Mary took one step, and then another. Fiona screamed, the sound nothing but air forced high from her throat. Then she screamed again.
There was a shout, and someone came through the door. Two people, three. Men. Voices rang through the room. Hands touched her.
Fiona turned her head and saw that Mary was gone.
She closed her eyes and let them take her.
chapter 33
Barrons, Vermont
November 2014
It hurt. Everything did. The world came and went—voices, sounds, hands, hot and cold. Fiona’s head was like an overblown balloon, a deafening pounding in her temples. She opened her eyes and saw an unfamiliar ceiling, heard an unfamiliar voice. She closed them again.
She woke and realized she was in a hospital bed. It was the middle of the night, and she was alone. She was painfully thirsty. Someone far down the corridor was talking in a low voice, then laughing quietly. She can’t get me here, Fiona thought with a hot wash of relief, and then she fell asleep again.
When she woke again, her father was there.
Her head was a little clearer this time. Weak sunlight came through the window; it was day, then. Malcolm was sitting in a chair next to her bed, wearing a short-sleeved button-down checked shirt, faded cargo pants, socks, and sandals. A pair of black rubber boots sat by the doorway—he always wore rubber boots in winter, then sandals inside the house. His longish gray-brown hair was tangled and tucked behind his ears, and he wore his half-glasses as he read the newspaper in his lap. He hadn’t noticed she was awake yet.
Fiona stared at him for a long moment, taking in every detail of him. “Dad,” she said finally, breaking the spell.
He lowered the paper and looked up at her over the tops of his glasses, his face relaxing with pleasure. “Fee,” he said, smiling.
She smiled back at him, though her throat hurt and her lips were cracked. “Am I okay?” she asked him.
“Well.” He folded the newspaper and put it down. “You have a lovely case of the flu, mixed with hypothermia, and frostbite was a close call. Plus the bruising on your neck. But they say you’ll be fine.”
She struggled into a sitting position, and he helped her, handing her a glass of water from the bedside table. “What happened?”
“You called me,” Malcolm said, smoothing her hair. “Remember?”
She did, though her memories were disjointed, out of order. “I wanted to tell you about Stephen Heyer.”
“Right.” He smoothed her hair again. “You left me a long message. I listened to it when I got home from the grocery store. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what the hell to do. While I was pondering it, my phone rang again. This time, it was Lionel Charters.”
Fiona put down the water glass. Her hand was shaky, but she focused on keeping the glass upright. “Lionel phoned you?”
“It was the strangest thing,” Malcolm said. “I’ve known who he is for years, of course. You know he runs a kind of informal rehab center in his old trailer? Lionel’s son died of an overdose, and ever since then, he’s let addicts stay with him while they try to dry out. It doesn’t always work. They do drugs out there, and they deal, and sometimes there’s trouble. But Lionel’s intentions are good.”
Fiona just sat, listening to his voice as he stroked her hair. He’s an old druggie, she heard Garrett Creel say. His son blew his brains out with coke. She had so much to say, so many questions to ask. But Malcolm was telling the story, and she was so tired, drifting on his voice. Once Malcolm was on his track, there was no distracting him.
“Lionel is no friend of the media,” Malcolm continued, “but he hates the police more. So he called me and said my daughter had just been on his property, looking for Stephen Heyer. That you seemed sick. He said Garrett Creel drove up, and pushed you into his car with him, and he drove off.”
“He told me . . . ,” Fiona said, then drummed up her strength. “He was at the drive-in the night Deb died. He told me . . .”
“I know what he told you,” Malcolm said. “I know what Lionel saw.”
She tried to swallow hard in her rasping throat. “You knew? About Garrett’s cruiser being there?”
Her father’s hand had stopped stroking her hair. It had gone stiff and tense and still. He looked past her at the wall, his eyes unreadable. “No,” he said, his voice deceptively calm. “But I know now.”
He looked, for a second, like the stranger who had been at Tim Christopher’s trial, the stranger who had sleepwalked through her parents’ divorce. But then his face softened into mere sadness. Fiona wanted to say something, anything. “Dad,” she managed.
“Lionel let you get into that car,” her father said.
She couldn’t tell if it was a question. “He was aiming his gun,” she said. “But he couldn’t shoot.”
“He told me that, too,” Malcolm said. “I told him he should have tried harder. Then I hung up on him and called Jamie.”
Fiona thought of Jamie’s father, his knee in her stomach, his breath in her face. I knew you would do this. His hands on her throat. She must have tensed, because Malcolm smoothed her hair again.
“Where is he?” Fiona said. “Where is Garrett?”
“At the moment?” Malcolm said. “I can’t quite pinpoint. Likely a holding cell. Or maybe he’s talking to his lawyer.” He patted her shoulder as she leaned into him in relief. “Jamie couldn’t reach his father,” he said, continuing the story, “and he couldn’t reach you. So he got backup and drove to Lionel’s place. He found his father’s car parked outside the Idlewild gates.” He sighed. “I didn’t go with him, so I only heard secondhand. But from what I know, they went inside, and Garrett shot at them.”
“What?” Fiona said, pulling away from him and sitting up. Her head spun.
“Hush, Fee,” Malcolm said. “The shot nicked Jamie’s hand, but that’s all.”
“I didn’t know he had a gun,” Fiona said. Garrett must have had it stowed in the car somewhere, probably the trunk, which was why he hadn’t used it on her. “Is Jamie okay?”
“He’s fine,” her father said. “They had to return fire, but no one was hurt. They found you, in one of the bedrooms of the old dorm, calling for help before you passed out on the floor, with his hand marks on your neck. They arrested Garrett. And here we are.”
She was shaking; she should call the nurse. They must have her on some kind of medication, something for the pain and the inflammation. She was so tired. “He tried to kill me,” she said. “He tried to strangle me in the field off one of the back roads. He was going to kill me and dump me.”
“I know,” Malcolm said. “The doctors examined your neck. Garrett hasn’t talked, but the police will come to take your statement.”
“He covered up for Tim. With Helen.” The words were jumbling in her head, but she felt the urgency, the importance of getting them out before she sank into sleep again.
“I know, honey,” her father said again.
You’re going to kill him, Jamie had said. There was no going back. Not from knowing that Tim could have been stopped before he ever met Deb. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she said.
He blinked and looked down at her. “For what?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t have gone.” The words coming up through her pained throat. “I should have left it alone. But I thought— I started to wonder whether it was possible that Tim hadn’t done it. Whether it was possible that whoever had killed Deb was still out there.” She felt tears on her face. She remembered Deb, sitting in the chair by the window, but she couldn’t tell him about that. She wasn’t even sure it was real. “I kept going over the case and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”
Malcolm looked thoughtful, and then he stroked her hair again. “You were seventeen when it happened,” he said. “You had questions.” He sighed. “I didn’t have the answers, a
nd neither did your mother. We couldn’t even answer our own questions. I’m afraid, Fee, that we left you to deal with all of it alone.”
“That isn’t it.” She was crying now, the sobs coming up through her chest as she heard Deb say, I was so scared. She pressed her face into his checked shirt, smelling his old-school aftershave and the cedar smell of the old drawer he’d pulled his undershirt from. “I should have just left it. I’m just so sorry.”
He let her cry for a while, and she felt him drop a kiss to her temple. “Well, now,” he said, and she heard the grief in his voice, but she also heard Malcolm Sheridan. Always Malcolm Sheridan. “That isn’t the way I raised you, is it? To leave things be. It’s just you and me left, Fee. That isn’t how we wanted it, but that’s how it is. And you’re my daughter.” He let her tears soak into his shirt as her sobbing stopped, and then he spoke again. “Besides, Helen’s family never had an arrest, a conviction, like we did. We can fix that, and we will.” He kissed her again. “Get some sleep. We’re going to be busy.”
She wanted to say something else, but her eyelids felt like sandpaper, and she closed her eyes. Sleep took her before she could speak.
* * *
• • •
The world was disjointed for a while, images passing by like dreams. She had a long, vivid dream of running across the field toward the trees, the dead brush scraping her shins, her breath bursting in her chest, as Garrett ran after her. Crows called in the stark sky overhead. Fiona jerked awake over and over, disoriented, before falling back into the same dream again. She had another dream of waking to the sight of her hand in Jamie’s, lying on the bed. His hand was bandaged, her fingers curled around it. She was aware of him, could see the familiar strong bones of his hand, the lines of his forearm, but she did not look up to see his face before falling asleep again.
The fever broke sometime the next day, and she sat up in the bed, sweaty and weary, drinking apple juice, as the police took her statement. Malcolm sat in the back corner of the room, listening, his sandals on over his socks, his newspaper folded on his lap.
She did not hear from Margaret Eden, but she heard from Anthony. When she was well enough to get her cell phone back from her father (“What do you need that thing for?”), she answered his call. He told her he was sorry, and he asked if there was anything he could do. She had the beginning of an idea, an itch at the back of her mind, and she asked Anthony a question. The answer he gave her put all the pieces together, and she realized it had been in front of her all along.
She had her answers now.
She would go to the Idlewild girls as soon as she was well again. But she had a suspicion that they’d come to her first.
chapter 34
Katie
Barrons, Vermont
April 1951
This was going to work.
There was never a doubt in Katie’s mind. Still, she could feel the tense anticipation from the other girls in Clayton 3C. Roberta sat in the chair by the window, pretending to study from a textbook. CeCe pulled off her uniform and put on her nightgown, even though it was only just past lunchtime. She yanked the pins from her hair and scrubbed her hand through it, making it messy.
For her part, Katie straightened her stockings and her skirt. She polished her black shoes to a shine and put them on. She added wadded Kleenex to her bra, then put on her cleanest white blouse, adjusting it so that the fabric stretched just slightly over her enhanced chest. She pulled a cardigan with the Idlewild crest over the blouse and buttoned it demurely to her neck.
CeCe pulled off her shoes and stockings, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I really don’t know about this,” she said. Her cheeks were pale. Good, Katie thought. That makes it more believable.
It was Roberta who answered. “Just follow the plan,” she said, bending her head to the textbook. In the five months since Sonia had disappeared—since she had died, since she had been killed; they all knew she had been killed—Roberta had gone waxy and hard, rarely smiling, never laughing. Her grades didn’t falter, and she played better than ever on the hockey field, but the change was clear to Katie. Roberta had taken her grief and her anger and buried it, let it sink into her bones. She looked less like a girl now and more like a grown woman, and she had become fierce. Katie loved her more than ever.
“You know I’m no good at these things,” CeCe said, pushing the covers back on her bed and obediently sliding into it. “When Katie cheated on that test, I nearly passed out.”
Katie leaned toward the room’s only mirror, smoothing and adjusting her hair, and watched the corner of her mouth turn up. CeCe always got cold feet, but she always did as well as the rest of them. “You were perfect,” she said to CeCe, “and you know it.”
CeCe flushed; praise from Katie always pleased her, even after all this time. Still, she had to whine a little. “This feels like lying.”
“It isn’t lying.” Roberta looked up from her book and directed her gaze at CeCe, lying in the bed. “We talked about this for months. It isn’t lying if it’s making someone happy. If it’s making all of us happy.”
CeCe bit her lip and looked back at Roberta. “Not Katie,” she argued. “She doesn’t get to be happy.”
So that was what was bothering her. Katie should have known. She laughed, touched despite herself. “I’ll be happiest of all,” she said. It wasn’t a lie, not completely; her heart was pounding in anticipation and a queer kind of excitement. She was ready. Was that the same as happy? She didn’t know, and in this moment she didn’t particularly care. She had just turned sixteen. What mattered was that she got what she wanted.
“It’ll be fine,” Roberta said, her voice flat.
“If it works,” CeCe said.
Katie leaned closer to the mirror, smoothing her eyebrows and lightly biting her lips. They weren’t allowed makeup at Idlewild—absolutely not—and part of her wished she had some, at least some dark eyeliner and mascara like she’d seen on movie stars, but she was afraid it would look too obvious. She definitely needed to look like a schoolgirl. “It’ll work,” she said.
CeCe lay back in the bed, pulling the covers up over her ample chest. Katie caught Roberta’s gaze in the mirror’s reflection, and they traded a look of understanding.
I’m going to do this.
Yes, you are, and we both know why.
It’s going to work. I’m going to make it.
Roberta’s gaze softened, the lines around her eyes easing, and she smiled at Katie in the mirror.
There was a knock on the door. “Ladies!” Lady Loon said. “It’s Family Visit Day. Cecelia, you have a visitor.”
Katie smoothed her expression into one of concern and opened the door. “Oh, no, Miss London,” she said. “Are you sure?”
Lady Loon looked frazzled, tendrils of hair escaping from the bun on top of her head. “Of course I’m sure, Katie,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s just that CeCe isn’t feeling very well.”
Katie stepped back, and Lady Loon stepped into the room, looking at CeCe on the bed. CeCe moaned a little. She looked positively green, probably from terror, which added to the effect.
“What is the matter?” Lady Loon asked her.
“Oh,” CeCe said, licking her lips as if they were dry. “It’s my stomach, Miss London. Is it my father who has come to see me?”
Lady Loon clenched her hands, her knuckles going white. “No, it’s—your brother, I believe.” She hated saying the words, Katie could see, keeping her face straight. Lady Loon did not like referring to CeCe’s bastard status, or her brother’s, which was what they wanted.
“Oh, no,” CeCe groaned, quite believably. “He came all this way. I can’t. I just can’t.”
“It’s very rude to turn him away,” Roberta commented calmly from over her textbook. “Can you talk to him, Miss London?”
Lady Loon�
��s eyes went wide. She looked positively horrified. “Me? Ladies, I am certainly not going to talk to that man.” An illegitimate bastard, she didn’t say.
“He came so far,” CeCe wailed again.
“Maybe one of us can go,” Roberta said.
“Maybe,” Katie said, as if this had just occurred to her. “Roberta, why don’t you go?”
Roberta frowned. “I have a Latin test tomorrow, and I need to study.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Why study?”
That made Lady Loon jump, just as it was supposed to. “Of course she needs to study, Katie Winthrop,” she said sharply. “And since you seem to be at leisure, you are to go speak to Cecelia’s brother immediately and explain the situation to him.”
“Me?” Katie put her lip out just a little, petulant. “I don’t want to go.”
“You’ll do as you’re told, young lady. Now go.”
Katie huffed a put-upon sigh and stomped out of the room. She didn’t look back.
He was sitting at a table in the dining hall, waiting. Before he noticed her, Katie took stock. He was twenty-one, according to CeCe. Dark hair slicked back. Nice suit, pressed shirt. A narrow face, gray eyes. He sat politely, no fidgeting. His hands were folded on the table in front of him, and she saw that they were elegant and masculine, the fingers long, the knuckles well formed. Nice hands, she thought, gathering her courage. I can deal with a man with nice hands.
She glanced to see that no one was looking. Then she folded the waist of her skirt with a quick twist of her wrist, making the length climb an inch above her knees, and then another. She unbuttoned the Idlewild cardigan but didn’t take it off, letting it fall open just so, so that he would be able to glimpse the stretched blouse beneath. Then she squared her shoulders and walked toward him.
The Broken Girls Page 29