The Broken Girls

She put her hands on the steering wheel, though the car was still parked, and took a deep breath. She was in a paid lot on Islington Street, and someone had papered the lot with flyers while she’d been in the coffee shop with Roberta, slipping their annoying advertisement onto every windshield. The paper flapped in the damp wind. She’d have to get out and pull it out from under her wiper, a task that suddenly seemed exhausting.

The interview with Roberta spun in her mind, and she tried to sort through it. Why hadn’t she used her recorder to catch everything? It was habit, yet she hadn’t even brought the recorder in her bag this morning. In desperation, she pulled out her notebook and pen and wrote her thoughts while they were fresh.

She knew about Ravensbrück, she wrote. Sonia must have told her. Deflected my question about it.

This was the tactic she had to take, she realized, going back over the conversation. Not to note what Roberta had said, because so much of what Roberta had said had confirmed things Fiona already knew. She needed to think about the things Roberta had deflected, as quickly and neatly as if she’d been hitting shots back over the net in a tennis match.

She knew the Idlewild records had been lost, Fiona scribbled. How? The only way is if she has looked for them.

That made her think for a minute. It didn’t stretch the imagination that as an adult and a lawyer Roberta would have made an inquiry, looking for something about her old friend’s disappearance. Once she was no longer a girl, she had used her powers as a lawyer to free her uncle and make his life as right as she could. She might have tried to make things right in Sonia’s death as well, especially as she had been convinced Sonia was murdered. Perhaps she had gotten access to the same missing persons file Jamie had pulled from the Barrons police, the one that said nothing at all. The existence of the Idlewild files had been Roberta’s only slip; she hadn’t known about it, and she had been avidly interested. It had been one of the only times in the interview that Fiona had gotten a peek beyond the calm, careful facade.

So the next question Fiona wrote was the only logical one: Does Roberta know who did it?

And then: Is she hiding it?

She had been truly grieved when she’d heard about Sonia’s body being found in the well—that hadn’t been an act. But Fiona made herself go back over that moment, carefully. What Roberta had shown was sadness and pain. What she hadn’t shown was surprise.

Fuck. Fuck. Fiona could have banged her forehead on the steering wheel. She had seen that, but it had been too fast, and she’d been too caught up in her own shit. She’d been outwitted by a seventy-nine-year-old woman. A woman who had spent thirty years as a successful lawyer, but still . . . Never assume, Fiona, Malcolm said in her mind.

From its place on the passenger seat, spilled out of her purse, her phone rang. She jumped, and for a second a wild hope sprang up in her that it was Jamie. But it wasn’t—it was Anthony Eden. What did he want? To summon her to another meeting with his mother? She’d had enough of frustrating old women for today. She ignored the call and flipped the page in her notebook to a fresh one.

She wrote a heading: Potential Suspects.

It seemed like in sixty-four years no one had done even this basic piece of logic, so she would do it herself. She started with the obvious choice, the one the headmistress had been so convinced of.

A boy.

That meant Sonia had had some kind of illicit romance. She would have had to keep it from the school, because they would surely have expelled her if they knew. It would have had to be a local boy, since in the pre-Internet, pre-Facebook days, there was no way she could have met a boy from anywhere else. It seemed unlikely, but Fiona kept it on the list, because if it was true, then Sonia’s roommate and friend Roberta had likely known. And it was believable that she had kept her friend’s secret all this time.

She wrote another possibility: a stranger.

The tale loosened, wove into a different pattern. This was Ginette Harrison’s theory that Sonia had been targeted. The killer-on-the-road theory, a predator passing through, perhaps a deliveryman or some other worker at the school. I didn’t see the face of a single man for three years, Roberta had said. The truth, or a lie? Why would Roberta cover it up if a gardener had killed her friend? Or, for that matter, a stranger on the road? She had to circle back to the fact that Roberta might be lying to her for reasons Fiona couldn’t see.

If Roberta was covering something, that led to: One of the girls did it. Perhaps Roberta herself, or CeCe Frank, or Katie Winthrop.

We always knew, Roberta had said. Sonia wouldn’t run away without her suitcase. The girls could have protested that Sonia hadn’t just disappeared in order to appear more innocent. The girls had had opportunity, access to Sonia, and Sonia’s trust. There was no gun or other weapon used in the crime—just a rock or a shovel, something the girls would have had access to. It was easy to imagine an argument, an impulse, done in a rage, the body dumped to cover it up quickly, the girls agreeing to cover for one another, never to expose one another.

And the motive? What kind of motive did teenage girls need? Jealousy, rejection, some imagined slight? The ultimate mean girls, and it explained why Roberta had not been surprised, why she had wanted access to Idlewild’s records: so she could find any clues to the crime in the files and remove them. Why she had made it clear she had no idea where the other two girls were now, which could be a lie.

It was the theory that fit in every detail, and it was the theory Fiona hated the most. She closed her eyes and tried to think clearly of why.

It was too pat, for one. Cliché, like a thriller movie. What’s more sinister than a teenage girl? Angry and duplicitous and full of hate. Everyone liked to picture a witchy coven of teenagers putting their hapless classmate to death, because it was easier and sexier than picturing Sonia being hit over the head by a local man who probably needed the 1950s version of mental health treatment, who had possibly sexually violated her first. But if it had been an accident, a true mistake, instead of a planned murder, then the girls would have been terrified. Covering it up would have been the first thing they’d do.

She hated it. But she had to admit it was possible. It was possible that she’d just had coffee with Sonia’s killer—or with a woman who was covering for Sonia’s killer, her school friend.

Maybe Fiona preferred picturing a man doing such a thing, or even a boy, instead of a girl. And that, she had to admit, circled back to Deb’s murder. She had always wanted Tim Christopher to be Deb’s killer. She had always wanted to believe that a man, sinister and big-handed and cruel, had put her innocent sister to death. Because it had fit.

But no one had seen Tim do it. And no one had seen him dump the body.

And for the first time in twenty years, Fiona let the words into her head, like a cold draft from a cracked window: Could they have gotten it wrong?

Tim had always maintained his innocence. Of course he had; nearly every convicted murderer did. But what if the wrong man was in prison? What if Deb’s killer was still free?

Sonia’s killer had walked free. That person was possibly dead, after living a life in which the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl had never been unearthed. Or that person was possibly living, elderly now. It was even possible that person had had a fruitful career as a lawyer, borne two children, and spent her morning playing cat and mouse with Fiona in a New Hampshire coffee shop.

There is no justice, Malcolm had told her once, but we stand for it anyway. Justice is the ideal, but justice is not the reality.

If Tim Christopher was innocent, it would kill her father.

Outside, the cold wind kicked up, and the flyer tucked beneath her windshield wiper flapped. Fiona stared at it, suddenly transfixed.

It wasn’t a flyer. It was a note.

She got out of the car and snatched it, nearly ripping it in half. She ducked back into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, smoothing out the note, staring at it.

Simple handwriting, on a piece of notebook paper, written in ballpoint pen.

Meet me behind the church at eleven o’clock, it said.

And, beneath that: You’re not looking hard enough.

Chapter 23

Katie

Barrons, Vermont

November 1950

“They’re probably circus freaks,” Katie said, sitting cross-legged on her bunk and watching Sonia pack. “He’s the world’s fattest man, and she’s the bearded lady. That’s why they’ve lived alone so long with no kids.”

“You forget I’ve seen them,” Sonia said, calmly folding a skirt and placing it in her suitcase. “They aren’t freaks. I met them when I first arrived in America.”

“And they forgot about you for three years,” Katie pointed out. “Maybe they were just busy building the cell they’re going to keep you in.”

She didn’t know why she was saying these things, passing them off as jokes. It was cruel, unnecessary, considering the true horror of Sonia’s past. But she couldn’t seem to stop it.

I don’t want you to go.