The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  She exhaled a long terrified breath. She waited, but no more voices came, not for the moment. But they would come again. She already knew she was going to be in here for a while.

  She stepped to the desk, picking up the pen and tapping it experimentally, looking for hidden spiders. Then she retreated to her spot next to the door. She balanced the textbook on her other arm and managed to write with cold, stiff fingers:

  I am trapped in Special Detention with Mary Hand and I can’t get out

  She stilled for a long moment, waiting. Waiting.

  Then she added: Mary knows.

  She lowered herself to the floor and crossed her legs beneath her skirt as something faint and weak scrabbled at the window.

  chapter 12

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  Malcolm Sheridan listened patiently, sipping his tea, as Fiona told him about the girl in the well. As she talked, he got quietly excited, evidenced by the quick jittering of his knee.

  “Does the coroner have her?” he asked when she finished.

  He meant the body. Sonia’s body. “Yes.”

  “That’ll be Dave Saunders. Can you get the results through Jamie? If not, I can call him.”

  Fiona sat back in her mother’s old flowered chair, thinking. “I don’t think the report will have any surprises,” she said. “I saw the girl—her skull was clearly smashed in. I can probably get the report from Jamie.”

  “That’s a damned lucky break with those records,” her father said, his mind already flying past hers, following its own track. He had put down his cup and was staring at the glass coffee table, his brow furrowing. This was what he was like when a story was brewing, she thought. She hadn’t seen this in a long time.

  “What I want,” she said, trying to steer his formidable brain, “is to know if there’s something we’re missing in France. Family, history. Something more than a birth certificate.”

  “You mean something from the camps,” Malcolm said.

  “Yes. Jamie found her birth record, but—”

  “No, no, no,” Malcolm interrupted. He got out of his chair and started to pace. “There are other places to look. Libraries, museums, archives. The government record is the smallest part of the picture. Was she a Jew?”

  Fiona shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s possible she wasn’t. She would have been so young during the war—not all the camps took children, or kept them alive if they did. If her father was in Dachau, she was likely imprisoned with her mother. We’ll have a better chance of finding her through a search for the mother.”

  Fiona looked at her notes. “The mother’s name was Emilie. Emilie Gallipeau.”

  “But no death record?” Malcolm picked up his cup and carried it into the kitchen. His voice traveled back to her. “It could have been any of the camps. Ravensbrück took women, and children, too, I think. So many of the records were sealed for decades, but a lot of them are coming unsealed now. And of course, many records were completely lost. The war was a great mess of data, you know, before computers. Full of human hubris and error. A different time. I have reference books, but some of them are outdated already. In some ways, right now is an exciting time for historians, if you can catch the last survivors before they die.”

  “Okay,” Fiona said. A pulse of excitement beat in her throat, but she tried to push it down. Most goose chases like this ended up with nothing, she reminded herself. “Since I can’t go to France and search every archive and library, what do I do?”

  Her father reappeared in the doorway. His eyes crinkled with amusement. “You talk to someone who can. Or who already is.”

  “The police—”

  “Fee, Fee.” He was clearly laughing at her now. “You’ve spent too long with that policeman of yours. The police don’t have all the answers, and neither does the government. The people are where you find things. Like those records you just found. The people are the ones who keep the memories and the records the powers that be would rather erase.”

  “Dad.” If she didn’t stop him now, he’d launch over his favorite ground, the political lectures that used to amuse her mother before Deb died. Once a hippie, always a hippie. “Okay, okay. We can go through whatever channels you want to find information. I promised Jamie we wouldn’t interfere with the police investigation, that’s all.”

  “No. The police will do an autopsy, do a search for living relatives, then put the file in a cold case box and move on. They won’t be going anywhere near France in 1945. But we can find her, Fee. We can find out who she was.”

  For a second, emotion rolled up through Fiona’s throat, and she couldn’t breathe. Her father had been like this, once upon a time. The man in the photo on the wall in the other room, the man on the ground in Vietnam in 1969, had been complicated and demanding and often absent, but he had been so painfully, vibrantly alive it had almost hurt to be around him. The air had crackled when he walked into a room. Malcolm Sheridan had never done small talk—he was the kind of man who looked you in the eye on first meeting and said, Do you enjoy what you do? Do you find it fulfilling? If you had the courage to answer, he’d listen like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard. And in that moment, it always was. He was a brilliant dreamer, a relentless intellectual, and a troublemaker, but the thing that always struck you about Fiona’s father was that he was truly interested in everything.

  It had been twenty years since she’d seen that man. He’d vanished when Deb’s body had been found on the field at Idlewild. When Tim Christopher had murdered his daughter, Malcolm had folded in on himself, disappeared. The man who had emerged from that experience had been subdued, unfocused, his anger scattershot, bubbling up and disappearing into apathy again. Fiona’s mother, who had been so tolerant of his larger-than-life personality before the murder, had simply shut down. She’d severed herself from his interests, from their friends. After the divorce, she’d been determined not to be that woman, Malcolm’s wife—Deb’s mother—anymore.

  But this Malcolm, the one Fiona was seeing a shadowy glimpse of right now—this Malcolm was the man people still spoke reverently of twenty years later, the man people still dropped everything for when he phoned. The man who had inspired such awe that his name had still gotten Fiona hired at Lively Vermont.

  But she couldn’t say any of that. They never talked about it, about what had happened after Deb. It was too hard. Fiona gathered up her notes, trying to keep her expression and her voice level.

  “Okay,” she said to him. “I’ll leave it with you. I have to stop by Lively Vermont. And I’m going to find these girls, these school friends of Sonia’s.”

  “I’ll call you later,” he said, turning back toward the kitchen. He called out: “Make sure that boy of yours doesn’t screw up the investigation!”

  As Fiona was on the road to the Lively Vermont offices, her phone buzzed. Anthony Eden. She ignored it. She’d update him later. Starving, she stopped for a burrito, then drove through downtown Barrons to the boxy old low-rise whose cheap rent was the kind that Lively Vermont could afford. Though it was only five o’clock, the sun was sinking fast in the sky, reminding her that winter in its full force was coming, with its whiteouts and snowdrifts.

  She was too late to see Jonas—he must have left on time today, which was rare for him. Fiona got the janitor to let her in. The offices were empty, Jonas’s door closed and locked. Instead of bothering him at home, Fiona took a piece of scrap paper from a handy desk and wrote, Came by to give you an update. Not much yet, but it’s good. Trust me. I’ll call tomorrow. F. She folded the paper and slipped it under his door.

  She had the file she’d pulled from the archives under her arm, so she walked to the scarred old cabinets on the wall to replace it. But with the drawer open and the file in her hand, she paused.

  There are references to the Christophers i
n there, Jonas had warned her.

  He was right. She’d seen it when she read the file: a photograph from the opening of the Barrons Hotel in 1971, showing Henry Christopher, dubbed a “prominent local investor and businessman,” standing next to the mayor, wearing a tuxedo and shaking hands while smiling at the camera. He was young, his resemblance to his future son sharp and distinct. At his shoulder was a cool, pretty blond woman in a shiny silk dress, smiling tightly at the camera. In true 1971 style, she was listed in the caption only as “Mrs. Christopher.” Ilsa, Fiona thought. Her name is Ilsa.

  She stared at the two faces, both young and attractive, a couple who was married and rich and had it all. Their son, who would grow up to kill Deb, would be born in three years, an only child. When Tim went to prison for murder, Henry and Ilsa left Vermont.

  Fiona had glossed over this picture when she’d first seen it, flinching away as one does when seeing an unexpected picture of something gory or dead, but now she made herself look at it. She waited for some kind of emotion to overcome her—hatred of these two people, or resentment, or grief. None of that happened. Henry kept smiling from his chiseled, handsome face and Ilsa kept looking slightly uncomfortable, and Fiona felt nothing but a churning in her gut.

  Henry Christopher looked at ease next to the mayor, as if they knew each other well. The Barrons Hotel had closed after barely four years, unable to stay afloat.

  Henry Christopher and the mayor, selling Barrons a bill of goods and smiling about it.

  She should quit this, but instead she closed the file and moved two cabinets down, to the files from the 1990s. She dug out 1994, the year of Deb’s murder, and opened it.

  She had never read Lively Vermont’s coverage of the murder, assuming it had been covered at all. In the 1990s the magazine hadn’t gone through its lifestyle phase yet and was still trying to be a newsmagazine, though it did its best to be the splashy kind that was in favor at the time. They’d changed the format to Rolling Stone–like larger, thinner paper and tried to put sexier stories on the cover. Ah, the last days of magazine glory, Fiona thought wistfully, looking through the year’s issues, when everyone was still making money.

  She could not have explained why she was doing this any more than she could explain why she’d walked Old Barrons Road, watching the patterns of cars, in the middle of the night. Maybe it had to do with seeing a spark of Malcolm’s old spirit earlier. Whatever the reason, it was a compulsion. Her blood started prickling as she paged through the issues of the magazine, the back of her neck tightening as it had the other night. I can’t stop this. I can’t.

  The murder wasn’t a cover story—that was too tabloidy for Lively Vermont—but they had covered the story after Tim Christopher’s arrest in a longish piece entitled “No Peace: Murder of a Local Girl Puts an End to Innocence in Rural Vermont.” Fiona winced at the headline at the same time her eye caught the piece’s byline: It had been written by Patrick Saller, a former staffer Fiona was familiar with who had been cut loose in one of Lively Vermont’s many staff purges and still freelanced the occasional story.

  It wasn’t a bad piece; Saller had done his homework. There was a timeline of Deb’s disappearance and murder that was correct, including the clothes Deb had last been seen in (white blouse, dark green cotton pants, light gray raincoat, black knit hat) and the fact that her roommate, Carol Dibbs, had been confused about the time she’d last seen Deb because of clocks that gave two different times in their shared apartment.

  The photos, too, were better than the ones taken from the wires in every news story of the day: the outside of Deb and Carol’s dorm building, looking forbidding and cold; a portrait of Deb cropped from a photo of her twentieth birthday two weeks before the murder, her hair flying, her face relaxed in a laugh. Their parents had released photos of Deb to the media when she went missing, but everyone used the more formal one, showing Deb sitting demurely with her hands in her lap; the snapshot Saller had picked was blurrier but, Fiona thought, showed Deb’s true personality better. The biggest shot was of the field at Idlewild Hall, as Fiona herself had seen it days after the body was removed, littered with wreaths and garbage.

  It was as if Saller had gotten a shot of Fiona’s own memory, and she stared at it for a long time, remembering what it had felt like to stand there, wondering what the hell she had expected to see, her feet freezing in her sneakers, snot running onto her upper lip. The memory brought a wave of nausea with it, as if Fiona were temporarily seventeen again, in the middle of that dark tunnel with no way out, with strangers for parents and teachers who gave her meaningful looks. For the rest of that school year—which she’d barely passed—she’d been That Girl, the one whose sister had been murdered. It had been a year of therapy sessions and irrational anger and a sort of blank, terrifying grief, accompanied—thank you, adolescence—by a skin breakout that had refused to go away.

  It’s over, she reminded herself. It’s over.

  Yet twenty years later, she was sitting at a desk in the magazine’s empty offices, reading the story.

  But as she scanned the article, something jumped out at her. Something she had never seen before.

  It was buried in an account of the evidence, pieced together from various sources, since the trial had not yet happened. The facts were familiar. In Tim’s defense, there were no witnesses to the murder; Deb had not been raped, and had no skin cells or bodily fluids on her; though he wasn’t a straight-A student, Tim was known as a decent, good-looking guy from a good family who wasn’t violent. Counteracting this were the hairs in his backseat, the fact that he was the last person seen with her, the fact that he and Deb had fought loudly and often, including on the day she was murdered, and—most damningly—a smear of her blood on the thigh of his jeans. The blood was likely from Deb’s nose, since blood had been found in her nostrils as if she’d been hit, and it had probably been wiped there absently from Tim’s hand when she’d bled on him.

  The biggest question was that of Tim’s alibi. At first, this was a blank in the narrative of Deb’s last night, like a passage that had been blacked out; but Patrick Saller had interviewed the owner of Pop’s Ice Cream, an ice-cream parlor on Germany Road, twenty minutes from the university campus. “He was here that evening,” Saller quoted the shop’s owner, Richard Rush, as saying. “Just after nine o’clock. He was alone. He ordered a cup of Rocky Road and stayed here, eating it, until we closed at ten.” Rush claimed that Tim was the only customer in the shop for much of that time, and therefore no one else had seen him. Deb’s time of death had been placed at sometime between nine and eleven o’clock.

  Fiona stared at the paragraph, reading it over and over. The words blazed in front of her eyes, then blurred again.

  None of this had been mentioned at the trial, or in any other coverage of the case. At trial, Tim had had no alibi for the time of the murder, claiming he had gone home alone after dropping Deb off after a fight. He admitted to hitting her and making her nose bleed, but nothing else. His lack of alibi had been part of what had brought a conviction. Tim’s testimony had never mentioned Pop’s Ice Cream at all.

  If Richard Rush was his alibi, at least until ten o’clock, why hadn’t it been presented in court? It wasn’t complete, but it cast reasonable doubt on the timeline. What the hell had happened? Why would a man fighting a murder charge not present testimony like this? Had it been discredited somehow?

  Leave it. Even as she was thinking it, Fiona had put the magazine down and was reaching for the phone on the empty desk she was sitting at. Leave it. She Googled Pop’s Ice Cream on her cell phone and saw that it was still in business, still on Germany Road. She used the landline to dial the number, in case the place had a call display.

  “Pop’s,” said a voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hi,” Fiona said. “I’m looking for Richard Rush.”

  It was a long shot, but she had nothing to lose by trying. “Um,” s
aid the voice, which was teenage and so far indistinguishable between male and female. “Does he work here?”

  “He used to own the place,” Fiona said.

  “Oh, right. Um. Let me get the owner.”

  Fiona waited, and a minute later a thirtysomething male voice came on the line. “Can I help you?”

  “Hi. I’m looking for Richard Rush, who used to own the shop in the 1990s. Do you know who I’m referring to?”

  “I should.” The voice gave a flat laugh. “That’s my dad.”

  “Is Mr. Rush still working, or is he retired?”

  “Dad is retired. Gone to Florida,” the man said. His tone was getting cooler now, guarded. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “My name is Tess Drake,” Fiona said. Tess Drake was the receptionist at her dentist’s office, and she’d always liked the name. “I write for the magazine Lively Vermont. I’m doing a follow-up story to a piece we did in 1994.”

  “Well, I’m Mike Rush,” the man replied, “and I’m surprised. I don’t think Lively Vermont has ever done a piece on us. I’ve worked here since I was sixteen.”

  Score again. Fiona should have been playing the slots with that kind of luck. “It wasn’t a piece about Pop’s, exactly,” she said. “It was a story about a murder that happened in 1994. A college student. Your dad was interviewed. It’s the twenty-year anniversary, and we’re doing a follow-up piece.”

  “You’re talking about Deb Sheridan,” Mike said. “I remember that.”

  Fiona’s throat seized for a brief, embarrassing second. She was so used to everyone tiptoeing around Deb in her presence that it was strange to hear this man, who had no idea who she was, say the name so easily. “Yes. That’s the one.”

  “Horrible,” Mike said. “I remember that night.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure, I was working here. I told you, I started when I was sixteen. Dad had me working the store with him that night.” Mike paused, as if something uncomfortable was coming back to him. “I never really knew what to think.”