The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  “She admitted to her brother that she was.”

  “Did the brother ever see him?” Jamie asked. “Did Tim come to the house? Meet the parents? Did he talk to them on the phone? The cops would have asked her friends and family if they’d ever seen her with him. Did they do that?”

  Fiona was quiet.

  “Of course they did,” Jamie said. “So she never told her parents about this great boyfriend she was supposedly seeing, and she never told her friends. Just one person knew, her brother. And he was reliable?”

  “He was into drugs,” Fiona said. “It got worse after his sister’s attack. He became an addict. But he wasn’t an addict when it happened. Just a teenager messing around.”

  “For God’s sake, Fiona,” Jamie said. “You’re listening to a story spun by a drug addict? Because that’s who you’ve been talking to, isn’t it? The brother.”

  Damn it. She had known this would happen, that he would be like this, and it made her so angry. “He’s telling the truth,” she said, fighting the impulse to shout. “He knows what his sister told him. There’s nothing wrong with his memory.”

  “And how did he find you?” Jamie’s gaze was hard and cold. “Because he did find you, didn’t he? He found some way to approach you and reel you in. You’re a smart woman, Fee, but when it comes to anyone mentioning your sister’s name, you can be completely goddamn stupid.”

  She stared at this Jamie and she didn’t know him. “Fuck you,” she spit at him. “That’s the cruelest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “I’m cruel?” he said. “Did you plan to go to your father with this? Was that your idea? To rip his wounds open with an unproven theory that his daughter’s death could have been prevented? Your evidence is hearsay from a girl who hasn’t spoken in twenty years and an addict. You’ll kill him with this kind of shit.” He took a breath. “But it’s all an acceptable sacrifice, isn’t it? Your life, your father’s life, your own happiness, our relationship—it’s all an acceptable sacrifice to you. This case has already taken your parents’ marriage and your mother’s life. What’s a little more misery for the pile?”

  The words made her wince—yet she felt that only now, after a year together, were they getting to the heart of it. “You think I should drop it,” she said.

  “Of course I think you should drop it. Do you know why? Because you should fucking drop it.”

  “Really? Or does this have to do with your precious police force?” She shoved the words at him. “The cops did a shit job on this case, Jamie. You know as well as I do that it’s always the boyfriend. It’s always the boyfriend. You think someone came up randomly behind her with a baseball bat? Did anyone think that, even for a minute? But we’re talking about Tim Christopher, aren’t we? Rich, good-looking, his family one of the wealthiest in the county. Oh, no, sir. No way it could be the boyfriend! Sorry to bother you—we’ll just be on our way!”

  “Goddamn it, Fee!” Jamie shouted. His face was red.

  “You want to talk about acceptable sacrifice?” Fiona said to him. “What’s an acceptable sacrifice to you? Is it acceptable that Helen’s case is never solved, that her attacker goes free, just so that the Christophers aren’t bothered with too many questions? Is it an acceptable sacrifice that you brush me off, just so no one asks questions now? So that the force doesn’t face any criticism? Everything is smoother, easier, if we just let it go.”

  He was breathing hard, trying to keep control. “You need to leave,” he said, his voice low and furious. “Now.”

  “You’re right,” Fiona said. “I do.” She picked up her papers, put them in the folder, and walked out the door.

  chapter 26

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  Fiona was hungry by the time she got home to her apartment. She pulled a box of crackers from the cupboard and stood at the kitchen counter, dipping the crackers in a jar of peanut butter and eating them, as she stared at the file that contained Helen Heyer’s press and refused to think about Jamie. It was hard to look at the photo of twenty-year-old Helen, with her clear eyes and silky dark hair, and compare it with the face she’d seen this afternoon. Helen at forty-one was vacant, confused, her eyes sunken and the corners of her mouth turned down, her hair graying. She looked at least fifty. She’d sat in the chair in the corner of her hospital room and watched her brother anxiously, rubbing the knuckles of her left hand with her right fingers in a gesture meant to soothe herself.

  Jamie was right that almost nothing about the two crimes matched, but Fiona knew it in her gut. They didn’t match because Tim Christopher had a temper. The crimes hadn’t been planned; he’d simply done what was easiest in his white-hot rage when a girl made him angry. Strangled her in his backseat. Hit her with a baseball bat. Whatever made her shut up for good. He was so careless he’d rubbed Deb’s blood on the thigh of his jeans as an afterthought.

  The ice in Jamie’s voice: What’s a little more misery for the pile?

  Screw it. Fiona opened the cupboard under the sink and pulled out the bottle of wine she kept there for emergency purposes. It had been there since last Christmas, because very few things counted as big enough emergencies for Fiona to drink chardonnay, but screw it. Her sister was dead, her love life was a mess, she had no career to speak of, and she was scooping crackers in peanut butter alone in her apartment. It was time for a glass.

  She had just taken a sip, making that involuntary shudder that always accompanied the first swallow, when her cell phone rang. It was Anthony Eden again. She sighed and answered it. “Fiona Sheridan.”

  “Fiona,” Anthony said. “I’ve been getting calls from the press about the body found at Idlewild. What do I say to them?”

  “Calls? From who?”

  He listed two names Fiona didn’t recognize, probably second-stringers or freelancers. “Word has gotten out,” he said. “What do I say?”

  Fiona picked up a cracker and jabbed at the jar of peanut butter. She wasn’t hungry anymore. “Tell them you have no statement yet,” she advised him. “You’re waiting for the police to notify next of kin. That’s how it works. The next of kin hears it before the media does.” Sonia Gallipeau had no next of kin, but the ruse would work for a while.

  “All right,” he said, sounding relieved. “And one more thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “I hear you somehow found the Idlewild records.”

  That surprised her. “How the hell do you know that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Anthony said. “The records weren’t on the grounds when Mother and I bought the property. I thought they were lost. I’d like to have them back.”

  Margaret, Roberta, and now Anthony—it seemed a lot of people were looking for the records. But she was not in the mood to be nice. “You can’t have them,” she told him. “I need them for research.”

  “But they’re part of the Idlewild property.”

  “When they were sent to the dump in 1979, they ceased being Idlewild property,” she said. “They became garbage. Which makes them mine.”

  “Fiona, I would really like those records.”

  “Then get a court order,” Fiona said, and hung up.

  She sipped her wine again. He hadn’t answered the question of how he knew she had the records. Roberta knew, but Anthony didn’t know her. He could have been in touch with Sarah London, or Cathy. Or his mother could have been making an educated guess.

  She looked at the boxes, stacked in her living room. They seemed to stare back at her.

  She picked up her wine and began the search.

  * * *

  • • •

  She started with the girls’ files. Sonia’s and Roberta’s she’d already read, so she pulled Katie Winthrop’s and CeCe Frank’s. Sarah London had said that Katie Winthrop was trouble; her file backed that up. She’d been sent to Idlewild by her parents
for persistent willful misbehavior, and the school had not improved her much. There were fistfights, cut classes, talking back to teachers, everything a restless teenage girl might do in the days before she could text her friends or put naked selfies on social media. For a cloistered girl with no access to drugs, alcohol, or boys, Katie’s exploits seemed painfully innocent (Hung her undergarments from a window, read an entry from her last week at Idlewild), but the school’s teachers saw her as a plague that could infect the other students. Isolation is best wherever possible, one teacher wrote, as she tends to have an effect on others. Katie left the same year Roberta did, 1953, and there was no note regarding her leaving, as the teachers were likely too busy sighing with relief.

  CeCe Frank’s file was surprising. Sarah had said that she had followed Katie around, the sort of girl who fell under Katie’s spell. Fiona had pictured an eager follower, an acolyte type of girl. Yet CeCe’s actual file showed something entirely different. Her grades were on the high side of average, though Sarah London had referred to her as stupid. She was never disciplined, never got in fights, and never acted out. Sarah had called her pudgy, but she had scored good marks even in physical education, where her teacher praised her dexterity. Could be an asset to the field hockey team, went the note, but does not seem motivated to apply herself. It now looked like CeCe was the kind of girl who was kind, friendly, and far from stupid, yet never earned an ounce of praise from the adults in her life—and there could be only one reason. Her bastard heritage must have colored everyone’s perceptions in 1950. It still colored Sarah London’s perceptions now. When Fiona saw nothing in her file referring to who her father was or why she’d been sent to Idlewild, she knew she was right.

  She poured herself another glass of wine and took a break from the files to Google the girls. Katie Winthrop was a dead end—twenty minutes of searching brought up nothing that remotely resembled someone who could have been the Idlewild girl. CeCe Frank’s name appeared on a list of girls belonging to a college sorority in 1954, but nowhere else. So CeCe had at least gone to college, then. Fiona wondered if her father had paid for that, too.

  She returned to the boxes and leafed through the student files, looking for names that jumped out at her, but nothing did. She moved on from the student records to the other boxes: curricula, financial records, mixed detritus taken from the classrooms. She picked up the Latin textbook she’d noticed earlier—the ridiculous Latin Grammar for Girls—and leafed through it, smelling its musty old-book smell and looking at the thick yellowed pages, the fonts that weren’t in use anymore.

  She noticed the handwriting halfway through the book. A line written in pencil along the edge of the page, past the margin of text. She turned the book to read the words.

  Mary Hand wears a black dress and veil

  She laughed like my dead little brother

  Madeleine Grazer, February 2, 1935

  A black dress and veil. The words froze the breath in her throat, and she had to close the book and put it down for a second. February 1935. Someone had seen the figure she saw in the sports field in 1935.

  What did she show you? That is the question you need to be asking.

  She picked up the book again, turned the pages, and saw more words, in a different handwriting, scrawled across the bottom of another page:

  MARY HAND HAS ALWAYS BEEN HERE

  Jesus. Roberta had mentioned that the girls wrote in the textbooks. If the textbooks were never changed from year to year, it made sense. This was how the Idlewild girls talked to one another, from one generation of girls to the next.

  She pushed the box of textbooks aside and dug through the box of Idlewild’s own records: bills of sale, staff hiring and firing paperwork, financial sheets. She found what she was looking for almost immediately in a file called “Land History,” slim with very few pages in it. She found schematics and building plans, a map of the grounds that was dated 1940. Behind that was a handwritten map, originally done in ink and now very faded. It showed Old Barrons Road, the woods, the ravine. Within the clearing where Idlewild now stood were drawn a square marked Church and another marked Hand House. The caption at the bottom—also handwritten—said Map of original landholdings, 1915. Church burned down in 1835 and never rebuilt, though the foundation was still intact. It was signed Lila Hendricksen, 1921.

  So this was, or purported to be, what had stood on the site before Idlewild was built. Fiona did a quick check in the staff records: Lila Hendricksen was listed as the school’s history teacher from 1919 to 1924.

  Fiona tapped her wineglass with a fingernail, thinking. It was easy to imagine Idlewild’s history teacher, most likely a local woman, also being an amateur historian. In any case, she’d written her own notes on the history of the place and kept them in Idlewild’s files. Fiona’s gaze traveled back to the second square on the map. Hand House. There had been an actual Hand family, and they’d lived here before the school came.

  She turned the page and found another sheet, this one also in Lila Hendricksen’s immaculate slanted handwriting. The page told, briefly and succinctly, the story—and the tragedy—of the Hand family.

  The Hands had lived on the land for several generations, eking out a living as small farmers. By 1914 the family line had dwindled to two parents and a daughter, Mary. At age sixteen, Mary got pregnant by a local boy. Ashamed, she kept the pregnancy a secret until she gave birth one night at home. Her stunned mother assisted with the birth while her father looked on.

  The baby was born dead, though Mary was convinced that her parents had killed it. Fiona wondered if she was right. In any case, when her parents took the baby away, Mary quickly became unhinged, and there was an argument. It ended with Mary’s father banishing her from the house in the cold, where Mary disappeared into the night.

  Her body was found the next morning, curled up in the ruins of the old church. She wasn’t buried in the Hand graveyard plot, but instead on the grounds of the homestead, with her baby’s body beside hers. Her parents had moved away soon afterward. The land was then purchased for the use of the school, the Hands forgotten. Mary’s grave, Lila Hendricksen wrote, was situated on the south side of the burned church.

  Fiona turned back to the map. She oriented the page, recalling in her head which way was north. She found the spot that was south of the square that indicated the church. Then she pulled out the map of the grounds that was created in 1940 and laid it next to Lila Hendricksen’s handwritten one. The burned church had sat roughly where Idlewild’s dining hall was now. And Mary and her baby’s grave was where the garden currently sat—the garden that was always in shade. Her baby was buried in the garden, Roberta had said.

  The rumor was mostly true. What was missing was that Mary Hand was buried there, too.

  Right next to the common, where the girls had passed by every day for the sixty years the school had been open.

  Fiona jumped when her phone rang. She answered it eagerly when she saw who it was. “Dad,” she said.

  “Well?” Malcolm asked her. “What do you say? Has history come alive?”

  She stared down at the maps in front of her, at Lila Hendricksen’s record. “What?”

  “Ginette Harrison,” he said. “The Ravensbrück historian.”

  Fiona sat back, her rear and lower back aching from sitting on the floor for so long. “Oh, yes.” She’d never updated him about that. Hearing his voice now made her think of her day with Stephen Heyer and what she’d learned about Tim Christopher. Did you plan to go to your father with this? Jamie had asked. You’ll kill him with this shit.

  “How did it go?” Malcolm asked. “I have great respect for Ginette. I’ve known her for years.”

  “Right,” she said, gathering her thoughts. She told him what she and Ginette had talked about, going over everything she’d learned about Ravensbrück.

  “That poor girl,” her father said softly. “We’ll never kno
w her life story now. No one will ever know. So much has been lost. It’s such a shame.”

  “It feels otherworldly,” Fiona admitted, “the concentration camp stories. Like it happened in a far-off era or on another planet.”

  “It does,” Malcolm agreed. “It seems so far back in history, until they find some decrepit old Nazi war criminal still living under a rock and put him on trial. Then you remember that it’s still living memory for some people. Hell, Vietnam is too far back in the history books for most young people, and I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

  His words made her brain tingle. She remembered Garrett Creel’s words as he carved the roast at the dinner table and discussed the murder with his son: It sounds like something a Nazi would do, except she came across the ocean to get away from those bastards.

  As they kept chatting, she opened her laptop and searched Google for “Nazi war criminal Vermont.” She clicked through the results as they moved the conversation off Sonia Gallipeau’s life to her search through the Idlewild records—she stayed off the topic of ghosts—and on to more personal topics. He was telling her about his long-delayed visit to the doctor for a checkup, and how much he hated peeing in a cup, when she stopped him. “Daddy.” She stared at her laptop screen, a pulse pounding in her throat. “Daddy.”

  This was how well her father knew her, how many years he’d lived as a journalist: He instantly knew to be excited. “What, Fee? What is it?”

  “You mentioned Nazi war criminals,” she said. “Well, I looked it up, and we had one here. In Vermont.”

  She heard a rustle and a click as he likely picked up his old telephone, with its extra-long cord, and hurried over to his own computer. “We did? I’ve never heard of it.”