The Broken Girls

Roberta shrugged. “I don’t suppose you’ve found much on the history. No one cared about that place.”

Fiona studied the older woman. She’d read Roberta’s Idlewild file last night: born in 1935, sent to Idlewild in 1950 after witnessing her uncle, a war veteran, attempt suicide with a pistol in the family garage. It was the same story Sarah London had told: There had been a suicide in the family, I believe, or an attempted one, and she had witnessed it. Roberta had stopped speaking for a while after the incident, which caused her parents to send her away. There were no notes in the school file, however, that Roberta had any speech problems after arriving at Idlewild. Once again, the laconic nature of Idlewild’s files was infinitely frustrating. No one seemed to pay very close attention to the girls they taught, or if they did, they didn’t write it down.

“Do you have good memories of Idlewild?” Fiona asked, her first broad volley of the interview.

Roberta’s hands curled around the warmth of her coffee cup. “It was awful,” she said, “but it was better than home.”

“I found a picture at the Barrons Historical Society.” Fiona pulled the printout of the field hockey team portrait and smoothed it open on the table, turning it for Roberta to see.

There was a long moment of quiet. Roberta Montgomery—Roberta Greene, as Fiona’s mind kept calling her—was one of those people with a gift for silence. Jamie was another; he didn’t feel any need to fill the quiet with his own chatter, which was what made him a good policeman. She thought of him with a pang. He hadn’t called or texted her since the night at his parents’.

“I remember this day,” Roberta said. “It was May. The snow had melted, but it wasn’t warm yet. The grass was wet beneath our feet.” She pointed to the teacher. “Dear God, that’s Lady Loon.”

“I’m sorry?” Fiona asked.

“The teacher,” Roberta said. “It was our nickname for her. She called all of us ‘ladies’ when she shouted at us.” She shook her head. “Irritating, really.”

“And the loon part?”

Roberta rolled her eyes, and for a minute Fiona saw the teenager she’d once been. “She was a lunatic,” she explained. “She really couldn’t handle a bunch of girls like we were. Her real name was Miss London.”

“I know,” Fiona said. “She lives in Vermont.”

“Lady Loon is still alive?” Roberta’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead. “Well, she wasn’t much older than us, I suppose. I always figured she’d drop dead of a stroke before she was fifty. We girls drove her crazy.”

“Mrs. Montgomery—”

“Roberta, please.”

“Roberta,” Fiona said. “Do you remember a girl named Sonia Gallipeau?”

She did. Fiona could see it stamped on her features the moment the name was spoken. “Yes, of course,” she said. “She was our roommate. I knew her well.”

“She disappeared in 1950.”

“She was murdered, you mean.”

Fiona felt her heart beating in her throat. After so much speculation, so much searching, here was Sonia’s living history, sitting across from her in a coffee shop. “What makes you say that?”

“Of course she was murdered,” Roberta said. Her gaze had dropped to the photo again. “We always knew. No one believed us, but we knew. Sonia wouldn’t just run away, not without her suitcase.”

“But she ran away from her relatives’ in the middle of visiting them.”

“I know,” Roberta said. Her voice was calm, yet somehow infinitely sad. “That wasn’t like her at all.” She paused, and Fiona waited, feeling like Roberta had more to tell. After a moment, the older woman continued. “Sonia had her hopes up about the visit, that her relatives would take her in. And if she learned that they didn’t plan that at all—that this was just a weekend visit and nothing more—it would have upset her. She didn’t actually run away, you know. She got on the bus to Barrons, and her suitcase was in the weeds near the gates. She wasn’t going somewhere unknown. She was coming back to the school.” She raised her gaze from the photo. “To us. We were her friends. We would have comforted her and understood if she was hurt. I think she was coming back to the only home she knew.”

“The headmistress seemed to think there was a boy.”

Roberta huffed a single bitter laugh. “There was no boy.”

Fiona took a breath. She’d never done this before; never told a person that someone they cared about, even from sixty-four years ago, was dead. Maybe she should have left this to the police, to Jamie. But no, Roberta wasn’t Sonia’s family. She was only a friend from over half a century ago. “Roberta,” she said, as carefully as she could, “I have to tell you something. This hasn’t been released publicly yet. But in the course of the restoration at Idlewild, a body was found. In the old well.”

Roberta Greene tilted her head up slowly, then looked up at the ceiling, and Fiona watched grief fall over her like a blanket. The old woman blinked, still looking up, and two tears tracked down her parchment cheeks. Her sadness was so fresh, so raw, it was as if none of the years had happened at all.

“Sonia,” she said.

Fiona felt the sting of tears behind her own eyes, watching. You loved her, she thought. She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said softly. “Sonia.”

“Tell me. Please.”

“She was hit over the head. She probably died quickly.” Fiona had no idea if this was true, but she couldn’t help saying it. “She had been in the well . . . Her body had been in the well all this time.”

“Oh, God,” Roberta said on a sigh.

“I’m sorry.”

Roberta shook her head. “After all this time, I suppose there’s no chance of the police catching her murderer.”

“You knew her best,” Fiona said. “Can you think of anyone who wanted to harm her? Anyone at all?”

“No.” The older woman picked up her napkin and dabbed at the tear tracks on her face. She seemed to have a handle on her grief now.

“Was there anyone who bothered the girls? Strangers who came to the school or hung around? Anyone who bothered Sonia in particular?”

“We were so isolated—you have no idea,” Roberta said. “No one ever came, and we never left.”

“What about gardeners? Janitors? Repairmen?”

“I don’t know. We never saw the kitchen staff. There were no gardens except the one the girls were forced to maintain. I suppose there were delivery people, for laundry and such, but we never saw them either. And as for repairs”—she gave a wry smile—“you’re making the assumption that anything at Idlewild was ever repaired at all. Unless a girl’s father or brother came on Family Visit Day, I didn’t see the face of a single man for three years.”

“There was a family visit day?” This was news to Fiona.

“Yes, the last Sunday of every month was designated for families who wished to visit.”

“Did anyone ever visit Sonia?”

“Her great-aunt and -uncle visited once a year at Christmas, but that was all. Sonia’s other family was all dead in the war. In concentration camps.”

Fiona felt a thread of tension unspooling in her, to hear her research confirmed so clearly. “There is evidence that Sonia spent time in Ravensbrück,” she said.

Roberta’s eyebrows rose again. She paused for a long time, and Fiona realized she had truly surprised the other woman. “You’ve done your research,” she commented. “And you’re very good.”

If it was a compliment, somehow it didn’t sound like one; it sounded more like Fiona had discovered something Roberta considered private, intruded on it. “Did Sonia ever talk to you about Ravensbrück?” she asked.

“No one ever talked about the war in those days,” Roberta replied. “We were teenage girls. No one talked to us about anything.”

That wasn’t an answer, Fiona realized. Not at all. “What about your own family?” she asked. “They didn’t talk to you about the war?”

“No,” came the answer. And then, repeated more softly: “No.”

“Did your family ever come to visit you on Family Visit Day while you were at Idlewild?”

“Only a few times over the years. The way I left home was difficult.”

“Because you stopped talking after what happened with your uncle,” Fiona said.

Roberta blinked at her. “Yes,” she said, her voice chilled. “I’m sorry, but may I ask how you know about my uncle?”

“It’s in your file.”

“My file?”

“From Idlewild.”

The other woman’s voice grew even colder. “There are no Idlewild files. The records have been lost.”

For a second Fiona was pinned by that cold gaze, which had probably been used in courtrooms and judges’ chambers for thirty years. It was impressive, and a little frightening, even in an old woman. Roberta was angry, Fiona realized, because she thought Fiona was lying. “The records weren’t lost,” Fiona insisted. “They exist. I’ve read them.” She left out Sarah London’s shed, and the fact that the records were currently stacked in boxes in her own neglected apartment.

“That isn’t possible.”