The Broken Girls
“I don’t understand it,” Jamie said, still looking out the window. “How no one could have thought something bad could have happened to her. How it didn’t even cross their minds. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had dropped her suitcase and disappeared.”
Unbidden, Malcolm’s words came into Fiona’s mind: Was she a Jew? There was nothing in the school’s file about Sonia being Jewish, but what if she had been? Would the police have searched for a runaway girl who was a Jewish refugee with no family the same way they would have searched for a local Catholic girl?
And who had taken Sonia’s suitcase from Julia Patton’s office? Her killer had put Sonia’s body in the well, which was nearly within view of the headmistress’s office window. Had the killer taken the suitcase as well? If the suitcase contained a clue to the killer’s identity, it would have to be disposed of. Could Julia Patton have known who Sonia’s killer was? Could she have done it herself?
She read the headmistress’s note again. “The fact that she left her great-aunt and -uncle’s a day early bothers me. She’d gone all that way to visit them. Why did she turn around and leave?”
“We may never know.”
Fiona put the file down. “Let’s continue,” she said. “We can’t answer these questions now. Let’s find the other girls’ files.”
“We don’t have time,” Jamie said, turning from the window and checking his watch. “We’re due for dinner at my parents’.”
“No, no. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Jamie shook his head. “You promised, so you’re coming. These files will be here when we get back.”
“I can’t leave.” She felt physical pain, staring at the boxes she wanted so badly to open.
“Yes, you can.”
She got up reluctantly from her spot on the floor and brushed off the legs of her jeans. “Fine. But I’m not dressing up. And we’re coming back here.”
“After dinner,” Jamie said. “I promise.”
They were in Jamie’s car, and he was pulling onto Meredith Street, when Fiona’s phone rang. It was her father.
“I’ve got something,” he said when she answered. “About your Sonia girl.”
Fiona felt her mouth go dry. “What is it?”
“I had a professor friend of mine put me in touch with a student to do some archival research,” he said. “She found her in a passenger manifest on a ship leaving Calais in 1947. Sonia Gallipeau, age twelve. Traveling alone. Same date of birth as your girl.”
“That’s her,” Fiona said.
“The manifest lists her previous place of residence,” Malcolm said. “An official took the information down, but it must have come from her.”
Fiona closed her eyes to the blacktop flying by, to the stark trees and the gray sky, to everything. “Tell me,” she said.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” her father said. “Her previous place of residence was Ravensbrück prison.”
Chapter 17
Roberta
Barrons, Vermont
November 1950
Of all the hated classes at Idlewild—and that was most of them—Weekly Gardening was the most despised. It had come, Roberta supposed, from some misguided idea that the housewives of the future should know how to grow their own vegetables. Or perhaps it descended from an idea that the school would subsist on its own produce, like a nunnery. In any case, every girl who attended Idlewild had to spend an hour every week in the communal school garden, digging hopelessly in the dirt and trying not to get her uniform muddy as she poked at the dead vegetables.
The month had slid into November, cold and hard. Roberta stood in a row with four other girls as Mrs. Peabody handed them each a gardening tool. “We are going to add lettuces to our planting next spring, so today we’ll be digging space before the ground freezes.” She indicated a chalked-off square of ground, filled with dead weeds and rocks. “One hour, girls. Get started.”
Roberta looked at Sonia, who was standing next to her. Sonia was huddled into her old wool coat, her face pinched and miserable, her thin hands on the handle of her shovel. “Are you all right?”
“Bon.” Sonia wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She reverted to French when she was tired.
Roberta buttoned her own coat higher over her neck and bent to her work. It wasn’t the work that the girls loathed—it was the garden itself. It was placed in the crux of shadows between the main hall and the dining hall, and it was relentlessly cold, damp, and moldy, no matter the season. The windows of both buildings stared blankly down at the girls as they worked. There was a persistent legend at Idlewild that Mary Hand’s baby was buried in the garden, which did nothing to add to the attraction of Weekly Gardening. Every time Roberta gardened in here, she expected to find baby bones.
The girls bent to work, their breath puffing in the morning air, the slanting November sunshine on the common putting them all in dark shadow. Roberta felt her shoes squish—the garden was always wet, with runnels of water pooling in the overturned dirt.
Mary Van Woorten raised her head and stared at Sonia. “You’re not digging,” she said, her mouth pursing in her pale round face.
“I am digging,” Sonia said grimly, pushing her shovel into the dirt.
“No, you’re not. You have to dig harder, like the rest of us.”
“Leave her alone,” Roberta said. She watched Sonia from the corner of her eye. The girl was gripping her shovel, wedging it into the wet dirt, but she wasn’t lifting much. Her teeth were chattering. Sonia was small, but she was strong, and this wasn’t like her. “Sonia?” Roberta said softly.
“I am fine.” As if to illustrate this, Sonia pushed at her shovel again.
“You aren’t even making a hole!” Mary persisted.
Sonia lifted her face and snapped at her. “You stupid girl,” she bit out, her hands shaking. “You’ve never had to dig. You’ve never had to dig.”
“What does that mean?” Mary said. “I’m digging right now.”
“I think something’s wrong with her,” Margaret Kevin piped up. “Mary, be quiet.”
“Shut up,” Sonia shouted, stunning all of them. Roberta had never seen her friend so angry. “Just be quiet, all of you, and leave me alone.”
They dug in silence. Roberta glanced back over her shoulder and saw Mrs. Peabody smoking a cigarette near the door to the teachers’ hall, talking quietly with Mrs. Wentworth. They laughed at something, and Mrs. Wentworth shook her head. From the girls’ place in the shadows, the two teachers looked bathed in sunlight, as if Roberta were watching them through a magical doorway.
She looked down at the space she was digging, the mottled, ugly clots of dirt. Baby bones. She always thought of baby bones here. Finger bones, leg bones, a soft little skull . . .
Don’t think about it. Don’t.
The blade of her shovel slipped, and for a second there was something white and fleshy speared on the metal, something pale and soft and rotten. Roberta flinched and dropped the shovel, preparing to scream, before she realized what she’d severed was a mushroom, huge and wet in the cold, damp earth.
She was trying to calm down when there was a huff of breath next to her, like a sigh. She turned to see Sonia fall to her knees in the dirt. She still clutched her shovel, her hands sliding down the handle as she lowered to the ground. Roberta bent and grabbed her friend by the shoulders.
“I can do it,” Sonia said, her head bowing so her forehead nearly touched the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“Mrs. Peabody!” Mary Van Woorten shouted.
“Sonia,” Roberta whispered, clutching the girl harder.
Sonia’s shoulders heaved, and she quietly threw up drops of spit into the dirt. Then she sagged, her eyes closing. Roberta held her tight. Her friend weighed almost nothing at all.
“Have you been sleeping?” Miss Hedmeyer, the school nurse, said. “Eating?”
“Yes, madame.” Sonia’s voice was pale, tired.
Miss Hedmeyer jabbed her fingers up under Sonia’s jaw, feeling her lymph nodes. “No swelling,” she said. “No fever. What else?”
“I have a headache, madame.”
Roberta bit the side of her thumb as she watched Miss Hedmeyer take a bottle of aspirin out of a cupboard and shake out a few large chalky pills. “I’ve seen this before,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She had light blond hair that contrasted with a startling spray of freckles across her nose. When she wasn’t treating the ailments of the Idlewild girls, she taught their meager science curriculum, which mostly consisted of the periodic table of elements and the process of photosynthesis, sometimes mixed with explanations of snow and rain. It was not assumed that the housewives of the future needed to know much about science. “It happens to some girls when they’re asked to do physical activity during their time of month. Am I correct?”
Sonia blinked and said nothing, and even Roberta could see her abject humiliation.
“Get some rest,” Miss Hedmeyer said. She tapped Sonia on the arm of her thick uniform sweater. “You need to be tougher,” she advised. “Girls like you. There’s not a thing wrong with you. We feed you good food here.”