The Broken Girls

November 2014

Malcolm Sheridan listened patiently, sipping his tea, as Fiona told him about the girl in the well. As she talked, he got quietly excited, evidenced by the quick jittering of his knee.

“Does the coroner have her?” he asked when she finished.

He meant the body. Sonia’s body. “Yes.”

“That’ll be Dave Saunders. Can you get the results through Jamie? If not, I can call him.”

Fiona sat back in her mother’s old flowered chair, thinking. “I don’t think the report will have any surprises,” she said. “I saw the girl—her skull was clearly smashed in. I can probably get the report from Jamie.”

“That’s a damned lucky break with those records,” her father said, his mind already flying past hers, following its own track. He had put down his cup and was staring at the glass coffee table, his brow furrowing. This was what he was like when a story was brewing, she thought. She hadn’t seen this in a long time.

“What I want,” she said, trying to steer his formidable brain, “is to know if there’s something we’re missing in France. Family, history. Something more than a birth certificate.”

“You mean something from the camps,” Malcolm said.

“Yes. Jamie found her birth record, but—”

“No, no, no,” Malcolm interrupted. He got out of his chair and started to pace. “There are other places to look. Libraries, museums, archives. The government record is the smallest part of the picture. Was she a Jew?”

Fiona shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“It’s possible she wasn’t. She would have been so young during the war—not all the camps took children, or kept them alive if they did. If her father was in Dachau, she was likely imprisoned with her mother. We’ll have a better chance of finding her through a search for the mother.”

Fiona looked at her notes. “The mother’s name was Emilie. Emilie Gallipeau.”

“But no death record?” Malcolm picked up his cup and carried it into the kitchen. His voice traveled back to her. “It could have been any of the camps. Ravensbrück took women, and children, too, I think. So many of the records were sealed for decades, but a lot of them are coming unsealed now. And of course, many records were completely lost. The war was a great mess of data, you know, before computers. Full of human hubris and error. A different time. I have reference books, but some of them are outdated already. In some ways, right now is an exciting time for historians, if you can catch the last survivors before they die.”

“Okay,” Fiona said. A pulse of excitement beat in her throat, but she tried to push it down. Most goose chases like this ended up with nothing, she reminded herself. “Since I can’t go to France and search every archive and library, what do I do?”

Her father reappeared in the doorway. His eyes crinkled with amusement. “You talk to someone who can. Or who already is.”

“The police—”

“Fee, Fee.” He was clearly laughing at her now. “You’ve spent too long with that policeman of yours. The police don’t have all the answers, and neither does the government. The people are where you find things. Like those records you just found. The people are the ones who keep the memories and the records the powers that be would rather erase.”

“Dad.” If she didn’t stop him now, he’d launch over his favorite ground, the political lectures that used to amuse her mother before Deb died. Once a hippie, always a hippie. “Okay, okay. We can go through whatever channels you want to find information. I promised Jamie we wouldn’t interfere with the police investigation, that’s all.”

“No. The police will do an autopsy, do a search for living relatives, then put the file in a cold case box and move on. They won’t be going anywhere near France in 1945. But we can find her, Fee. We can find out who she was.”

For a second, emotion rolled up through Fiona’s throat, and she couldn’t breathe. Her father had been like this, once upon a time. The man in the photo on the wall in the other room, the man on the ground in Vietnam in 1969, had been complicated and demanding and often absent, but he had been so painfully, vibrantly alive it had almost hurt to be around him. The air had crackled when he walked into a room. Malcolm Sheridan had never done small talk—he was the kind of man who looked you in the eye on first meeting and said, Do you enjoy what you do? Do you find it fulfilling? If you had the courage to answer, he’d listen like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard. And in that moment, it always was. He was a brilliant dreamer, a relentless intellectual, and a troublemaker, but the thing that always struck you about Fiona’s father was that he was truly interested in everything.

It had been twenty years since she’d seen that man. He’d vanished when Deb’s body had been found on the field at Idlewild. When Tim Christopher had murdered his daughter, Malcolm had folded in on himself, disappeared. The man who had emerged from that experience had been subdued, unfocused, his anger scattershot, bubbling up and disappearing into apathy again. Fiona’s mother, who had been so tolerant of his larger-than-life personality before the murder, had simply shut down. She’d severed herself from his interests, from their friends. After the divorce, she’d been determined not to be that woman, Malcolm’s wife—Deb’s mother—anymore.

But this Malcolm, the one Fiona was seeing a shadowy glimpse of right now—this Malcolm was the man people still spoke reverently of twenty years later, the man people still dropped everything for when he phoned. The man who had inspired such awe that his name had still gotten Fiona hired at Lively Vermont.

But she couldn’t say any of that. They never talked about it, about what had happened after Deb. It was too hard. Fiona gathered up her notes, trying to keep her expression and her voice level.

“Okay,” she said to him. “I’ll leave it with you. I have to stop by Lively Vermont. And I’m going to find these girls, these school friends of Sonia’s.”

“I’ll call you later,” he said, turning back toward the kitchen. He called out: “Make sure that boy of yours doesn’t screw up the investigation!”

As Fiona was on the road to the Lively Vermont offices, her phone buzzed. Anthony Eden. She ignored it. She’d update him later. Starving, she stopped for a burrito, then drove through downtown Barrons to the boxy old low-rise whose cheap rent was the kind that Lively Vermont could afford. Though it was only five o’clock, the sun was sinking fast in the sky, reminding her that winter in its full force was coming, with its whiteouts and snowdrifts.

She was too late to see Jonas—he must have left on time today, which was rare for him. Fiona got the janitor to let her in. The offices were empty, Jonas’s door closed and locked. Instead of bothering him at home, Fiona took a piece of scrap paper from a handy desk and wrote, Came by to give you an update. Not much yet, but it’s good. Trust me. I’ll call tomorrow. F. She folded the paper and slipped it under his door.

She had the file she’d pulled from the archives under her arm, so she walked to the scarred old cabinets on the wall to replace it. But with the drawer open and the file in her hand, she paused.

There are references to the Christophers in there, Jonas had warned her.

He was right. She’d seen it when she read the file: a photograph from the opening of the Barrons Hotel in 1971, showing Henry Christopher, dubbed a “prominent local investor and businessman,” standing next to the mayor, wearing a tuxedo and shaking hands while smiling at the camera. He was young, his resemblance to his future son sharp and distinct. At his shoulder was a cool, pretty blond woman in a shiny silk dress, smiling tightly at the camera. In true 1971 style, she was listed in the caption only as “Mrs. Christopher.” Ilsa, Fiona thought. Her name is Ilsa.

She stared at the two faces, both young and attractive, a couple who was married and rich and had it all. Their son, who would grow up to kill Deb, would be born in three years, an only child. When Tim went to prison for murder, Henry and Ilsa left Vermont.

Fiona had glossed over this picture when she’d first seen it, flinching away as one does when seeing an unexpected picture of something gory or dead, but now she made herself look at it. She waited for some kind of emotion to overcome her—hatred of these two people, or resentment, or grief. None of that happened. Henry kept smiling from his chiseled, handsome face and Ilsa kept looking slightly uncomfortable, and Fiona felt nothing but a churning in her gut.

Henry Christopher looked at ease next to the mayor, as if they knew each other well. The Barrons Hotel had closed after barely four years, unable to stay afloat.

Henry Christopher and the mayor, selling Barrons a bill of goods and smiling about it.