He said there’s no point.” He held up Sonia’s slim missing persons file again. “This is from Granddad’s time; he was one of the cops who interviewed the headmistress. Granddad died in 1982. The cop who took down this report is dead, too.”

  “We need people who were young at that time,” she said. She opened her laptop and powered it up. “They’re more likely to be alive now. How tired are you?”

  “I’m not tired,” he said. He looked tired, but she knew that, like her, he’d never sleep. They’d never done this before, she realized—worked together on something. Usually their work took them in separate directions, which was how she’d thought they liked it. But it was good, working with Jamie. “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

  She circled her thoughts back to the task at hand. “It’ll take some searching, but if we split it up, it won’t take as long,” she said. She opened her e-mail and called up a message from her in-box. “There’s almost nothing about Idlewild online,” she said. “Most boarding schools have alumni associations or something, but Idlewild was different. When it shut down, it just disappeared.”

  “Not the usual kind of student bonding,” Jamie said. />
  “It wasn’t a happy place for most of those girls, I think. They were sent there because they were problem kids. As far as I can tell, no one has ever planned a reunion, or tried to. Facebook gave me nothing, either. So I called the local historical society.”

  The Barrons Historical Society, it turned out, consisted of two old widowed sisters who kept copies of newspapers and random other papers willed to the society in a rented office that was open for only four hours a week. They might have seemed like dotty eccentrics on the surface, but Hester, the sister Fiona had talked to, had knowledge of Barrons that rivaled Jamie’s.

  “I’ve never been there,” Jamie said.

  “You’d probably love it,” Fiona told him. “However, they had next to nothing about Idlewild Hall—only a few class photographs. I had the woman I talked to scan and e-mail them to me.” Fiona had been prepared to drive to the office and do that herself instead of asking an elderly woman to do it, but Hester had surprised her, saying that she and her sister were in the process of trying to digitize the entire archive. “The pictures are interesting, but not particularly useful. Except one.” She called it up in her e-mail and turned her screen so he could see. Eleven girls stood on the lawn in front of Idlewild, each girl holding a field hockey stick. They wore field hockey uniforms, and they were carefully posed, the girls on each side angled inward, their shoulders overlapping. Despite the sports uniforms, they all looked formal: unsmiling white girls of varying shapes and sizes, staring into the lens, waiting for the picture to be taken. At the left end was a woman who was obviously a teacher, though she looked to be only in her early twenties. Neat handwriting across the top stated: Idlewild Girls Field Hockey Team, 1952. Two years after Sonia’s death.

  Fiona let Jamie look at the photo, and then she clicked to the next attachment. It was a scan of the back of the photo, which was covered in the same neat handwriting, the ink only slightly faded over time.

  Jamie leaned forward. “Shit,” he said. “This is a list of their names.”

  “It’s the only photo with handwriting,” Fiona said. She clicked back to the photo itself and pointed to the pixels of black and white, the blur of girls’ faces. “One of these girls must have known Sonia. And if we dig, somebody must still be alive.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was nearly one o’clock when they found her.

  The beer was long gone, and Fiona’s eyes hurt, moving dryly in her skull as if they were made from the cracked volcanic ash of Pompeii. She was no stranger to Internet searches; she was something of an expert at them, in fact. A journalist had to be in this day and age. But she was soft, she realized. She’d spent too much time looking up gluten-free brownie recipes and ways to use egg cups to make Christmas decorations, and she’d never tried to find this many people from so long ago.

  Most of the girls in the photograph, as far as they could tell, were dead. Four of the eleven, frustratingly, had such common names that it was impossible to pin down who they might be; since few Idlewild girls were local, they could have been born anywhere, so records searches were no good. One girl, Roberta Greene, a tall, pretty girl with a braid of pale hair, had possibly become a lawyer in New Hampshire under a married name. That was interesting, and Fiona wondered how an Idlewild girl had ended up with an expensive law school education. But it was Jamie who hit the jackpot, and he hit it with the teacher.

  “Sarah London,” he said. “Never married. Retired teacher, member of the East Mills Ladies’ Society.” He turned his laptop toward her, showing her the society’s Web page complete with photo, and gave a tired smile that even this late, even with her ashy eyes, made Fiona’s stomach flutter. “Thank God for old spinsters,” he said. “I’ll get an address from the DMV tomorrow.”

  It was a lucky break. They went to bed at last, and even though they were both exhausted, they pulled each other’s clothes off in silence. Fiona didn’t need any words as she slid her fingers through his hair, as he kissed the tender skin along her jawline and just below her ear, as he flexed his arms around her and pulled her in tight. As she hooked her legs over the backs of his thighs and smelled the scent of his skin and let all her thoughts spiral away as sensation took over.

  After, Jamie dressed and curled up against her back in his T-shirt and boxers, asleep before his head hit the pillow. Fiona lay on her side with her knees up, her eyes open, feeling the weight of his arm over her waist and the deep, soothing rhythm of his breathing, and as she did so often, she thought about Deb.

  Fiona had been at Tim Christopher’s murder trial, sitting in the front seats reserved for the victim’s family. She’d thought she’d get an argument when she said she wanted to go, but by the time of the trial it felt like her parents had been snatched by aliens that inhabited their bodies, leaving them silent and apathetic, barely able to look her in the eye. Maybe a seventeen-year-old girl shouldn’t have been there, but it didn’t matter. She’d gone.

  The trial, she realized later, had been her full initiation into adult life, even more than the murder had been. Afterward, she’d no longer been able to pretend that this was happening to someone else, or that Deb had just died naturally and peacefully in her sleep—both fantasies she’d used while lying in bed at night, wishing frantically that it would all go away. The trial was where they had talked of blood and hyoid bones and scrapings from beneath Deb’s fingernails. Of Deb’s sexual activity, or lack of it, analysis of when her sister had had sex and how often. Strands of Deb’s long black hair had been found in Tim Christopher’s backseat, and a discussion had ensued about exactly how a girl’s hair might get into her boyfriend’s backseat: Was she lying there because they were having intercourse? Or was she lying there because he’d strangled her and she was already dead?

  Fiona had always thought herself worldly because of her father’s career. But the clear forensic debates by strange men in suits, in front of a crowded courtroom, of the contents of Deb’s vagina—no one had ever said the word vagina in their house—had shocked her deeply, sickeningly. She had looked around the room and known that every person there was picturing smart, sleek, handsome Tim Christopher atop her sister in his backseat, grunting away. That, right there, had been her first clear understanding that adulthood was going to be nothing like she’d thought it would be.

  There had been testimony, one day, from one of Tim Christopher’s college friends. He had seen Tim the morning of the murder. They had shot hoops between classes. They had talked about nothing special, the friend recalled—except for one thing. There had been mention of a girl they both knew who had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide the week before. The friend had been shocked, but Tim Christopher had just shrugged, throwing the ball at the hoop. Some girls should just be dead, the friend remembered Tim saying, his voice cold. There’s nothing that can be done.

  Deb, dead in that cold field. Sonia Gallipeau, curled up in the well four hundred feet away.

  Some girls should just be dead.

  Fiona thought of her sister’s long, beautiful black hair, and closed her eyes.

  chapter 10

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  It snowed overnight, just a light dusting that gathered in the cracks and crevices, blowing in the wind like packing peanuts. Fiona drove over roads more and more remote and rutted into East Mills, a tiny town that didn’t seem to offer much more than a gas station, a few grimy shops, and a Dunkin’ Donuts. Trucks blasted by as she traveled the main street, either on their way to Canada or on their way back. The sky was mottled, the sun coming and going behind swift-moving clouds.

  Sarah London lived in an old Victorian with missing shingles and a postage-stamp front lawn that was thick with dead weeds. Fiona had tried to call first, but had gotten only a phone that rang and rang on the other end, with no answering machine, and she hadn’t had a signal on her cell at all for the last half hour. She pulled the phone
out of her pocket now, as she sat in the driveway, but saw that she had no bars. Fine, then. She would wing it.

  She got out and walked to the wooden porch, her boots loud on the damp, sagging steps. According to the DMV record Jamie had pulled, Sarah London was eighty-eight years old, which made the house’s neglect logical, especially if the old woman lived alone.

  Her first knock on the storm door wasn’t answered, but her second knock brought a faint shuffling from within. “Miss London?” she called. “I’m not a salesperson. My name is Fiona Sheridan, and I’m a journalist.”

  That brought footsteps, as she’d known it would. The inner door swung open to reveal a woman with a stooped back, her thin white hair tied back. Though her posture was crouched and she was wearing an old housecoat, she still gave off an air of offended dignity. She narrowed her eyes at Fiona through the screen. “What does a journalist want with me?”

  “I’m doing a story on Idlewild Hall.”

  In an instant the woman’s eyes lit up, a reaction that she quickly struggled to mask as if she thought Fiona was leading her on. “No one cares about Idlewild Hall,” she said, suspicious again.

  “I do,” Fiona said. “They’re restoring it. Did you know that?”

  For a second the woman swayed in utter surprise, her gaze so vacant with shock that Fiona wondered if she’d have to barge inside and use the landline to call 911. Then she gripped the doorframe and unlatched the storm door. “My God, my God,” she murmured. “Come inside.”

  The house’s interior mirrored the exterior: a place that had been cared for, but was now sinking into neglect with the age of its owner. An unused sitting room sat primly on the right, old figurines and knickknacks growing dust on its fussy shelves. The floor of the front hall was lined with a plastic runner that had probably been placed there in the early eighties. Fiona politely paused and unlaced her boots as the woman proceeded into the kitchen.