The Broken Girls

Sonia was unperturbed despite the barbs Katie was throwing. She was calm and happy, a little flushed with expectation. Like the other three, she had never been away from Idlewild, even for an afternoon, since arriving here.

“You’re packing everything,” CeCe pointed out, sitting on the floor, playing with the dials on her little radio, even though it was morning, just after breakfast, and they were at risk of getting caught. They only ever listened to the radio at night. “You’re only going for two days. Why are you packing your uniform?”

“Because,” Katie said when Sonia didn’t answer, “she thinks they’re going to want to keep her.”

“Shut up, Katie,” Roberta said. She was leafing through Sonia’s copy of Blackie’s Girls’ Annual, and she didn’t look up as she issued the reprimand. There was no venom in it.

“They might keep me,” Sonia said, adding her pitifully small stack of underwear to the suitcase. “Why else did they ask me to visit after so much time?”

She looked up, and the glimpse of hope on her face, naked and bare before she tucked it away, made Katie feel a slice of pain. She was an idiot, she knew. Stupid and petty. She wanted Sonia to be happy, but not by leaving, not by going to live with strangers.

And what if those strangers didn’t want to keep Sonia after their visit was over? What would happen to the hope on Sonia’s face then?

Sonia had gained a little weight over the last few weeks. She had smoothed out, her eyes less sunken, her elbows less sharp and bony. She wasn’t pretty—Katie knew, with the perfect detachment of the beautiful, that no one was pretty next to her—but her skin had a healthier flush to it, her gaze a calmer sparkle. Her uniform skirt was too short now, and it had begun to grow tight around the hips, though her bust was hopeless and probably always would be. When we’re out of here, Katie mused idly, I’ll get her one of those padded brassieres. There were no movie magazines—no magazines at all—at Idlewild, but some of the teachers wore bras that made their bodies look like soft rocket ships beneath their blouses. Katie was fascinated by the idea, not because she found it attractive, but because she had an animal instinct that boys would. If her hips grow out some more, and I get one of those, and I curl her hair . . . Oh, being eighteen was going to be fun.

Then she remembered that Sonia might not leave here with the rest of them.

“I bet they’re monsters,” she said, unable to stop herself. Unable to keep the words from scraping her throat as they came out.

“Hush,” CeCe chided, looking up from her radio. “Monsters don’t exist.”

They were all quiet for a moment, no one believing this, not even CeCe.

Katie looked up to see Sonia looking at her, watching her from those calm eyes. She had stopped packing. “I’ll be back Sunday,” she said quietly.

The hope draining from her friend’s face was worse than anything, so of course Katie’s perverse mood swung the other way. “It’s best if they do keep you,” she said. “That way you can find a way to sneak me some dirty magazines.”

Roberta laughed, glancing up from Blackie’s Girls’ Annual, and Sonia made a face. “What if they don’t have any dirty magazines?”

“You find a way to get them, silly,” Katie instructed her. “You ask for an allowance.”

“I want chocolate,” CeCe said, perking up at this.

“Books,” Roberta added. “For God’s sake, get us something to read besides Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We’ve already read the dirty parts to death.”

A squawk came from CeCe’s radio, and she twisted a button. “Careful with that thing, or we’ll lose it,” Katie said.

“No one has heard us so far,” CeCe pointed out. “I like it. I want to know what shows are on at this time of morning.”

“Probably nothing.” Katie watched Sonia put her notebook in the suitcase, accompanied by the pen. Her hairbrush, her nightgown. “I don’t think they start the shows this early.”

The radio squawked again as CeCe turned the dial. Sonia looked at the book in Roberta’s hand. “You can borrow that, if you like,” she said.

Roberta looked at her. Her calm gaze cracked for a fraction of a second, a flinch that only someone who knew her well would be able to see. Katie read her thoughts perfectly, since they mirrored her own. You might not come back. “No,” she said, her placid voice recovered. “You take it.” She handed it over, and it went into the suitcase with the other things. “If they don’t want you, come back,” she said to Sonia. “We’ll be here.”

“You’ll be late for class,” Sonia observed, closing the suitcase on its painfully few contents and latching it. “Don’t you have Latin?”

They would be late for class. There was only half an hour of break time allotted after the first class of the day, and it was already stretching past that now. Soon, someone—dorm monitor Susan Brady or Lady Loon herself—would come knocking on doors, shouting that the lazy girls needed to get their things. Still, nobody moved.

“What time is your bus?” CeCe asked for the dozenth time, though they all knew the answer.

“Twelve o’clock,” Sonia replied, as she had every other time. “I should start walking to the bus stop soon.”

“Do you have your ticket?” Roberta asked.

Sonia nodded. Her relatives had mailed her the ticket when she’d accepted the invitation. She had carefully placed it in the pocket of her wool coat so she wouldn’t lose it—as if she had so many things that she was in danger of not keeping track of them. Now, despite her earlier excitement, even Sonia seemed reluctant. She picked up her shoes and sat on the edge of her bunk, slowly putting them on.

The radio in CeCe’s hands stopped its static blast, and the harmony of a barbershop quartet emitted from it. A voice came over the music: “Welcome to The Pilcrow Soap Sunrise Show!”

“Sunrise was hours ago,” Katie snorted.

“Shh,” Roberta said. Sonia continued slowly pulling on her shoes.

The singing continued, sweet and buttery, the notes slipping so easily from one voice to the next. “Sweet dreams of you, sweet dreams are true . . . sweet dreams of us saying, ‘Yes, I do . . .’ ” The girls listened in silence, hypnotized, no longer caring about teachers or dorm monitors or Latin. A few sweet moments of peaceful quiet, the kind only the radio could give them, a few moments of nothing but sound from the world outside, where people were living and singing and playing songs. Normal people in a normal world.

Far off, down a hallway, a single door slammed. The radio squawked in CeCe’s hand, the singing interrupted.

It blasted briefly; then it was gone again. Silence came from the little box. Not static, not music. Just silence.

“What did you do?” Roberta said.

“Nothing!” CeCe stared down at the radio. “I didn’t touch anything.”

Steps sounded in the hall. “Someone’s coming,” Katie whispered, her lips cold and numb with sudden fear.

CeCe shook her head. “I—”

There was the sound of breathing. A breath in, a breath out. From the radio.

Katie felt her temples pulse, her vision blur. She had heard that same breathing, sensed it, in Special Detention.

She’s here.

The four girls sat frozen in a tableau, no one moving. And from the radio, breaking the breathing silence, came the thin, reedy, distressing cry of a baby’s wail. It wavered, as if far away, as if weak. And then it cried again.

CeCe dropped the radio with a thump. She kicked it, hard, and it spun under the bed, hitting the wall, the baby’s wail cutting off.

A knock pounded on the door. “Ladies!” Lady Loon shouted through the wood, making them all jump. “Ladies! You are late for class!”

There was a frozen moment in which nobody moved. And then Katie leaned over, took Sonia’s icy hand in hers, and looked into her face.

“Go,” she said.

Chapter 24

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

November 2014

There was more than one church in Portsmouth. There were many, and Fiona silently cursed her anonymous note writer. What the hell church did he or she mean? New England was hardly bereft of churches.

She blew out a breath and checked the time on her phone. It was ten forty-five. Should she stay for fifteen minutes and play into this person’s game, or should she start her car and drive away? She already faced a wet drive back to Vermont, and she wanted to get back into the Idlewild files, which she’d barely had time to skim through. She wanted to talk to Malcolm. Even, if he’d let her, to Jamie.

Still . . . You’re not looking hard enough.

Goddamn it.

It was as if whoever it was knew how to reach into her journalist’s psyche and flip the switch of her curiosity—the switch that couldn’t be turned off. The switch that would most likely get her killed one of these days. But it was morning in sunny New Hampshire, with the thin wet snow melting and retirees walking by to go into the twee coffee shops beneath pretty awnings.