The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  “Oh, hell,” he said.

  The shed was full—literally full—of cardboard file boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling, some of them collapsing beneath a quarter century of weight. Fiona’s heart sped up. This was it: sixty years of Idlewild’s history compacted into one old woman’s shed. Somewhere in here was the answer to who Sonia Gallipeau was, maybe even where she’d come from. Somewhere in here were files about Sonia’s friends, who might still be alive. Somewhere in here might even be a file about a girl named Mary Hand.

  Unable to help herself, she tugged on the first box sitting at eye level and hauled it out, placing it on the cold ground and popping the lid off. Inside were textbooks, old and yellowed. The top was titled Latin Grammar for Girls.

  Jamie read the title over her shoulder. “The good old days,” he commented, “when apparently Latin was different if you were a girl.”

  Fiona agreed. She lifted the textbook and found a few others stacked inside. Biology. History. “It looks like Miss London wanted to keep the curriculum as well as all the records.” She looked up at him. “Is all of this going to fit in your SUV?”

  He glanced around, calculating. “Sure,” he said. “The bigger question is, are you going to keep all of this in your apartment?”

  “I have room.”

  He shrugged, picked up the box, and carted it toward the car.

  It took them nearly ninety minutes to empty the shed. Considering how long the boxes had been sitting there, surprisingly few of them had water damage. Even when building sheds with vinyl siding, Yankees had taken pride in their craftsmanship in the seventies. They drove off with all of Idlewild in the back of Jamie’s SUV, smelling like damp cardboard.

  There were twenty-one boxes in all. Fiona tried to organize them once they had unloaded them into her small apartment, stacked in the living room. Some boxes contained tests and lesson plans; these were shoved against the wall as unimportant. Some contained financial records, like paychecks and supplier bills; these were stacked next as possibles. Some seemed to contain random memorabilia, probably scooped from classrooms on the school’s last day before closing: a desk-sized globe, a slide rule, a rolled-up poster, the old textbooks. These Fiona set aside as fascinating but not necessary to the story. When she’d finished the article, she’d take pictures of them to add to the context of the story when it went to press.

  The final five boxes were student records. Fiona and Jamie ordered Chinese delivery for lunch and split the last boxes, looking for the names on Fiona’s list, as well as any other names that stood out as interesting. Jamie’s box contained the G files, and the first folder he pulled out was Sonia Gallipeau’s.

  The first page listed Sonia’s height, weight, age, uniform size, and date of admission to Idlewild. It listed her nearest family member as her great-uncle, Mr. Henry DuBois, of Burlington, a name Jamie recognized from his search for Sonia’s relatives. Henry DuBois and his wife, Eleanor, were the people Sonia had visited for the weekend before she was murdered. The last known people who saw her alive. They were both dead, and had no children.

  There was no photograph. Fiona found herself wishing she knew what Sonia had looked like.

  There were a few pages listing Sonia’s grades—all were high. A teacher had written in pencil: Bright and quiet. Adept at memorization. Physical fitness adequate. Sonia’s body was small; if she’d been in a concentration camp, she’d have been malnourished while she was supposed to be growing, but she would have had to be strong to survive at all. Fiona made a note to ask a doctor for an opinion.

  There was a piece of notepaper slipped into the file signed by Gerta Hedmeyer, the Idlewild school nurse. Student brought to infirmary November 4, 1950. Fainting spell during Weekly Gardening. No reason known. Student is slight; possibly iron deficient. Complained of headache. Gave student aspirin and instructed her to rest. Released to care of Roberta Greene, student’s dorm mate.

  “There’s Roberta,” Jamie said as Fiona read over his shoulder. “Proof that they were friends. We need to talk to her.”

  Fiona stared at the note. Roberta Greene, who had brought her friend to the infirmary when she’d fainted sixty-four years ago, was at the moment the closest thing to family Sonia Gallipeau had. It was definitely time to meet Roberta.

  “This is interesting,” Jamie said, pointing to the nurse’s note. “She says it’s a possible iron deficiency.”

  “That’s code,” Fiona explained.

  “What?”

  “It means Sonia was having her period on the day she fainted. It was a polite way to refer to it back then. Our old doctor still used that when I was growing up.”

  “But this is the nurse’s own notes,” he protested. “In an all-female boarding school. There wasn’t a man for miles around.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was going in the file, where others could read it. She still had to be polite. It was a generational thing.”

  He shook his head. “That generation blows my mind. They didn’t talk about anything at all. My granddad fought in the war and never talked about it, not even to Dad. An entire damn war, and not one word.”

  “It’s true,” Fiona said. “There’s nothing in this file about Sonia being in a concentration camp. If she had come from one, the school nurse didn’t even know. She would have lived with the experience and never talked about it. All of these girls—these Idlewild girls. Whatever they went through to end up sent off to boarding school, they probably never spoke of it. That wasn’t how it was done.”

  The next page of the file, the final page, contained the entry about Sonia’s disappearance. It was written by Julia Patton, Idlewild’s headmistress, neatly typed on a page of letterhead.

  December 5, 1950

  IDLEWILD HALL

  I, Julia Patton, headmistress of Idlewild Hall, state that on November 28, 1950, student Sonia Gallipeau was given weekend leave to visit relatives. She departed at 11:00 on Friday, November 28, intending to take the 12:00 bus to Burlington. She wore a wool coat and skirt and carried a suitcase. She was seen walking up Old Barrons Road to the bus stop by several students.

  I also state that Sonia Gallipeau did not return to Idlewild Hall, neither on the intended day of her return, November 30, 1950, nor any other day. I swear hereby that she has not been seen again by me, by any teacher in my employ, or by any other student in my care. On the morning of December 1, 1950, when I was informed by a member of my staff that Sonia had not returned, I placed a call to the Barrons police and reported her missing. I was interviewed by Officers Daniel O’Leary and Garrett Creel and gave a statement. I also helped police search the woods by Old Barrons Road when it was made known to police that Sonia had in fact boarded the bus leaving Burlington on November 29, 1950. We found a suitcase that I recognize as Sonia’s, which now resides in my office.

  It is my belief that Sonia ran away, likely with the aid of someone helping her, possibly a boy.

  Signed,

  Julia Patton

  A note handwritten across the bottom of the page read:

  Addendum, December 9, 1950: Suitcase now missing from my office.

  Not located. JP.

  Jamie put the file down and stood up, pacing to the window. He didn’t speak.

  Running a hand through her hair, Fiona turned to Julia Patton’s statement and picked it up. She turned the paper over, noting the faint carbon marks on the back. “This was typed with carbon paper behind it,” she said. “She probably gave a copy to the police.” Though the police would not have received the handwritten addendum, which had been added later.

  “It isn’t in the missing persons file,” Jamie said. “There’s only a report from Daniel O’Leary.”

  “Is that weird?” Fiona asked him. “Pages missing from case files?”

  “In a case sixty-four years old? I don’t know. Probably not.”

  He went quiet again. He was
possibly thinking about Garrett Creel Sr., his grandfather, who had apparently interviewed Julia Patton about the disappearance alongside his colleague, and what the file implied about him. Fiona let him wrestle with it for a minute.

  “It was a different time,” Jamie finally said, “but it’s pretty clear that no one took Sonia’s disappearance seriously.” He paused. “Not even Granddad.”

  It was bothering him. Jamie was proud of his cop’s lineage. “The judgment on Sonia is pretty harsh,” Fiona agreed, “especially coming from the headmistress. I know she left her relatives’, but to conclude that she ran off with a boy? This was a girl who lived under supervision in a boarding school. She was hardly out tearing up Barrons, seducing boys. And she had no suitcase.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Jamie said, still looking out the window. “How no one could have thought something bad could have happened to her. How it didn’t even cross their minds. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had dropped her suitcase and disappeared.”

  Unbidden, Malcolm’s words came into Fiona’s mind: Was she a Jew? There was nothing in the school’s file about Sonia being Jewish, but what if she had been? Would the police have searched for a runaway girl who was a Jewish refugee with no family the same way they would have searched for a local Catholic girl?

  And who had taken Sonia’s suitcase from Julia Patton’s office? Her killer had put Sonia’s body in the well, which was nearly within view of the headmistress’s office window. Had the killer taken the suitcase as well? If the suitcase contained a clue to the killer’s identity, it would have to be disposed of. Could Julia Patton have known who Sonia’s killer was? Could she have done it herself?

  She read the headmistress’s note again. “The fact that she left her great-aunt and -uncle’s a day early bothers me. She’d gone all that way to visit them. Why did she turn around and leave?”

  “We may never know.”

  Fiona put the file down. “Let’s continue,” she said. “We can’t answer these questions now. Let’s find the other girls’ files.”

  “We don’t have time,” Jamie said, turning from the window and checking his watch. “We’re due for dinner at my parents’.”

  “No, no. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Jamie shook his head. “You promised, so you’re coming. These files will be here when we get back.”

  “I can’t leave.” She felt physical pain, staring at the boxes she wanted so badly to open.

  “Yes, you can.”

  She got up reluctantly from her spot on the floor and brushed off the legs of her jeans. “Fine. But I’m not dressing up. And we’re coming back here.”

  “After dinner,” Jamie said. “I promise.”

  They were in Jamie’s car, and he was pulling onto Meredith Street, when Fiona’s phone rang. It was her father.

  “I’ve got something,” he said when she answered. “About your Sonia girl.”

  Fiona felt her mouth go dry. “What is it?”

  “I had a professor friend of mine put me in touch with a student to do some archival research,” he said. “She found her in a passenger manifest on a ship leaving Calais in 1947. Sonia Gallipeau, age twelve. Traveling alone. Same date of birth as your girl.”

  “That’s her,” Fiona said.

  “The manifest lists her previous place of residence,” Malcolm said. “An official took the information down, but it must have come from her.”

  Fiona closed her eyes to the blacktop flying by, to the stark trees and the gray sky, to everything. “Tell me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” her father said. “Her previous place of residence was Ravensbrück prison.”

  chapter 17

  Roberta

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 1950

  Of all the hated classes at Idlewild—and that was most of them—Weekly Gardening was the most despised. It had come, Roberta supposed, from some misguided idea that the housewives of the future should know how to grow their own vegetables. Or perhaps it descended from an idea that the school would subsist on its own produce, like a nunnery. In any case, every girl who attended Idlewild had to spend an hour every week in the communal school garden, digging hopelessly in the dirt and trying not to get her uniform muddy as she poked at the dead vegetables.

  The month had slid into November, cold and hard. Roberta stood in a row with four other girls as Mrs. Peabody handed them each a gardening tool. “We are going to add lettuces to our planting next spring, so today we’ll be digging space before the ground freezes.” She indicated a chalked-off square of ground, filled with dead weeds and rocks. “One hour, girls. Get started.”

  Roberta looked at Sonia, who was standing next to her. Sonia was huddled into her old wool coat, her face pinched and miserable, her thin hands on the handle of her shovel. “Are you all right?”

  “Bon.” Sonia wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She reverted to French when she was tired.

  Roberta buttoned her own coat higher over her neck and bent to her work. It wasn’t the work that the girls loathed—it was the garden itself. It was placed in the crux of shadows between the main hall and the dining hall, and it was relentlessly cold, damp, and moldy, no matter the season. The windows of both buildings stared blankly down at the girls as they worked. There was a persistent legend at Idlewild that Mary Hand’s baby was buried in the garden, which did nothing to add to the attraction of Weekly Gardening. Every time Roberta gardened in here, she expected to find baby bones.

  The girls bent to work, their breath puffing in the morning air, the slanting November sunshine on the common putting them all in dark shadow. Roberta felt her shoes squish—the garden was always wet, with runnels of water pooling in the overturned dirt.

  Mary Van Woorten raised her head and stared at Sonia. “You’re not digging,” she said, her mouth pursing in her pale round face.

  “I am digging,” Sonia said grimly, pushing her shovel into the dirt.

  “No, you’re not. You have to dig harder, like the rest of us.”

  “Leave her alone,” Roberta said. She watched Sonia from the corner of her eye. The girl was gripping her shovel, wedging it into the wet dirt, but she wasn’t lifting much. Her teeth were chattering. Sonia was small, but she was strong, and this wasn’t like her. “Sonia?” Roberta said softly.

  “I am fine.” As if to illustrate this, Sonia pushed at her shovel again.

  “You aren’t even making a hole!” Mary persisted.

  Sonia lifted her face and snapped at her. “You stupid girl,” she bit out, her hands shaking. “You’ve never had to dig. You’ve never had to dig.”

  “What does that mean?” Mary said. “I’m digging right now.”

  “I think something’s wrong with her,” Margaret Kevin piped up. “Mary, be quiet.”

  “Shut up,” Sonia shouted, stunning all of them. Roberta had never seen her friend so angry. “Just be quiet, all of you, and leave me alone.”

  They dug in silence. Roberta glanced back over her shoulder and saw Mrs. Peabody smoking a cigarette near the door to the teachers’ hall, talking quietly with Mrs. Wentworth. They laughed at something, and Mrs. Wentworth shook her head. From the girls’ place in the shadows, the two teachers looked bathed in sunlight, as if Roberta were watching them through a magical doorway.

  She looked down at the space she was digging, the mottled, ugly clots of dirt. Baby bones. She always thought of baby bones here. Finger bones, leg bones, a soft little skull . . .

  Don’t think about it. Don’t.

  The blade of her shovel slipped, and for a second there was something white and fleshy speared on the metal, something pale and soft and rotten. Roberta flinched and dropped the shovel, preparing to scream, before she realized what she’d severed was a mushroom, huge and wet in the cold, damp earth.

  She was trying to calm
down when there was a huff of breath next to her, like a sigh. She turned to see Sonia fall to her knees in the dirt. She still clutched her shovel, her hands sliding down the handle as she lowered to the ground. Roberta bent and grabbed her friend by the shoulders.

  “I can do it,” Sonia said, her head bowing so her forehead nearly touched the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head.

  “Mrs. Peabody!” Mary Van Woorten shouted.

  “Sonia,” Roberta whispered, clutching the girl harder.

  Sonia’s shoulders heaved, and she quietly threw up drops of spit into the dirt. Then she sagged, her eyes closing. Roberta held her tight. Her friend weighed almost nothing at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Have you been sleeping?” Miss Hedmeyer, the school nurse, said. “Eating?”

  “Yes, madame.” Sonia’s voice was pale, tired.

  Miss Hedmeyer jabbed her fingers up under Sonia’s jaw, feeling her lymph nodes. “No swelling,” she said. “No fever. What else?”

  “I have a headache, madame.”

  Roberta bit the side of her thumb as she watched Miss Hedmeyer take a bottle of aspirin out of a cupboard and shake out a few large chalky pills. “I’ve seen this before,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She had light blond hair that contrasted with a startling spray of freckles across her nose. When she wasn’t treating the ailments of the Idlewild girls, she taught their meager science curriculum, which mostly consisted of the periodic table of elements and the process of photosynthesis, sometimes mixed with explanations of snow and rain. It was not assumed that the housewives of the future needed to know much about science. “It happens to some girls when they’re asked to do physical activity during their time of month. Am I correct?”

  Sonia blinked and said nothing, and even Roberta could see her abject humiliation.