The Broken Girls

“I don’t know anything about any records,” the old woman said, as Cathy banged a glass especially loud on the counter behind her.

“Okay,” Fiona said. “You mentioned Sonia’s friends. Can you tell me anything else about them?”

“Those girls were her roommates in Clayton Hall, the dorm” came the answer, called straight up from the old woman’s memory. “They were together often. It was hard for her to make friends, I suppose, since she was quiet and not pretty. I remember thinking it was unusual to see girls like that become friends. They didn’t fit.”

“Didn’t fit? How?”

“Oh, Lord.” She waved a hand again, and Cathy ran the water in the sink in a rushing jet, nearly drowning her out. “The Winthrop girl, for one. She was trouble through and through. She was a bad influence. The Greene girl was nice enough, but we all knew she’d had a mental breakdown at home and stopped talking for months. Quiet, but touched in the head, that one. The Ellesmere girl came from a good family, but not properly, if you know what I mean. She was stupid, too. Not like Sonia.”

Fiona pulled her notebook and pen from her pocket, the first time she’d done so. “What were their names? Their full names? Starting with the Winthrop girl?”

“It was a long time ago,” Cathy complained from the sink. “Aunt Sairy shouldn’t have to remember names.”

“I do,” Miss London insisted, her teacher’s voice so icy that Cathy was immediately silenced. “The Winthrop girl’s name was Katie. Her people were from Connecticut, I think—good people, though their daughter had gone bad. She was a discipline problem from the day she arrived until the day she left.”

“Where did she go? Home?”

“No. God knows. I think she found a boy or something. It wouldn’t surprise me. She had that kind of look—the kind that boys go crazy for. Beauty, but not the wholesome kind.” She shook her head. “The one that was touched in the head was Roberta Greene—she was on the field hockey team.” She pulled the photo printout toward her and stabbed a finger at one of the girls. “That’s her right there.”

Fiona nodded, trying not to show how excited she was. Roberta Greene was the girl she and Jamie thought might have become a lawyer. She couldn’t have been too “touched in the head” to get through law school and pass the bar. “She had a breakdown, you say?” Maybe there were medical records somewhere.

“Stopped talking. There was a suicide in the family, I believe, or an attempted one, and she witnessed it.”

“That’s terrible.”

Miss London shrugged. “We didn’t have social services or child psychologists in those days. We didn’t have Oprah or Dr. Phil. Parents just didn’t know what to do. They were at the end of their rope, and they sent her to us.”

“Okay.” Fiona steered the old woman’s memories back. “The last girl, the stupid one. You said her name was Ellesmere?”

Behind her, Cathy finally gave up and stood watching them, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Miss London answered, “The Ellesmeres were a prominent family in those days. The girl—Cecelia was her name; I have it now—was the daughter of Brad Ellesmere, but born on the wrong side of the blanket, if you know what I mean.”

“Right.” Fiona caught Cathy’s eye, and they exchanged a brief look. The generation of people who used phrases like born on the wrong side of the blanket was rapidly disappearing, Fiona thought with a pang. “So she was Mr. Ellesmere’s child, but she didn’t have his name.”

“That’s right.” Miss London lowered her voice a little, as if someone could still overhear this bit of juicy gossip. “She was the housekeeper’s daughter. He let her have the child, but he packed her away. There was something about the mother going away for a while, too—went crazy from having a child out of wedlock, or so I heard. Brad Ellesmere didn’t have children inside his marriage, but he had more than one bastard child. It was a scandal in those days, but we kept quiet about it. It was private business. It wasn’t like now, when everybody’s business is all over the Internet, for the world to see.”

Fiona wrote down the name Cecelia. “And what was her last name, then?” she asked. “Her legal one?”

“Oh, goodness.” Miss London stroked her cheek again, but this time it was for show. She was having a good time, and she wanted to draw it out. Fiona waited patiently, her pen poised. “We all thought of her as the Ellesmere girl. There was no secret about it—Brad Ellesmere himself dropped her off at the school. She used to follow the Winthrop girl around; it was a natural pairing, the strong, pretty girl with the weaker, pudgier one. Ah yes—Frank. That was her last name. I told you there was nothing wrong with my memory.”

“No.” Fiona smiled at her. “There certainly isn’t.”

“Okay, Aunt Sairy,” Cathy broke in. “You need a rest.”

“Thank you very much for your help, Miss London,” Fiona said.

“You’re welcome. What does Sonia Gallipeau have to do with a story on the school’s restoration?”

“Part of the article is about some of the newsworthy events in the school’s past,” Fiona said smoothly. “Sonia’s disappearance is one of them. I thought that if I could track down a few of her friends, one of them might be able to give me a memory of her.”

“You’re going to have a tangle,” Miss London said practically. “Most of the girls disappeared when they left school. No one knew where they went, and frankly, there was no one who cared.”

There was a second of silence in the room as these harsh words came down. Then Cathy moved to the kitchen door. “Don’t get up, Aunt Sairy. Fiona, I’ll show you out.”

Fiona followed her through the house’s stuffy hall. At the front door, she put her boots back on and dug a business card out of her pocket, putting it in Cathy’s hand. “I appreciate you letting me talk to her,” she said. “If she remembers anything else, or if I can come back and see her again, please give me a call.”

Cathy gave her a baleful, suspicious stare, but took the card. “No one cares about Aunt Sairy anymore,” she said. “No one ever has. She’s a good woman. If you publish one bad word about her, I’ll come find you and sue you.”

It was as good a farewell as she was going to get, so Fiona took it. As she started her car and pulled out of the driveway, she wondered why Sarah London’s niece felt it was so important to insist, after all these years, that her aunt was a good woman.

She was five miles out of East Mills before she got a cell signal again, her phone beeping and vibrating on the passenger seat. She was on a back road heading to the paved two-lane that would eventually turn into Seven Points Road, her car shuddering over old potholes, but she pulled over beneath an overhang of trees and picked up the phone. In these parts, it was always best to take advantage of a signal when you could get one.

There was a message from Jamie: “Call me.” She dialed him first, bypassing his office line and using his personal cell. He picked up on the second ring.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Heading back from East Mills. I talked to the teacher.”

“And?”

“I got a few names of Sonia’s friends. I’ll start tracking them. What about you?”

There was disappointment in his voice. There was a low murmur of voices in the background, and she guessed he was inside the station, in the open desk area the cops used. “I have nothing, if you can believe it.”

“Nothing?”

“The French police came back to me. They have a birth record of Sonia Gallipeau in 1935, and that’s all. Nothing else.”

Fiona felt her heart sink. She thought of the girl’s body, curled in on itself in the well, her head resting on her knees. “No living relatives at all?”

“None. There’s a death record for her father in Dachau concentration camp in 1943. Nothing about her mother, or any siblings.”

Fiona stared out her windshield at a swirl of snow that had kicked up on the side of the road in the wind. Those words—Dachau concentration camp—had the power to give her a twist of nausea, a clammy, greasy chill of fear. “I thought the Nazis kept records of everything.”

“So did I. But I think we’re wrong. It’s like Sonia was born, and then she and her mother disappeared off the face of the earth. Until Sonia appeared on the immigration records. Alone.”

It was hard for her to make friends, Sarah London had said of Sonia, since she was quiet and not pretty. What sort of life had Sonia lived, the lone survivor of her small family in a strange country? Fiona felt outrage that she had died alone, her head smashed in, dumped in a well for sixty-four years. Deb had died alone, but she’d been found within thirty hours, buried with love at a funeral that had drawn hundreds of friends and family. She’d been grieved for twenty years, loved. Was still grieved. Sonia had simply been forgotten. “I guess we need to find the friends, then,” she said to Jamie. “Miss London said the girls were roommates, and that they were close. One of them must remember her.”