The Broken Girls
“Ssshh,” she said to him again. “It’s no one. It’s nothing. I thought I heard something, that’s all.”
“Do I have to tell you,” he said, “to get off of a dark, abandoned road in the middle of the night?”
“Have you ever thought that there’s something creepy about Old Barrons Road?” she asked. “I mean, have you ever been out here? It’s sort of uncanny. It’s like there’s something . . .”
“I can’t take much more of this,” Jamie said. “Get back in your car and drive home, or I’m coming to get you.”
“I’ll go, I’ll go.” Her hands were tingling, even the hand that was frozen to her phone, and she still had a jittery blast of adrenaline blowing down her spine. That had been a footstep. A real one. The hill was hidden through the trees from here, and she suddenly longed for the comforting sight of the fluorescent gas station lights. She took a step, then realized something. She stopped and turned around again, heading quickly for the gates of Idlewild Hall.
“I hope that sound is you walking toward your car,” Jamie said darkly.
“There was a sign,” Fiona said. “I saw it. It’s posted on the gates. It wasn’t there before.” She got close enough to read the lettering in the dark. ANOTHER PROJECT BY MACMILLAN CONSTRUCTION, LTD. “Jamie, why is there a sign saying that Idlewild Hall is under construction?”
“Because it is,” he replied. “As of next week. The property was sold two years ago, and the new owner is taking it over. It’s going to be restored, from what I hear.”
“Restored?” Fiona blinked at the sign, trying to take it in. “Restoring it into what?”
“Into a new school,” he replied. “They’re fixing it up and making it a boarding school again.”
“They’re what?”
“I didn’t want to mention it, Fee. I know what that place means to you.”
Fiona took a step back, still staring at the sign. Restored. Girls were going to be playing in the field where Deb’s body had lain. They would build new buildings, tear down old ones, add a parking lot, maybe widen the road. All of this landscape that had been here for twenty years, the landscape she knew so well—the landscape of Deb’s death—would be gone.
“Damn it,” she said to Jamie as she turned and walked back toward her car. “I’ll call you tomorrow. I’m going home.”
Chapter 2
Katie
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.
Saw Mary Hand through the window of 1G, Clayton Hall.
She was walking away over the field.
Wednesday, August 7, 1941. Jenny Baird.