The Broken Girls Read online

  “Garrett, please,” Diane was forced to say.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Jamie said, but he turned back to his father and said, “Her family didn’t make it.”

  “Well, that’s a hell of a thing,” Garrett said. “To go through all that just to get killed and dropped in a well. Who would kill a girl like that? Sounds like something a Nazi would do, except she came all the way across the ocean to get away from those bastards.” He shook his head. “I was always proud that my dad went over there to help us beat those sons of bitches.”

  “Garrett,” Diane said again, and Fiona dropped her gaze to cut her meat.

  After supper, which felt interminable with tension, Diane busied herself in the kitchen again, cleaning up, and Jamie helped her. Fiona was left alone in the family room with Garrett as a football game played on mute on the TV. She stared at the screen silently, utterly uninterested in football, until she glanced at Garrett and realized he was looking at her.

  And suddenly, she was finished being polite. Just finished. “Listen,” she said to Garrett, knowing the words were a bad idea even as she said them. “Jamie isn’t in the room. I know you don’t want me here. I’ll admit, I don’t want to be here, either. Having dinner with the man who found my sister’s body isn’t my idea of fun.”

  He blinked at her, momentarily surprised, but there wasn’t a shred of sympathy in his expression. “What you don’t understand,” he said, “is the influence you have on him. The kind of influence he doesn’t need.”

  It took her a second to follow. “Jamie?” she asked. “You think I have an influence on Jamie?”

  “He can’t move up if he’s dating you,” Garrett said. “No one trusts a cop who’s in bed with a journalist.”

  It was probably true, but Jamie had never said anything about it to her. He’d never shown any resentment. He’d also never shown any burning ambition to move up, which was probably what was bothering Garrett. “That’s his decision,” she said.

  Garrett shook his head. “People don’t always make the best decisions,” he said. “So few people understand that you have to look out for your own best interests. All the time. Sometimes I think Jamie understands that least of all.”

  She stared at him. This conversation was surreal. “Jamie is a good man.”

  “What do you know about it?” he asked softly, and suddenly she knew, in a perfect premonition, that he was about to hurt her. That he was about to hurt her hard. “Tim Christopher was a good man, too, before his life was ruined.”

  For a second, she had no words at all. “What did you just say?” she managed.

  “I’ve always wondered,” Garrett said. “A witness who saw them arguing, and a drop of blood on his leg? That’s circumstantial evidence.” He shrugged, but the look he gave Fiona was deep and sharp. “Maybe he was railroaded. Don’t you ever wonder?”

  “Stop it.” The words came out like someone else’s voice. “Just stop.”

  “I’m not the only one,” Garrett said. “Because you can’t leave it alone.”

  There was the snap of the dishwasher closing in the kitchen, the rush of water. Diane laughed at something Jamie said.

  “It’s been twenty years,” Garrett said softly. “You think Jamie doesn’t tell me?”

  Fiona felt her dinner turn in her stomach, a rush of acid up her throat.

  “Wandering around on Old Barrons Road,” Garrett said. “Climbing the Idlewild fence. Deep down, you wonder about it just the same as I do. You’re a mess, sweetheart.”

  His gaze was fixed on her, the same gaze he’d used to pin liars and wrongdoers in thirty years of policing. “I was one of the first called out to that field,” he told her. “Some kids called it in. I had just come on shift. The only other cop on shift was Jim Carson, and he was barely twenty. No way would I let a kid like that be the first at a body. I took him with me, sure. But I knew it had to be me.”

  Fiona was silent now, unable to look away.

  “Everyone remembers,” Garrett said. “Everyone remembers, but no one remembers it quite like I do. Before the circus descended, when it was just Jim and me and the crows in the quiet of that field, looking down. I looked at her and thought, Whatever this is, this will be the worst thing this town has ever seen. This will be the beginning of the end.” He blinked. “It really was, wasn’t it? It really was. Tim’s life was over. The Christophers left. People locked their doors after that.”

  “You told Richard Rush to lie,” Fiona said. The words were hard, but they came. The idea she’d had since she’d read the article and talked to Mike Rush about his father. “You went into his shop and you made him do it somehow. You told him to say that Tim Christopher was there at nine o’clock. And he did. But he must have retracted it for some reason, because it never made it to court.” When I saw that article and asked Dad about it, he got angry, Mike Rush had said. My dad only ever gave me the belt three times in my life, and that was one of them. He told me never to ask about it again.

  “Are you going to do this?” Garrett asked her, his eyes on her, never leaving her. “Are you going to do it, twenty years later? Those are serious words, Fiona. I suggest you take them back.”

  But she wouldn’t stop, not now. “Why did you make him lie?”

  “What’s going on here?”

  Jamie stood in the doorway, watching them. His gaze flickered to his father, then to Fiona.

  “Thanks for coming, son,” Garrett said, his voice cold. “I think the evening is over.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Jamie was quiet the entire drive home, his jaw tight. Fiona looked briefly at him, at the lights of passing cars washing over his profile, and then she looked away, watched out the window.

  He didn’t speak until he pulled up in front of her apartment building, and then he put the SUV in park without turning it off. “It was something to do with Deb, wasn’t it?” he said, still staring ahead. “What you and my father were arguing about. It was something to do with this obsession of yours that won’t go away.” He paused. “You made him angry. What did you say to him?”

  She stared at him. “No one is allowed to make the great Garrett Creel angry—is that it?”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jamie said, and his voice was almost as cold as his father’s. “What did you say to him, Fiona?”

  And suddenly she was angry, too, so furious her hands were shaking. “I told you this was a bad idea. I warned you it wouldn’t work.”

  “You said you’d try. A couple of fucking hours. You didn’t even try to get along.”

  “Is that what everything is about with you?” she asked, lashing out at him, taking out all the anger she couldn’t unleash on Garrett. “Just getting along?”

  “Those are my parents.” His voice was rising. “That’s my dad.”

  “Jamie, you’re twenty-nine.”

  He stared at her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “He baited me. He started when we walked in, and he twisted the screws when he was left alone with me. He defended Tim Christopher, Jamie. This was what he wanted to happen.” And she’d given in to it. She’d walked right into the trap. What did that say about her?

  “Dad wouldn’t do that,” Jamie said. He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe you misunderstood. God, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”

  “You’re dating a journalist,” she said. “You’re a cop, and you’re dating Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter. Your family hates it. I’m sure your fellow cops hate it. Your sacred brotherhood. And I didn’t misunderstand anything. Tell me, do you and your dad ever sit around over beers and shoot the shit about my sister’s case?”

  Jamie went still and said nothing.

  “You knew,” she said to him. “That night we met at the bar. You knew who I was. You knew more about my sister’s case than I di
d. Your father was the first on the scene with my sister’s body. How did you think this would work, Jamie? Why the hell did you talk to me at all?”

  “Don’t put this on me,” he shot back, furious. “You’ve always known, Fee. From that first night, you knew who my father was. He was chief of police in 1994. You knew he worked that case. You sat through the entire fucking trial, all the testimony, read the papers. So why the hell did you talk to me?”

  The silence descended, heavy and tight.

  This is why, Fiona thought. This is why I haven’t done this, ever. Not with anyone. Why I’ve always said no.

  Because there was always Deb. And there always would be. Easy or no easy.

  She looked at Jamie and wanted to tell him that his father had made Richard Rush lie about Tim Christopher’s alibi. There was no way to prove it. Garrett would deny it, and so, she was sure, would Richard. There was only Mike Rush’s word, and Mike had already said he wasn’t interested in invoking his father’s anger. Mike hadn’t known he was talking to Deb Sheridan’s sister when he told the story, because Fiona had lied to him. She had lied without a second thought, and if she had to do it over again, she would do it without a second thought again. And again.

  But she wouldn’t tell Jamie. There was no point. He was a cop; his father was a cop; his grandfather was a cop. There was no need to make him believe. There was just hurt and anger, and confusion. Even if they patched it up, she’d hurt him again. Or he’d hurt her. Again.

  “Jamie,” she said.

  “Don’t.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, then dropped it again. “Fee, we can’t do this. Just . . . for now, okay? There’s too much shit going on. Just for now.”

  She stared down into her lap. The anger had gone as quickly as it came, and now she felt shaky and a little ashamed. But Jamie was right. She couldn’t do this right now. Not even for Jamie.

  Still, the idea of getting out and going home alone made her ill. For the first time, she wondered: When will this be over?

  But she already knew the answer to that. So she got out of the car.

  When he drove off, she stood watching for a moment, her hands in her pockets.

  When his taillights disappeared, she turned and climbed the stairs to her apartment.

  chapter 19

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  Malcolm had given her a phone number, of a woman in England who was at the helm of a research project focusing on Ravensbrück concentration camp. The woman answered after the phone rang for nearly a minute. “Ginette Harrison,” she said in a clipped upper-crust accent.

  “Hello,” Fiona said. “My name is Fiona Sheridan. My father, Malcolm, referred me to you?”

  “Yes,” Ginette said. Fiona heard the whistle of a teakettle in the background, as if she’d just dialed the direct number into a BBC show. “Fiona. I remember.”

  “Is now a good time?” Fiona asked. “I have some questions about Ravensbrück, if you have a moment.”

  “Well, yes, I do,” Ginette said. She sounded a little bemused. Fiona tried to guess her age from the sound of her voice, but with that dry English accent, she could have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty. “Pardon, I know I sound surprised,” she said. “It’s only that it’s just after nine o’clock in the morning here, and Malcolm told me you live near him, in Vermont.”

  “I do,” Fiona said.

  “That means it’s about four o’clock in the morning there, does it not?”

  Fiona looked around her dark apartment. She was sitting on the sofa, wearing a sleeping shirt and a pair of women’s boxer shorts, surrounded by the boxes from Idlewild. She’d given in and called England after fruitless hours of trying to sleep. “It is,” she admitted. “I just . . . It seemed urgent that I talk to you. Did my father tell you we found a body here?”

  “Yes.” There was a rustling, as if Ginette Harrison was sitting down somewhere, getting comfortable. Perhaps she was putting sugar and milk in her tea. “A girl found in a well?”

  “She disappeared in 1950,” Fiona said. “It was presumed she was a runaway.”

  “I see. And no one looked for her?”

  “According to the police record, no. Not after the first few days.”

  “I see,” Ginette said again. “I’m intrigued. Not because I’m a ghoul, but because if you’ve found a verified Ravensbrück inmate, I’d like to add her to my research.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The records from Ravensbrück were destroyed,” Ginette said, her voice clipped with calm anger. “They were incinerated right before the Russians liberated the camp in 1945. Records survive from many of the other camps, but Ravensbrück was obliterated. Willfully forgotten, if you will.”

  “Everything?” Fiona asked, her heart sinking.

  “I’m afraid so, yes. The Nazis dumped all of the prisoner records into the crematorium, alongside the bodies, before they left ahead of the advance of the Soviet army. And when the Russians took over the camp, they made no effort to preserve anything that was left.”

  “I see.” Fiona looked around at the boxes from Sarah London’s shed. Willfully forgotten.

  “Much of my research is focused on filling in those blanks,” Ginette continued. “I have spent years trying to find survivors, or any written records the survivors left. There are very few, and what still exists is hard to find.”

  “Hard to find?” Fiona asked. “The history of concentration camps is taught in schools. I thought there was a large body of work, much of it written by survivors, or sourced from survivors’ interviews.”

  “Most of the women who survived Ravensbrück didn’t speak of it,” Ginette explained. “They did their best to go back into the fabric of their lives and forget, which was all they wanted. A few wrote memoirs, but they’re long out of print. I’ve gathered what I can, especially from the few women left alive who are willing to talk about it. But Ravensbrück is a footnote. That leaves your dead girl as a footnote, too, I’m sorry to say.”

  “How could that be?” Fiona said. “How can an entire concentration camp be a footnote?”

  Ginette Harrison sighed. “It was a women’s camp, for one. And when the war ended and the Cold War began, it landed on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. No one in the West had access to the site for decades. Scholars, survivors, writers—everyone was split, East from West. By the time the Cold War ended, many of the survivors had died. No one wrote about it except for a handful of scholars who have kept the hope alive that the story can be rebuilt. One of them is me.”

  Fiona heaved herself onto her back on the sofa and ran a hand through her hair. She was tired, so tired. “So there is no chance that I’ll find a record of Sonia Gallipeau, who was there as a child, most likely with her mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ginette said. “Almost none. Malcolm gave me the name Emilie Gallipeau, but that doesn’t match any of the records I’ve found. Tens of thousands of women died at Ravensbrück, you understand—in the gas chambers, or worked to death in the slave labor camp, tortured, executed, or simply starved. Most of those women became anonymous when the records were burned.”

  Fiona stared at her ceiling in the dark, her eyes burning. It was incredible that tens of thousands of people could vanish from history without a single record. “Were the women Jews?” she asked.

  “Very few, in fact,” Ginette said. “They were prisoners from countries occupied by the Nazis, communists, members of the Resistance, Gypsies, captured spies. There was also a certain type of prisoner the Nazis termed ‘asocial.’”

  “Asocial?”

  “Prostitutes, destitute women, addicts and alcoholics, the mentally ill. Women the Nazis simply didn’t want society to support anymore, or women considered of low morals.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Fiona said. “How horrible.”

  “So you see wh
y so few survivors left records,” Ginette said quietly. “Some of the women at Ravensbrück were highly educated, but many were not. Many were simply powerless.”

  “And some were children.”

  “Yes,” the other woman agreed. “Some were children.”

  Fiona thought about this, still staring at her ceiling. The story itself was a horror so large it threatened to overtake everything in its path. She had to try to control it, not to let the nightmare send her off the path of what she was really after. She had to remember Sonia. “What happened to the camp itself after the war?”

  “It was mostly demolished over time,” Ginette replied. “The Soviet army took it, and there was no effort at historical preservation. Most of the buildings are long gone. There is a memorial there now in what buildings were left, including the crematorium. In the last days of the war, the Nazis who ran the camp fled, though some of them were captured, along with guards. There were two Ravensbrück trials in 1946, and the women—”

  “The women?” Fiona interrupted. “The guards were women?”

  “They were,” Ginette said. “The camp commander was a man, a member of the SS, reporting directly to Himmler. But the guards were women. Some were recruited from women’s prisons where they worked as guards, and some were from the local countryside, women who wanted a job.” She paused, listening to Fiona’s silence. “It’s a tad upsetting, isn’t it? We like to believe that women wouldn’t do such things to other women—send them into the gas chambers with their children, put them in the ovens. But I’m afraid there is no question that they did.”

  “Sorry I interrupted,” Fiona said. “You were talking about the war crimes trials.”

  “Yes. Even those were forgotten for decades during the Cold War. The records were sealed. There were a number of convictions, at least, and executions of guards. Many guards were never caught. It was the same with every concentration camp. There is a memorial on the site now, though Ravensbrück is out of the way, several hours from Berlin, over back roads. It was intentionally built on a remote site, on a lake with only a small rural town nearby.”