The Broken Girls

For the first time, his face went hard, the expression closed down. “Your sister isn’t there. I told Norm Simpson the same thing. She’s gone. You sound like your mother, still worried every day that you’re making Deb unhappy.”

“I don’t—” But she did. Of course she did. Leave it to her father to get to the heart of it with his journalist’s precision. Her parents had divorced two years after the murder, unable to carry on together anymore. Her mother had gone to work at Walgreens after the divorce, even though she had a Ph.D. She’d said it was because she was tired of academia, but Fiona always knew it was because Deb had been embarrassed by what she referred to as her parents’ nerdiness. She’d been uncomfortable with Malcolm’s fame as a journalist and an activist—twenty-year-old Deb, who had wanted nothing more than to fit in, be popular, and have friends, had thought she had all the answers. She’d been so young, Fiona thought now. So terribly young. The attitude had affected their mother, yet no matter how Deb had scorned him, Malcolm refused to apologize for the way he led his life.

But when Fiona looked around their childhood home now, at the clutter and disorder that hadn’t been touched in years, she wondered if her father felt as guilty as the rest of them did. There had been arguments that year before Deb died—she’d been in college, barely passing her classes while she socialized and had fun. She’d been drinking, going to parties, and dating Tim, to their parents’ hurt confusion. Fiona, at seventeen, had watched the rift from the sidelines. And then, one November night, it had all been over.

Still, Malcolm Sheridan was Malcolm Sheridan. Two days after she’d visited him, Fiona received a phone call from Anthony Eden’s assistant, asking her to meet Eden at the gates of Idlewild Hall the next morning for a tour and an interview. “I can’t do it,” she said to Jamie that night, sitting on the couch in his small apartment, curled up against him and thinking about Deb again. “I can’t go.”

“Right,” he said. “You can’t go.”

Fiona pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes. “Yes, I can. I can go. I’m going.”

“This is the most ambitious thing you’ve ever written, isn’t it?” he asked. He’d finished a long shift, and they were sitting in the half-dark quiet, without even the TV on. She could feel his muscles slowly unknotting, as if his job kept him in some unbearable level of silent tension he could only now release.

“Is that a dig?” she asked him, though she knew it wasn’t.

“No,” he said. “But since I’ve known you, all you’ve written are those fluff pieces.” He paused, feeling his way. “I just get the feeling you’re a better writer than you let on.”

Fiona swallowed. She’d gone to journalism school—it had been second nature to follow in Malcolm’s footsteps, and she was incapable of doing anything else—but she’d freelanced her entire career instead of working in a newsroom. She told herself it was because she could do bigger and better things that way. But here she was. “Well, I guess I’ll find out. They say you’re supposed to do something that scares you every day, right?”

Jamie snorted. He was probably unaware she’d read that motto on a yoga bag. “It’s a good thing I’m a cop, then.”

“Oh, really?” It was one of her hobbies to test how far she could push Jamie. “Directing traffic at the Christmas parade? That must be pretty terrifying.”

In response, he dropped his head back, resting it on the back of the sofa and staring at the ceiling. “You are so dead,” he said with a straight face.

“Or that time they were fixing the bridge. You had to stand there for hours.” Fiona shook her head. “I don’t know how you handle it every day.”

“So dead,” Jamie said again.

“Or when we get a big snowfall, and you have to help all the cars in the ditch—”

She was fast, but he was faster. Before she could get away, he had pulled her down by the hips and pinned her to the sofa. “Take it back,” he said.

She leaned up and brushed her lips over his gorgeous mouth. “Make me,” she said.

He did. She took it back, eventually.

Fiona stood next to the tall black gates to Idlewild, leaning on her parked car, watching Old Barrons Road. It looked different in daylight, though it was still stark and lonely, the last dead leaves skittering across the road. There was no movement at the gas station, no one on the hill. Birds cried overhead as they gathered to go south before the brutal winter hit. Fiona turned up the collar of her parka and rubbed her hands.

A black Mercedes came over the hill, moving as slowly as a funeral procession, its engine soundless. Fiona watched as it pulled up next to her and the driver’s window whirred down, showing a man over fifty with a wide forehead, thinning brown hair, and a pair of sharp eyes that were trained on her, unblinking.

“Mr. Eden?” Fiona said.

He nodded once, briefly, from the warm leather interior of his car. “Please follow me,” he said.

He pressed a button somewhere—Fiona pictured a sleek console in there, like in a James Bond film—and the gates made a loud, ringing clang. An automatic lock—that was new. A motor purred and the gates swung open slowly, revealing an unpaved dirt driveway leading away, freshly dug like an open scar.

Fiona got in her car and followed. The drive was bumpy, and at first there was nothing to see but trees. But the trees thinned, and the driveway curved, and for the first time in twenty years she saw Idlewild Hall.

My God, she thought. This place. This place.

There was nothing like it—not in the Vermont countryside full of clapboard and Colonials, and perhaps not anywhere. Idlewild was a monster of a building, not high but massively long, rowed with windows that dully reflected the gray sky through a film of dirt. Brambles and weeds clotted the front lawn, and tangles of dead vines crawled the walls. Four of the windows on the far end of the building were broken, looking like eyes that had blinked closed. The rest of the windows grinned down the driveway at the approaching cars. All the better to eat you with, my dear.

Fiona had last been here four days after Deb’s body was found. The police hadn’t let her come to the scene, but after they’d cleared everything away, she’d come through the fence and stood in the middle of the sports field, on the place where Deb’s body had lain. She’d been looking for solace, perhaps, or a place to begin to understand, but instead she’d found a litter of wreaths, cheap bundles of flowers, beer bottles, and cigarette butts. The aftermath of the concerned citizens of Barrons—and its teenagers—conducting their own vigil.

The building had been in ruins then. It was worse now. As Fiona got closer, she saw that the end of the main building, where the windows were broken, actually sagged a little, as if the roof had fallen in. The circular drive in front of the main doors was uneven and muddy, and she had to take care to keep her balance as she got out of the car. She strapped her DSLR camera around her neck and turned to greet her tour guide.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” the man said as he walked from the parked Mercedes toward her. “The driveway was overgrown, the pavement cracked and upended in parts. We had to have it redug before we could do much else.” He held out his hand. His expression was naturally serious, but he attempted a smile. “I’m Anthony Eden. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Fiona Sheridan.” His hand was warm and smooth. He was wearing a cashmere coat, in contrast to the jeans, boots, and parka she’d worn in preparation for touring a construction site.

“I only have an hour, I’m afraid,” Anthony said. “Shall we start with the main building?”

“Of course.” As they started walking, Fiona pulled out her pocket MP3 recorder. “Do you mind if I record what you tell me? It helps to make the quotes more accurate.”

Anthony briefly glanced down at the recorder, then away again. “If you like.” An electric security console had been installed on the main door, and he punched in a code. The console beeped, and he opened the door.

“You’ve worked fast,” Fiona commented, thumbing on the recorder. “I noticed the new fencing and the electric gate as well.”

“Security was our first measure. We don’t want the local kids treating this place as a free hotel room anymore.” He had walked into the main hall and stopped. Fiona stopped, too.

It was a massive space, musty and dim, lit only by the cloudy sunlight coming through the windows. The ceiling rose three stories high; the floor was paneled in wood of a chocolate color so dark it was nearly black. In front of them rose a staircase, sweeping up to a landing on the second floor and another landing on the third, lined with intricate wood railings, the balconies on the upper floors spinning away from either side of the staircase like a spider’s web, fading back into the darkness. There was no sound but a silent hush and the rustle of a bird’s wings somewhere in the rafters. The smell was mildewy like wet wood, underlain with something faintly rotten.