He was expecting CeCe, so it took him a moment to realize she was coming his way, that she was heading for him. He lifted his chin and looked at her and froze perfectly still.
Katie blinked her tilted, long-lashed eyes at him and smiled. Sweet and knowing at the same time. Abashed, as if he was having an effect on her, yet she didn’t quite want it to show.
Joseph Eden watched her come toward him, and his eyes went wide, his jaw dropping open just a little as he watched her thighs move below the hem of her skirt.
“Hi there,” Katie said to him, pulling up a chair and sitting across from him.
“You—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “You’re not CeCe,” he managed.
She smiled at him again. “No, I’m not. I’m her roommate. She’s not feeling well today, but she felt terrible that you came all this way. So she sent me instead.” She held out her hand and leaned across the table, letting the cardigan fall open just the right way. “My name’s Katie,” she said. “Katie Winthrop.” When he shook her hand in his bigger one—Nice hands, she reminded herself—she squeezed it and leaned forward across the table. Now he’d have a hint of cleavage, hidden in the shadows of her sweater and her blouse. “I have to confess, I’ve always wanted to meet you,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially.
He blinked. “Me?”
“CeCe talks about you so much.” Katie let a dreamy look cross her expression. “Her wonderful brother. We’re all dying of curiosity.” She lowered her voice again. “Especially me.”
He caught her gaze, and she saw the second his shoulders relaxed. He smiled. Hooked, but not quite reeled in. Not yet. “Well, I’m Joseph,” he said. “Joseph Eden. It sure is nice of you to come and keep me company if CeCe isn’t feeling well. I did come a long way.”
She let his hand go and smiled again. He had a nice enough smile, lovely hands, and a good suit. And he wasn’t legitimate, but he was Brad Ellesmere’s only son, and would someday be his heir.
Katie was counting on it.
You make your own fate, she thought. You build it every day. This is how it begins.
“Well, then,” she said to Joseph Eden. “We have some time to kill before you go all the way home again. I think we can entertain each other. Don’t you?”
chapter 35
Barrons, Vermont
November 2014
She had made her full statement to the police, and the doctors gave her permission to go home, so Fiona pulled clothes from the overnight bag Malcolm had brought for her and spent forty-five minutes putting them on, slowly pulling on underwear, jeans, a T-shirt, and a zip-up hoodie. The fever had broken, but she was still woozy and tired, her muscles made of melted butter. She put on socks and walked to the bathroom adjoining her hospital room, washing up the best she could. Her face in the mirror was ghostly, her skin waxen, shadows under her eyes. Her red hair looked stark under the fluorescent lights and against the pallor of her skin. She tucked it behind her ears and looked down into the sink again.
When she was finished, she walked to the bathroom door and stopped.
A woman stood in her hospital room. Small of stature, but straight of posture. Thick white hair cut short and curled. She wore a wool coat, belted at the waist, her hands in the large pockets. When Fiona made a noise in the bathroom doorway, she turned and looked at her, one eyebrow raised. It was Margaret Eden.
Fiona stared at her. She was light-headed; this felt a little surreal. She said, “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you,” Margaret said.
Even in her ill state, Fiona didn’t think for a second that Margaret Eden was concerned about her health. “Why?” she asked.
Margaret stayed where she was, hands in the pockets of her expensive coat, and waited. Finally she said, “Fiona. Do we have something to talk about?”
Fiona stepped farther into the room, steadying herself on the doorjamb. “I know who you are,” she said. “Who you really are.”
“Do you?” The older woman seemed curious, but unconcerned.
“Yes.” Fiona felt her fingers go slick against the door, cold sweat on her palms. “You’re Katie Winthrop.”
She hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t the smile that spread over Margaret Eden’s face, her features relaxing. Margaret turned her chin, directing her words back over her shoulder. “Girls,” she said. “She knows.”
Two other women came into the room. One was Roberta Greene, tall and stately, her features composed. The other, the same age as Katie and Roberta, was shorter and rounder, her eyes kind and her hair cropped close to her head. CeCe Frank, Fiona thought to herself, or whatever her name is now.
“It’s nice to meet you, honey,” CeCe said, taking Fiona’s hand and squeezing it. “Oh, sit down. Katie, she’s still ill.” CeCe sighed and looked in Fiona’s eyes. “She forgets about people’s feelings sometimes.”
Fiona turned to stare at Katie again. “The first time we met, you told me you’d never been a student at Idlewild.”
Katie shrugged. “I lied,” she said. “I do that sometimes. When I have to. How did you figure out it was me?”
“I’ve seen your Idlewild file. It has your full name—Katherine Margaret Winthrop. It didn’t click at first. But I asked your son what your maiden name was, and when he said Winthrop, I knew.”
That made Katie laugh. “All right, it isn’t a state secret. I just don’t make my past public, that’s all.”
“How did you do it?” Fiona asked Katie, walking to the edge of the bed and lowering herself. “How did you change your name? And why?”
Katie still stood, her hands in her pockets. Beauty, but not the wholesome kind, Sarah London had said of Katie Winthrop in 1950. She was a discipline problem from the day she arrived until the day she left. She looked down at Fiona where she sat on the bed, and in the arched brows and the determined set of her jaw, Fiona could see that girl from sixty-four years ago. “Well, I married Joseph Eden, for one,” she said. “I didn’t want to be Katie anymore. I wanted to leave everything behind—my family, Idlewild. Not the girls, of course. But the rest of it, yes. My parents had always treated me like an embarrassment, and as Joseph’s wife I could forget about them entirely. I was young, and I thought I could start new. I told Joseph I’d always hated the name Katie, and that I wanted to be called by my middle name, Margaret, instead. I told him I wanted to leave that old wayward girl behind and start a new life as his wife.” She shrugged. “He agreed.”
“Who was Joseph Eden?” Fiona asked.
“He was my brother,” CeCe supplied. She pulled up a chair and sat on it facing Fiona, as if they were going to have a chat. Katie stayed standing, and Roberta had walked to the window, where she listened as she looked out. “My half brother, that is. We had the same father.”
“Brad Ellesmere,” Fiona said.
CeCe blinked. “Is that in my file?”
“Never mind what’s in the file,” Fiona said. “Katie married your father’s illegitimate son?”
“His heir.” This was Roberta, speaking from her place by the window. Her voice was low, commanding, and they all looked at her. “He was Brad Ellesmere’s illegitimate son, but he was also his only son. Brad Ellesmere put him in the will. He was the Ellesmere heir.”
“I see.”
“You think it’s cold,” Katie said. “I can see it in your face, Fiona. You think it makes me a manipulative bitch. I was sixteen when I met Joseph, though he waited until I was eighteen to marry me. I was sixteen, and I needed to make my own life by whatever means I had.”
Fiona swallowed. “I’m not judging you.”
“Aren’t you? You’re right. I married him because I thought he’d be useful. Because I was cold and angry. But do you know what? I ended up liking him. I made him happy. I never thought I’d make anyone happy. We were together for nearly sixty years, and
we got along just fine. Not many married couples can say as much.” She smiled. “Joseph got me out of Idlewild, away from my family, away from everything. I used his money to send Roberta to law school so she could help her uncle. I used his money to send CeCe to Vassar so she could get away from her horrible mother. So she could stay away from that woman.”
“My mother was Brad Ellesmere’s housekeeper,” CeCe explained. “Having his illegitimate child was a burden to her. It was harder in those days. There was so much shame. She tried to drown me in the ocean when I was six.” She rubbed a finger lightly over her lower lip. “She really wasn’t stable,” she said, her voice almost gentle. “My father sent her for treatment after she tried to kill me, but she checked herself out and left. I went to college and became a teacher so I wouldn’t have to go home.”
“You’re a teacher?” Fiona asked.
“Oh, no, not anymore.” CeCe dropped her hand. “I quit once I got married and had children. I’d achieved what I wanted, and I was better at being a mother anyway. I preferred to raise my kids. Katie howled at me, I can tell you, but that was the one time she lost an argument with me.”
“CeCe always did want children.” Katie was still standing, looking down, watching as Fiona tried to follow the conversation. This was how the girls talked, it seemed, finishing one another’s sentences. Completing one another’s thoughts after so many years.
“CeCe was a better mother than any of us, I think,” Roberta said from her place by the window.
“That’s true,” Katie said. She had been beautiful once; Fiona could see that now. She was still beautiful. Katie glanced down at CeCe, and Fiona saw the complicated love in the look. “Without that degree, you would have married some country bumpkin at eighteen, not an engineer at twenty-seven.”
CeCe reached over and, to Fiona’s surprise, took Katie’s hand in hers and held it tightly. “She got us out of there,” she said to Fiona, still holding her friend’s hand. “All three of us. Away from our families, our pasts. Katie set us free.”
“That wasn’t all of it, though,” Roberta said. She was watching them, leaning casually against the window. “There was always a bigger plan behind that one. A bigger goal.”
“Sonia,” Fiona said. “You wanted to find who killed your friend.”
“The police wouldn’t investigate,” CeCe explained. “That was my fault. I told the headmistress that Sonia had been at Ravensbrück when I tried to explain she couldn’t have run away. I was so innocent. I had no idea that would make everyone assume she was a Jew, that it would make the investigation less important, not more. But they asked a few questions, looked in the woods for an hour or two, and filed it away. It was over.”
“With money,” Katie explained, her voice soft, “we at least could investigate the matter ourselves.” She pulled up a chair at last and sat next to CeCe, crossing her legs elegantly. “I hired private investigators over the years to go over the evidence, but never with any results. The school was still open, and they wouldn’t give permission for my investigators to search the grounds. They claimed it was an old case of a runaway girl, and there was no cause. When the school closed, I begged Joseph to buy it, but unfortunately that was the one time he said no to me. He said the land was a terrible investment and he’d lose his shirt. He wasn’t willing to lose that much money to satisfy a whim of mine.” She smiled at Fiona. “But we did solve it in the end. Ourselves. I’ll tell you freely, if you want. Would you like to know who Sonia’s murderer was?”
It was the temptation, the same one that had lured her into this case, that had nearly gotten her killed. Katie Winthrop, Fiona realized, was very adept at playing off the expectations of whomever she was talking to.
“I already know,” Fiona said to her. “Though when I first looked at it, the most likely suspects were you three.” She glanced around at them. “You had access to her, and you certainly had the opportunity. Sonia was killed by something blunt to the head, not a weapon. It was a crime of opportunity, of someone who hated her seeing their chance and getting rid of her.”
The women were quiet. Katie looked amused. Roberta stared out the window, her jaw set. CeCe’s eyes were wide.
“But I never liked that theory,” Fiona went on. “The account I heard was that you were friends with her, that you liked her. Roberta brought her to the school nurse a few weeks before she was killed.”
That made Roberta turn her head. “She had a fit in the garden,” she said. “It made her think of the digging detail at Ravensbrück. A flashback, though that term wasn’t in use at the time. Sonia almost certainly had some form of PTSD. She nearly passed out.”
Fiona nodded. “You cared about her. It could have been a lie, but when you talked about her when we met, it didn’t seem like it. I should have just assumed that one of you did it and moved on.”
“But you didn’t, did you?” Katie asked softly. “How terribly clever.”
“No, I didn’t. I followed another lead.” She met Katie’s gaze. “I don’t know how you did it, but I have the feeling that what I found won’t be a surprise to you at all.”
“You won’t know unless you tell us, will you?” Katie said.
“I did some research,” Fiona said. “I learned about a woman named Rose Albert. Also known as Rosa Berlitz.”
There was a long, drawn-out minute of silence. Fiona could hear her own breathing, the beeps of machines in rooms down the hall, the clatter of someone walking by dragging an IV stand. Nurses talked and laughed quietly beyond the door of her room. The four of them were still. Roberta still looked out the window, but Katie and CeCe watched Fiona.
“Well.” Katie sat back in her chair and pressed her hands together. Her features were composed, even amused, but Fiona still had the feeling she’d impressed the older woman for the first time today. “This is interesting.”
“How did you do it?” CeCe blurted. She looked like she could barely contain herself. “You never saw the picture.”
“What picture?” Fiona asked.
“Sonia’s drawing. In her notebook.” CeCe glanced at Katie, who was giving her an icy look, and made an impatient sound. “Leave it, Katie—she already knows. Why not tell her about the book?” CeCe turned back to Fiona. “Sonia had a notebook. I gave it to her, actually—it had been a present to me, but I never used it. Sonia took it and wrote in it. All of her memories. And she drew pictures—of her family, of Ravensbrück, of the people she knew there. The notebook was in her suitcase when she disappeared.”
“The suitcase that was taken from the headmistress’s office?” Fiona asked.
CeCe ignored another dirty look from Katie. “We took it, of course. We wanted Sonia’s things back. They didn’t belong in some dusty old closet, and we thought it might hold a clue. So we took it. But we never found a clue in there, not until 1973.”
“That was the year of Rosa Berlitz’s trial,” Fiona said. “The year Rosa died.” A heart attack in her own home, the papers had said.
From her place in the window, Roberta chimed in. “I had a baby in 1973,” she said. “My son. I didn’t hear about the Berlitz trial. But when I came back to work at the firm, people were talking about it. My firm hadn’t handled the case, but it was a landmark in local legal circles. I heard the word Ravensbrück, and I started to wonder.” She turned and faced Fiona, the harsh light from the window illuminating her still-perfect skin. “I dug up the articles about the trial. A war crimes trial, and it wasn’t even front-page news.”
Fiona nodded. That was what she’d seen as well.
“I made copies of the articles and mailed them to Katie and CeCe,” Roberta went on. “I asked them if they thought it might have some bearing on Sonia, since Rosa Berlitz had lived in Burlington. It was just too much of a coincidence that she and Sonia had been close enough to cross paths. But I’m sure you thought the same thing already.”
“It was
me who figured it out,” CeCe said. “I saw the photo from the newspaper and I recognized her immediately. I was the one who kept Sonia’s suitcase, you see, with the notebook in it. We’d all read the notebook, but I’d read it many times over. And the minute I saw Rosa Berlitz, I recognized her face. Sonia had drawn a portrait of her from memory. Rosa had been a Ravensbrück guard.”
“Wait,” Fiona said. “Rosa Berlitz was acquitted. You’re saying you had evidence of her identity, and you didn’t go to the authorities with it?”
“We would have gone to the authorities,” Katie said quietly. “But we didn’t have time. We went to Rosa first.”
“All of us,” Roberta said.
“We went right to her house,” CeCe added. “Knocked on the door, and there she was.”
“I have to say,” Katie said, “she really wasn’t expecting us. She wasn’t an old woman, but she was a recluse, especially since the trial. She was not well.” She shook her head. “Not well at all.”
Fiona found that she was gripping the edge of the bed so hard her knuckles were white. “What did you do?” she said. “The obituary said she died of a heart attack. What did you do?”
Katie smiled at her. “We asked her questions. About Ravensbrück. About Sonia. About everything.” She shrugged. “She didn’t want to admit anything at first, but we were persistent, and Roberta has a lot of experience with witnesses on the stand in court. She was magnificent. I suppose you could say we bullied Rose a little bit, but that’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it? In any case, we made her believe that it was over, that we already knew everything there was to know. We made her believe she could be indicted not only for the Ravensbrück crimes, but for Sonia’s murder as well. She looked sick—she wasn’t well, as I say—and then she started to talk.”
“She admitted to it?” Fiona asked.
“Yes,” Roberta said. Her voice was bitter. “She knew where Sonia was going from her bus ticket. Sonia had changed the ticket at her agency. She went to the stop in her car, parked, and waited. When Sonia got off the bus, she followed her into the woods and killed her with a rotted beam from the old fence. Then she dumped the body, walked back to her car, and drove away. She was very, very sorry.”
The Broken Girls Page 30