Portsmouth, New Hampshire

November 2014

Fiona stomped off the thin layer of slush from her boots as she entered the little café. A thin, wet ribbon of snow had fallen overnight, just enough to make the drive from Vermont hazardous and wet as it melted again. Still, she’d made it to New Hampshire on time for her meeting with Roberta Montgomery, formerly Roberta Greene.

Fiona had taken a chance and called her, asking if she was in fact the Roberta Greene who had once attended Idlewild, and the elderly woman had given a dignified, reserved agreement. Fiona had explained over the phone, her spiel about the restoration of the school and her wish to cover the story, and after a moment of silence Roberta had agreed to a meeting. Roberta was seventy-nine now, and Fiona easily picked her out in the small café, a white-haired woman who sat with perfectly straight posture and still resembled the picture that had been taken with the field hockey team when she was seventeen.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Fiona said, pulling out a chair and ordering a coffee.

“I’m sorry you had to drive in the mess,” Roberta said. Her voice was educated, naturally cool, as if she rarely got excited. “I don’t drive anymore, I’m afraid. I like to sit here, across from the firm.” She gestured out the plate-glass window, where across Islington Street a sign was visible on one of the old buildings: MONTGOMERY AND TRUE, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW.

“You were a partner?” Fiona asked.

“For thirty years. Retired now, of course.” Roberta tilted her face toward the window, and Fiona realized she had the quiet, stoic kind of beauty that defied age. “They still let me come in a few times a week and consult. They’re humoring me, but what do I care?” She turned back to Fiona and smiled. “Try the cheese croissants. They bake them here, and I eat them every day. I’ve stopped worrying about fat at my age.”

Fiona smiled back at her and did as she was told. The coffee was so strong it nearly took the top of her head off, which was welcome after the long drive. “I’d like to talk to you about Idlewild,” she said.

“Yes,” Roberta said. “Someone is restoring it, you said.”

“You didn’t know?”

Roberta shrugged. “I don’t suppose you’ve found much on the history. No one cared about that place.”

Fiona studied the older woman. She’d read Roberta’s Idlewild file last night: born in 1935, sent to Idlewild in 1950 after witnessing her uncle, a war veteran, attempt suicide with a pistol in the family garage. It was the same story Sarah London had told: There had been a suicide in the family, I believe, or an attempted one, and she had witnessed it. Roberta had stopped speaking for a while after the incident, which caused her parents to send her away. There were no notes in the school file, however, that Roberta had any speech problems after arriving at Idlewild. Once again, the laconic nature of Idlewild’s files was infinitely frustrating. No one seemed to pay very close attention to the girls they taught, or if they did, they didn’t write it down.

“Do you have good memories of Idlewild?” Fiona asked, her first broad volley of the interview.

Roberta’s hands curled around the warmth of her coffee cup. “It was awful,” she said, “but it was better than home.”

“I found a picture at the Barrons Historical Society.” Fiona pulled the printout of the field hockey team portrait and smoothed it open on the table, turning it for Roberta to see.

There was a long moment of quiet. Roberta Montgomery—Roberta Greene, as Fiona’s mind kept calling her—was one of those people with a gift for silence. Jamie was another; he didn’t feel any need to fill the quiet with his own chatter, which was what made him a good policeman. She thought of him with a pang. He hadn’t called or texted her since the night at his parents’.

“I remember this day,” Roberta said. “It was May. The snow had melted, but it wasn’t warm yet. The grass was wet beneath our feet.” She pointed to the teacher. “Dear God, that’s Lady Loon.”

“I’m sorry?” Fiona asked.

“The teacher,” Roberta said. “It was our nickname for her. She called all of us ‘ladies’ when she shouted at us.” She shook her head. “Irritating, really.”

“And the loon part?”

Roberta rolled her eyes, and for a minute Fiona saw the teenager she’d once been. “She was a lunatic,” she explained. “She really couldn’t handle a bunch of girls like we were. Her real name was Miss London.”

“I know,” Fiona said. “She lives in Vermont.”

“Lady Loon is still alive?” Roberta’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead. “Well, she wasn’t much older than us, I suppose. I always figured she’d drop dead of a stroke before she was fifty. We girls drove her crazy.”

“Mrs. Montgomery—”

“Roberta, please.”

“Roberta,” Fiona said. “Do you remember a girl named Sonia Gallipeau?”

She did. Fiona could see it stamped on her features the moment the name was spoken. “Yes, of course,” she said. “She was our roommate. I knew her well.”

“She disappeared in 1950.”

“She was murdered, you mean.”

Fiona felt her heart beating in her throat. After so much speculation, so much searching, here was Sonia’s living history, sitting across from her in a coffee shop. “What makes you say that?”

“Of course she was murdered,” Roberta said. Her gaze had dropped to the photo again. “We always knew. No one believed us, but we knew. Sonia wouldn’t just run away, not without her suitcase.”

“But she ran away from her relatives’ in the middle of visiting them.”

“I know,” Roberta said. Her voice was calm, yet somehow infinitely sad. “That wasn’t like her at all.” She paused, and Fiona waited, feeling like Roberta had more to tell. After a moment, the older woman continued. “Sonia had her hopes up about the visit, that her relatives would take her in. And if she learned that they didn’t plan that at all—that this was just a weekend visit and nothing more—it would have upset her. She didn’t actually run away, you know. She got on the bus to Barrons, and her suitcase was in the weeds near the gates. She wasn’t going somewhere unknown. She was coming back to the school.” She raised her gaze from the photo. “To us. We were her friends. We would have comforted her and understood if she was hurt. I think she was coming back to the only home she knew.”

“The headmistress seemed to think there was a boy.”

Roberta huffed a single bitter laugh. “There was no boy.”

Fiona took a breath. She’d never done this before; never told a person that someone they cared about, even from sixty-four years ago, was dead. Maybe she should have left this to the police, to Jamie. But no, Roberta wasn’t Sonia’s family. She was only a friend from over half a century ago. “Roberta,” she said, as carefully as she could, “I have to tell you something. This hasn’t been released publicly yet. But in the course of the restoration at Idlewild, a body was found. In the old well.”

Roberta Greene tilted her head up slowly, then looked up at the ceiling, and Fiona watched grief fall over her like a blanket. The old woman blinked, still looking up, and two tears tracked down her parchment cheeks. Her sadness was so fresh, so raw, it was as if none of the years had happened at all.

“Sonia,” she said.

Fiona felt the sting of tears behind her own eyes, watching. You loved her, she thought. She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said softly. “Sonia.”

“Tell me. Please.”

“She was hit over the head. She probably died quickly.” Fiona had no idea if this was true, but she couldn’t help saying it. “She had been in the well . . . Her body had been in the well all this time.”

“Oh, God,” Roberta said on a sigh.

“I’m sorry.”

Roberta shook her head. “After all this time, I suppose there’s no chance of the police catching her murderer.”

“You knew her best,” Fiona said. “Can you think of anyone who wanted to harm her? Anyone at all?”

“No.” The older woman picked up her napkin and dabbed at the tear tracks on her face. She seemed to have a handle on her grief now.

“Was there anyone who bothered the girls? Strangers who came to the school or hung around? Anyone who bothered Sonia in particular?”

“We were so isolated—you have no idea,” Roberta said. “No one ever came, and we never left.”

“What about gardeners? Janitors? Repairmen?”

“I don’t know. We never saw the kitchen staff. There were no gardens except the one the girls were forced to maintain. I suppose there were delivery people, for laundry and such, but we never saw them either. And as for repairs”—she gave a wry smile—“you’re making the assumption that anything at Idlewild was ever repaired at all. Unless a girl’s father or brother came on Family Visit Day, I didn’t see the face of a single man for three years.”

“There was a family visit day?” This was news to Fiona.

“Yes, the last Sunday of every month was designated for families who wished to visit.”

“Did anyone ever visit Sonia?”

“Her great-aunt and -uncle visited once a year at Christmas, but that was all. Sonia’s other family was all dead in the war. In concentration camps.”

Fiona felt a thread of tension unspooling in her, to hear her research confirmed so clearly. “There is evidence that Sonia spent time in Ravensbrück,” she said.

Roberta’s eyebrows rose again. She paused for a long time, and Fiona realized she had truly surprised the other woman. “You’ve done your research,” she commented. “And you’re very good.”

If it was a compliment, somehow it didn’t sound like one; it sounded more like Fiona had discovered something Roberta considered private, intruded on it. “Did Sonia ever talk to you about Ravensbrück?” she asked.

“No one ever talked about the war in those days,” Roberta replied. “We were teenage girls. No one talked to us about anything.”

That wasn’t an answer, Fiona realized. Not at all. “What about your own family?” she asked. “They didn’t talk to you about the war?”

“No,” came the answer. And then, repeated more softly: “No.”

“Did your family ever come to visit you on Family Visit Day while you were at Idlewild?”

“Only a few times over the years. The way I left home was difficult.”

“Because you stopped talking after what happened with your uncle,” Fiona said.

Roberta blinked at her. “Yes,” she said, her voice chilled. “I’m sorry, but may I ask how you know about my uncle?”

“It’s in your file.”

“My file?”

“From Idlewild.”

The other woman’s voice grew even colder. “There are no Idlewild files. The records have been lost.”

For a second Fiona was pinned by that cold gaze, which had probably been used in courtrooms and judges’ chambers for thirty years. It was impressive, and a little frightening, even in an old woman. Roberta was angry, Fiona realized, because she thought Fiona was lying. “The records weren’t lost,” Fiona insisted. “They exist. I’ve read them.” She left out Sarah London’s shed, and the fact that the records were currently stacked in boxes in her own neglected apartment.

“That isn’t possible.”

“Then how do I know you were sent to Idlewild after witnessing your uncle attempting suicide with a pistol? It wasn’t covered in the newspapers at the time.” She’d checked, of course. Journalistic habits died hard.

Roberta pressed her lips together, thinking. Then she said, “My uncle Van came home from the war with a severe case of PTSD, though that term didn’t exist at the time. He was very ill, but everyone simply told him to move on and it would get better.” She blinked and looked out the window. “When I was fourteen, I walked into our garage to find him sitting in a chair, bent over, holding a gun in his mouth. The radio was playing an old GI song. He was weeping. He hadn’t known anyone was home.”

“What happened?” Fiona asked softly.

“I started screaming. Uncle Van looked up at me, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t blow his brains out while I watched. So in a stupid way, I saved his life.” She turned to look at Fiona again. “I couldn’t talk after that. I don’t know why; I simply couldn’t. It was some kind of shock or stress. We had no knowledge in those days to help people. We barely have it now.” She paused. “So my parents sent me to Idlewild, and while I was away, they sent Uncle Van to a mental hospital and had him locked up against his will. Instead of having any feeling for him at all, they thought he was a disgrace to the family. I was a disgrace, too, because I’d had to see a psychiatrist, which in those days was a shameful thing to do. I had exemplary parents, as you can guess.”

“I’m so sorry,” Fiona said. “You didn’t think your uncle was crazy?”

“No. I was sad for him, sorry for him. He felt horrible about what I had seen, that I’d stopped speaking, that I was being sent away. It was another burden of guilt on him. My parents’ marriage fell apart the following year, and they thought I was better off away at school—that shame again, you see. When I left Idlewild, I went to law school partly so I could legally find a way to set my uncle free. To set men like him free of their ashamed families. To prevent men like my uncle from having their freedom, their assets, their homes and children, taken away. That day in the garage ended up shaping the rest of my life.”

“So after everything that happened,” Fiona said, “your parents paid for law school?”

Roberta blinked. “If one wants something very badly, I suppose, one can find a way.”

Another nonanswer, delivered smoothly and easily. Roberta Greene was a lawyer through and through. “And did you?” Fiona asked. “Get your uncle out?”

Roberta smiled. “Oh, yes. I got Uncle Van out. It took time, but I helped him get a job, set up his life again. There weren’t many tools to help him with his problems, but I gave him what I could. Things got better. He got married in 1973, when he was in his fifties. His wife was the woman who had lived next door to him for years and had always secretly wanted to marry him. They were married twenty years, until he died. I spent much of my career doing pro bono work for other veterans. It was the best part of the work for me.”

“Did you have children?”

“Yes. My husband, Edward, died of cancer last year. Our son lives in Connecticut, and our daughter lives in Sydney, Australia. I have no grandchildren. But they are both happy, I think. At least, I tried to raise them to be as happy as they can be. Happier than I was. My husband helped with that.”

“What about your other friends from Idlewild?” Fiona asked, hoping that the talkative mood would continue. “Cecelia Frank and Katie Winthrop. Did you keep in touch with them? Do you know where I could find them? I’d like to interview them as well.”

But Roberta shook her head. “No, dear. It was over sixty years ago. I’m sorry.”

“Miss London told me the four of you were good friends.”

“We were. We stuck together. But we fell apart after Sonia died. We were all so certain she was murdered, but no one would listen to us. No one at all.”

“What about the headmistress, Julia Patton? She wouldn’t listen to you?”

“No. Is there anything about Sonia’s disappearance in the files?”

It was said calmly, but Fiona sensed that Roberta wanted to know. Badly. The files were news to her, and she was burning with curiosity, though she hid it well.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Fiona said. “There doesn’t seem to have been much of an investigation. And there was that bullshit theory about a boy.”

The words were out before she thought them, and she surprised herself with them. She’d never realized until this minute that the boy theory made her angry. That someone would dismiss the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old Holocaust survivor as an impulsive everyday tramp’s hooking up with a boy and running away without saying good-bye, without even her suitcase. She wanted to dig Julia Patton and Garrett Creel Sr. out of their graves and shake them, shout at them. If you’d only listened, maybe you could have saved her before she died. Now we’ll never know.

She looked up to see Roberta watching her from across the table. There was a faint smile on her lips, as if she knew exactly what Fiona was thinking. “Bullshit, indeed,” she said.

Fiona swallowed. She was tired, off her game. She was losing control of this interview, if she’d ever had it. “A few more questions,” she said, trying to sound businesslike. “Do you know a woman named Margaret Eden?”

Roberta shook her head. “No, dear, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

“Or her son, Anthony Eden? They’re the ones who bought and are restoring Idlewild.”

“Then I feel sorry for them, but no, I don’t know them.”

“Can you think of a reason they’d want to restore the school?”

That brought the smile again. “People who don’t know Idlewild look at it and think it might be a good investment. They are quite wrong.”

Fiona met her gaze straight on. “Why are they wrong? Is it because of Mary Hand?”

There was not a whisper of surprise, of derision, of deflecting humor on Roberta’s face. Only a softening around the eyes, which looked remarkably like pity. “She’s still there, isn’t she?” she said. “Of course Mary is still there. You’ve seen her.”

“Have you?” Fiona asked, her voice a rasp.

“Every girl who went to Idlewild saw Mary. Sooner or later.” Spoken quietly, matter-of-factly, the madness of seeing a ghost turned into an everyday thing.

Fiona could see honest truth in the other woman’s eyes. “What did she show you?” she asked. She hadn’t wanted to admit to Margaret Eden what had happened, the strangeness of her deepest, most painful memories made real. But it felt different to tell Roberta. Roberta had gone to Idlewild; she knew.

“It doesn’t matter what she showed me,” Roberta said. “What did she show you? That is the question you need to be asking.”

“I don’t understand it,” Fiona said. “Who was she? Mary Hand?”

“There were rumors.” Roberta shrugged. “She died when she was locked out in the cold—that was one. Another was that her baby was buried in the garden.”

Fiona thought of the damp garden, the shape she’d thought she’d seen from the corner of her eye. No. Not possible.

“There was a rhyme,” Roberta continued. “The girls passed it down. We wrote it in the textbooks so the next generation of girls would be equipped. It went like this: Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land. She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again!” She smiled, as if pleased she’d recalled all the words. “I don’t know the answer, Fiona, but I lived at Idlewild for three years, and I can tell you what I think. I think Mary was there before the school was. I think she is part of that place—that she was part of it before the first building was even built. We were in her home. I don’t know what shape she took before the school was built, but it’s what she does—takes shapes, shows you things, makes you hear things. I have no doubt that she was a real person at some point, but now she’s an echo.”

Fiona’s throat was dry. She thought of the figure she’d seen, the girl in the black dress and veil. “An echo of what?”

Roberta reached across the table and touched the space between Fiona’s eyes with a gentle finger. “What’s in here,” she said. “And what’s in here.” She pointed to Fiona’s heart. “It’s how she frightens us all. What is more terrifying than that?”