The Broken Girls Read online

  Fiona tore her gaze from the body in the well and stared at him. Something was crawling through her at the sight of the body, crawling over her skin. Not just revulsion and pity. Something big. Something that had to do with Deb and the words scrawled on the window. Good Night Girl. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe she fell. But it’s part of the story.”

  She watched his jaw clamp shut, his mind work. He was thinking about lawyers, nondisclosure agreements, gag orders. None of it mattered. Fiona was already standing here, looking at the body, and the cat was already out of the bag. “You can’t possibly be such a jackal,” he said finally.

  “I’m not sure what I am,” she told him, “but I’m not a jackal. I’m a writer. And this”—she motioned to the gaping hole in the well, the girl inside—“can be handled with respect.” She thought of Deb, the news stories from twenty years ago. “I can do it. I might be the only one who can do it right.”

  He was silent for a long minute. “You can’t promise that. The police—”

  “I can help with that, too.” She pulled out her cell phone and dialed. “Listen.”

  It rang only twice before Jamie’s voice came on the other end. “Fee?”

  “Jamie, I’m at Idlewild. We’re going to need some police.”

  He paused, surprised. She’d called his personal cell phone. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  “They’ve found a body here.”

  “Shit. Shit, Fee. Call nine-one-one.”

  Fiona remembered that she’d used the wrong terminology in this case. “It isn’t a fresh body. It’s remains, definitely human, probably decades old. We’ll need a coroner, some police. But can it be quiet? It might be . . . an accident. She might have just fallen.”

  “She?”

  “Yes. The owners want it quiet until she’s identified and it’s sorted out. Can that be done?”

  He paused for a second. “All right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. We’re on our way.”

  “Your help is admirable,” Anthony said as she hung up. “But futile.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  He put his icy hand over hers on the flashlight and aimed it at the back of the dead girl’s head. “Look at that,” he said. “Now tell me she fell.”

  Fiona stared. Who are you? she thought. What happened? Who are you, and how did you get here?

  Even after so many years, with the blood long gone, it was clear in the light. Beneath the strands of hair, the back of the girl’s head was smashed, a section of the skull nothing but shards of broken bone.

  * * *

  • • •

  The day stretched long, over the cold light of afternoon and the early descent of evening. By six o’clock the crew on scene had set up lights beneath the two tents they worked in—one over the ruins of the well, the second to receive and photograph the body. The crew was small. Fiona had memories of crowds of people in the news footage after Deb’s body was found—uniformed cops pressing back rubberneckers, detectives and crime scene techs scurrying in and out, more uniformed cops spreading out to look for footprints. But this was different. There was a handful of people moving back and forth between the tents, talking as quietly as if they were working in a library. There were no rubberneckers except Fiona, who was sitting on a pile of broken stone from the well, sipping a hot cup of coffee. Anthony Eden was gone, probably to report to his mother, and the only uniform on the scene belonged to Jamie.

  He exited the tent with the body in it and crossed the grass to sit next to her, wearing his heavy cop’s parka. His hair looked darker in the onset of dusk, his trim beard of lighter gold. “We’re almost done,” he said.

  Fiona nodded and made room for him to sit next to her. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “It’s nothing. You’ve been sitting here all day. You must be freezing.”

  “I’m fine.” Her toes were a little frigid in her hiking boots and her ass was numb, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. She’d long ago put her camera back in her car, since pictures were out of the question. “Can you tell me anything?”

  He stared at the lit tent and seemed to think it over. “Is this off the record?”

  “Jamie, for God’s sake.”

  “I know. I have to ask. It’s my job.”

  She drew a thumbnail along the top of her coffee cup. “Fine. It’s off the record.”

  “She was a teenager,” he said, appeased. “Fourteen, fifteen, thereabouts. Small for her age, but based on the bones, Dave Saunders is certain.”

  “The cause of death?”

  “It’s preliminary until the autopsy is done, but you saw her head. Saunders says a blow with something big and blunt, a rock or the end of a shovel.”

  “She couldn’t have hit her head on the way down the well?”

  “No. The bricks in the well are the wrong shape, the wrong size. Too smooth.”

  She’d been expecting it, but still she felt something heavy in her stomach. Her glance wandered off through the trees toward the sports field, where Deb had lain. Two girls dead, four hundred feet apart. “How old is the body?”

  “Based on the decomposition, at least forty years. According to Saunders, she’s reasonably well preserved because she’s been in the well, though not in water. The body is too old to test whether she was raped. No animals have been at her, and she’s been mostly protected from the elements. But she’s decomposed. She’s been there a long time.”

  This girl had been here, long dead, curled inside the well, on the night Deb was murdered. And after Deb was dead and before her body was found on the field, Idlewild had been the resting site for two murdered girls, decades apart. There was no way Fiona could be impartial about this, no way she could avoid crossing the lines. “I’ve seen pictures of the Idlewild uniforms, and they were navy blue and green. She isn’t wearing a uniform, is she?”

  Jamie said nothing, and Fiona turned and looked at him. He was still staring at the tent where the body lay, his jaw set.

  “What?” Fiona said. “You know something else. What is it?”

  He paused. “We can’t be sure. And if I tell you, you have to stay out of it at least until we notify the family.”

  Fiona felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. “You’ve identified her?”

  “There’s a tag sewn into the collar of her blouse,” he said. “A name tag.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Fee, you’ve been on the other side of this. If she has family, and the slightest thing is handled wrong, we make this worse.”

  Fiona knew. She remembered the day the cops had knocked on their door, the minute she had seen their faces and known that Deb wasn’t missing anymore. She pulled a notebook and pen from her back jeans pocket. “Just tell me.”

  “I’m warning you: don’t go digging. Give us a few days at least. This is a police investigation.”

  “I know.” Fiona stared at him, waiting. “I know. Jamie. Tell me.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Sonia Gallipeau,” he said. “I don’t recognize the name—I don’t think it’s a local family. She may have been a student from away. It doesn’t ring a bell for me, any missing girl with that name, but I already have Harvey digging into the files back at the station. He’ll call me any minute. And we don’t even have confirmation that this girl is Sonia Gallipeau—she could just be wearing Sonia’s blouse. She could have stolen or borrowed it, or bought it secondhand.”

  Fiona scribbled the name down in her notebook. “I’ll do my own search,” she said, holding up a hand before he could speak. “Just on the Internet. No phone calls. And I’ll ask Dad.”

  Jamie’s mouth was open to speak, but he thought better of it and closed it. He might not like it, but he was smart enough not to turn down help from Malcolm if it could aid the case. “I want to know what he says. And wha
t you find.”

  “I’ll come by later.” She pocketed the notebook and pen, then flung an arm around his neck, leaning in close to his ear, feeling the tension in his shoulders even through his parka. “I’ll bring takeout, and we’ll trade. Quid pro quo. How does that sound?”

  He still stared ahead, but a red flush moved up his cheeks. “You do this to me,” he said, shaking his head. “Fuck it. Bring beer.”

  “I will.” She could have kissed him, but she didn’t. Instead, she got up and headed back over the muddy track toward her car, without looking back to see if he was watching.

  chapter 8

  Sonia

  Barrons, Vermont

  October 1950

  Books were her salvation. As a child, she’d had a shelf of childhood favorites that she loved enough to read over and over again. But after, during the hospital stay and the long voyage and the cold days in Idlewild’s dreary hallways, books became more than mere stories. They were her lifeline, the pages as essential to her as breathing.

  Even now, sitting in class, Sonia touched her finger to the yellowed pages of her Latin textbook, as if its texture could calm her. At the blackboard, Mrs. Peabody droned on about verb conjugation as the ten girls in the room fidgeted in their chairs. Charlotte Kankle peeled at a hangnail on her thumb, watching from under her angry lowered brows as a bead of blood came out. Cindy Benshaw shifted in her chair and scratched her ear, the motion of her arm revealing the circles of sweat stains on the armpit of her blouse, like the rings of an old tree. It was cold outside, but it was suffocating in here, the room airless, the smells of unwashed girls’ bodies and chalk dust trapped in a bubble.

  Sonia already knew this Latin lesson. She had read ahead in the textbook ages ago; she couldn’t help it. Books were in short supply at Idlewild. There was no library, no literature class, no kindly librarian to take My Friend Flicka from the shelf and hand it over with a smile. The only books at Idlewild were sent by friends or family, dropped off on rare Family Visit Days, or brought back by the lucky girls after Christmas holiday visits home. As a result, every book in Idlewild, no matter how silly or dull, circulated through a hundred hungry hands before finally disintegrating into individual pages, which were often held together by an elastic band until the pages themselves began to disappear. And when there were no other books to be had, the most desperate girls read textbooks.

  Barely listening to the lecture, Sonia flipped the pages of the textbook over, looking for the handwriting. Pencil writing, just as Katie had shown them in her own book under the light of a flashlight. She turned to the first page of the textbook’s index and stared at the writing in the margin.

  Mary hates the teachers more than she hates us.

  Jessie Dunn, January 1947.

  Sonia turned away from the page again and looked up at Mrs. Peabody. She was writing on the blackboard, her wide rear end on full display, her thick waist pinched painfully by her ill-fitting girdle beneath her polyester dress. Idlewild’s polite fiction that its girls would leave educated, ready for great things—Bryn Mawr, Yale, Harvard—was one that no one believed, not even the teachers.

  Her temples pounded, an aftereffect of yesterday’s episode in the dining hall. The details were shaky and juddery in places, like a film coming off its reel. She had frozen at supper, watching the girls fight, listening to the angry shouts from the teachers. Her friends had taken her back to their room while she’d fought the memory of something awful and terrifying, a thing she didn’t want to look at or touch anymore.

  Charlotte Kankle was sucking the side of her thumb, licking the blood off. She watched Mrs. Peabody with a sort of hypnotized focus, a half-asleep concentration. Sonia envied her, the way she could turn her brain off, think about absolutely nothing. It was a trick Sonia herself had never learned. That was what books did—they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn’t have your own. Her own treasure was her copy of Blackie’s Girls’ Annual, found on a shelf in the dorm, left by some previous occupant and quickly squirreled away so she could stare at its thirty-year-old plates and read its strange stories of English schoolgirls’ picnic outings over and over again.

  Books, Sonia had decided, were what she would live with when she finally left this place. She would work in a library—any library, anywhere. She’d sweep the floors if she had to. But she’d work in a library, and she’d read the books every day for the rest of her life.

  Sonia’s chair jerked: Katie, kicking her from the desk behind. Sonia had never seen a girl who got bored as fast, or as dangerously, as Katie. Roberta had the ability to be still, and CeCe rarely got bored at all, but behind Katie’s tilted, dark-lashed eyes lurked a restless intelligence that sometimes looked for trouble.

  Sure enough, seconds later a scrap of paper sailed over Sonia’s shoulder and landed on her desk. Sonia uncrumpled it to see a crude drawing of Mrs. Peabody, wearing a witch’s hat, sporting a wart on her nose, riding a field hockey stick, her black skirt hiked up and a pelt of dark hair visible on her knobby legs. The caption beneath the drawing read, SPORTSMANSHIP, GIRLS! SPORTSMANSHIP!

  Sonia stifled a laugh. Sportsmanship was Mrs. Peabody’s hobbyhorse, the lecture she gave out regularly, whether the topic was test marks or proper ways to line up in the dining hall or actual sports. Lack of sportsmanship, in Mrs. Peabody’s view, was the root of most problems with Idlewild girls. Like Lady Loon’s constant use of “ladies” or Mrs. Wentworth’s spitting as she spoke, it was a tic that became more noticeable with the suffocating familiarity that was life at a boarding school, and it made for good satire. The sportsmanship lecture was unavoidable for any student who spent years in Mrs. Peabody’s class.

  Sonia slipped the paper into her textbook just as Mrs. Peabody turned around. “Miss Winthrop,” the teacher said with dark intent.

  “Yes, Mrs. Peabody,” came Katie’s voice from behind Sonia.

  “You are disturbing my class for the third time this week.”

  Though she wasn’t facing her, Sonia could imagine Katie’s lip curling. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Mrs. Peabody’s eyes went hard. She was a fiftyish woman with a face pockmarked with old acne scars. She handled the girls with more dignity than Lady Loon, but she was tough as nails and usually mean, her fingers and teeth yellowed with nicotine. Sonia wondered what had caused Mrs. Peabody, like the other teachers, to take a job at Idlewild instead of at a normal school. “Your rudeness is only making it worse for you,” she said to Katie.

  “I didn’t do anything, you old hag,” Katie snapped back.

  Sonia felt clammy sweat on her back, beneath her blouse. Charlotte Kankle had stopped sucking her thumb, and Cindy Benshaw was staring, openmouthed. Stop shouting, Sonia thought. She remembered having the same thought in the dining hall yesterday.

  “Katie Winthrop!” Mrs. Peabody picked up a ruler and smacked it hard on the desk, making all the girls jump. “You are the most disobedient—”

  Next to the blackboard, the classroom door flew open and hit the wall with a bang.

  The girls jumped again, including Sonia. The sound was as loud as a gunshot, the doorknob crashing into the wall. There was no one in the doorway, nothing to see beyond it but an empty hall.

  Let me in, a voice said.

  Mrs. Peabody dropped her ruler. There was a breath of silence in the room, a waft of cold air down the back of Sonia’s neck. She slid down in her chair, her body wanting to fold in on itself. What was that? Sonia looked around. Rose Perry had her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. Charlotte Kankle was gripping the sides of her desk with a white-knuckled hold. Had everyone heard it? Or was it just her?

  “What is this?” Mrs. Peabody nearly shouted, her voice harsh and shrill. Fear, Sonia realized. She recognized fear. It was crawling through the depths of her own stomach right now. “Is this some kind of prank?” The teacher stared at them, her e
yes blazing.

  The room was silent. Even Katie didn’t speak. Someone giggled, the sound terrified and completely devoid of humor. Someone else whispered, Shh. Sonia stared at the open square of doorway. What if something is coming? Right now? Down the hallway toward the door, slow and steady, closer, and when it reaches the door, it will—

  “Fine,” Mrs. Peabody said into the silence of the room. “Since no one will confess, Miss Winthrop, get up. You’re going to detention.”

  “That’s unfair!” Katie shouted. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Mrs. Peabody marched out from behind her desk and up the classroom aisle. Her face was red now, her cheeks mottled. “Get up,” she said. “Right now.” She yanked Katie out of her seat by the arm, jerking her upward in a bruising grip. Katie’s limbs jumped like a marionette’s, and her face set in an expression hard as granite. As Mrs. Peabody yanked her mercilessly back down the aisle, Katie caught Sonia’s eye and her look was cold.

  The girls watched as Katie was taken from the room, her shoes clapping uneasily on the old wood floor as she tried to keep her balance in Mrs. Peabody’s grip. Then both of them were gone, and the air was heavy with silence. Not one girl breathed a word.

  I should have done something, Sonia thought softly to herself, staring down at her textbook again. I should have stood up. It’s too late now.

  And suddenly, she felt like crying.

  chapter 9

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  At ten o’clock that night, Fiona arrived at Jamie’s. She brought her laptop, her notebooks, and the promised six-pack of beer.

  Jamie lived on the top floor of a duplex in downtown Barrons, an old Victorian house that had been restored—to a degree—and rented. The lady who owned it was more than happy to rent the top unit to a cop, and the family with two small children who lived in the bottom unit were happy to have him for a neighbor. The street was a treelined lane that had been wealthy a hundred years ago, when Barrons had seen better days. Now its big Victorians were split into apartments for blue-collar parents and retirees, and rusty bikes and abandoned kids’ toys littered the half-mowed lawns.