The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  She ignored the people walking by, who were giving side-looks to the woman staring at a closed-up Rite Aid, and turned in a circle. This wasn’t just a sentimental visit. Fiona was making a map.

  Rose Albert. Rosa Berlitz. Had they been one and the same? Was there a way Rose Albert, in her made-up American life, could have crossed paths with Sonia?

  It had taken only a little digging, cross-referenced with county tax records, to get addresses. The police record said that the ticket taker had seen Sonia at the bus station, getting on the bus. Fiona was at ground zero of Sonia’s case, the last place she was seen by anyone except the bus driver—who was never interviewed—and her killer.

  But Sonia had gotten on the bus. That was witnessed. And her suitcase was found on Old Barrons Road, a few hundred feet from Idlewild. Fiona had spent a sleepless night going over it, wishing painfully for Jamie, his clever logic, his head for facts. It wasn’t easy, figuring these things out alone. And it wasn’t fun, either.

  But she had come to some conclusions that she thought were the most logical, the most likely. As Sherlock Holmes said: Eliminate the impossible, and what’s left must be the truth. If she followed the Rose Albert theory, it wasn’t impossible that a woman who lived in Burlington would coincidentally be standing on Old Barrons Road, in the middle of nowhere, when Sonia Gallipeau walked by. But it was unlikely.

  It was more likely that Rose Albert had come across Sonia in Burlington, before she got on the bus.

  But that didn’t turn any of it into fact. The newspaper reports of Rose’s trial had stated that Rose Albert worked as a clerk in a travel agency, four streets away. Perhaps Rose had somehow spotted Sonia from her home, a fifteen-minute walk from the travel agency, while Sonia and her relatives were out enjoying their weekend. Fiona started walking down South Winooski Avenue toward the home where Sonia had stayed.

  But half an hour later, she was no further along. The house of Henry and Eleanor DuBois was nowhere near the address where Rose Albert was listed as living. She could not see how Rose and Sonia could have crossed paths in the space of a weekend. It didn’t help that there was no way of knowing what activities the DuBoises had done with their great-niece. Shopping? Sightseeing? Walking in the park? Eating out? If Sonia had any new-bought items or souvenirs in her suitcase, it would have given a clue as to where she had gone that weekend, but the suitcase had disappeared from Julia Patton’s office after Sonia was murdered, never to be seen again.

  She was walking back toward the site of the former bus station, wishing someone in 1950 had interviewed the goddamned bus driver, when it struck her so forcefully she stopped on the sidewalk to think.

  The bus ticket. That was the connection.

  In 1950, you didn’t buy a bus ticket online, or from a machine at the bus station, using a credit card. You bought a bus ticket from a clerk at the station, or at a travel agent’s. Rose had worked as a clerk for a travel agent, filling out and filing the stacks of paperwork that accompanied travel bookings in the pre-Internet age.

  Sonia’s relatives had bought her a round-trip bus ticket to Burlington. But when Sonia had run away to go back to school, she must have changed it.

  Fiona felt the excitement building in her chest, and she started walking again, nearly jogging back toward her car. It was easy to picture: Sonia at the travel agent’s, changing her ticket while Rose sat at her desk, doing paperwork. Had Sonia seen Rose? Had she recognized her? She must have; Rose must have known that Sonia knew who she was, that she could identify her as Rosa Berlitz. She knew what bus Sonia was taking back to Idlewild. And at some point, Rose Albert must have decided that she’d have to do something permanent about Sonia, or her life would fall to pieces.

  It was speculation. It wasn’t concrete. There were a million ways it could have been wrong. It was more far-fetched than the theory of one of Sonia’s friends simply caving her head in and dumping her in a well.

  But if you followed it, it fit.

  Sonia had been in the same city at the same time as a woman who might have been a guard at Ravensbrück, where Sonia had been a prisoner. She had visited family within blocks of Rose Albert’s home and her office. How far apart had they been, guard and prisoner? One mile, at most? The two of them in the same place in America, five years after the war ended. A coincidence, but a documented one. It fit.

  Fiona thought back to the picture from the news story—Rose Albert’s calm face, her level eyes, her large pupils, her milky skin. The face of Rosa Berlitz, the guard who had put women in the gas chambers, in the ovens. If she had done that, then the death of one teenage girl would have meant nothing. Not in the face of survival. Not if a secret had to be kept.

  If it was true, then Sonia Gallipeau’s murder wasn’t random, or impulsive. She had been chosen and stalked, though not in the way that Ginette Harrison had imagined. She had been under a death sentence from the moment she walked into Rose Albert’s travel agency. Followed until she was away from the city and the crowds, until the bus had driven away and she was alone on a deserted road. Rose Albert hadn’t even needed to take the bus alongside her prey; she had already known where her prey was headed. She could have traveled ahead to the bus stop in her car, parked, and waited until the bus pulled up and the girl got off.

  If you were hunting for someone to murder, Ginette had said, what better person could you choose?

  * * *

  • • •

  Her head was pounding when she got home, since she’d barely slept and she hadn’t eaten. The light was still out in the hallway on her floor—it had burned out nearly three weeks ago—and for once she was grateful for the eerie half-light that was usually an alarming security concern. Her thoughts were too heavy, too loud, and she wanted only the darkness of her apartment.

  He was there. She hadn’t expected him, but somehow when she saw him, she wasn’t surprised. Jamie, sitting on the floor, next to her closed apartment door, his back against the wall, his knees up. Out of uniform, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a flannel shirt unbuttoned over it and work boots, his hair mussed. He watched her come up the hallway toward him, his expression closed and blank.

  Fiona stopped in front of his feet and looked down at him in the half-light. “How long have you been here?” she asked softly.

  “Not long.”

  “You have a key.”

  He looked up at her. The fight was gone from him, the outrage, the bluster. He just looked at her. “It took me eight months to get that key,” he said finally.

  It was true. He had given her his key long before she’d given him hers, and it had been hard for her even then. Her father didn’t have a key to her place; no one did. Not ever. But at long last, she’d given Jamie one.

  She’d questioned it; she hadn’t trusted it. It had scared her, so much so that she hadn’t noticed he’d been careful with it, that he always called or texted her first, that he’d gone slow. She saw that now, so clearly.

  “Keep it,” she said to him, her voice hoarse.

  He looked away. She should have opened the door now, invited him in if he wasn’t going to come in himself; part of her knew that. But he seemed disinclined to move, as if whatever he had to say was better here in the hallway, with the broken lights and the ugly industrial carpet. “I came here to explain,” he said.

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I do.” She watched him struggle with this. “You were right.”

  He was going to tell her something buried, and she hadn’t thought she could handle any more buried things . . . but she owed him this. “Right about what?”

  “Helen Heyer,” he said. “I pulled the file.”

  Her stomach dropped. “What do you mean?”

  “They questioned Helen’s friends,” Jamie said. “The cops working the case. They interviewed her friends about whether she’d ever told them about her relationship with Tim Christop
her. What they didn’t do was ask Tim’s friends.”

  Fiona was quiet.

  “Tim was popular,” Jamie continued. He glanced at her. “You know that, of course. He had a lot of friends. They could have interviewed them, found out who Tim was seeing. One of them would likely have known who he was dating, whether he was lying about Helen. It’s routine. But they didn’t. They interviewed Tim, with his parents in the room. And then they dropped it.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t prove that Tim tried to kill Helen. The MO still doesn’t fit. But . . .” He trailed off. Fiona knew the rest of it without words. The fact that the cops had backed off from the Christophers meant they’d left part of the investigation undone. If any of his friends had admitted that Tim was seeing Helen, Deb would be alive.

  Then Jamie made her stomach drop further by saying, “Dad’s name is in the file. He did the interview.”

  Tim Christopher was a good man before his life was ruined, Garrett had said. “My God, Jamie.”

  “When I was a kid, he used to take me for ride-alongs,” Jamie said. “It was what made me want to be a cop. He’d take me on patrol, and not much happens in Barrons, you know? So we’d spend most of the time shooting the shit. I thought being a cop was fun, and Dad was chief, so everyone treated him like a boss. What’s not to like?”

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose, his eyes tired, and Fiona waited.

  “One night we got a domestic call,” Jamie continued. “A woman said her husband was hitting her. I was with him. I was ten. He put me in the backseat while he and his partner went inside. I don’t know what happened in the house, but after ten minutes they both came out and we drove away without a word.

  “I asked Dad what had happened. He told me it didn’t matter, everything was fine, because he was good friends with the guy’s brother. Then he turned and looked at me in the backseat. Family comes first, doesn’t it, son? he said. His partner didn’t say anything. Not a word. And I was ten, and he’s my dad, so I just nodded and agreed with him. I’d thought I’d forgotten about that night until I became a cop. Then I remembered it.”

  “What are you saying?” Fiona asked.

  “It’s small things, you know?” Jamie said. “Or so it seems. His golf buddy’s speeding ticket gets thrown away. Another buddy’s nephew gets off with a warning when he spray-paints the school. The mayor’s son gets let go when he’s caught driving over the limit. Dad was still chief when I started, and everyone accepted it. We fought about it at first, but no one would back me up, and Dad was close to retirement. I started to think I could just wait it out, and after Dad was gone, I could help the force be different. Do things different. Like those old days were gone.”

  Fiona remembered Garrett at the family dinner, how he’d known everything that was going on in the force. “Except it didn’t work out that way, did it?” she supplied.

  Jamie was quiet for a long beat. “He’s so fucking powerful,” he said. “And Barrons is so small. I didn’t realize how bad it was, how deep it was, until I’d been on the force for years. No one questions the chief, or anything he does, because then you’re off the gravy train. Everyone on the force has it easy. Why rock the boat? They tell themselves it’s just a slip here and there, never anything serious. No one is getting hurt. You do a favor for someone; they do a favor for you. Just fill out the paperwork and go home. And I woke up one day and realized I’d been on the force for seven years, and I was starting to think that way, too. That toxic don’t-give-a-fuck. I realized I had to get away somehow, get out to save myself.” He looked up at her. “That was the night I met you.”

  Fiona stared at him, speechless.

  “I knew who you were,” he said. “That night. You were right. Of course I knew. But I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “You looked lost, like me. You’re Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter. You’ve lived life. You know this place, but you don’t quite buy it, don’t quite buy anything. You don’t buckle under. You’re beautiful. And your shirt was sliding off your shoulder.”

  She dropped to her knees, put her hands on his shoulders. He was warm, tense, his muscles bunched beneath her hands. “Jamie,” she said. “Helen Heyer isn’t a thrown-away speeding ticket.”

  He looked at her, right into her in that way Jamie had, as if he knew what she was thinking. “I know,” he said roughly, touching his fingertips to the line of her jaw. “I’m not going to drop it, Fee. I’m going to take it as far as it can go. I’m done.”

  She leaned in and kissed him. He kissed her back, his hands tangling in her hair. This was so easy; this, they knew. She slid forward between his knees and ran her hands down the tops of his thighs through his jeans as he opened her mouth slowly, gently. It felt raw and familiar and real, and she knew how this would go. Sex with Jamie was never rushed; he liked to take his time, go slow, as if he was studying her. She realized now that it was because he was never entirely sure that she would be back. Because he never quite knew which time would be the last time. And neither did she.

  She followed the kiss where it led, not caring if any neighbors came down the hallway, not caring that she was hungry and her knees hurt. Not caring about Idlewild or dead girls or anything but the way she could read his pulse beneath his skin.

  He broke this kiss and sighed, his hands still twisted in her hair. “We’re not doing this,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  She kissed his neck, feeling the scrape of his beard against her mouth. “No,” she agreed. “Not right now.”

  He let his head drop back, banging it gently against the wall. “Fuck,” he muttered.

  Fiona pressed her cheek against his collarbone. He dropped a hand to the back of her neck. And they stayed like that for a long, long time.

  chapter 29

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  Fiona woke on the sofa, her throat scratchy and her neck sore. She rolled over, looked at the mess of her apartment in the dark. There were stacks of boxes, papers. On her coffee table were her laptop and a half-eaten box of Ritz crackers. She tapped her laptop to make it wake up so she could see the time in the little display in the corner. It was six a.m.

  She stared at the screen, looking at the topic she’d been reading about when she fell asleep, sometime around three. Rose Albert.

  Rose’s face stared at her. The picture had been taken on the street by an enterprising photographer sometime after Rose had been arrested and granted bail. She was dignified, wearing an old-fashioned skirt and jacket and a fur stole—out of style in 1973, but giving off an air of class. At the time of the trial, she was only fifty-five, with the clear skin Fiona had seen in the other photographs of her, her mouth a firm line, her eyes so perfectly even and dark, her expression shuttered and cool. The photographer had caught her unawares, and she had put a hand to the fur stole as she walked, nearly clutching it. The few accounts Fiona had found of the trial had described her as wearing a fox fur stole. The same one.

  The trial itself was not on public record; the transcripts were sealed. It had been a midsized local story in its day, worthy of a dedicated reporter and a photographer assigned to take shots from the street once or twice, but it hadn’t been front-page news. Looking at the coverage, Fiona could perfectly follow the logic of that news editor in 1973: They had to cover the story for the local angle, because there were people who knew this woman, but hell, no one wanted to read about concentration camps really. It was too depressing and out of touch. Vietnam was happening; Vietnam was real. A lady in a fur stole who might or might not have been an old Nazi was news, but not big news.

  Still, the coverage was well researched and well written, making Fiona nostalgic for the heyday of reporters who were actually on staff instead of freelance, and stories that didn’t have to say “You won’t believe what happened next” in order to survive in the click-or-die Internet age. Rose Albert w
as a spinster living in Burlington, an immigrant from Europe after the war. She claimed to have come from Munich, where she had worked in a factory. She did admit to being a member of the Nazi Party, but she claimed that it was only a survival tactic, because under Hitler’s regime, those who did not join were suspect. Yes, she had attended rallies, but only so she wouldn’t have been denounced by her neighbors and arrested. No, she had not worked in a concentration camp, and once the war was over, she had come to America to start again, and she had been lucky enough to get the job at the travel agency.

  Rosa Berlitz, the Ravensbrück guard, was a mystery. She had been recruited from one of the local German villages, a girl with no experience, and had taken to the job at once. She had chased prisoners with the dogs the Nazis had given the guards, who were trained to attack and kill. She had stood by while women were experimented on and sentenced to death, then helped carry out the murders. Who her family and friends were was unknown; what had happened to her after the war, when the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück, was also unknown. Rosa Berlitz had appeared from nowhere, tortured and killed the prisoners of Ravensbrück without flinching, and disappeared again.

  There was only one known photograph of Rosa: standing in a line of other guards, being inspected by Himmler as he toured the camp. Himmler was a large figure in the picture, wearing his long coat and Nazi insignia, striding across the grounds. The women were in uniform, ranged in three neat rows, but Rosa’s face was in the back row and slightly out of focus, leaving only two dark eyes, a straight nose, a glimpse of white skin. It might have been Rose Albert, and it might not. No other record of Rosa Berlitz was left, nothing that said she had existed at all, except for the memories of the prisoners who had lived under her.

  Three survivors had identified Rose Albert as Rosa Berlitz. One had died of cancer the week before the trial began; the other two had testified in court. It seemed there had been too many holes, too much missing information in the trail leading back to Rosa Berlitz, even with survivors’ testimony, and Rose had gone free. When Fiona dug further, she found that the two remaining survivors had died in 1981 and 1987.