But she couldn’t. When CeCe was afraid, when she was nervous, she found it hard to shut up. “Katie knew, too. She’s seen this before.”
“No, I haven’t.” Katie was in the doorway, a glass of water in her hand. “I just think on my feet. She’s had a shock of some kind, and she was about to faint. We had to get her out of there so the teachers wouldn’t see. Sonia, drink this.” She reached down, pulled one of the other girl’s hands from her face, tilted her head back, and looked into her eyes. “Listen to me,” she said clearly. “People saw us leaving. It’s over if you don’t get hold of yourself. Girls who faint get sent to Special Detention for being disruptive. Now sit up.”
CeCe opened her mouth to protest, but to her amazement Sonia swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She swayed for a second, then held out her hand. “Give me the water,” she said, her voice a rasp, her French accent sharpened by exhaustion.
A knock came on the door. “Ladies.” It was Lady Loon. “What is going on in there?”
Katie nodded to Roberta, and Roberta stood and opened the door. “Nothing, Miss London,” she said. “Sonia had a fit of dizziness, but she’s well now.”
Sonia had been gulping the water, but she lowered the glass and looked at the teacher. “I hate blood,” she said clearly.
Lady Loon ran a hand through her disastrous hair. “Afternoon class starts in twenty minutes,” she said. “Anyone not in attendance will be noted for detention. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Miss London,” CeCe said.
The teacher looked helplessly up the hallway, then down again, then wandered off toward the stairwell.
CeCe looked at the faces of the three other girls. What had happened in the dining hall had nearly given Sonia a nervous breakdown. What could be so horrible that it could be brought back by the sight of two girls fighting? She usually felt like the stupid one, but she thought maybe she was starting to see. She didn’t know everything about her friends, but these were Idlewild girls. Idlewild girls were always here for a reason. They were rough, like Katie, or impassive, like Roberta, because something had made them that way. Something they instinctively understood in one another. They hadn’t known what exactly was wrong with Sonia—they still didn’t know—but they had recognized it all the same.
Please don’t take me there, Sonia had said. CeCe didn’t know what it meant, but it was something terrible. Maybe more terrible than anything the rest of them had seen.
CeCe hadn’t been wanted, not by either her father or her mother, but she’d always been safe. She’d never been in the kind of danger that she thought Sonia was seeing behind her eyes. She’d never had anything really bad happen to her. Not really bad.
Except for the water. That day at the beach with her mother, years ago, swimming in the ocean. Looking up through the water, unable to breathe, and seeing her mother’s face. Then nothing.
But the water had been a long time ago. And it had been an accident.
And as CeCe’s mother had told her, girls had accidents all the time.
Chapter 7
Barrons, Vermont
November 2014
It was a twenty-minute walk over the hardened, muddy ground to the well. Fiona walked behind Anthony Eden, glancing at his black-clad back as he scrambled in his expensive shoes. She kept her hand on her camera so it wouldn’t bounce against her chest, and she was grateful she’d remembered to wear her hiking boots. She had simply followed him from the dining hall after he got the call, without a word, and so far he was so flustered he hadn’t yet thought to send her away.
Through the gaps in the trees she glimpsed the sports field, where Deb had been found. There was nothing there now but empty, overgrown grass. Closer were the indoor gymnasium and girls’ lockers, the building dilapidated and falling down. In the eaves of the overhang at the edge of the building, she could see tangles of generations of birds’ nests.
The workmen were gathered in a knot. One of them had pulled out a large plastic tarp of cheerful, incongruous blue and was attempting to unfold it. The others watched Anthony as their foreman stepped forward.
“Are you certain?” Anthony said.
The man’s face was gray. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s pretty clear.”
“It isn’t a hoax? Teenagers have been using this property to scare each other for years.”
The foreman shook his head. “Not a hoax. I’ve been in this business twenty years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Anthony’s lips pursed. “Let me see.”
They led him around the rise. There was a digger of some kind and a backhoe, both of them parked and silent. Dug into the slope of the rise was a huge ragged hole, the edges of mud and crumbling brick. Though it was full daylight, the center of the hole was pitch-black, as if it led into the depths of somewhere light could not go.
“In there,” the foreman said.
There was a smell. Wet, rancid. Digging into the back of the brain, traveling down the spine. Anthony took a large flashlight from one of the workmen and approached the hole, carefully climbing over the mud and the broken bricks in his leather shoes. Swallowing the smell, Fiona followed at his shoulder.
He clicked on the flashlight and shone it into the blackness. “I don’t see anything.”
“Lower, sir. You’ll see it.” The foreman paused. “You’ll see her.”
Her.
Fiona stared at the circle of light, watching it move down the well. The far wall was still intact, the bricks damp and slimy. Her hands were cold, but she couldn’t put them in her pockets. She couldn’t move as the light traveled down, down.
And then, her.
She was not a hoax.
The girl was folded, her knees bent, tucked beneath her chin. Her head was down, her face hidden, as if bowed with grief. Rotten strands of long hair trailed down her back. One hand was dropped to her side, hidden in the darkness; the other was curled over one shin, nothing but a translucent sheen of long-gone skin over dark bone. The shin itself was a mottled skeleton. Her shoes, which had probably been leather, had long rotted away, leaving only rubber soles beneath the ruins of her feet. But there were ragged remains of the rest of her clothes: a thin wool coat, mostly decayed away. A collar around her neck that was the last of what had once been a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. A skirt, discolored with mold. Threads dangling from her skeletal legs that had once been wool stockings.
“There’s no water in the well.” This was the foreman’s voice, low and strangled. “It dried up, which was why it wasn’t in use anymore. The water, it drained away down . . .” He trailed off, and Fiona wondered if he was pointing or gesturing somewhere. Neither she nor Anthony was watching. “So it’s damp in there, sure, but—she’s just been sitting there.”
Fiona swallowed and said to Anthony, “Give me the flashlight.” He seemed to have shut down; he handed the light to her immediately. She hefted it, swung it down to the girl’s skirt. “The color is bleached away,” she said. “Idlewild uniforms were navy blue and dark green.” Her research last night had drawn up more than one class picture, girls lined up in rows, wearing identical skirts and blouses. “I can’t tell if she’s got the Idlewild crest.”
“She’s a student,” Anthony said. His voice was low, his words mechanical, as if he was not thinking of what he was saying. “She must be. Look at her.”
“She’s small,” Fiona said, traveling the light over the body again. “She looks like a child.”
“Not a child.” His voice was almost a whisper. “Not a child. A girl. This is a disaster. This will end us. The entire project. Everything.” He turned and looked at her, as if remembering she was there. “Oh, God. You’re a journalist. Are you going to write about this? What are you going to do?”
Fiona tore her gaze from the body in the well and stared at him. Something was crawling through her at the sight of the body, crawling over her skin. Not just revulsion and pity. Something big. Something that had to do with Deb and the words scrawled on the window. Good Night Girl. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe she fell. But it’s part of the story.”
She watched his jaw clamp shut, his mind work. He was thinking about lawyers, nondisclosure agreements, gag orders. None of it mattered. Fiona was already standing here, looking at the body, and the cat was already out of the bag. “You can’t possibly be such a jackal,” he said finally.
“I’m not sure what I am,” she told him, “but I’m not a jackal. I’m a writer. And this”—she motioned to the gaping hole in the well, the girl inside—“can be handled with respect.” She thought of Deb, the news stories from twenty years ago. “I can do it. I might be the only one who can do it right.”
He was silent for a long minute. “You can’t promise that. The police—”
“I can help with that, too.” She pulled out her cell phone and dialed. “Listen.”
It rang only twice before Jamie’s voice came on the other end. “Fee?”