Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

It was easier to ignore the flowers and the cards this time. Easier to watch her boots scuffle through them and kick them aside as she made her way across the field. Now that she knew what Mary was. But the fear didn’t go away. We were all so horribly afraid, Sarah London had said, but Fiona understood now. That Sarah London had spent thirty years in this place, with this fear. That the girls had lived with it. That Sonia had lived with it, and yet she had come running back, fleeing her killer, dropping her suitcase in the trees. Just like Fiona was running back now.

This place, she thought. This place.

The garbage underfoot fell away and she passed the gymnasium, approaching the main building with its rows of teeth. Come back, it seemed to say to her, grinning in anticipation. Come back here as you always have. As you always do. As you always will, over and over. Come back. She ran toward it without question, drawn to its grinning face.

A backhoe was parked in the gravel in front of the main hall, and a pickup truck was parked next to it, but she saw no sign of workers. Whoever it was she had glimpsed before was gone. She shouted, but her voice was only a hoarse whisper, blown away by the wind. She’d seen vehicles here earlier, movement; she was sure of it. Where had they gone?

The big black front gates were locked; there was no sign of a security guard. Had Garrett already come and gone, finding no way in? How much time had passed? She had no idea, but when she heard a car’s engine approaching from the road, she decided not to chance it. She turned and ran to the front door of the main building, trying to call for help over and over.

The front door of the main hall was locked. Fiona stared at the keypad next to it, blinking stupidly, trying to remember the code she’d seen Anthony punch in. She’d watched him do it, watched his fingers move over the keys—if only she could remember. She pulled the memory dimly from her brain and punched in a number combination, her surprise muffled with pain when the light went green and the door clicked open.

She slipped inside, closing the door behind her. A car’s engine could be heard faintly outside, and she walked hurriedly across the high-ceilinged main hall, her boots scuffing on the dusty floor. Her breath frosted on the air, and there was no sound in here except a rustling in the rafters—birds or bats.

How did anyone ever learn in this place? she wondered as she walked to the bottom of the main staircase. She stared up at the balconies above, spinning away from the staircase like a wheel, and her head throbbed. She pictured Roberta Greene here, the young teenager with a braid down her back, wearing the Idlewild uniform from the photographs. Going up and down these stairs, textbooks under her arm, her head down. Wondering when she’d encounter the resident ghost. She’s an echo, Roberta had said.

Fiona put a foot on the bottom step, thinking to go upstairs and look for the work crews from the windows, but something stopped her. She turned.

A girl stood in the shadows of the west end of the hall, watching her. She was small and slight, her face in shadow. She wore a green-and-blue-plaid skirt and a white blouse. The Idlewild uniform.

Fiona’s breath stopped. She stood half-turned, her foot still on the step, as the wind blew outside and howled through a hole somewhere in the roof. Dead leaves rustled across the hall’s abandoned floor.

She looked at the girl’s uniform, her size, and even though she’d never seen a photograph, she suddenly knew.

“Sonia?” she said, her voice a hoarse croak.

The girl didn’t move.

Slowly, Fiona lifted her foot from the step and backed away from the staircase. She walked toward the girl.

“Sonia?” she said again.

As she got closer, she could see the girl’s face in the shadows. She had a high forehead, clear gray eyes, a small and straight nose. Lips that were narrow and well formed. A face long and heart-shaped, with a chin as clean as a sculpture’s, on a neck that was long and elegant. Her hair was mousy blond, thin and flat, shoulder length, pulled back from her forehead with bobby pins. An average-looking girl, with a quiet sweetness and dignity about her, who would someday grow up to be a pretty, strong-featured woman with wisdom in her eyes. Except that she wouldn’t, because she’d never make it past fifteen.

She was as real, in that moment, as if she was truly standing there. She watched Fiona come closer, her expression inscrutable, and then she turned and walked into the shadows.

She’s leading me, Fiona thought.

She followed. This was the same back corridor Anthony Eden had led her through on their tour, so long ago now. It led, Fiona remembered, to a back door to the common.

From behind her, she heard the front door rattle as someone tried to open it.

She moved quickly. Sonia was gone; maybe she had given the message she wanted to give. Fiona found the back door and pushed it open, just as she heard the front door rattle again far behind her. She slipped out onto the common and eased it closed behind her.

Where to now, Sonia?

The cold air hit her, and she shivered uncontrollably for a second, her body shaking inside her coat, her teeth chattering. Quiet, be quiet. Don’t make a noise. Sonia was on the far side of the common, walking toward a building Anthony hadn’t taken her to last time. She searched her mind for what he’d told her it was. The dorm.

She hurried across the quad after the girl, shaking away the persistent idea that this was madness. It didn’t feel like madness. Her throat hurt where Jamie’s father had tried to strangle her to death. As flakes of snow hit her hair and her eyelashes, that was what felt like madness. This felt sane.

Halfway across the common, she looked back. In one of the windows of the main building there was a silhouette watching her: a slim girl in a black dress, a veil over her face.

Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land . . .

Good Night Girl.

Fiona turned and ran faster.

The dorm building, unlike the others, was unlocked, for the simple reason that the front door was broken. It had been forced off its hinges at some point, the wood rotten, an unintelligible graffiti sign sprayed on the front. Since the restoration had begun, the door had been propped back in place, kept shut by a piece of wood nailed into it and across the doorframe. The wood of the frame was so rotted that Fiona pried the board from it easily, the wood splintering like butter beneath her hands.

She pushed the door open and walked into a building that had obviously been broken into at least once since the school had closed. Broken bottles, splintered glass, cigarette butts, and even worse garbage littered the floor. An old sleeping bag, crusted with something unspeakable, lay in the corner, shredded nearly to pieces by mice over the years. Charred marks on the floor spoke of at least one fire lit in here. Fiona was grateful when she saw Sonia’s shadow flit at the top of the stairs, and she quickly moved past it all and started up.

She was nearly at the top when she heard the gunfire.

It was so sudden that Fiona’s knees buckled, and she drooped clumsily on the stairwell, gripping the railing. There was one shot, then another, then two in quick succession. They came from somewhere close outside. The sharp cracks reverberated through her aching head, and she opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came from her tortured throat.

Her vision blurred for a minute, and when she realized the shots had stopped, she pulled herself upward again, her shoulders aching. There was no more sound from outside. Quiet, be quiet. Hide. She hadn’t known Garrett was armed. It was strange that he’d fired shots outside, and not at her. Maybe he was shooting at Mary.

She moved as quietly as she could down the corridor, blinking in the gloom, looking for Sonia. She saw the girl move through a doorway, silent as a shadow, and followed. The door had a number in cracked, faded paint: 3C.

She was in a bedroom. There had been beds in here once—two sets of bunks, by the looks of it—but they were long destroyed, the mattresses gone, the frames splintered and dismantled. An old dresser lay on its side against one wall. The room was musty and smelled like spilled beer and old, cold urine. It had been defaced and defiled and forgotten, but Fiona knew it had been Sonia’s room. That was why Sonia had come through the door.

If it had been Sonia’s room, then it was the room she’d shared with Katie Winthrop, Roberta Greene, and CeCe Frank. Shivering, Fiona sank to the floor and closed her eyes. This was the room they’d lived in, slept in. She pictured them, though she had no idea what Katie or CeCe looked like, wearing their uniforms, talking and teasing one another and arguing and whispering secrets at night the way girls did. She wondered what secrets had been whispered in this room. She wondered if this was where the girls had felt safe.

She couldn’t run anymore. She was too tired. Shaking with cold, she lay on the ground, hoping Garrett wouldn’t find her.

Fiona didn’t know she’d drifted off until she opened her eyes. She was looking at the ceiling of the bedroom, but the dark stains in the plaster were gone. The smell of beer and piss was gone. She could hear the wind moaning through the room’s only window, but no other sounds. Her body ached too much to sit up, but she turned her head and saw that the bunks were in place, the beds neatly made with green-and-blue-plaid wool blankets over them. A hockey stick leaned against one wall. There was a single wooden chair by the window, and a girl sat in it, her face turned toward the glass. She moved, and Fiona heard a gasping sob come from her throat.

It was Deb.

She wore the clothes she’d worn the day she was murdered. Her gray raincoat was belted around her narrow waist, though the black knit hat she’d worn when Tim Christopher picked her up was gone. It hadn’t been on her body, and it had never been found. Deb’s dark hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, secured at the back of her neck. She looked at Fiona from gray-blue eyes Fiona hadn’t seen in twenty years.

“Don’t let her in,” Deb said.

Fiona lifted her head from the floor. “Deb,” she said.

Deb turned back to the window. “She’ll ask,” she said. Her voice was reedy, as if heard through the blast of a windstorm. “She’ll beg. She sounds so pitiful. Don’t let her in.”

I’m hallucinating, Fiona thought, but part of her didn’t care. Her sister was beautiful, sitting there with her legs in their dark green pants crossed at the ankles, her feet in the sneakers she’d worn on her date with Tim Christopher. She was quietly, painfully beautiful, forever twenty years old. Her body, dead on the field outside, had still worn those shoes.

“Deb,” Fiona said again, scrambling to get words out. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Deb said, still looking out the window.

Fiona pushed herself up on her elbows. “Are you always here?”

Her sister was quiet for a moment, and then she answered, “Sometimes.” She sounded softly confused. “It’s all so strange. Like a dream, don’t you think?” She turned and pinned Fiona with her gray-blue gaze again. “Please don’t let her in.”

“Is it Mary?” Fiona rasped.

“It gets so cold out there.” Deb looked back out the window. “She sounds so sad.”

Fiona opened her mouth again, trying to get Deb’s attention. She had so much to say, to ask, but her sister couldn’t hear. Voices and shouts came from outside. She blinked and the room wavered. No, she thought. No. She tried to heave herself up—to touch Deb perhaps, to grab her—but her body wouldn’t cooperate. She tried clumsily to get her knees beneath her, realizing her hands were numb. “No,” she rasped out loud.

The voices sounded again, closer this time. Shouts. Fiona’s leg gave from under her, and she fell to the floor, landing softly on her shoulder, trying to get her arm beneath her. She blinked as the room wavered again.

“I was so afraid,” Deb said.

And then the room went back again, to the abandoned shell with its sticks of furniture and awful smell. Fiona lay on her side as tears coursed down her face, cold against her skin. Her teeth chattered.

There was the shuffle of fabric, the rustle of a dress in the room.

Fiona tried to close her eyes, and couldn’t.

The hem of a black dress came into her line of vision. It moved through the door of the bedroom as Mary Hand came inside. Fiona curled her knees up against her chest, unable to move, unable to scream. Unable to run. There was nowhere to go.

“I didn’t let her in,” she whispered to herself. “I didn’t.”

The hem of the black dress swept the dirty floor, the fabric so real Fiona could see the sheen of the thick black silk. Then Mary came toward her, her feet ghastly and visible below the dress’s hem. They were bare, icy white and blue with cold. Thin skin stretched over bones.

Mary took one step, and then another. Fiona screamed, the sound nothing but air forced high from her throat. Then she screamed again.

There was a shout, and someone came through the door. Two people, three. Men. Voices rang through the room. Hands touched her.

Fiona turned her head and saw that Mary was gone.

She closed her eyes and let them take her.