The Broken Girls Page 11

  “None. There’s a death record for her father in Dachau concentration camp in 1943. Nothing about her mother, or any siblings.”

  Fiona stared out her windshield at a swirl of snow that had kicked up on the side of the road in the wind. Those words—Dachau concentration camp—had the power to give her a twist of nausea, a clammy, greasy chill of fear. “I thought the Nazis kept records of everything.”

  “So did I. But I think we’re wrong. It’s like Sonia was born, and then she and her mother disappeared off the face of the earth. Until Sonia appeared on the immigration records. Alone.”

  It was hard for her to make friends, Sarah London had said of Sonia, since she was quiet and not pretty. What sort of life had Sonia lived, the lone survivor of her small family in a strange country? Fiona felt outrage that she had died alone, her head smashed in, dumped in a well for sixty-four years. Deb had died alone, but she’d been found within thirty hours, buried with love at a funeral that had drawn hundreds of friends and family. She’d been grieved for twenty years, loved. Was still grieved. Sonia had simply been forgotten. “I guess we need to find the friends, then,” she said to Jamie. “Miss London said the girls were roommates, and that they were close. One of them must remember her.”

  “I agree,” Jamie said. “Listen, I have to go. Give me the names, will you?”

  For a second, Fiona felt the urge to say no. She wanted to do this—she wanted to be the one to track these girls down, to talk to them, to do something for the dead girl in the well. But she couldn’t do as much on her own as she could with the Barrons police force helping her. So she gave Jamie the names and hung up, staring at the deserted roadside with her phone in her lap, wondering why she felt like she’d just given the case away, let it slip from her hands.

  She called her father, and the second she heard his voice, she began to feel better. “Dad, can I come by?”

  “Fee! Yes, of course.” She heard the rustle of papers, the beep of the outdated computer. He was working, as always. “How far are you? Let me put tea on.”

  “Give me twenty-five minutes.”

  “You have something to run by me, don’t you, my girl?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That’s my daughter,” he said, and hung up.

  The trees waved in the wind, the bare branches overhanging the car wafting like a sultan’s fan. Fiona shivered and sank farther into her coat, unwilling to move for the moment. She had done this the other night, too—sat in her parked car at the side of the road, staring at nothing and thinking. There was something soothing and meditative about the side of a road, a place most people passed by. As a child she’d spent car rides looking out the window, thinking of the places they passed, wondering what it would be like to stop there, or there, or there. It had never been enough for her just to get from one place to another.

  Now she watched as a crow landed on a stark branch on the other side of the road, its big black body gleaming as if coated with oil. It cocked its black beak at her and was soon joined by a second bird, the two of them edging cautiously along the branch the way birds do, each foot rising and falling with careful precision, the talons flexing out and curling in again as they gripped the branch. They stared at her with their small black eyes, so fathomless yet so knowing, as if they were taking in every detail of her. Near the end of the branch, having found a good vantage point, both birds were still.

  The phone shrilled and vibrated in Fiona’s lap, making her jump. She didn’t recognize the number, but it was local. She answered. “Hello?”

  “Okay, fine.” The words were brisk, not bothering with a greeting. Fiona recognized the voice only because she’d just heard it twenty minutes ago—it was Cathy. “Aunt Sairy’s napping, and she can’t hear me, so I guess I’ll tell you. But you have to promise she won’t get in trouble.”

  Fiona felt her heart stutter in her chest, the back of her neck prickling. “What do you mean, get in trouble?”

  “She had good intentions,” Cathy said. “You have to understand that Aunt Sairy has a good heart. She meant well. She’s been paranoid ever since she did it. That’s why she didn’t tell you. But she’s getting old now, and we’re going to get rid of the house soon. She’s moving in with me. We might as well tell you as anyone.”

  “Cathy.” Fiona was sitting up in the driver’s seat now, her mouth dry. “What are you talking about?”

  “The records,” Cathy said. “From the school. She took them, the last day. They were going to destroy them—sixty years of records. There was nowhere to put them, nowhere to store them. No one wanted them. The Christophers had bought the land and were going to put the records in the landfill. So Aunt Sairy volunteered to take the records to the dump, but instead she brought them home.”

  “Home?”

  “In the shed out back,” Cathy said. “They’re all there. They’ve been there since 1979. We’ll have to get rid of them when we sell the house. Give me a few days to talk Aunt Sairy into it, and you can come and get them. Hell, they’re worthless. You can have every single one of them for all I care.”

  chapter 11

  Katie

  Barrons, Vermont

  October 1950

  Katie had never been to Special Detention before, not even when she got into a fistfight with Charlotte Kankle. That fight had been broken up by Sally D’Allessandro, the dorm monitor for Floor Three before she’d left Idlewild and nosy Susan Brady had been appointed instead. Sally had had an oddly languid manner for a dorm monitor, and she’d never sent anyone to Special Detention—she’d just halfheartedly dressed them down as she’d stood in front of them with her droopy posture and bony arms. Hey, just stop it, okay?

  Katie followed Mrs. Peabody across the courtyard, her hands still jittering in nervous fear. What had just happened? Had that been real? The door banging open? The voice? She hadn’t heard the words exactly, but she’d heard something. High-pitched, plaintive. The other girls had looked as scared as she was. Katie watched Mrs. Peabody’s polyester-clad back, looking for a sign, a reaction, anything from a grown-up. All she saw was the teacher’s furiously angry stride, the swish of her dress loud in the silence.

  Mrs. Peabody led her to a room on the first floor at the end of the teachers’ dorm. She pointed to a stack of Latin textbooks, accompanied by blank paper and a pen. “The conjugation exercises,” she said succinctly. “Do them until the detention is finished. I will be checking your work.”

  Katie stared balefully at the stack of books. “The exercises from which one?” she asked.

  “All of them,” Mrs. Peabody replied. “Think twice before you talk back to me and you pull a prank like that again.”

  “It wasn’t a prank,” Katie protested. How was that even possible? How could she have made the door slam open?

  But in an angry flash of understanding, she knew it didn’t matter. Because Mrs. Peabody already knew. This was all a fiction to make the teacher feel better. “It was Mary,” she said to the older woman, the truth hard and satisfying as she watched Mrs. Peabody recoil. “It was Mary—”

  Mrs. Peabody lunged forward and grabbed Katie’s arm so fast, so hard, that Katie cried out. “I will hear no more of this nonsense!” she hissed, her face so close Katie could smell sugary peppermint on her breath. Her eyes were hard with fear. She shook Katie once, her fingers digging into her arm. “Conjugation exercises. One hour.” She let her go and left, shutting the door with a click.

  “It wasn’t a prank!” Katie screamed at the closed door, as loud as she could. “It was Mary!”

  There was no response.

  Stupid, stupid. She was still shaking. Time to get herself together. Katie did a circuit of the room. A dusty chalkboard; a grimy window looking out toward the woods; a stack of old local newspapers, mostly rotted; a single desk and chair, the desk stacked with the books, papers, and pen. Katie tried the door; it was locked. She
yanked at the window, but got a shower of old paint flakes in her hair for the effort. She got on her stockinged knees and inspected the desk, looking at all the initials carved by girls locked in Special Detention over the years. Disappointing—she didn’t recognize any of the initials, nor had anyone carved anything good into the hard wood. A riffle through the blank notepaper showed nothing there, either.

  Then she looked at the stack of textbooks. Books that stayed permanently in this room.

  Teachers are so stupid.

  She sat in the hard ladder-back chair and leafed open the top book. The verb conjugation answers were written in the margins; doing the exercises would be easy. The book was full of other messages left over the years, including an entire story about a unicorn written in pencil over the empty back pages, complete with drawings. The story started innocently, and got progressively dirtier, until the final illustration was so rude even Katie had to laugh. Whoever the author was—the story was unsigned—Katie approved of her heartily. There were other messages in the book’s margins, some of them barely literate, some of them rude, some of them potentially useful.

  Mrs. Patton pretends she has a husband but she doesn’t. Interesting. Mrs. Patton was Idlewild’s headmistress, often spoken of but rarely seen. Katie filed this tidbit away.

  Mary Hand walks on Old Barrons Road at night. She sucks blood. Maybe true, probably not, and not very interesting either way.

  There is a baby buried in the garden.

  Katie had heard this one before. It was one of Idlewild’s myths, though she had no idea if it was true. Everyone hated the garden, which they were all forced to use in weekly sessions called Weekly Gardening. There was no one reason the garden was so hated, though the strangely slimy soil and the pervasive chill created by the shadows of the two buildings that bordered it were part of it. The garden never drained properly, and it always had an odor of rotting vegetables to it, mixed with something more pungent. Every once in a while someone resurrected the dead baby story, probably to scare the freshman girls.

  Katie looked up when she noticed movement on the wall. A spider was crawling down from the ceiling, its legs rippling gracefully, its body fat and black. Katie stared at it for a long minute, transfixed and shuddering. Idlewild had a lot of spiders—and mice, and beetles, and bats under the eaves outside the locker rooms. But the spiders were the worst. If she killed it with her shoe, she’d be stuck looking at its dead black smear for the rest of Special Detention. Reluctantly, she looked down at the books again.

  The next textbook had other bits of wisdom: If you call for Mary Hand at dusk under a new moon, she rises from the grave.

  Beneath this, a different girl had written in bold, black pen: Tried it not true

  The conversation was continued by a third girl, writing along the bottom of the page: She is real. Died in 1907 after miscarriage. It is in the records.

  A debater chimed in: Idlewild was not opened until 1919 stupid

  To which was returned: This house was here then look it up. Her baby is buried in the garden

  The baby in the garden again. Katie glanced up at the spider, which was halfway down the wall now, intent on its spider business. There was a second one in the far corner of the ceiling, still and curled. She could not see a web. Maybe I should kill them after all, she thought. Feeling like she was being watched, she forced her gaze down and reached forward to turn the page.

  Hold still, a voice said in her ear as a spider, black and cold, crawled over the edge of the desk and skittered over the back of her hand.

  Katie screamed, upending the chair and backing away, shaking her hand. The spider dropped out of sight, but she could still feel the touch of its tiny legs on her skin, the feather pokes of its feet. Her heart was pounding so hard her vision blurred, and she heard deep, gasping breathing that she realized was her own. She put her hands to her ears.

  Hold still, the voice said again.

  Her teeth chattered. She struggled to inhale a breath that tasted like old chalk and something acid, sour. She backed up against the wall, her shoulders bumping it, then too late remembered the spider she’d seen. She looked up to find it poised several feet above her left ear, utterly still, clearly watching her. It began a slow, deliberate pace toward her, somehow intent. The other spider was still in the corner of the ceiling, curled, though its legs were now waving helplessly, as if it couldn’t move.

  Katie tried the locked door again, her clammy hand slipping on the knob. Then she lunged to the desk, picked up one of the textbooks, and smashed the spider on the wall.

  She couldn’t look at the mess it made. She dropped the textbook and picked up the next one, holding it up, maneuvering back toward the door. Somehow the door seemed the safest place. Her hands were shaking. She nearly put her back to the door, then realized there could be more spiders—spiders—and stood several inches from it instead, the textbook under her arm. The silence beat in her ears. There was no movement.

  “Fuck,” she said into the silence. It was an awful word—the worst curse she knew, the worst word in her entire vocabulary. Her mother would have slapped her if she’d heard her speak it. It felt good, somehow powerful, coming from her mouth right now. “Fuck,” she said again, louder. “Fuck!”

  There was no answer. She spun in a circle, still keyed up and shaking, the textbook raised, her gaze skipping over the disgusting smear on the wall. Everything was still. The thing in the top corner had stopped moving.

  She let out a shaky breath. There were cold tears on her cheeks, she realized, though she had no memory of shedding them. She looked down at the textbook in her hands and opened it. Written in pencil, the lines of a familiar rhyme looked back up at her:

  Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land. She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again!

  She stared at it, her head aching. Her eyes burned. Those two words: Hold still. She wanted to cry again.

  She’d met Thomas when she was thirteen. He was sixteen, with big, heavy shoulders, eyes that drooped sleepily, and a curious smell of mothballs. He’d lived on the other side of the block. He’d liked to flirt with her, and she’d loved the attention: tickling, chasing, wrestling. More tickling. He had given her silly nicknames, teased her, made fun of her. She’d played along, breathless, feeling special, singled out among the other girls. He was sixteen!

  And then, an afternoon in July: the air hot, the sky high and blistering blue, the two of them in the empty school yard, chasing each other around the playground, abandoned in the summer heat. He’d caught her behind the slide, which was too hot to touch that day, the slide that was so familiar to her with its nonsensical words painted down the side: BIG SLIDE FUN!

  Thomas had pinned her to the ground, shoved at her skirt. Hold still, he’d said.

  He’d knocked the wind out of her, and for a second her eyes focused on those bright yellow words—BIG SLIDE FUN!—in confusion, the letters crossing over one another. Then she’d felt his fingers on her, and she’d fought him. She’d bitten him, scratched him, thrashed him with her feet. He’d hit her—hit her—and thumped her to her knees on the ground when she’d tried to run, his big hands on her, his mothball smell in her nose. Hold still. Yanking her cotton underpants off, his only words to her for those few frantic, hot minutes: Hold still.

  She’d managed to run. She wasn’t faster than he was, with his big, long legs, but he gave up quickly, not wanting to chase her publicly through the neighborhood. She remembered coming through the front door of her house and seeing herself in the eyes of her mother, who was just then coming down the stairs: disheveled, her stockings ripped, her underwear gone, dirt in her hair, blood on her knees, a red mark on her cheek. Her mother had stared at her in shock for a moment and descended the rest of the stairs in one quick motion, gripping Katie by the arm.

  “For God’s sake, get cleaned up,” she’d said. “Do you wan
t your father to see you like this?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Katie.” Her mother’s grip was painful. She was wearing a flowered silk blouse and a dark green skirt, stockings, heels. Katie could smell her mother’s familiar smell, the Calgon soap she used and the Severens Ladies’ Pomade she used in her hair. She could see the familiar look in her mother’s eyes: anger, wretched fear, bone-deep disgust. You’re going to get in trouble, her mother had warned her countless times, hissed angrily when her father was out of range, when she’d tried to run away yet again. I don’t know what’s the matter with you. I’ve never known. You’re going to get in trouble.

  “Go,” her mother said, shoving her toward the stairs.

  They blamed her, of course. They never even asked who the boy was, not that she would have told them. The low, murmured conversations behind closed doors were almost expected after that. Katie thought about running away again, but instead she’d been dropped off at Idlewild three weeks later, the mark on her cheek faded, the scrapes on her knees healed.

  The Special Detention room was still. The air was thin, stale. The spider in the corner had quieted. But Katie was not fooled.

  Somewhere here, breathing. A quiet sound, somewhere she couldn’t see.

  And then a breath of voice, pleading. Let me in . . .

  Katie felt her legs tense. She squeezed her bladder, trying not to let it go.

  Let me in. More clear now, coming from the direction of the window. Please. Please, I’m so cold. Let me in!

  “No,” Katie said. She made herself shout it. “No! I’m not letting you in! Go away!”

  Please. The voice was high, pitiful, pleading. I’ll die out here.

  Katie was shaking. “You can’t because you’re already dead.” She stared at the window, saw nothing, and turned in a full circle, her eyes panicked and staring. “I’m not letting you in, so go away! I mean it!”

  Let me in, came the plaintive cry again—and then her mother’s voice, close to Katie’s ear, spoken like an expert mimic. You’re going to get in trouble.