Barrons, Vermont

October 1950

The first time Katie Winthrop had seen Idlewild Hall, she nearly cried. She’d been in the backseat of her father’s Chevy, looking between Dad’s gray-suited shoulder and Mom’s crepe-bloused one, and when the big black gates loomed at the end of Old Barrons Road, she’d suddenly felt tears sting her eyes.

The gates were open, something she soon learned was rare. Dad had driven the car through the entrance and up the long dirt drive in silence, and she had stared at the building that rose up before them: the main hall, three stories high and stretching endlessly long, lined with peaked windows that looked like rows of teeth, broken only by the portico that signaled the front door. It was August, and the air was thick and hot, heavy with oncoming rain. As they drew closer, it looked uncannily like they were traveling into the jaws of the building, and Katie had swallowed hard, keeping straight and still as the hall grew larger and larger in the windshield.

Dad stopped the car, and for a moment there was no sound but the engine ticking. Idlewild Hall was dark, with no sign of life. Katie looked at her mother, but Mom’s face was turned away, looking sightlessly out the passenger window, and even though Katie was so close she could see the makeup Mom had pressed onto her cheek with a little sponge, she did not speak.

I’m sorry, she’d suddenly wanted to say. Please don’t make me stay here. I can’t do it. I’m so sorry . . .

“I’ll get your bags,” Dad said.

That had been two years ago. Katie was used to Idlewild now—the long worn hallways that smelled like mildew and girls’ sweat, the windows that let in icy drafts around the edges in winter, the wafts of wet, mulchy odor on the field hockey green no matter what the season, the uniforms that hadn’t been changed since the school first opened in 1919.

Katie was the kind of girl other girls tended to obey easily: dark-haired, dominant, beautiful, a little aggressive, and unafraid. She wasn’t popular, exactly, but she’d had to use her fists only twice, and both times she’d won easily. A good front, she knew, was most of the battle, and she’d used hers without mercy. It wasn’t easy to survive in a boarding school full of throwaway girls, but after swallowing her tears in those first moments, Katie had mastered it.

She saw her parents twice a year, once in summer and once at Christmas, and she’d never told them she was sorry.

There were four girls per room in Clayton Hall, the dormitory. You never knew whom you would get. One of Katie’s first roommates, a stringy-haired girl from New Hampshire who claimed to be descended from a real Salem witch, had the habit of humming relentlessly as she read her Latin textbook, biting the side of her thumbnail with such diligence that Katie had thought it might be grounds for murder. After the Salem witch left, she was replaced by a long-legged, springy-haired girl whose name Katie had never remembered, and who spent most of her nights curled up in her bunk, quietly sobbing into her pillow until Charlotte Kankle, who was massive and always angry, rolled out of her bunk and told her, Stop crying, for the love of Jesus Christ, or I promise you these other girls will hold you down while I give you a bloody nose. No one had contradicted her. The sobbing girl had been quiet after that, and she’d left a few weeks later.

Charlotte Kankle had since moved down the hall—after she and Katie got into a fistfight, one of Katie’s victories—and now she had a set of roommates here in 3C that, she had to admit, might not be a total failure. Idlewild was the boarding school of last resort, where parents stashed their embarrassments, their failures, and their recalcitrant girls. Hidden in the backwoods of Vermont, it had only 120 students: illegitimate daughters, first wives’ daughters, servants’ daughters, immigrant girls, girls who misbehaved or couldn’t learn. Most of them fought and mistrusted one another, but in a backward way, Katie felt these girls were the only ones who understood her. They were the only ones who just shrugged in boredom when she told them how many times she’d run away from home.

She sat up in bed after curfew one night and rooted beneath her pillow for the pack of cigarettes she’d stashed there. It was October, and cold autumn rain spattered the single high window in the dorm room. She banged on the bunk above her. “CeCe.”

“What is it?” CeCe was awake, of course. Katie had already known it from the sound of her breathing.

“I want to tell you a ghost story.”

“Really?” There was a muffled sound as CeCe slid over on her bunk and looked over the edge, down at Katie. “Is it Mary Hand?”

“Oh, no,” came a voice from the top bunk across the room. “Not another story about Mary Hand.”

“Ssh, Roberta,” CeCe said. “You’ll wake Sonia.”

“I’m awake,” Sonia said from beneath her covers on the bunk below Roberta. When she was half-asleep, her French accent was more pronounced. “I cannot sleep with all of your talking.”

Katie tapped a cigarette from the pack. All four girls in the room were fifteen years old—Idlewild had long ago grouped girls of the same age, since the older girls tended to bully the younger ones when they roomed together. “Mary Hand is in my Latin textbook,” she said. “Look.”

She pulled the book—which was decades old and musty—from beneath her bed, along with a small flashlight. Flashlights were forbidden at Idlewild, a rule that every girl flouted without exception. Holding the flashlight steady, she quickly paged through the book until she came to the page she wanted. “See?” she said.

CeCe had climbed down from her bunk. She had the biggest breasts of any of the four of them, and she self-consciously brought a blanket down with her, pulling it over her shoulders. “Oh,” she said as she stared at the page Katie had lit with the flashlight. “I have that in my grammar book. Something similar, at least.”

“What is it?” Roberta was lured from her top bunk, her sleek calves poking from the hem of her outgrown nightgown, her brownish blond hair tied into a braid down her back. She landed on the floor without a sound and peered over CeCe’s shoulder. Katie heard her soft intake of breath.

Along the edge of the page, in the narrow band of white space, was a message in pencil.

Looking at it gave Katie a blurry, queasy feeling, a quick pulse of fear that she refused to show. Everyone knew of Mary Hand, but somehow these penciled letters made her more real. “It isn’t a joke, is it,” she said—a statement, not a question.

“No, it’s not a joke,” CeCe said. “The one in my grammar book said Toilet, third floor, end of west hall, I saw Mary there. That one was from 1939.”

“It’s a message.” This was Sonia, who had gotten up and was looking over Roberta’s shoulder. She shrugged and backed away again. “I’ve seen them, too. They have never changed the textbooks here, I think.”

Katie flipped through the musty pages of the Latin textbook. Its front page listed the copyright as 1919, the year Idlewild opened. She tried to picture the school as it had been then: the building brand-new, the uniforms brand-new, the textbooks brand-new. Now, in 1950, Idlewild was a time machine, a place that had no inkling of atomic bombs or Texaco Star Theatre on television. It made sense, in a twisted way, that Idlewild girls would pass wisdom down to one another in the margins of their textbooks, alongside the lists of American Revolution battles and the chemical makeup of iodine. The teachers never looked in these books, and they were never thrown away. If you wanted to warn a future girl about Mary Hand, the books were the best place to do it.

Through the window of 1G, Clayton Hall. Katie struck a match and lit her cigarette.

“You shouldn’t,” Roberta said halfheartedly. “Susan Brady will smell it, and then you’ll catch hell.”

“Susan Brady is asleep,” Katie replied. Susan was the dorm monitor for Floor Three, and she took her job very seriously, which meant that no one liked her. Katie switched off the flashlight and the four of them sat in the dark. Roberta tossed a pillow on the floor and sat with her back against the narrow dresser. Sonia quietly moved to the window and cracked it open, letting the smoke escape.

“So,” CeCe said to Katie. “Have you seen her?”

Katie shrugged. She wished she’d never brought it up now; she knew these girls, but not well enough yet to trust them. Looking at the penciled messages in her Latin book again had unsettled her. The fact was, she wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to her, and she wished that it had been as simple as seeing Idlewild’s ghost in the bathroom. It had seemed real at the time, but to put it into words now felt impossible. She swallowed and deflected the subject. “Do you think she was really a student here?” she asked the other girls.

“I heard she was,” Roberta said. “Mary Van Woorten, on the field hockey team, says that Mary Hand died when she was locked out of the school on a winter night and lost her way.”

“It must have been years ago.” CeCe had crawled onto the bunk next to Katie and propped up the pillows against the headboard. “I heard she knocks on the windows at night, trying to get in. That she begs girls to come outside and follow her, but if you do it, you die.”

CeCe was the roommate Katie had had the longest, and the one she knew the most about, because CeCe was an open book. She was the illegitimate daughter of a rich banker, sired on one of the housemaids and packed off to one boarding school or another for most of her life. CeCe, amazingly, held no animosity toward her father, and was close to her mother, who was now a housekeeper for a family in Boston. She’d told Katie all of this on their first meeting, as she’d hung up her Idlewild crested jacket and put away her hockey stick.

“You can sometimes hear her singing in the field when the wind is in the trees,” Roberta added. “A lullaby or something.”

Katie hadn’t heard that one. “You can hear her?”

Roberta shrugged. She had been at Idlewild for only a few months, whereas the other girls had been here for at least a year, and Sonia for three. Roberta was smart, a natural athlete, though she didn’t talk much. No one knew anything about her home life. Katie couldn’t figure out what she was doing here of all places, but from the hooded look that she often saw in Roberta’s eyes—that look of retreat, of watching the world as if from behind a wall, that was common to a lot of Idlewild girls—she guessed there was a reason. “I’ve never heard her myself, and I’m at practice four times a week.” Roberta turned to Sonia, as she often did. “Sonia, what do you think?”

If CeCe was the easiest to understand, Sonia was the hardest. Pale, thin, quiet, flitting in and out of the crowds and the complicated social cliques, she seemed apart from everything, even for an Idlewild girl. She was an immigrant from France, and in the aftermath of the war, where so many of the girls had lost a father or a brother or had men come home ragged from POW camps, no one asked her about it. She’d been at Idlewild the longest of any of them.

Sonia seemed completely self-contained, as if whatever was happening inside her own head was sufficient for her. For some reason Roberta, who was swift and fit and graceful, had become smitten with Sonia, and could often be seen by her side. They were so easy together, it made Katie want that, too. Katie had never been easy with anyone. She’d always been the girl with admirers, not friends.

Sonia caught Katie’s eyes briefly and shrugged, the gesture cool and European even in her simple white nightgown. “I have no use for ghosts,” she said in her sweet, melodious accent, “though like everyone else, I’ve heard she wears a black dress and a veil, which seems a strange outfit if you are outside in the snow.” Her gaze, resting on Katie in the darkened gloom, missed nothing. “You saw something. Did you not?”

Katie glanced at the cigarette, forgotten in her fingers. “I heard her,” she said. She tamped out the smoke against the brass back of the sophomore achievement medal someone had left behind, and ground the butt with her thumb.

“Heard her?” CeCe asked.

Katie took a breath. Talking about Mary Hand felt like speaking of a family secret somehow. It was one thing to tell ghost stories in the dark, and another when you opened your locker before gym class and felt something push it closed again. There were always small things, like a feeling of being watched, or a cold patch in a hallway, that you were never quite sure you’d experienced, and you felt stupid bringing up. But this had been different, and Katie had the urge to speak it out loud. “It was in the common, on the path that goes past the dining hall.”

The girls nodded. Idlewild’s main buildings were arranged in a U-shaped square around a common, dotted with unkempt trees and weedy flagstoned paths. “That section scares me,” CeCe said. “The one by the garden.”

It scared Katie, too. No one liked the garden, even though the curriculum included Weekly Gardening, when they had to reluctantly dig through its damp, rotten-smelling earth. Even the teachers gave the garden a wide berth. “I was sneaking a cigarette after dinner, and I left the path so Mrs. Peabody wouldn’t see me—you know she smokes her own cigarettes out there, even though she’s not supposed to. I was beneath the big maple tree, and I just felt something. Someone was there.”

CeCe was leaning forward, rapt. “But you didn’t see anything?”

“There was a voice,” Katie said. “It was— I didn’t imagine it. It was right there next to me, as if someone was standing there. I heard it so clearly.”

She could still recall that moment beneath the maple tree, standing on a bed of old maple keys, her cigarette dropping to the ground, the hair standing up on the back of her neck when a voice somewhere behind her right ear had spoken. Idlewild was an old place, and the fear here was old fear. Katie had thought she understood fear until that moment, but when the voice had spoken, she’d understood fear that was older and bigger than she could imagine.

“Well?” Roberta prompted. “What did she say?”

Katie cleared her throat. “ ‘Hold still,’ ” she said.

They were all quiet for a moment.

“Oh, my God,” CeCe said softly.

Strangely, it was Sonia that Katie looked at. Sonia was sitting on the floor, against the wall beneath the window, her thin legs drawn up, her knees to her chest. She was very still, bathed in shadow, and Katie couldn’t tell if Sonia’s eyes were on her or not. Far off, a door slammed, and something tapped, like dripping water, in the ceiling.

“Why?” Sonia asked her, the French lilt soft. “Why did she say that to you?”

Katie shrugged hard, the muscles wrenching in her shoulders, even though it was dark and the other girls couldn’t see it. “I don’t know,” she snapped, her voice growing sharp before she tempered it. “It was just a voice I heard. That’s all I know.”

A lie, a lie. But how could some old ghost even know?

Hold still. She couldn’t talk about that. Not to anyone. Not yet.

“What did you do?” Roberta asked.

This was an easier question. “I ran like hell.”

Only CeCe, leaning against the headboard, gave a quick tut at the language. She’d been raised prim for an illegitimate girl. “I would have run, too,” she conceded. “I saw a little boy once. At the Ellesmeres’.” The Ellesmeres were her rich father’s family, though CeCe hadn’t been given the family name. “I was playing in the back courtyard one day while Mother worked. I looked up and there was a boy in an upper window of the house, watching me. I waved, but he didn’t wave back. When I asked my mother about it, about why the boy wasn’t allowed outside to play, she got the strangest look on her face. She told me I’d been seeing things, and that I should never say anything about that boy again, especially in front of the Ellesmeres. I never did see him again. I always wondered who he was.”

“My grandmother used to tell me about the ghost in her attic,” Roberta said. “It moved all the furniture around up there and made a racket. She said there were nights she’d lie in bed listening to trunks and dressers being dragged across the floor. Mum always said she was just an old lady looking for attention, but one summer I spent two weeks at my grandmother’s house, and I heard it. It was just like she’d said—furniture being dragged across the floor, and the sound of the old brass floor lamp being picked up and put down, over and over. The next morning I asked her if it was Granddad’s ghost doing it, and she only looked at me and said, ‘No, dear. It’s something much worse.’ ” She paused. “I never went back there. She died at Christmas that year, and Mum sold the house.”

“What about you, Sonia?” CeCe asked. “Did you ever see a ghost?”

Sonia unfolded her thin legs and stood, then gripped the window and pulled it shut. The draft of cold air from outside ceased, but still Katie shivered.

“The dead are dead,” she said. “I have no use for ghosts.”

Katie watched her silhouette in the near darkness. It had sounded dismissive, but Sonia hadn’t said she didn’t believe in ghosts. She hadn’t said she’d never seen one. She hadn’t said they weren’t real.

She knew, just as they all did.

The rain pelted the window again. Hold still, the voice in Katie’s head said again. Hold still. She hugged herself tightly and closed her eyes.