The Broken Girls

“Who’s first?” she asked, sitting down and sliding his beer over to him.

“I’ll go.” Jamie cracked his beer and took a drink. “Sonia Gallipeau, age fifteen, was reported missing in early December 1950. She was an Idlewild student with no local family. She left to visit a great-aunt and great-uncle in Burlington. She left after a day without their permission—ran away. She got on the bus back to Barrons. She never got there, and she was never seen again.”

“So it is her,” Fiona said. “Not just a borrowed blouse.”

“It seems so, yes.” Jamie riffled through his stack of papers. “We have no trace of dental records and no trace of any living relatives. The great-aunt and great-uncle are long dead, no descendants. So at this point we can’t match her, even with DNA.”

Fiona took a bite of her cold pasta. “Where was she last seen?”

“Burlington, getting on the bus, by the ticket taker.”

“What did the bus driver say?”

“No one interviewed him. No one even found out his name.” Jamie pulled an old folder out of his pile and held it up. “You see this? This is the missing persons file.” It had two or three pieces of paper in it, tops. “She was a boarding school girl, and she was fifteen, so she was presumed a runaway. Case closed.”

“Who reported her missing?”

“The headmistress at Idlewild. One Julia Patton.” Jamie put the file down again. “She died in 1971, so that’s a dead end. I can’t get a line on Idlewild’s student records, because the school has been closed for so long. And Anthony Eden won’t return my calls.”

“Aha.” Fiona held up her spoon. “That’s where I come in. He returned mine.”

Jamie shook his head. “Of course he did.”

“It pays to have a nosy journalist on your side,” Fiona said. “But in this case, it’s a dead end. Because get this: According to Anthony Eden, there are no Idlewild student records.”

Jamie sat back in his chair. “They’re gone?”

“Disappeared when the school closed, and were most likely destroyed. Sixty years of records.”

“That’s going to make things harder.” He scratched at his beard for a second, dismayed. “Do you think Eden is lying?”

“Maybe,” Fiona said. She took another scoop of the pasta. “It’s always possible. But I can’t see the angle. He wants this squared away fast, not drawn out. I can’t picture him carting dozens of moldy old file boxes out of there and hiding them. And I can’t figure what he would be covering up, since this happened before he was born.”

“Neither can I. But I’m going to run a check at local storage places to see if he’s rented a space. That many records would need room.”

That was fine with her. She’d promised Anthony to handle the story quietly, not to keep him immune from police probing. “What else did you find?” she asked Jamie.

“We did a basic check on the name,” he replied. “She was only fifteen, so there wasn’t much. No medical or dental that we could find. She’d never been in the system before, as either a juvenile delinquent or a runaway. And no birth certificate, either—she wasn’t born here.”

That surprised her. They were a few hours from Quebec, and French names were not that uncommon. “She was from Canada?”

Jamie shook his head. “France.”

Damn. Damn. She should have thought of that angle, instead of assuming and looking locally. Never make assumptions, her father admonished in her head. “You found immigration records?”

He nodded, his expression haunted. “She came in 1947.”

It hit her. Arriving from France in 1947, age twelve, no family. “Shit,” she said. “You mean she was a refugee.”

“Yes.”

She put down her spoon and rubbed her fingertips over her eye sockets, thinking. “So Sonia spent her childhood in France during the war. Nazi-occupied France. She lost her parents, her family. And she came here, only to—”

“Only to be murdered and dumped in a well,” Jamie finished for her.

They were silent for a minute. It had happened over sixty years ago, but something about it was still nauseating, as if she could smell that rotten stench from the blackness of the well once again. She pressed her fingers harder, then dropped her hands. It was done; Sonia Gallipeau was dead, no matter how unjustly. She couldn’t change it, but maybe she could do something about it. “What about her records from France?” she said to Jamie. “Can you get those?”

He was sitting back in his chair, staring blankly at his laptop screen as if it might give him answers. He listlessly picked up his beer and drained it. “I’ve put the request out,” he said. “It’ll take a day or two. The only reason I was given permission to do it at all was in case she had living relatives in Europe that we can inform. Maybe someone, somewhere, was left to look for her.”

Fiona stared at him. She knew how a small police force worked, and she knew even more now that she’d spent a year with him. “How long do we have?” she asked.

Jamie shook his head. “Not long. We don’t have many detectives, Fee, and there was a murder in Burlington last week. We can spend some resources on it, but this girl has no family, and the likelihood is that whoever did this is dead.”

“But it’s a murder,” she protested. “Once the coroner confirms it, it’s an open case.”

“A cold one. Cold before we even touched it. We’ll do our diligence—we’ll investigate. But our resources are limited. There are fresh cases we have to work. If nothing comes up quick, we move on.”

Fiona realized she hadn’t touched her own beer yet. She cracked it open and took a drink. “Can your father help?” Jamie’s father was a retired chief of police, and he still had cronies in the department who held considerable sway.

“I already asked him,” Jamie said. “He said there’s no point.” He held up Sonia’s slim missing persons file again. “This is from Granddad’s time; he was one of the cops who interviewed the headmistress. Granddad died in 1982. The cop who took down this report is dead, too.”

“We need people who were young at that time,” she said. She opened her laptop and powered it up. “They’re more likely to be alive now. How tired are you?”

“I’m not tired,” he said. He looked tired, but she knew that, like her, he’d never sleep. They’d never done this before, she realized—worked together on something. Usually their work took them in separate directions, which was how she’d thought they liked it. But it was good, working with Jamie. “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

She circled her thoughts back to the task at hand. “It’ll take some searching, but if we split it up, it won’t take as long,” she said. She opened her e-mail and called up a message from her in-box. “There’s almost nothing about Idlewild online,” she said. “Most boarding schools have alumni associations or something, but Idlewild was different. When it shut down, it just disappeared.”

“Not the usual kind of student bonding,” Jamie said.

“It wasn’t a happy place for most of those girls, I think. They were sent there because they were problem kids. As far as I can tell, no one has ever planned a reunion, or tried to. Facebook gave me nothing, either. So I called the local historical society.”

The Barrons Historical Society, it turned out, consisted of two old widowed sisters who kept copies of newspapers and random other papers willed to the society in a rented office that was open for only four hours a week. They might have seemed like dotty eccentrics on the surface, but Hester, the sister Fiona had talked to, had knowledge of Barrons that rivaled Jamie’s.

“I’ve never been there,” Jamie said.

“You’d probably love it,” Fiona told him. “However, they had next to nothing about Idlewild Hall—only a few class photographs. I had the woman I talked to scan and e-mail them to me.” Fiona had been prepared to drive to the office and do that herself instead of asking an elderly woman to do it, but Hester had surprised her, saying that she and her sister were in the process of trying to digitize the entire archive. “The pictures are interesting, but not particularly useful. Except one.” She called it up in her e-mail and turned her screen so he could see. Eleven girls stood on the lawn in front of Idlewild, each girl holding a field hockey stick. They wore field hockey uniforms, and they were carefully posed, the girls on each side angled inward, their shoulders overlapping. Despite the sports uniforms, they all looked formal: unsmiling white girls of varying shapes and sizes, staring into the lens, waiting for the picture to be taken. At the left end was a woman who was obviously a teacher, though she looked to be only in her early twenties. Neat handwriting across the top stated: Idlewild Girls Field Hockey Team, 1952. Two years after Sonia’s death.

Fiona let Jamie look at the photo, and then she clicked to the next attachment. It was a scan of the back of the photo, which was covered in the same neat handwriting, the ink only slightly faded over time.