Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

Jamie insisted on coming with her to pick up the files from Sarah London’s back shed. It was a Thursday, his day off shift, because as the police department’s junior member—Jamie was twenty-nine, but the force was hardly swamped with new recruits—he worked all the weekend shifts. Like a man born from a line of true cops, he ignored Fiona’s suggestion he take an actual day off, and drove her to East Mills to clean out the ancient shed filled with papers that had been sitting there for thirty-five years.

Fiona gave in, unable to resist not only Jamie but the use of his strong shoulders in hauling boxes, and his much bigger SUV. So they drove down the rutted two-lane blacktop off the highway as the sun climbed, slanting thin late-autumn light into their eyes even though it was after nine o’clock. The days were getting shorter, and soon they’d be in the dregs of winter, when the sun never warmed the air no matter how bright, and the light was gone by five.

They talked as they drove, Jamie in jeans and a thick flannel shirt over a T-shirt, his hair combed back, a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in one hand as he drove with the other. Fiona wore a pullover sweater and jeans, her hair in a ponytail, and leaned against the passenger door, sipping her own coffee as they talked. It had been a while since they’d spent a day together—two weeks, maybe three. Jamie picked up as much overtime as the force’s budget would allow, and Fiona’s schedule was equally offbeat as she wrote one story or another. They usually kept their conversations light, but today it wasn’t going to happen. She had too much on her mind. Jamie, as always, was a good listener, and before she knew it, the words were spilling out.

She told him about her visit to Idlewild. It hadn’t been her finest moment, and she still didn’t know what to make of what she’d seen on the field. But she forced the story out, trying to keep her voice matter-of-fact. Jamie didn’t chide her about trespassing, or not answering his texts, and he took in her account of the ghost with surprised silence.

“Jesus Christ, Fiona,” he said at last.

Fiona gulped her coffee. “Say it,” she prompted him. “If you think I should go on meds, just say it.”

He shook his head. “No meds,” he said. “I can’t say I know what you saw, but I don’t think you’re crazy.”

She stared at him for a long time, waiting for more. But the silence stretched out in the car, the hum of the SUV’s engine the only sound between them. “That’s it?” she said. “You think I actually saw a ghost?”

“Why not?” he said, surprising her. “You want me to say it isn’t possible? How the hell do I know what’s possible or not? Kids have always said that place is haunted.”

“Have you ever heard the name Mary Hand?” Fiona asked.

“No.”

“Margaret Eden has,” she said. “She says there’s a legend about a girl named Mary Hand haunting the grounds. And yet Margaret also says she was never a student, and she isn’t local.” She paused, looking out the passenger window, unseeing. “She knew what I saw, Jamie. She knew.”

“Is there any way she could have been repeating back something you’d already said?”

Fiona thought back over the conversation. “No. Margaret described the black dress and veil. I hadn’t talked about that. I hadn’t admitted anything.”

“A girl with a veil,” Jamie said, musing. “I haven’t heard that particular story before. Then again, I never did a dare to go on the Idlewild grounds, growing up. I was the straight-and-narrow kid, destined to become a cop. What about you?”

Fiona shook her head. “Deb was into friends and boys, not ghost-hunting dares. Which meant I wasn’t, either.” The words cut sharply, the memory still clear. Deb had been three years older, and Fiona had followed everything she did—she’d worn Deb’s hand-me-down clothes, her old shoes, her old winter jackets. She was quieter and more introverted than her outgoing sister, but she’d tried her best not to be. Deb had been a road map of what to be, and when she’d died, that road map had vanished, leaving Fiona adrift. For twenty years and counting.

“If this . . .” It felt strange to talk about a ghost like it was actually a real thing. “If Mary Hand has been there all these years, someone must have seen her besides me. Sarah London told me that everyone at the school lived in fear of something. But she’d never heard of Margaret.”

“So Sarah London knows,” he said. “Maybe Mary Hand was a student. If so, there should be something about her in the records.”

“That’s what Margaret thinks.” Fiona drained the last of her coffee. “She wants these records. She was a cagey old lady. I can’t figure out what her game is—whether it’s money, or ghosts, or something else she wants. But the records are definitely part of what she’s looking for. I think she suspected that I know where they are.”

“Well, we’re one up on her, then,” Jamie said, grinning. “Let’s see what happens when she knows they’re yours. Maybe she’ll come to you with a different game.”

Fiona smiled at him.

“What?” he said, glancing at her.

“You’re sucked in,” she said. “Just like I am. Admit it.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe,” she mocked him.

He pulled into Sarah London’s gravel drive and turned off the ignition. Her heart gave a little pop, because she knew that look in his eyes. Still, she watched as he put his cup down, leaned over, and took her face in his hands.

He kissed her slowly, properly, taking his time. She tried to stay unaffected, but he was oh so good at it; she felt the rasp of his beard and the press of his thumbs, and before she knew it, she was gripping his wrists and kissing him back, letting her teeth slide over his bottom lip as he made a sound in her mouth and kissed her harder. Sometimes their kisses were complicated, a kind of conversation on their own, but this one wasn’t—this was just Jamie, kissing her in his car as the bright sunlight slanted in, making the moment spin on and on.

Finally, they paused for breath. “Come to dinner at my parents’ tonight,” he said, still holding her face, his breath on her cheek.

She felt herself stiffen. She’d met Jamie’s parents once, briefly, and she was pretty sure a journalist was not whom they wanted for their precious son. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Sure it is.” He kissed her neck and she tried not to shiver. “We’ve been dating for a year, Fee. Having dinner with the parents is part of the deal.”

It was. She knew it was. But a meet-the-parents evening— Jesus. She wasn’t ready for this. “I’m no good at it,” she warned him. “The girlfriend thing. I’m terrible at it, actually.”

“I know,” he said, and he laughed softly when he felt her stiffen in offense. “But they’ve been asking about you. My mother especially. She wants to feed you pot roast and ask leading questions about what your intentions are.”

“Oh, my God.” Fiona didn’t even like pot roast. She’d had pretzels for dinner last night.

“I know we’ve taken it slow, Fee,” he said. “I get it. I wanted to take it slow, too. But it’s time.”

Damn it. He was right. There was only so long she would have gotten away with putting this off. “Look, I can endure it, but if we do this, they’re going to think we’re serious.”

She regretted the words—this could lead to the are we serious conversation—and thought he might argue, but Jamie just exhaled a sigh and leaned against the seat next to her. “I know,” he said. “But I have to give them something. My mother actually asked me when I’m going to find a nice girl and settle down.”

Fiona paused, surprised at how that alarmed her. The words bubbled up—Is that what you want? To get married and settle down?—but she bit them back. What if he said, Yes, it is?

They were not having this conversation.

It had been only a year. That wasn’t long; this was 2014. People weren’t expected to court and get married anymore like it was 1950. But Jamie was younger than she was, and he hadn’t grown up with freethinking hippie parents. He didn’t ask her for much. As much as she hated the idea of dinner with his parents, she could do it. For him. Just suck it up and go.

“Fine,” she finally said, halfheartedly shoving against his chest. “I’ll go, all right? I’ll eat pot roast. Now let’s get moving. You’re going to give that old lady a heart attack if she’s looking out the window.”

He grinned and grabbed his coat from the backseat.

Miss London wasn’t watching from the window. She didn’t come to the door, either, even after repeated knocking. Worried, Fiona pulled out her cell phone and walked to the end of the drive, looking for cell reception. She was partway down the street when she lucked into enough bars to call Cathy.

“I had to take Aunt Sairy for a checkup,” Cathy said. “The doctor changed the time, and she can’t miss her checkups. Just go around back to the shed. I left the key under the old gnome.”

So they walked around the house to the backyard. Miss London had no neighbors behind her, and her backyard sloped away into a thicket of huge pine trees, stark and black now against the gray sky. Beyond that were a few tangled fields and a power station crisscrossed with metal towers. Crows shouted somewhere overhead, and a truck engine roared from the nearby two-lane highway.

Standing behind the old house was a shed covered with vinyl siding in avocado green. Fiona felt for the key beneath the garden gnome on the back porch while Jamie cleared the shed doorway of the snow shovel and the wheelbarrow leaning against it. The door was rusted, held shut by a padlock that was dulled with age and exposure. Fiona had a moment of doubt that the old lock would even work, but the key slid in easily and Jamie popped off the lock and swung open the door.

“Oh, hell,” he said.

The shed was full—literally full—of cardboard file boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling, some of them collapsing beneath a quarter century of weight. Fiona’s heart sped up. This was it: sixty years of Idlewild’s history compacted into one old woman’s shed. Somewhere in here was the answer to who Sonia Gallipeau was, maybe even where she’d come from. Somewhere in here were files about Sonia’s friends, who might still be alive. Somewhere in here might even be a file about a girl named Mary Hand.

Unable to help herself, she tugged on the first box sitting at eye level and hauled it out, placing it on the cold ground and popping the lid off. Inside were textbooks, old and yellowed. The top was titled Latin Grammar for Girls.

Jamie read the title over her shoulder. “The good old days,” he commented, “when apparently Latin was different if you were a girl.”

Fiona agreed. She lifted the textbook and found a few others stacked inside. Biology. History. “It looks like Miss London wanted to keep the curriculum as well as all the records.” She looked up at him. “Is all of this going to fit in your SUV?”

He glanced around, calculating. “Sure,” he said. “The bigger question is, are you going to keep all of this in your apartment?”

“I have room.”

He shrugged, picked up the box, and carted it toward the car.

It took them nearly ninety minutes to empty the shed. Considering how long the boxes had been sitting there, surprisingly few of them had water damage. Even when building sheds with vinyl siding, Yankees had taken pride in their craftsmanship in the seventies. They drove off with all of Idlewild in the back of Jamie’s SUV, smelling like damp cardboard.

There were twenty-one boxes in all. Fiona tried to organize them once they had unloaded them into her small apartment, stacked in the living room. Some boxes contained tests and lesson plans; these were shoved against the wall as unimportant. Some contained financial records, like paychecks and supplier bills; these were stacked next as possibles. Some seemed to contain random memorabilia, probably scooped from classrooms on the school’s last day before closing: a desk-sized globe, a slide rule, a rolled-up poster, the old textbooks. These Fiona set aside as fascinating but not necessary to the story. When she’d finished the article, she’d take pictures of them to add to the context of the story when it went to press.

The final five boxes were student records. Fiona and Jamie ordered Chinese delivery for lunch and split the last boxes, looking for the names on Fiona’s list, as well as any other names that stood out as interesting. Jamie’s box contained the G files, and the first folder he pulled out was Sonia Gallipeau’s.

The first page listed Sonia’s height, weight, age, uniform size, and date of admission to Idlewild. It listed her nearest family member as her great-uncle, Mr. Henry DuBois, of Burlington, a name Jamie recognized from his search for Sonia’s relatives. Henry DuBois and his wife, Eleanor, were the people Sonia had visited for the weekend before she was murdered. The last known people who saw her alive. They were both dead, and had no children.

There was no photograph. Fiona found herself wishing she knew what Sonia had looked like.

There were a few pages listing Sonia’s grades—all were high. A teacher had written in pencil: Bright and quiet. Adept at memorization. Physical fitness adequate. Sonia’s body was small; if she’d been in a concentration camp, she’d have been malnourished while she was supposed to be growing, but she would have had to be strong to survive at all. Fiona made a note to ask a doctor for an opinion.

There was a piece of notepaper slipped into the file signed by Gerta Hedmeyer, the Idlewild school nurse. Student brought to infirmary November 4, 1950. Fainting spell during Weekly Gardening. No reason known. Student is slight; possibly iron deficient. Complained of headache. Gave student aspirin and instructed her to rest. Released to care of Roberta Greene, student’s dorm mate.

“There’s Roberta,” Jamie said as Fiona read over his shoulder. “Proof that they were friends. We need to talk to her.”

Fiona stared at the note. Roberta Greene, who had brought her friend to the infirmary when she’d fainted sixty-four years ago, was at the moment the closest thing to family Sonia Gallipeau had. It was definitely time to meet Roberta.

“This is interesting,” Jamie said, pointing to the nurse’s note. “She says it’s a possible iron deficiency.”

“That’s code,” Fiona explained.

“What?”

“It means Sonia was having her period on the day she fainted. It was a polite way to refer to it back then. Our old doctor still used that when I was growing up.”

“But this is the nurse’s own notes,” he protested. “In an all-female boarding school. There wasn’t a man for miles around.”

“It doesn’t matter. It was going in the file, where others could read it. She still had to be polite. It was a generational thing.”

He shook his head. “That generation blows my mind. They didn’t talk about anything at all. My granddad fought in the war and never talked about it, not even to Dad. An entire damn war, and not one word.”

“It’s true,” Fiona said. “There’s nothing in this file about Sonia being in a concentration camp. If she had come from one, the school nurse didn’t even know. She would have lived with the experience and never talked about it. All of these girls—these Idlewild girls. Whatever they went through to end up sent off to boarding school, they probably never spoke of it. That wasn’t how it was done.”

The next page of the file, the final page, contained the entry about Sonia’s disappearance. It was written by Julia Patton, Idlewild’s headmistress, neatly typed on a page of letterhead.

A note handwritten across the bottom of the page read:

Jamie put the file down and stood up, pacing to the window. He didn’t speak.

Running a hand through her hair, Fiona turned to Julia Patton’s statement and picked it up. She turned the paper over, noting the faint carbon marks on the back. “This was typed with carbon paper behind it,” she said. “She probably gave a copy to the police.” Though the police would not have received the handwritten addendum, which had been added later.

“It isn’t in the missing persons file,” Jamie said. “There’s only a report from Daniel O’Leary.”

“Is that weird?” Fiona asked him. “Pages missing from case files?”

“In a case sixty-four years old? I don’t know. Probably not.”

He went quiet again. He was possibly thinking about Garrett Creel Sr., his grandfather, who had apparently interviewed Julia Patton about the disappearance alongside his colleague, and what the file implied about him. Fiona let him wrestle with it for a minute.

“It was a different time,” Jamie finally said, “but it’s pretty clear that no one took Sonia’s disappearance seriously.” He paused. “Not even Granddad.”

It was bothering him. Jamie was proud of his cop’s lineage. “The judgment on Sonia is pretty harsh,” Fiona agreed, “especially coming from the headmistress. I know she left her relatives’, but to conclude that she ran off with a boy? This was a girl who lived under supervision in a boarding school. She was hardly out tearing up Barrons, seducing boys. And she had no suitcase.”

“I don’t understand it,” Jamie said, still looking out the window. “How no one could have thought something bad could have happened to her. How it didn’t even cross their minds. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had dropped her suitcase and disappeared.”

Unbidden, Malcolm’s words came into Fiona’s mind: Was she a Jew? There was nothing in the school’s file about Sonia being Jewish, but what if she had been? Would the police have searched for a runaway girl who was a Jewish refugee with no family the same way they would have searched for a local Catholic girl?

And who had taken Sonia’s suitcase from Julia Patton’s office? Her killer had put Sonia’s body in the well, which was nearly within view of the headmistress’s office window. Had the killer taken the suitcase as well? If the suitcase contained a clue to the killer’s identity, it would have to be disposed of. Could Julia Patton have known who Sonia’s killer was? Could she have done it herself?

She read the headmistress’s note again. “The fact that she left her great-aunt and -uncle’s a day early bothers me. She’d gone all that way to visit them. Why did she turn around and leave?”

“We may never know.”

Fiona put the file down. “Let’s continue,” she said. “We can’t answer these questions now. Let’s find the other girls’ files.”

“We don’t have time,” Jamie said, turning from the window and checking his watch. “We’re due for dinner at my parents’.”

“No, no. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Jamie shook his head. “You promised, so you’re coming. These files will be here when we get back.”

“I can’t leave.” She felt physical pain, staring at the boxes she wanted so badly to open.

“Yes, you can.”

She got up reluctantly from her spot on the floor and brushed off the legs of her jeans. “Fine. But I’m not dressing up. And we’re coming back here.”

“After dinner,” Jamie said. “I promise.”

They were in Jamie’s car, and he was pulling onto Meredith Street, when Fiona’s phone rang. It was her father.

“I’ve got something,” he said when she answered. “About your Sonia girl.”

Fiona felt her mouth go dry. “What is it?”

“I had a professor friend of mine put me in touch with a student to do some archival research,” he said. “She found her in a passenger manifest on a ship leaving Calais in 1947. Sonia Gallipeau, age twelve. Traveling alone. Same date of birth as your girl.”

“That’s her,” Fiona said.

“The manifest lists her previous place of residence,” Malcolm said. “An official took the information down, but it must have come from her.”

Fiona closed her eyes to the blacktop flying by, to the stark trees and the gray sky, to everything. “Tell me,” she said.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” her father said. “Her previous place of residence was Ravensbrück prison.”