Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

It snowed overnight, just a light dusting that gathered in the cracks and crevices, blowing in the wind like packing peanuts. Fiona drove over roads more and more remote and rutted into East Mills, a tiny town that didn’t seem to offer much more than a gas station, a few grimy shops, and a Dunkin’ Donuts. Trucks blasted by as she traveled the main street, either on their way to Canada or on their way back. The sky was mottled, the sun coming and going behind swift-moving clouds.

Sarah London lived in an old Victorian with missing shingles and a postage-stamp front lawn that was thick with dead weeds. Fiona had tried to call first, but had gotten only a phone that rang and rang on the other end, with no answering machine, and she hadn’t had a signal on her cell at all for the last half hour. She pulled the phone out of her pocket now, as she sat in the driveway, but saw that she had no bars. Fine, then. She would wing it.

She got out and walked to the wooden porch, her boots loud on the damp, sagging steps. According to the DMV record Jamie had pulled, Sarah London was eighty-eight years old, which made the house’s neglect logical, especially if the old woman lived alone.

Her first knock on the storm door wasn’t answered, but her second knock brought a faint shuffling from within. “Miss London?” she called. “I’m not a salesperson. My name is Fiona Sheridan, and I’m a journalist.”

That brought footsteps, as she’d known it would. The inner door swung open to reveal a woman with a stooped back, her thin white hair tied back. Though her posture was crouched and she was wearing an old housecoat, she still gave off an air of offended dignity. She narrowed her eyes at Fiona through the screen. “What does a journalist want with me?”

“I’m doing a story on Idlewild Hall.”

In an instant the woman’s eyes lit up, a reaction that she quickly struggled to mask as if she thought Fiona was leading her on. “No one cares about Idlewild Hall,” she said, suspicious again.

“I do,” Fiona said. “They’re restoring it. Did you know that?”

For a second the woman swayed in utter surprise, her gaze so vacant with shock that Fiona wondered if she’d have to barge inside and use the landline to call 911. Then she gripped the doorframe and unlatched the storm door. “My God, my God,” she murmured. “Come inside.”

The house’s interior mirrored the exterior: a place that had been cared for, but was now sinking into neglect with the age of its owner. An unused sitting room sat primly on the right, old figurines and knickknacks growing dust on its fussy shelves. The floor of the front hall was lined with a plastic runner that had probably been placed there in the early eighties. Fiona politely paused and unlaced her boots as the woman proceeded into the kitchen.

“I don’t—I don’t have anything,” the woman said as she looked around the kitchen, where the newspaper she’d been reading was neatly set on the kitchen table. “I wasn’t expecting . . .”

“It’s okay, Miss London,” Fiona said. “I don’t need anything. Thank you.”

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Fiona Sheridan. Call me Fiona, please.”

Sarah London nodded, and Fiona noticed she didn’t return the invitation. “Have a seat, Fiona.”

Obediently, Fiona pulled out a kitchen chair and sat on it. Once a teacher, always a teacher, she thought. She folded her hands in front of her on the table.

That seemed to please the old woman. She pulled out her own chair and lowered herself. Her hands were twisted and gnarled with arthritis, the knuckles pearly gray. “Now, please tell me about this restoration. As you can see, I’ve been reading the newspaper, which I do every day. I’ve never read anything about this.”

“That’s why I’m writing the story,” Fiona said.

Miss London seemed to consider this. “Who—who in the world is mad enough to restore Idlewild?”

It was a sentiment that so closely mirrored Fiona’s own thoughts that she paused. But there was a tinge of nerves on the edges of Miss London’s expression, on the edges of her words. “A woman named Margaret Eden,” she said, “aided by her son, Anthony.”

Miss London blinked and shook her head. “I’ve never heard of such people.”

Fiona had a list of questions in her head that she’d planned to ask, but on an impulse she skipped all of them. “Why do you think it’s mad to restore Idlewild?” she said.

“Well, of course it’s mad.” Miss London’s voice shook a little, but she maintained her composure, sitting with ramrod posture. “Of course it is. That old building . . . that old place.” She waved a twisted hand, as if Fiona should surely know what she was talking about. “Are they making it into a school?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, dear God.” The words were spoken swiftly, softly, as if they’d escaped from the woman’s mouth. Then she recovered and said, “Well, I wish them luck.”

“You were a teacher there for a long time, were you not?”

“Twenty-nine years. Until the school’s last day.”

“You must have loved it there.”

“No one loved it there,” the older woman said bluntly. “Those girls were trouble. They made life miserable for all of us. They weren’t good girls. Not at all.”

Fiona felt her eyebrows rise. “And yet you stayed.”

“Teaching is all I know, Fiona,” Miss London said, her expression growing stern. “It’s what I do. Or what I did, at least.”

“Was Idlewild the only place you ever worked?”

“I worked at a few other schools after Idlewild closed, until I retired. I’m local.” That hand wave again, as if there was no need to say all of this aloud. “Born not even half a mile from where we’re sitting now. A Vermonter all my life. I never saw the need to leave.”

In the pasty light of the kitchen, Sarah London looked much older than she had at first, her eyes watery, the corners of her mouth drooping. She was a tough old Vermonter, but that didn’t mean she’d had an easy life. “I have a photograph,” Fiona said. “Would you like to see it?”

“I suppose,” Miss London said carefully, though the gleam of interest in her eyes was a dead giveaway.

Fiona pulled a printout of the field hockey photograph from her pocket and smoothed it out over the table. Miss London looked at it for a long time. “That’s me,” she said finally. “Took over the team the year Charlene McMaster quit to get married. She barely lasted eight months. I didn’t want to do it, not one bit. But we did as we were told in those days.”

“Do you remember these girls?” Fiona asked.

“Of course I do. We didn’t have all that many students. And my memory hasn’t gone yet, praise God.”

Fiona glanced down at the photograph, the girls lined up in their uniforms. They weren’t good girls. “You even remember their names?”

“Yes, probably. Why do you ask?”

“This was taken two years after the disappearance of a student named Sonia Gallipeau,” Fiona said. “Do you remember that?”

The room rang with deafening silence.

“Miss London?” Fiona asked.

“The French girl,” Miss London said quietly, almost to herself. She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that name in over sixty years.”

“Something happened to her,” Fiona said. “In 1950.”

“She ran away, they said.” Miss London’s hand went to her face, the gnarled yet elegant old fingers stroking her cheek in an absent, thoughtful gesture. “I remember that day. My first year. She went off to see relatives and never came back.”

“What do you remember?” Fiona prompted softly.

“Everything.” Miss London’s fingers stroked her cheek again, automatic. “We searched for her, but not for long. There wasn’t much to do about a runaway girl. I never said anything, because the case was closed and we all moved on. But I always thought she was dead.”

“Why did you think she was dead?” Fiona asked.

“Don’t get me wrong. We had girls who ran away.” Miss London shook her head. “One just the year before Sonia. There’s nothing you can do about a bad apple. But I never thought Sonia would do it. She had nowhere to go, for one. She wasn’t even American. She was plain, quiet as a mouse. She wouldn’t go off hitching rides or running away with some boy. She didn’t have it in her.”

“So you don’t think she ran away.”

“I thought at first—the relatives must have done it. It’s the obvious choice, isn’t it? No one knew them. They came to see her once a year at Christmas, but that was all. Then she goes to visit and she never comes back. But they checked out the relatives and said no. They were just a couple of old people who felt sorry for her, but didn’t want to take in a girl. The wife had nagged the husband into the visit—said she felt bad, leaving the girl there for so long, with a visit only once a year. The husband didn’t want to do it—he wasn’t interested in a teenage girl, though eventually he gave in. But she’d changed her bus ticket and run away from them, too.”

Fiona waited. Miss London’s eyes were open, but she was seeing nothing, nothing but 1950. There wasn’t even a clock ticking in this house; it was so silent.

“They found her suitcase,” Miss London continued. “In the woods right off the edge of Old Barrons Road, where it meets the school gates. They found it in the weeds.”

Now it was Fiona’s turn to freeze in shock. Right where I was walking, she thought. Right where I was standing, talking to Jamie on the phone, and listening to a shuffling sound in the gravel that was just like a footstep.

The old teacher kept talking, the words spilling out. “What girl runs away with no suitcase? I ask you. Her friends were beside themselves, but the Winthrop girl left a few years later, and that girl, the Ellesmeres’ girl, left after that. I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t know what happened to any of them.”

“Wait a minute,” Fiona said. “They found her abandoned suitcase, and still everyone thought she’d run away?”

“You weren’t there,” Miss London argued. “You weren’t living with those girls. In that place. We had a girl run away the year before I came. They’d thought for sure she was dead. Then she turned up at her grandparents’ in Florida with some hoodlum in tow.” Her eyes met Fiona’s, eyes that were aged and watery but somehow hard. “Sonia ran away from her own relatives, so it was decided. I couldn’t say anything. I was new, but even then I understood.”

“Understood what?”

“You can sit there and judge. But you spend twenty-nine years at Idlewild. I was on edge every day. It’s a hard place, an awful place. I had to stay because it was my job, because I needed the money, but sometimes the girls . . . they ran. And deep down we didn’t blame them.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were all so horribly afraid.”

The back of Fiona’s neck was icy cold. “Afraid of what?”

Miss London’s lips parted, but there was a smack on the front storm door, followed by the bang of the inner door. “Aunt Sairy!” came a woman’s voice, roughened by cigarette smoke. “It’s me.”

Shoes clomped up the hallway runner, and Fiona twisted in her chair to see a woman in her late forties come to the kitchen door, her lank blond hair in a ponytail, her wide hips pressed into yoga pants beneath her parka. She was scowling. “Oh, hello,” she said, her voice darkening with suspicion.

Fiona pushed her chair back and stood up, figuring she was once again being mistaken for a salesperson, probably in the midst of snowing an eighty-eight-year-old woman into some kind of scam. “I’m Fiona Sheridan,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m a journalist writing a story about Idlewild Hall.”

The cloud left the woman’s face, and she looked at Miss London for confirmation. “Okay, then,” she said ungraciously, shaking Fiona’s hand briskly in her freezing-cold one. “I saw your car outside. Aunt Sairy almost never has visitors.”

“Cathy is my sister’s daughter,” Miss London said from her seat at the table. She had recovered her brisk teacher’s manner.

Fiona’s chance was gone. There was no way to get back what had just been about to be said—whatever that was. But she wasn’t ready to leave yet, Cathy or no Cathy. “Miss London, I’ll get out of your hair, but can I ask you a few quick questions first? Nothing too complicated, I promise.”

Miss London nodded, and Cathy banged into the kitchen, noisily doing something with the dishes in the sink. I’m watching you, her every movement said.

Fiona quickly lowered herself into a chair again. “First of all, the records from Idlewild haven’t been located. Do you remember anything about where they might have gone when the school closed?”

“I don’t know anything about any records,” the old woman said, as Cathy banged a glass especially loud on the counter behind her.

“Okay,” Fiona said. “You mentioned Sonia’s friends. Can you tell me anything else about them?”

“Those girls were her roommates in Clayton Hall, the dorm” came the answer, called straight up from the old woman’s memory. “They were together often. It was hard for her to make friends, I suppose, since she was quiet and not pretty. I remember thinking it was unusual to see girls like that become friends. They didn’t fit.”

“Didn’t fit? How?”

“Oh, Lord.” She waved a hand again, and Cathy ran the water in the sink in a rushing jet, nearly drowning her out. “The Winthrop girl, for one. She was trouble through and through. She was a bad influence. The Greene girl was nice enough, but we all knew she’d had a mental breakdown at home and stopped talking for months. Quiet, but touched in the head, that one. The Ellesmere girl came from a good family, but not properly, if you know what I mean. She was stupid, too. Not like Sonia.”

Fiona pulled her notebook and pen from her pocket, the first time she’d done so. “What were their names? Their full names? Starting with the Winthrop girl?”

“It was a long time ago,” Cathy complained from the sink. “Aunt Sairy shouldn’t have to remember names.”

“I do,” Miss London insisted, her teacher’s voice so icy that Cathy was immediately silenced. “The Winthrop girl’s name was Katie. Her people were from Connecticut, I think—good people, though their daughter had gone bad. She was a discipline problem from the day she arrived until the day she left.”

“Where did she go? Home?”

“No. God knows. I think she found a boy or something. It wouldn’t surprise me. She had that kind of look—the kind that boys go crazy for. Beauty, but not the wholesome kind.” She shook her head. “The one that was touched in the head was Roberta Greene—she was on the field hockey team.” She pulled the photo printout toward her and stabbed a finger at one of the girls. “That’s her right there.”

Fiona nodded, trying not to show how excited she was. Roberta Greene was the girl she and Jamie thought might have become a lawyer. She couldn’t have been too “touched in the head” to get through law school and pass the bar. “She had a breakdown, you say?” Maybe there were medical records somewhere.

“Stopped talking. There was a suicide in the family, I believe, or an attempted one, and she witnessed it.”

“That’s terrible.”

Miss London shrugged. “We didn’t have social services or child psychologists in those days. We didn’t have Oprah or Dr. Phil. Parents just didn’t know what to do. They were at the end of their rope, and they sent her to us.”

“Okay.” Fiona steered the old woman’s memories back. “The last girl, the stupid one. You said her name was Ellesmere?”

Behind her, Cathy finally gave up and stood watching them, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Miss London answered, “The Ellesmeres were a prominent family in those days. The girl—Cecelia was her name; I have it now—was the daughter of Brad Ellesmere, but born on the wrong side of the blanket, if you know what I mean.”

“Right.” Fiona caught Cathy’s eye, and they exchanged a brief look. The generation of people who used phrases like born on the wrong side of the blanket was rapidly disappearing, Fiona thought with a pang. “So she was Mr. Ellesmere’s child, but she didn’t have his name.”

“That’s right.” Miss London lowered her voice a little, as if someone could still overhear this bit of juicy gossip. “She was the housekeeper’s daughter. He let her have the child, but he packed her away. There was something about the mother going away for a while, too—went crazy from having a child out of wedlock, or so I heard. Brad Ellesmere didn’t have children inside his marriage, but he had more than one bastard child. It was a scandal in those days, but we kept quiet about it. It was private business. It wasn’t like now, when everybody’s business is all over the Internet, for the world to see.”

Fiona wrote down the name Cecelia. “And what was her last name, then?” she asked. “Her legal one?”

“Oh, goodness.” Miss London stroked her cheek again, but this time it was for show. She was having a good time, and she wanted to draw it out. Fiona waited patiently, her pen poised. “We all thought of her as the Ellesmere girl. There was no secret about it—Brad Ellesmere himself dropped her off at the school. She used to follow the Winthrop girl around; it was a natural pairing, the strong, pretty girl with the weaker, pudgier one. Ah yes—Frank. That was her last name. I told you there was nothing wrong with my memory.”

“No.” Fiona smiled at her. “There certainly isn’t.”

“Okay, Aunt Sairy,” Cathy broke in. “You need a rest.”

“Thank you very much for your help, Miss London,” Fiona said.

“You’re welcome. What does Sonia Gallipeau have to do with a story on the school’s restoration?”

“Part of the article is about some of the newsworthy events in the school’s past,” Fiona said smoothly. “Sonia’s disappearance is one of them. I thought that if I could track down a few of her friends, one of them might be able to give me a memory of her.”

“You’re going to have a tangle,” Miss London said practically. “Most of the girls disappeared when they left school. No one knew where they went, and frankly, there was no one who cared.”

There was a second of silence in the room as these harsh words came down. Then Cathy moved to the kitchen door. “Don’t get up, Aunt Sairy. Fiona, I’ll show you out.”

Fiona followed her through the house’s stuffy hall. At the front door, she put her boots back on and dug a business card out of her pocket, putting it in Cathy’s hand. “I appreciate you letting me talk to her,” she said. “If she remembers anything else, or if I can come back and see her again, please give me a call.”

Cathy gave her a baleful, suspicious stare, but took the card. “No one cares about Aunt Sairy anymore,” she said. “No one ever has. She’s a good woman. If you publish one bad word about her, I’ll come find you and sue you.”

It was as good a farewell as she was going to get, so Fiona took it. As she started her car and pulled out of the driveway, she wondered why Sarah London’s niece felt it was so important to insist, after all these years, that her aunt was a good woman.

She was five miles out of East Mills before she got a cell signal again, her phone beeping and vibrating on the passenger seat. She was on a back road heading to the paved two-lane that would eventually turn into Seven Points Road, her car shuddering over old potholes, but she pulled over beneath an overhang of trees and picked up the phone. In these parts, it was always best to take advantage of a signal when you could get one.

There was a message from Jamie: “Call me.” She dialed him first, bypassing his office line and using his personal cell. He picked up on the second ring.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Heading back from East Mills. I talked to the teacher.”

“And?”

“I got a few names of Sonia’s friends. I’ll start tracking them. What about you?”

There was disappointment in his voice. There was a low murmur of voices in the background, and she guessed he was inside the station, in the open desk area the cops used. “I have nothing, if you can believe it.”

“Nothing?”

“The French police came back to me. They have a birth record of Sonia Gallipeau in 1935, and that’s all. Nothing else.”

Fiona felt her heart sink. She thought of the girl’s body, curled in on itself in the well, her head resting on her knees. “No living relatives at all?”

“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.”