The Broken Girls

“It feels otherworldly,” Fiona admitted, “the concentration camp stories. Like it happened in a far-off era or on another planet.”

“It does,” Malcolm agreed. “It seems so far back in history, until they find some decrepit old Nazi war criminal still living under a rock and put him on trial. Then you remember that it’s still living memory for some people. Hell, Vietnam is too far back in the history books for most young people, and I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

His words made her brain tingle. She remembered Garrett Creel’s words as he carved the roast at the dinner table and discussed the murder with his son: It sounds like something a Nazi would do, except she came across the ocean to get away from those bastards.

As they kept chatting, she opened her laptop and searched Google for “Nazi war criminal Vermont.” She clicked through the results as they moved the conversation off Sonia Gallipeau’s life to her search through the Idlewild records—she stayed off the topic of ghosts—and on to more personal topics. He was telling her about his long-delayed visit to the doctor for a checkup, and how much he hated peeing in a cup, when she stopped him. “Daddy.” She stared at her laptop screen, a pulse pounding in her throat. “Daddy.”

This was how well her father knew her, how many years he’d lived as a journalist: He instantly knew to be excited. “What, Fee? What is it?”

“You mentioned Nazi war criminals,” she said. “Well, I looked it up, and we had one here. In Vermont.”

She heard a rustle and a click as he likely picked up his old telephone, with its extra-long cord, and hurried over to his own computer. “We did? I’ve never heard of it.”

Fiona scrolled through the article she had up on her screen. “In 1973, a Nazi war criminal was arrested in Burlington. Acquitted after a trial, because the identity couldn’t be established beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Is that so? What happened to him?”

Fiona took a breath. “There was going to be a possible second trial in Germany. But before it could happen, she died of a heart attack in her own home.”

Malcolm’s voice was a surprised shout. “She?”

“Yes,” Fiona said, clicking on the photo that accompanied the article. A woman stared back at her: a wide forehead, thick hair tied neatly back, a straight nose, thin lips in a round face. The eyes were perfectly level, well shaped, the pupils dark, the gaze calm and unexpressive. She was coming down the steps of a courthouse, her body already partially turned away from the camera, as if she was already walking away. Rose Albert, the photo caption read, accused of being concentration camp guard Rosa Berlitz, leaving court after acquittal this morning. “It was a woman,” she said to her father. “She was accused of being a guard at Ravensbrück. And she walked free.”

Chapter 27

Katie

Barrons, Vermont

December 1950

They thought, at first, that maybe Sonia’s dreams had come true. That her relatives had kept her, opened their arms and their home to her. That even now she was sitting on her own bed in her own bedroom, scared and excited and planning to go to school.

But by Monday the rumors were that she’d run away, and that was something very different. Sonia would never, ever run away. The girls knew that. She’d done enough running, enough journeying to last a lifetime. All Sonia wanted was safety, a place to be. Even if that place was Idlewild, with the misfits and the ghosts.

Katie sat in English class on Monday afternoon, her pulse pounding quietly in her wrists, her temples. Where was Sonia? Her mind spun the possibilities. A broken-down bus; a case of strep throat that hadn’t yet been communicated to the headmistress; a misplaced sign that put her on the bus to the wrong destination. She was only twenty-four hours late; it could have been nothing. But her gut told her it wasn’t nothing.

She glanced out the window to see a strange car come up the driveway to the main building, slowing and parking by the front portico. The classroom was on the third floor, and from this angle she looked down on the car, on its black-and-white stripes, on the tops of the heads of the two men who got out, putting on their navy blue policemen’s caps. No, she thought. They’re not here for Sonia. She wanted to scream.

That night, the teachers told the girls to stay in their rooms, no exceptions. They went from door to door in the dorm with lists in their hands, taking attendance of each girl. (We stood every day in the Appelplatz, Sonia had said. It was supposed to be a roll call, but it wasn’t.) They listened to Mrs. Peabody’s steps moving up and down the corridor, the sharp crack of her irritated voice. A girl had run away only last year, and the teachers were angry.

CeCe looked out the window and watched flashlights in the distance as the adults searched the woods for Sonia. Eventually CeCe climbed the ladder into Roberta’s bunk and fell asleep, the two girls curled together in their nightgowns, their faces drawn and pale. Katie stayed awake, watching the lights. Watching the woods.

The next day there was still no sign of her, and again the next. A rumor went around that Sonia’s suitcase had been found, that Mrs. Patton had it in her office. Katie thought about Sonia packing her suitcase, carefully folding her few stockings, her notebook, the copy of Blackie’s Girls’ Annual that Roberta had returned to her. She ground her teeth in helpless anger.

The weather grew bitter cold, though no snow fell yet. The sky was dark in the morning when the girls were roused for morning classes, and it was dark again when they finished supper and left the dining hall, stumbling over the common to their dorm. Roberta went to morning practice in the dark, the girls in their navy uniforms inkblots against the field in the predawn stillness, playing in silence with barely a shout. Katie watched Roberta dress, her skin as pale and gray as she knew her own was, her eyes haunted, her mouth drawn tight. Darkness and silence—those were the two things that dominated the days after Sonia disappeared. Darkness and silence, waking and sleeping. Then darkness and silence again.

After that first night, flashlights were not seen in the woods again, though the girls were kept under strict curfew after supper, roll call taken by the teachers as they sat in their rooms. CeCe was the one who went to Mrs. Patton’s office, pleading for the search to continue—She’s not run away, she said to the headmistress, the woman no girl dared approach. She can’t have run away. She’s hurt. Please, we have to help her. It was hopeless. She’d begged Katie to come with her, but Katie had refused, embalmed in the dark and the stillness, her body numb, her brain hushed, watching everything as if it were a world away. Watching the other Idlewild girls lose the fearful looks on their faces and begin to chatter again.

“She just ran away, that’s all,” Susan Brady said. Susan was riding high on her importance as the dorm monitor, helping the teachers with roll call every night. She heard things the other girls didn’t, things the students weren’t supposed to hear. “That’s what the police say. They say she must have found a boy. She wouldn’t need her suitcase if he bought her all new things, would she? That’s what I think. She was quiet, secretive.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

The teachers lost their tense, watchful postures, their anger replaced with the usual everyday irritation again. Ladies, ladies. Sportsmanship. Three days, that was all it had taken. Three days, four. Five. Six.

She’s hurt.

The girls didn’t speak of it.

The girls barely spoke at all.

I’m failing her, Katie thought, the words like constant echoes buried deep in her brain. She needs me, and I’m failing her. It was CeCe who had had the courage to go to the headmistress’s office, not Katie. It was Roberta who had left early for field hockey practice to search the woods on her own. Katie was powerless—as powerless as she’d been in the moment Thomas had thrown her down in the playground and yanked her skirt, his breath in her face; as powerless as she’d been the day she’d gotten out of her parents’ car and looked up at the portico of Idlewild. All her bravery, all her bluster, was a fake. At the end of it all, when it came down to what mattered, Katie was a girl, and nothing more.