The Broken Girls Page 2
“She wasn’t your sister,” Fiona said.
He was quiet for a second, acknowledging that. “Tim Christopher was charged,” he said. “He was tried and convicted of Deb’s murder. He’s spent the past twenty years in a maximum-security prison. And, Fee, you’re still out there on Old Barrons Road at three o’clock in the morning.”
The farther she walked, the darker it got. It was colder here, a strange pocket of air that made her hunch farther into her coat as her nose grew numb. “I need to know how he did it,” she said. Her sister, age twenty, had been strangled and dumped in the middle of the former sports field on the abandoned grounds of Idlewild Hall in 1994, left lying on one side, her knees drawn up, her eyes open. Her shirt and bra had been ripped open, the fabric and elastic torn straight through. She’d last been seen in her college dorm thirty miles away. Her boyfriend, Tim Christopher, had spent twenty years in prison for the crime. He’d claimed he was innocent, and he still did.
Fiona had been seventeen. She didn’t much like to think about how the murder had torn her family apart, how it had affected her life. It was easier to stand on the side of the road and obsess over how Christopher had dumped her sister’s body, something that had never been fully understood, since no footprints had been found in the field or the woods, no tire tracks on the side of the road. The Idlewild property was surrounded by a fence, but it was decades old and mostly broken; he could have easily carried the body through one of the gaps. Assuming he came this way.
Jamie was right. Damn him and his cop brain, which her journalist brain was constantly at odds with. This was a detail that was rubbing her raw, keeping her wound bleeding, long after everyone else had tied their bandages and hobbled away. She should grab a crutch—alcohol or drugs were the convenient ones—and start hobbling with the rest of them. Still, she shivered and stared into the trees, thinking, How the hell did he carry her through there without leaving footprints?
The phone was still to her ear. She could hear Jamie there, waiting.
“You’re judging me,” she said to him.
“I’m not,” he protested.
“I can hear it in how you breathe.”
“Are you being serious?”
“I—” She heard the scuff of a footstep behind her, and froze.
“Fiona?” Jamie asked, as though he’d heard it through the phone.
“Ssshh,” she said, the sound coming instinctively from her lips. She stopped still and cocked her head. She was in almost complete darkness now. Idlewild Hall, the former girls’ boarding school, had been closed and abandoned since 1979, long before Deb died, the gates locked, the grounds overgrown. There were no lights here at the end of the road, at the gates of the old school. Nothing but the wind in the trees.
She stiffly turned on her heel. It had been distinct, a footstep against the gravel. If it was some creep coming from the woods, she had no weapon to defend herself with. She’d have to scream through the phone at Jamie and hope for the best.
She stared into the dark silence behind her, watched the last dying leaves shimmer on the inky trees.
“What the fuck?” Jamie barked. He never swore unless he was alarmed.
“Ssshh,” she said to him again. “It’s no one. It’s nothing. I thought I heard something, that’s all.”
“Do I have to tell you,” he said, “to get off of a dark, abandoned road in the middle of the night?”
“Have you ever thought that there’s something creepy about Old Barrons Road?” she asked. “I mean, have you ever been out here? It’s sort of uncanny. It’s like there’s something . . .”
“I can’t take much more of this,” Jamie said. “Get back in your car and drive home, or I’m coming to get you.”
“I’ll go, I’ll go.” Her hands were tingling, even the hand that was frozen to her phone, and she still had a jittery blast of adrenaline blowing down her spine. That had been a footstep. A real one. The hill was hidden through the trees from here, and she suddenly longed for the comforting sight of the fluorescent gas station lights. She took a step, then realized something. She stopped and turned around again, heading quickly for the gates of Idlewild Hall.
“I hope that sound is you walking toward your car,” Jamie said darkly.
“There was a sign,” Fiona said. “I saw it. It’s posted on the gates. It wasn’t there before.” She got close enough to read the lettering in the dark. ANOTHER PROJECT BY MACMILLAN CONSTRUCTION, LTD. “Jamie, why is there a sign saying that Idlewild Hall is under construction?”
“Because it is,” he replied. “As of next week. The property was sold two years ago, and the new owner is taking it over. It’s going to be restored, from what I hear.”
“Restored?” Fiona blinked at the sign, trying to take it in. “Restoring it into what?”
“Into a new school,” he replied. “They’re fixing it up and making it a boarding school again.”
“They’re what?”
“I didn’t want to mention it, Fee. I know what that place means to you.”
Fiona took a step back, still staring at the sign. Restored. Girls were going to be playing in the field where Deb’s body had lain. They would build new buildings, tear down old ones, add a parking lot, maybe widen the road. All of this landscape that had been here for twenty years, the landscape she knew so well—the landscape of Deb’s death—would be gone.
“Damn it,” she said to Jamie as she turned and walked back toward her car. “I’ll call you tomorrow. I’m going home.”
chapter 2
Katie
Barrons, Vermont
October 1950
The first time Katie Winthrop had seen Idlewild Hall, she nearly cried. She’d been in the backseat of her father’s Chevy, looking between Dad’s gray-suited shoulder and Mom’s crepe-bloused one, and when the big black gates loomed at the end of Old Barrons Road, she’d suddenly felt tears sting her eyes.
The gates were open, something she soon learned was rare. Dad had driven the car through the entrance and up the long dirt drive in silence, and she had stared at the building that rose up before them: the main hall, three stories high and stretching endlessly long, lined with peaked windows that looked like rows of teeth, broken only by the portico that signaled the front door. It was August, and the air was thick and hot, heavy with oncoming rain. As they drew closer, it looked uncannily like they were traveling into the jaws of the building, and Katie had swallowed hard, keeping straight and still as the hall grew larger and larger in the windshield.
Dad stopped the car, and for a moment there was no sound but the engine ticking. Idlewild Hall was dark, with no sign of life. Katie looked at her mother, but Mom’s face was turned away, looking sightlessly out the passenger window, and even though Katie was so close she could see the makeup Mom had pressed onto her cheek with a little sponge, she did not speak.
I’m sorry, she’d suddenly wanted to say. Please don’t make me stay here. I can’t do it. I’m so sorry . . .
“I’ll get your bags,” Dad said.
That had been two years ago. Katie was used to Idlewild now—the long worn hallways that smelled like mildew and girls’ sweat, the windows that let in icy drafts around the edges in winter, the wafts of wet, mulchy odor on the field hockey green no matter what the season, the uniforms that hadn’t been changed since the school first opened in 1919.
Katie was the kind of girl other girls tended to obey easily: dark-haired, dominant, beautiful, a little aggressive, and unafraid. She wasn’t popular, exactly, but she’d had to use her fists only twice, and both times she’d won easily. A good front, she knew, was most of the battle, and she’d used hers without mercy. It wasn’t easy to survive in a boarding school full of throwaway girls, but after swallowing her tears in those first moments, Katie had mastered it.
She saw her parents twice a year, once in summer and once at Chris
tmas, and she’d never told them she was sorry.
There were four girls per room in Clayton Hall, the dormitory. You never knew whom you would get. One of Katie’s first roommates, a stringy-haired girl from New Hampshire who claimed to be descended from a real Salem witch, had the habit of humming relentlessly as she read her Latin textbook, biting the side of her thumbnail with such diligence that Katie had thought it might be grounds for murder. After the Salem witch left, she was replaced by a long-legged, springy-haired girl whose name Katie had never remembered, and who spent most of her nights curled up in her bunk, quietly sobbing into her pillow until Charlotte Kankle, who was massive and always angry, rolled out of her bunk and told her, Stop crying, for the love of Jesus Christ, or I promise you these other girls will hold you down while I give you a bloody nose. No one had contradicted her. The sobbing girl had been quiet after that, and she’d left a few weeks later.
Charlotte Kankle had since moved down the hall—after she and Katie got into a fistfight, one of Katie’s victories—and now she had a set of roommates here in 3C that, she had to admit, might not be a total failure. Idlewild was the boarding school of last resort, where parents stashed their embarrassments, their failures, and their recalcitrant girls. Hidden in the backwoods of Vermont, it had only 120 students: illegitimate daughters, first wives’ daughters, servants’ daughters, immigrant girls, girls who misbehaved or couldn’t learn. Most of them fought and mistrusted one another, but in a backward way, Katie felt these girls were the only ones who understood her. They were the only ones who just shrugged in boredom when she told them how many times she’d run away from home.
She sat up in bed after curfew one night and rooted beneath her pillow for the pack of cigarettes she’d stashed there. It was October, and cold autumn rain spattered the single high window in the dorm room. She banged on the bunk above her. “CeCe.”
“What is it?” CeCe was awake, of course. Katie had already known it from the sound of her breathing.
“I want to tell you a ghost story.”
“Really?” There was a muffled sound as CeCe slid over on her bunk and looked over the edge, down at Katie. “Is it Mary Hand?”
“Oh, no,” came a voice from the top bunk across the room. “Not another story about Mary Hand.”
“Ssh, Roberta,” CeCe said. “You’ll wake Sonia.”
“I’m awake,” Sonia said from beneath her covers on the bunk below Roberta. When she was half-asleep, her French accent was more pronounced. “I cannot sleep with all of your talking.”
Katie tapped a cigarette from the pack. All four girls in the room were fifteen years old—Idlewild had long ago grouped girls of the same age, since the older girls tended to bully the younger ones when they roomed together. “Mary Hand is in my Latin textbook,” she said. “Look.”
She pulled the book—which was decades old and musty—from beneath her bed, along with a small flashlight. Flashlights were forbidden at Idlewild, a rule that every girl flouted without exception. Holding the flashlight steady, she quickly paged through the book until she came to the page she wanted. “See?” she said.
CeCe had climbed down from her bunk. She had the biggest breasts of any of the four of them, and she self-consciously brought a blanket down with her, pulling it over her shoulders. “Oh,” she said as she stared at the page Katie had lit with the flashlight. “I have that in my grammar book. Something similar, at least.”
“What is it?” Roberta was lured from her top bunk, her sleek calves poking from the hem of her outgrown nightgown, her brownish blond hair tied into a braid down her back. She landed on the floor without a sound and peered over CeCe’s shoulder. Katie heard her soft intake of breath.
Along the edge of the page, in the narrow band of white space, was a message in pencil.
Saw Mary Hand through the window of 1G, Clayton Hall.
She was walking away over the field.
Wednesday, August 7, 1941. Jenny Baird.
Looking at it gave Katie a blurry, queasy feeling, a quick pulse of fear that she refused to show. Everyone knew of Mary Hand, but somehow these penciled letters made her more real. “It isn’t a joke, is it,” she said—a statement, not a question.
“No, it’s not a joke,” CeCe said. “The one in my grammar book said Toilet, third floor, end of west hall, I saw Mary there. That one was from 1939.”
“It’s a message.” This was Sonia, who had gotten up and was looking over Roberta’s shoulder. She shrugged and backed away again. “I’ve seen them, too. They have never changed the textbooks here, I think.”
Katie flipped through the musty pages of the Latin textbook. Its front page listed the copyright as 1919, the year Idlewild opened. She tried to picture the school as it had been then: the building brand-new, the uniforms brand-new, the textbooks brand-new. Now, in 1950, Idlewild was a time machine, a place that had no inkling of atomic bombs or Texaco Star Theatre on television. It made sense, in a twisted way, that Idlewild girls would pass wisdom down to one another in the margins of their textbooks, alongside the lists of American Revolution battles and the chemical makeup of iodine. The teachers never looked in these books, and they were never thrown away. If you wanted to warn a future girl about Mary Hand, the books were the best place to do it.
Through the window of 1G, Clayton Hall. Katie struck a match and lit her cigarette.
“You shouldn’t,” Roberta said halfheartedly. “Susan Brady will smell it, and then you’ll catch hell.”
“Susan Brady is asleep,” Katie replied. Susan was the dorm monitor for Floor Three, and she took her job very seriously, which meant that no one liked her. Katie switched off the flashlight and the four of them sat in the dark. Roberta tossed a pillow on the floor and sat with her back against the narrow dresser. Sonia quietly moved to the window and cracked it open, letting the smoke escape.
“So,” CeCe said to Katie. “Have you seen her?”
Katie shrugged. She wished she’d never brought it up now; she knew these girls, but not well enough yet to trust them. Looking at the penciled messages in her Latin book again had unsettled her. The fact was, she wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to her, and she wished that it had been as simple as seeing Idlewild’s ghost in the bathroom. It had seemed real at the time, but to put it into words now felt impossible. She swallowed and deflected the subject. “Do you think she was really a student here?” she asked the other girls.
“I heard she was,” Roberta said. “Mary Van Woorten, on the field hockey team, says that Mary Hand died when she was locked out of the school on a winter night and lost her way.”
“It must have been years ago.” CeCe had crawled onto the bunk next to Katie and propped up the pillows against the headboard. “I heard she knocks on the windows at night, trying to get in. That she begs girls to come outside and follow her, but if you do it, you die.”
CeCe was the roommate Katie had had the longest, and the one she knew the most about, because CeCe was an open book. She was the illegitimate daughter of a rich banker, sired on one of the housemaids and packed off to one boarding school or another for most of her life. CeCe, amazingly, held no animosity toward her father, and was close to her mother, who was now a housekeeper for a family in Boston. She’d told Katie all of this on their first meeting, as she’d hung up her Idlewild crested jacket and put away her hockey stick.
“You can sometimes hear her singing in the field when the wind is in the trees,” Roberta added. “A lullaby or something.”
Katie hadn’t heard that one. “You can hear her?”
Roberta shrugged. She had been at Idlewild for only a few months, whereas the other girls had been here for at least a year, and Sonia for three. Roberta was smart, a natural athlete, though she didn’t talk much. No one knew anything about her home life. Katie couldn’t figure out what she was doing here of all places, but from the hooded look that she often saw in Robert
a’s eyes—that look of retreat, of watching the world as if from behind a wall, that was common to a lot of Idlewild girls—she guessed there was a reason. “I’ve never heard her myself, and I’m at practice four times a week.” Roberta turned to Sonia, as she often did. “Sonia, what do you think?”
If CeCe was the easiest to understand, Sonia was the hardest. Pale, thin, quiet, flitting in and out of the crowds and the complicated social cliques, she seemed apart from everything, even for an Idlewild girl. She was an immigrant from France, and in the aftermath of the war, where so many of the girls had lost a father or a brother or had men come home ragged from POW camps, no one asked her about it. She’d been at Idlewild the longest of any of them.
Sonia seemed completely self-contained, as if whatever was happening inside her own head was sufficient for her. For some reason Roberta, who was swift and fit and graceful, had become smitten with Sonia, and could often be seen by her side. They were so easy together, it made Katie want that, too. Katie had never been easy with anyone. She’d always been the girl with admirers, not friends.
Sonia caught Katie’s eyes briefly and shrugged, the gesture cool and European even in her simple white nightgown. “I have no use for ghosts,” she said in her sweet, melodious accent, “though like everyone else, I’ve heard she wears a black dress and a veil, which seems a strange outfit if you are outside in the snow.” Her gaze, resting on Katie in the darkened gloom, missed nothing. “You saw something. Did you not?”
Katie glanced at the cigarette, forgotten in her fingers. “I heard her,” she said. She tamped out the smoke against the brass back of the sophomore achievement medal someone had left behind, and ground the butt with her thumb.
“Heard her?” CeCe asked.
Katie took a breath. Talking about Mary Hand felt like speaking of a family secret somehow. It was one thing to tell ghost stories in the dark, and another when you opened your locker before gym class and felt something push it closed again. There were always small things, like a feeling of being watched, or a cold patch in a hallway, that you were never quite sure you’d experienced, and you felt stupid bringing up. But this had been different, and Katie had the urge to speak it out loud. “It was in the common, on the path that goes past the dining hall.”