The Broken Girls

Rose’s face stared at her. The picture had been taken on the street by an enterprising photographer sometime after Rose had been arrested and granted bail. She was dignified, wearing an old-fashioned skirt and jacket and a fur stole—out of style in 1973, but giving off an air of class. At the time of the trial, she was only fifty-five, with the clear skin Fiona had seen in the other photographs of her, her mouth a firm line, her eyes so perfectly even and dark, her expression shuttered and cool. The photographer had caught her unawares, and she had put a hand to the fur stole as she walked, nearly clutching it. The few accounts Fiona had found of the trial had described her as wearing a fox fur stole. The same one.

The trial itself was not on public record; the transcripts were sealed. It had been a midsized local story in its day, worthy of a dedicated reporter and a photographer assigned to take shots from the street once or twice, but it hadn’t been front-page news. Looking at the coverage, Fiona could perfectly follow the logic of that news editor in 1973: They had to cover the story for the local angle, because there were people who knew this woman, but hell, no one wanted to read about concentration camps really. It was too depressing and out of touch. Vietnam was happening; Vietnam was real. A lady in a fur stole who might or might not have been an old Nazi was news, but not big news.

Still, the coverage was well researched and well written, making Fiona nostalgic for the heyday of reporters who were actually on staff instead of freelance, and stories that didn’t have to say “You won’t believe what happened next” in order to survive in the click-or-die Internet age. Rose Albert was a spinster living in Burlington, an immigrant from Europe after the war. She claimed to have come from Munich, where she had worked in a factory. She did admit to being a member of the Nazi Party, but she claimed that it was only a survival tactic, because under Hitler’s regime, those who did not join were suspect. Yes, she had attended rallies, but only so she wouldn’t have been denounced by her neighbors and arrested. No, she had not worked in a concentration camp, and once the war was over, she had come to America to start again, and she had been lucky enough to get the job at the travel agency.

Rosa Berlitz, the Ravensbrück guard, was a mystery. She had been recruited from one of the local German villages, a girl with no experience, and had taken to the job at once. She had chased prisoners with the dogs the Nazis had given the guards, who were trained to attack and kill. She had stood by while women were experimented on and sentenced to death, then helped carry out the murders. Who her family and friends were was unknown; what had happened to her after the war, when the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück, was also unknown. Rosa Berlitz had appeared from nowhere, tortured and killed the prisoners of Ravensbrück without flinching, and disappeared again.

There was only one known photograph of Rosa: standing in a line of other guards, being inspected by Himmler as he toured the camp. Himmler was a large figure in the picture, wearing his long coat and Nazi insignia, striding across the grounds. The women were in uniform, ranged in three neat rows, but Rosa’s face was in the back row and slightly out of focus, leaving only two dark eyes, a straight nose, a glimpse of white skin. It might have been Rose Albert, and it might not. No other record of Rosa Berlitz was left, nothing that said she had existed at all, except for the memories of the prisoners who had lived under her.

Three survivors had identified Rose Albert as Rosa Berlitz. One had died of cancer the week before the trial began; the other two had testified in court. It seemed there had been too many holes, too much missing information in the trail leading back to Rosa Berlitz, even with survivors’ testimony, and Rose had gone free. When Fiona dug further, she found that the two remaining survivors had died in 1981 and 1987.

Rose Albert was acquitted, but later that year she was found dead in her home. The coroner declared the cause of death a heart attack, and she was quietly buried, her death a footnote in the back pages.

Fiona peeled herself off the sofa. She felt hideous, as if she’d gone on a bender, though all she’d done was sit in her dark apartment and read. She put coffee on and got in the shower, but that only made her shiver no matter how hot she turned the water tap. She washed quickly and got out again, then dried off. She gulped her coffee and tried not to think of Jamie, of what he was doing right now. Of Garrett Creel. Of Tim Christopher with a baseball bat, coming up the walk behind Helen Heyer.

Maybe she was coming down with something. Her head was throbbing, and her throat was still sore. She dug in her cupboards and found some ibuprofen, some cold meds, an old Halls. She took the pills and popped the Halls in her mouth, wincing at its waxy old texture and menthol taste. She had no time to be sick, not now. Not yet.

She needed to settle some things.

She put on her coat and boots, pulled a thick wool cap over her still-wet hair, and walked out the door after grabbing her keys.

The dawn was gray, the wind icy and bitter, which meant only one thing: snow on the way. It was nearly December, and from now until April, Vermont would fight the winter battle as it always did. Old Barrons Road was quiet, though Fiona could see movement on the Idlewild property through the trees. The pause to retrieve Sonia’s body was over, and the restoration had started up again.

But she didn’t go to Idlewild this time. She found the rough, overgrown driveway on the left-hand side of the road instead of the right, and followed it into the overgrown weeds where the drive-in used to be. She remembered walking along Old Barrons Road, talking to Jamie on the phone. It felt like years ago. But he’d reminded her that the old drive-in had still been open in 1994. On the night Deb died, it hadn’t been running any movies, because November was the off-season, but it was still a hangout for kids who liked to drink in an abandoned lot. The police had interviewed as many of those kids as they could find, but none of them recalled seeing Tim Christopher’s car parked at the side of Old Barrons Road, which he must have done in order to dump Deb’s body.

The drive-in had closed sometime in the late nineties, and like most people, Fiona had assumed that it was an empty lot. Until she’d met Stephen Heyer in Portsmouth, and he’d told her that he’d seen her because he slept here sometimes. The old man who used to run the drive-in lets me use his place.

Her car rumbled over the dirt path, brushing the clumps of overgrown weeds. The screen was long gone, as was the popcorn stand, but a sign remained, placed along what was once the driveway where the cars would patiently line up, waiting to pay admission. It was a four-foot billboard, showing a dancing hot dog and a can of soda, doing a jitterbug on cartoon legs. WELCOME TO OUR DRIVE-IN! the lettering proclaimed. Water had damaged the edge of the billboard, and time had faded its colors, but surprisingly the vandals and graffiti artists had left it alone, a relic in the abandoned lot.

Fiona pulled the car just past the sign, to where the open lot was, and put the car in park. She was cold, her spine shivering, though she was huddled in her coat with the heat on high. Snow coming, she thought. She looked around. Where the hell does Stephen Heyer sleep in this place?

She pulled out her phone, thinking to call someone about something important, but then she stared at the display, bewildered. Her thoughts were moving too fast, spinning out of her hands. I’m not sick. I’m not. She thumbed through her contacts and almost dialed Jamie, just to hear the rumble of his voice. But she flipped past his number and dialed Malcolm instead.

She got his answering machine. She could picture it, a literal machine, an old tape-recording answering machine that sat in his phone nook—because of course her father had a phone nook—next to his nineties-era landline phone. The phone rang, and the machine whirred to life, sending Malcolm’s voice down the line, asking her to leave a message. And then a loud beep.

“Daddy,” she said, “there’s something I have to tell you.” She told him about Stephen Heyer, how he’d found her, what he’d told her. About how she’d seen Helen Heyer, who had nearly been beaten to death with a baseball bat by Tim Christopher the year before he’d met Deb. She was still talking when the machine cut her off.

She hung up.

You’ll kill him with this shit, Jamie had said.

And then her father’s voice, when she was fourteen and her mother didn’t want the distressing picture he’d taken in Vietnam framed and put on the wall. Do you think they won’t see the real world, Ginny? he’d said. Do you think the real world will never come to them?

Fiona touched her cheeks. There were tears there, though they were cold and nearly dry. She wiped them off with her mittened hands and got out of the car.