“That dried-up old Nazi bitch,” Katie said darkly.
“Yes, she was,” CeCe added. “She wouldn’t tell us where she’d dumped the body, because she knew that would seal her case. It was her word against ours, and once a body was recovered, it was over. But we weren’t leaving. We asked and asked. We were so angry after all these years. She got agitated.”
Fiona had to ask it. “Did you kill her?”
It was Katie who answered that one. “Did you think we killed her?” she asked. “What a picture that paints. All of us standing over her, choking her—suffocating her, perhaps—in revenge. The coroner misdiagnosing it as a heart attack. The three of us sending Sonia’s killer to hell.” She nodded. “I like it. That isn’t how it happened. But I can’t say I find the picture distasteful.”
“No, we didn’t kill her,” Roberta added. “She had a heart attack. A real one. While we were there, asking over and over where we could find Sonia’s body. I think the fear and the stress just overpowered her. She fell on the floor. We thought she was faking at first, but she wasn’t. She really was dying.”
“It was a disaster,” CeCe said. “She was the only one who knew where Sonia was buried. I was so upset.”
Fiona stared at her. “So—what did you do?”
“She died,” Katie said, her voice cold and sharp. “We left. That was all.”
“You just left her there?”
Roberta snorted, the most unladylike sound Fiona had ever heard the older woman make. But it was Katie who answered.
“If that piece of Nazi garbage had killed your sister,” she said, “and then spent decades living free while she rotted in a well—what would you do?”
The room was quiet. Fiona couldn’t answer.
Katie Winthrop rose from her chair and touched Fiona on the shoulder. “I’m not a bad person,” she said. “None of us are. But this was Sonia’s killer. We’d spent our lives trying to find her when no one cared, when the police stopped looking. I think, of all people, you would understand.”
“Jesus,” Fiona breathed.
“You see what we were up against,” Katie said. “We had to be hard. We’ve always had to be hard. It was either that or break.”
“I have one more question,” Fiona said.
“Go ahead,” Katie said. “You’ve earned it.”
“Idlewild.” Fiona made herself say the word. “The restoration. Was it ever real?”
Katie shook her head, giving her the truth. “I bought Idlewild because I knew Sonia was buried there somewhere,” she said. “She had to be there. I intended to go over every inch and find her. Anthony never knew. He just thought I was misguided. He disapproved from the first, just like his father did. But that was because he didn’t know what I really wanted.”
“And now you’ve found Sonia,” Fiona said.
“I have,” Katie said softly. “I’m going to give her a proper burial. And then, my dear, you can rest easy. I’m not going to restore Idlewild. I’m going to take that place, with all of its ghosts, and I’m going to bury it. I’m going to dismantle every stick and stone until there’s nothing left, and then I’m going to leave it to rot, just like it wants to.”
chapter 36
Barrons, Vermont
December 2014
Fiona stayed at her father’s house her first night out of the hospital, on the twin bed that was still in her old bedroom, and then she went home. She was shaky and tired, but the worst of the flu was over, and her neck was beginning to heal. She went back to her small apartment, laden with groceries from Malcolm, and looked around at the stacks of boxes from Idlewild Hall. Then she went to bed.
She thought maybe she’d stay there. That maybe she’d run out of whatever had driven her for the last twenty years, and without it she had nothing left. The jittery feeling she always got in her bloodstream was gone, and she thought she’d sleep for a week. But instead she stared at the ceiling, her mind ticking over—more slowly, more deliberately than it used to, but ticking all the same. Within an hour she was up again, wearing old boxers and a stretched-out T-shirt, eating crackers and canned soup, her feet up on a box of Idlewild records. She pulled out her laptop after a while and checked her e-mail.
There was a small avalanche in her in-box. Jonas hoping she was okay. Journalists from the local press covering the story of Garrett Creel’s arrest and looking for a statement. Hester, one of the sisters from the Barrons Historical Society, sending her links to the story in the local press. There was nothing from Jamie.
It was midmorning, quiet in her apartment building, most of the residents gone to work. Fiona clicked on the links Hester had sent her and scanned through the news stories.
Garrett Creel had been charged with kidnapping and attempted murder for his attack on her, as well as firing at a police officer, who happened to be his own son. He was scheduled for a bail hearing the next day. The articles on the newswire gave a brief summary of Fiona’s background, of Deb’s murder and Tim’s conviction, of the fact that Fiona was dating Garrett’s son, but no motive for the attack was given. And there was no mention of Garrett Creel covering up evidence of Tim’s crimes and the murder of Deb in 1994.
It wasn’t completely surprising. The police would keep the internal investigation under wraps for as long as they could. There were always potential leaks in internal police cases, but it took a diligent journalist to dig them out. This story was a small one—a retired chief of police attacking a thirty-seven-year-old woman and trying to choke her to death. A family dispute. Even a lovers’ quarrel, maybe. Something seedy. She set aside the requests from the journalists in her in-box without answering them. She would decide whom to talk to, and when.
She picked up her cell phone, stared at its string of notifications, and suddenly felt tired. She wished Jamie was here.
He hadn’t texted. He hadn’t called. He’d been at the hospital—she hadn’t imagined that. She wondered what he was doing, how he was taking his father’s arrest. She pictured that cozy, time-warped house without Garrett in it, Diane knocking around it by herself.
As she was staring at her phone, it rang in her hand. An unknown number. On impulse, she answered it.
“Hello, Fiona” came the rich, familiar voice of an elderly woman on the other end.
Fiona felt her stomach tighten. “Hello, Katie.”
Katie Winthrop sighed. “No one ever calls me that,” she said. “Except Roberta and CeCe. And now you. The hospital tells me you were released. How are you feeling?”
“Fine, I suppose.”
“I just talked to Anthony. He’s suspicious that something is up. He asked me why in the world you wanted to know my maiden name.”
“Then you should tell him the truth, don’t you think?”
“I just might,” Katie said. “I’m old enough now. I’m tired of being Margaret. I think it’s time to be Katie again. But that isn’t what I’m calling about. I’m calling about the Idlewild files.”
By reflex, Fiona stared around her darkened apartment at the files stacked against the walls. “Anthony already tried,” she said.
“Yes, he did. Now I’m going to try and bargain with you. I want the files. I already own the school and the property. I want the files, too.”
“What for?”
“Because it’s my history,” Katie said. “It’s our history, me and the girls. Sonia’s history. And maybe I’m a maudlin old lady, but I think it might have answers.”
“It’s a bunch of old textbooks and personnel files,” Fiona said. “I don’t think you’re going to find the answer you want.”
“Then I’ll be disappointed, I suppose. But I’m willing to make an offer,” Katie said. “What do you want, Fiona?”
Fiona stared down at her bare legs, her bare feet, as the words echoed home. What do you want, Fiona?
She wanted all of this to
be over. She wanted to be different. She wanted her life to be different. She wanted the chance to do it all over again.
She wanted money, a career that felt real. She wanted Jamie back.
But what she said was “I want Sonia’s diary.”
There was icy silence on the other end of the line.
“You thought I’d ask for money, didn’t you?” Fiona said. “I suppose everyone asks you for money. But that’s not what I want from you.”
“What exactly do you want with the diary?” Katie asked.
“There’s a historian in the UK who is writing about Ravensbrück,” Fiona said. “The records from the camp were burned before the Soviet army liberated it. The survivors’ histories are few. She’s trying to put the pieces together, to tell the story. Sonia’s diary would add to the history.”
“I’m willing to consider it,” Katie said. “I’ll ask the girls. But we aren’t prepared to give the diary away permanently. We’ll lend it or give a copy. But we’re in that diary—she drew all of us. It’s personal to us.”
“I think she can work with that.”
“I’m burying her, you know,” Katie said. “Sonia. Now that the coroner is done with her and she has no relatives, I’ve asked that she be released to me. I’m going to have her properly buried in Barrons Memorial Cemetery, with a headstone. There will be a small ceremony next week, if you’d like to come.”
“I will,” Fiona said. “And I’m still going to write the story about the case, about her disappearance and the discovery of the body.”
“I see,” Katie said. “And will your story mention Rosa Berlitz?”
“It might.” It would. Of course it would. Whom did she think she was dealing with?
“Do your worst,” Katie said, resigned. “I’m old now. I have lawyers.”
“I will. Thanks. And there’s one more thing.”
“What is it?”
Fiona reached into one of the file boxes and pulled out the file in which Lila Hendricksen, Idlewild’s history teacher, had put together the map of the Hand house and the church before Idlewild was built. “When you get the files, there’s one in particular you’ll want to read. It’s the history of Mary Hand—the real Mary Hand. She was an actual person, and her house was on the Idlewild grounds before the school was.”
There was another cold silence, but this one was tinged with fear. “My God,” Katie said. “Is she buried there?”
“With her baby, yes,” Fiona said.
“She’s in the garden, isn’t she?” Katie was excited now. She didn’t wait for a reply before she said, “I knew it. That damned garden. Well, it’s my garden now, which makes her mine, too. I’m calling the girls.”
“Katie—”
“I’ll take care of it,” Katie said, and hung up.
chapter 37
Barrons, Vermont
December 2014
The Barrons police headquarters looked the same as it always had, squat and industrial. Fiona crunched through the icy crust of last night’s snow through the parking lot and up the walk to the front door. She passed the picnic table where she’d sat the first day she’d told Jamie about the Idlewild story.
Christmas was a few weeks away, and someone had pulled out the department’s box of wilted decorations. A too-short garland made of tinsel sagged over the door when Fiona walked through, and a small plastic Christmas tree, topped with a Snoopy, sat on the dispatch desk. The old cop on dispatch looked up and nodded at Fiona as she came through the door. “Back interview room,” he said. “The chief’s waiting for you.”
Fiona tasted copper in the back of her throat at the words. The chief’s waiting for you. It wasn’t Garrett Creel; it was Barrons’ current police chief, Jim Pfeiffer. Still, she wasn’t quite used to hearing those words. She nodded and kept walking.
The open office had a low hum of activity that went quiet as she passed. Jamie’s desk was empty, his coat gone, his computer off. Jamie was on leave while his father’s case moved through the system.
People watched her as she walked by. This was the effect of being the person Barrons’ beloved longtime police chief had assaulted and nearly killed, the person that had caused his fall from grace. She kept her gaze forward and walked back to the station’s interview room.
Jim Pfeiffer was fifty, fit and vigorous, unremarkable except for the black-framed glasses he wore that made him look more like an engineer from 1960s NASA than a modern-day cop. He shook Fiona’s hand and offered to take her coat before he closed the door of the interview room.
“Sit down,” he said, not unkindly. “I thought we should talk in private.”
Fiona sat. “I already gave my statement,” she said. “Several times, actually.”
“Yes, I’m aware,” Pfeiffer said. “There are a few other things I’d like to go over.” He smiled. “First of all, how are you doing?”
Fiona smiled tightly back at him. “I’m just great. Thanks. Your entire force hates me because your former boss tried to kill me, but that’s okay. I sleep great at night knowing he’s out on bail.”
Pfeiffer leaned back in his chair. “That’s how the system works, Fiona. The judge made a ruling.”
A judge who was one of Garrett’s golf buddies, likely. But Fiona kept quiet.
“We’ve been getting some calls from the media,” Pfeiffer said. “Chief Creel’s arrest was public record, but I’ve been fielding inquiries that contain inside information.” He stared at her from behind his glasses. “Specifically, we’ve been getting calls about a case from 1993, the assault of a girl named Helen Heyer. There seems to be some belief starting up that the Heyer case has to do with Tim Christopher.”
“Is that so?” Fiona asked.
Pfeiffer sighed. “Please, Fiona, drop the act. We all know the Heyer case was one of your crazy theories before all of this happened.”
“Yes, of course,” Fiona said. “I had a crazy theory, and Garrett tried to kill me to shut me up. But my theory is crazy. Sure thing.”
“It will go through the standard channels of investigation,” Pfeiffer said, the exact phrase he’d used at the press conference. “But we don’t appreciate media muckraking over this.”
“Then talk to the media who are doing the muckraking, not me.”
“Except it is you,” Pfeiffer said. “It isn’t you making the calls, but it’s you feeding them. Please don’t insult me by suggesting otherwise.”
Fiona stared down at her hands and said nothing. She’d known from the first that none of it would be followed up properly—not Garrett’s cover-up of Tim’s assault on Helen Heyer, not Garrett’s attempts to cover Deb’s murder. Her father had raised a journalist, not a fool.
So she’d called Patrick Saller, the journalist who had written the original article about Deb’s murder for Lively Vermont in 1994. Patrick was freelancing now, and Fiona had offered him everything she knew about the police corruption case that was about to unfold—a case that tied back to Deb’s murder, to the piece Patrick had written, even back to the interview he’d done with Richard Rush in which he’d stated that Tim Christopher had eaten ice cream in his shop at nine o’clock. Saller had remembered every detail of the case, and of his own piece, and had jumped on the lead.
But she wasn’t telling Pfeiffer that.
“Okay,” Fiona said. “You’d like the media to leave you alone. Anything else?”
Pfeiffer shook his head. “I’m not getting through to you, am I?”
“Like I said, you need to talk to the reporters who are calling you, not me.”
“There’s a Web page,” Pfeiffer argued. “It’s called the Tim Christopher Truth page. There’s a bunch of garbage on there about police misconduct on these two cases. Christopher’s lawyer has caught wind of it. He says he might sue.”
“Interesting,” Fiona said. You can’t sue someone you
can’t find, she thought.
“There are social media pages. There’s some hippie lawyer involved, working pro bono. Someone’s made a podcast. Fiona, this is crazy.”
“Well, there are a lot of crazy people out there,” Fiona agreed. “None of them are me.”
Now he was angry. “It’s you and your father, and you know it.”
Fiona suppressed a smile. Malcolm might not have known much about modern technology, and he couldn’t have made a Web page or a Facebook post to save his life, but it didn’t matter. Malcolm knew everyone. No one could muster the right people to get a message out more quickly, or in a more sophisticated way, than Malcolm Sheridan. He had Patrick Saller on his side, as well as a retired civil rights lawyer from his Vietnam days. He also had the support of Jonas Cooper, Fiona’s editor at Lively Vermont, who knew a few tech geeks from the local community college.
And when it came to exposing the attempted cover-up of his daughter’s murder, Malcolm was both connected and motivated. Lighting a fire under the cops was his God-given talent.
“I wouldn’t care about all of this,” Pfeiffer said. “People post shit on the Internet all the time. My problem is that yesterday I got a call from BCI. They’re opening an internal investigation into Garrett Creel and four of my other cops for criminal misconduct.”
Fiona tried not to show her shock. That was new to her. She didn’t think even Malcolm had any sway with the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. That was why they’d come up with the Internet campaign.
“This is just the start,” Pfeiffer said. He had a head of steam now. “There will be more names. I’ll have to put more guys on leave, which makes me understaffed. I have to pay for overtime, which shoots my budget to hell. Morale is going to be a problem. I’m hardly swamped with recruits here. I still have to get up every morning and work in this community.”
The Broken Girls Page 31