Barrons, Vermont

December 1950

They thought, at first, that maybe Sonia’s dreams had come true. That her relatives had kept her, opened their arms and their home to her. That even now she was sitting on her own bed in her own bedroom, scared and excited and planning to go to school.

But by Monday the rumors were that she’d run away, and that was something very different. Sonia would never, ever run away. The girls knew that. She’d done enough running, enough journeying to last a lifetime. All Sonia wanted was safety, a place to be. Even if that place was Idlewild, with the misfits and the ghosts.

Katie sat in English class on Monday afternoon, her pulse pounding quietly in her wrists, her temples. Where was Sonia? Her mind spun the possibilities. A broken-down bus; a case of strep throat that hadn’t yet been communicated to the headmistress; a misplaced sign that put her on the bus to the wrong destination. She was only twenty-four hours late; it could have been nothing. But her gut told her it wasn’t nothing.

She glanced out the window to see a strange car come up the driveway to the main building, slowing and parking by the front portico. The classroom was on the third floor, and from this angle she looked down on the car, on its black-and-white stripes, on the tops of the heads of the two men who got out, putting on their navy blue policemen’s caps. No, she thought. They’re not here for Sonia. She wanted to scream.

That night, the teachers told the girls to stay in their rooms, no exceptions. They went from door to door in the dorm with lists in their hands, taking attendance of each girl. (We stood every day in the Appelplatz, Sonia had said. It was supposed to be a roll call, but it wasn’t.) They listened to Mrs. Peabody’s steps moving up and down the corridor, the sharp crack of her irritated voice. A girl had run away only last year, and the teachers were angry.

CeCe looked out the window and watched flashlights in the distance as the adults searched the woods for Sonia. Eventually CeCe climbed the ladder into Roberta’s bunk and fell asleep, the two girls curled together in their nightgowns, their faces drawn and pale. Katie stayed awake, watching the lights. Watching the woods.

The next day there was still no sign of her, and again the next. A rumor went around that Sonia’s suitcase had been found, that Mrs. Patton had it in her office. Katie thought about Sonia packing her suitcase, carefully folding her few stockings, her notebook, the copy of Blackie’s Girls’ Annual that Roberta had returned to her. She ground her teeth in helpless anger.

The weather grew bitter cold, though no snow fell yet. The sky was dark in the morning when the girls were roused for morning classes, and it was dark again when they finished supper and left the dining hall, stumbling over the common to their dorm. Roberta went to morning practice in the dark, the girls in their navy uniforms inkblots against the field in the predawn stillness, playing in silence with barely a shout. Katie watched Roberta dress, her skin as pale and gray as she knew her own was, her eyes haunted, her mouth drawn tight. Darkness and silence—those were the two things that dominated the days after Sonia disappeared. Darkness and silence, waking and sleeping. Then darkness and silence again.

After that first night, flashlights were not seen in the woods again, though the girls were kept under strict curfew after supper, roll call taken by the teachers as they sat in their rooms. CeCe was the one who went to Mrs. Patton’s office, pleading for the search to continue—She’s not run away, she said to the headmistress, the woman no girl dared approach. She can’t have run away. She’s hurt. Please, we have to help her. It was hopeless. She’d begged Katie to come with her, but Katie had refused, embalmed in the dark and the stillness, her body numb, her brain hushed, watching everything as if it were a world away. Watching the other Idlewild girls lose the fearful looks on their faces and begin to chatter again.

“She just ran away, that’s all,” Susan Brady said. Susan was riding high on her importance as the dorm monitor, helping the teachers with roll call every night. She heard things the other girls didn’t, things the students weren’t supposed to hear. “That’s what the police say. They say she must have found a boy. She wouldn’t need her suitcase if he bought her all new things, would she? That’s what I think. She was quiet, secretive.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

The teachers lost their tense, watchful postures, their anger replaced with the usual everyday irritation again. Ladies, ladies. Sportsmanship. Three days, that was all it had taken. Three days, four. Five. Six.

She’s hurt.

The girls didn’t speak of it.

The girls barely spoke at all.

I’m failing her, Katie thought, the words like constant echoes buried deep in her brain. She needs me, and I’m failing her. It was CeCe who had had the courage to go to the headmistress’s office, not Katie. It was Roberta who had left early for field hockey practice to search the woods on her own. Katie was powerless—as powerless as she’d been in the moment Thomas had thrown her down in the playground and yanked her skirt, his breath in her face; as powerless as she’d been the day she’d gotten out of her parents’ car and looked up at the portico of Idlewild. All her bravery, all her bluster, was a fake. At the end of it all, when it came down to what mattered, Katie was a girl, and nothing more.

Each floor of the dorm had a shared bathroom at the end of the hall; aside from regular washing, the girls were allowed a bath once per week, the days allotted on a schedule. On CeCe’s night, seven days after Sonia hadn’t come home, Katie was in their room, lying on her bunk and staring at the slats of the bunk above her, enduring the endless stretch of time between supper and curfew, when she heard screaming from down the hall.

She flew out of bed and fought her way to the bathroom, pushing aside the other girls who crowded the door in curiosity. They gave way easily when they saw who she was; she didn’t even have to kick anyone in the shins. She got to the bathroom to find CeCe still in the bathtub, hunched over her knees, her arms crossed over her ample chest, her hair hanging wet and plastered to her face, her lips blue, her eyes vacant. She was shaking.

Katie whirled to the other girls. “Get out,” she snapped at them, and when they receded back, she slammed the door. Then she turned to CeCe. “What happened?”

CeCe looked up at her, her big eyes pools of terror. Her teeth chattered.

For the first time in a week, everything was so clear in that moment. The puddles of water on the cold, tiled floor. The lip of the big old bathtub that dated back to the day Idlewild was first built. The smell of school-issued soap and shampoo, mixed with a sickly smell of lavender that came from the bath soap Mary Van Woorten’s older sister gave her, which she used religiously. The intestinal coils of the hot radiator against the wall. The grid of the drain against the floor, its wrought iron stark and black against the white tiles. The air was chilled, as if a draft had leaked into the room, and Katie felt as if someone had slapped her awake. “What happened?” she asked CeCe again.

CeCe answered, but Katie was so awake in that moment she already knew what CeCe would say. “She was here.”

“Mary?” Katie demanded. “In this room?”

CeCe looked away, her teeth still chattering. “I was rinsing my hair. I went under the water. I saw a shape . . .” She shuddered, so hard it looked like she’d been shoved with a cattle prod. “Something held me down.”

Katie looked down at her. There was not a whisper of disbelief in her blood, not a twinge of doubt. CeCe’s mother had tried to drown her, had held her down. It was the reason CeCe was here.

It was exactly what Mary Hand would prey on.

Katie jerked up her sleeve, bent over the bathtub, and pulled the plug from the drain. As the water gurgled, the door behind them opened with a quiet click—the toilets locked, but the bath did not, not at Idlewild—and Katie turned to shout at the intruder until she saw it was Roberta.

Roberta closed the door quietly behind her and looked from one girl to the other, instant understanding on her face. She grabbed a bath towel and held it out to CeCe, who snatched it and wrapped it around herself.

“Are you all right?” Roberta asked.

CeCe nodded, staring at the floor. Then tears began streaming down her cheeks, and her shoulders shook with a sob.

“Let’s get her out of here,” Katie said.

But Roberta was staring at the mirror. “Look,” she said.

The fog on the bathroom mirror was drying, but near the top of the mirror the letters were still visible, written by something scratchy:

CeCe made a choked sound in her throat, and Katie grabbed the girl’s robe and threw it over her shoulders. But it was Roberta who leaned over the sink, raised her arm, and scrubbed the words away with a vicious jerk, her jaw set, her fist scrubbing so hard on the mirror it made a screeching sound.

The curious girls in the hall had lost interest and dispersed, and the three girls went back to their room in hushed silence, Roberta’s arm over CeCe’s shoulders.

Still, CeCe was sobbing when they closed the door behind them. The robe dropped unheeded and she clutched the too-small towel to her, her shoulders shaking and tears rolling down her face. “She’s dead,” she said, the words sounding like stones she was trying to dislodge from her throat. “We can say it out loud. She’s dead.”

Roberta and Katie exchanged a glance.

CeCe rubbed a palm over her wet cheek. “Mary killed her.”

Bile curled in Katie’s stomach. “Not Mary,” she said. “Someone did. But not Mary.”

CeCe looked up at her, her eyes wide and seared with pain, searching Katie’s face. “What do we do?”

There was the helplessness again, creeping down the back of her neck, but this time Katie fought it. There had to be something. But dead was dead. She knew in her bones that Sonia wasn’t alive anymore, not after a week. They couldn’t save her. Maybe they never could have.

Roberta picked up CeCe’s robe from the floor and hung it, then walked to CeCe’s dresser drawer and pulled out a nightgown and a pair of underpants. She held them out to CeCe. “Do you know what I don’t like?” she said. Her face was pale and sickly, like that of someone who had lost a lot of blood, but her eyes were fire. “I don’t like that Mrs. Patton has her suitcase.”

Katie swallowed. She was angry now, the fire in Roberta’s eyes similar. Those were Sonia’s things. Her books, her notebook, her socks and underwear. They’d all watched her pack them, lovingly, hoping she’d never come back here. It wasn’t right that a bunch of adults who hadn’t known Sonia and had given up on her got to keep the suitcase and forget about it. Besides, it was possible there was a clue in there. “It must be somewhere in Mrs. Patton’s office,” she said.

“Which is locked,” CeCe said. She had taken the underpants from Roberta and slid them on beneath her towel. Her face was still blotchy, but now her mouth was set in a grim line.

“I’ll bet Susan Brady has a key,” Roberta said.

“To the headmistress’s office?” That didn’t seem likely to Katie.

“There’s a skeleton key,” CeCe said, as Roberta held up the towel and she turned away to put on her nightgown. “I’ve heard Susan brag about it. It opens everything. She isn’t supposed to have it, but she’s Mrs. Peabody’s pet, and Mrs. Peabody gives her things to do that she doesn’t want to do herself. So she has to have a key.”

Well, well. Things were always so easy when girls—and teachers—were stupid. “All right, then,” Katie said. “CeCe, you’re still distraught. You need to go see the nurse. Tell Susan that Roberta and I are mad at you and won’t take you, and you have no one else.”

CeCe had always pretended to be the stupid one, but Katie wasn’t fooled. CeCe caught on quickly. “That’s no fair,” she said, her distress over the bathroom incident fading beneath her outrage. “I want to help. I was lookout for you when you took extra food from the kitchen for Sonia. I’m good.”

“You are,” Katie agreed, meaning it, “but everyone just heard you screaming in the bathroom, so now is the perfect time to get Susan out of her room. So go get her to take you to Miss Hedmeyer. Roberta and I will get the key.”

“Get it and wait for me,” CeCe insisted. “I’m coming, too.”

Katie bit her lip, but she couldn’t argue. If the roles were reversed, she wouldn’t want to sit out. “Be quick, then,” she counseled. “Tell Miss Hedmeyer you have cramps, and she’ll give you some aspirin and send you back to your room. Susan will be mad, but just act sheepish.”

CeCe shrugged. “Susan thinks I’m stupid anyway.”

It was infuriating how many people got things wrong about you when you were a teenage girl, but as she had learned to do, Katie took her anger and made it into something else. She had the glimmer of an idea in the back of her mind, an idea bigger than stealing a key from Susan Brady’s room and getting Sonia’s suitcase from the headmistress’s office. Her anger fed it, like wood being fed into a fire. It would take thought and planning, and time. Katie had plenty of time.

But first she wanted Sonia’s suitcase. “Get your slippers on and get moving,” she said to CeCe. She pinched CeCe’s cheeks so their red splotchiness wouldn’t fade yet. CeCe turned her face to Katie, then to Roberta, who dabbed water on her cheeks from the basin. Katie watched in admiration as CeCe closed her eyes for a minute, drooped her shoulders, and let her bottom lip go soft. Then she whirled and ran from the room, slamming the door behind her as if running from an argument.

It was almost too easy. Susan Brady led CeCe to the nurse, Susan chiding and CeCe choking back distressed sobs; Roberta kept watch in the hall while Katie slipped into Susan’s room and rifled through her things, looking for the key. She found it in Susan’s jewelry box, among the tiny gold earrings and a cheap paste ring. Both girls were back in their room when CeCe returned, having swallowed the requisite chalky aspirin and taken a verbal drubbing from Susan. She quickly dressed and the three of them set out, slipping down the stairs into the common, then to the main hall—the skeleton key let them in just fine—and down the hall to the headmistress’s office.

Sonia’s suitcase was in a closet at the back of the room, alongside Mrs. Patton’s winter coat and snow boots and other confiscated items taken from Idlewild girls over the years: lipsticks, cigarettes, a pearl compact and mirror, a pair of silk stockings, a glossy photograph of Rudolph Valentino—How old was that? Katie wondered—and two beautiful priceless items: a small flask of alcohol and a stack of magazines. The girls couldn’t resist: Katie pocketed the alcohol, Roberta snatched the magazines, and CeCe took the suitcase. They dropped the skeleton key in the garden, Roberta edging it beneath the soft, wet earth with the toe of her shoe.

Back in their room, they set aside the unexpected loot and went quietly through the suitcase, reverently touching Sonia’s things. The case was neatly packed, and Katie knew that no one had opened it since Sonia had packed it at her relatives’ house. Not one person—not the headmistress, not the police, not anyone—had bothered to look in the missing girl’s things.

Katie opened Sonia’s notebook, leafing through the pages as the other two girls looked on. There was Sonia’s handwriting, the portraits she’d drawn of her family and the people she’d seen at Ravensbrück. There were maps, and sketches, and pages and pages of memories, Sonia’s short life put down in her private journal. In the last pages were portraits of her three friends, drawn closely and lovingly.

Katie had already known that Sonia was dead, but looking at the notebook—which Sonia, while alive, would never have abandoned to her last breath—she knew.

This is good-bye, Katie thought, but not farewell. Someone did this. And I won’t stand for it. None of us will.

The girls closed the suitcase and went to bed.

And Katie began to think.