The Broken Girls

It was almost too easy. Susan Brady led CeCe to the nurse, Susan chiding and CeCe choking back distressed sobs; Roberta kept watch in the hall while Katie slipped into Susan’s room and rifled through her things, looking for the key. She found it in Susan’s jewelry box, among the tiny gold earrings and a cheap paste ring. Both girls were back in their room when CeCe returned, having swallowed the requisite chalky aspirin and taken a verbal drubbing from Susan. She quickly dressed and the three of them set out, slipping down the stairs into the common, then to the main hall—the skeleton key let them in just fine—and down the hall to the headmistress’s office.

Sonia’s suitcase was in a closet at the back of the room, alongside Mrs. Patton’s winter coat and snow boots and other confiscated items taken from Idlewild girls over the years: lipsticks, cigarettes, a pearl compact and mirror, a pair of silk stockings, a glossy photograph of Rudolph Valentino—How old was that? Katie wondered—and two beautiful priceless items: a small flask of alcohol and a stack of magazines. The girls couldn’t resist: Katie pocketed the alcohol, Roberta snatched the magazines, and CeCe took the suitcase. They dropped the skeleton key in the garden, Roberta edging it beneath the soft, wet earth with the toe of her shoe.

Back in their room, they set aside the unexpected loot and went quietly through the suitcase, reverently touching Sonia’s things. The case was neatly packed, and Katie knew that no one had opened it since Sonia had packed it at her relatives’ house. Not one person—not the headmistress, not the police, not anyone—had bothered to look in the missing girl’s things.

Katie opened Sonia’s notebook, leafing through the pages as the other two girls looked on. There was Sonia’s handwriting, the portraits she’d drawn of her family and the people she’d seen at Ravensbrück. There were maps, and sketches, and pages and pages of memories, Sonia’s short life put down in her private journal. In the last pages were portraits of her three friends, drawn closely and lovingly.

Katie had already known that Sonia was dead, but looking at the notebook—which Sonia, while alive, would never have abandoned to her last breath—she knew.

This is good-bye, Katie thought, but not farewell. Someone did this. And I won’t stand for it. None of us will.

The girls closed the suitcase and went to bed.

And Katie began to think.

Chapter 28

Burlington, Vermont

November 2014

The small building that had once been the bus station in downtown Burlington was long gone. Anyone wishing to catch a bus had to go to the Greyhound station just out of town at the airport. Fiona stood on the sidewalk on South Winooski Avenue and stared at a Rite Aid that was currently closed down, the sign half-dismantled and the windows boarded. Traffic blared by on the street behind her. This was a section of town populated with grocery stores, Laundromats, gas stations, and corner stores, with a gentrifying residential area starting farther up the street. It looked very little like it would have looked in 1950, but Fiona still felt a connection, a quiet jolt of energy, knowing she was standing in the place Sonia Gallipeau had stood on the last day of her life.

She ignored the people walking by, who were giving side-looks to the woman staring at a closed-up Rite Aid, and turned in a circle. This wasn’t just a sentimental visit. Fiona was making a map.

Rose Albert. Rosa Berlitz. Had they been one and the same? Was there a way Rose Albert, in her made-up American life, could have crossed paths with Sonia?

It had taken only a little digging, cross-referenced with county tax records, to get addresses. The police record said that the ticket taker had seen Sonia at the bus station, getting on the bus. Fiona was at ground zero of Sonia’s case, the last place she was seen by anyone except the bus driver—who was never interviewed—and her killer.

But Sonia had gotten on the bus. That was witnessed. And her suitcase was found on Old Barrons Road, a few hundred feet from Idlewild. Fiona had spent a sleepless night going over it, wishing painfully for Jamie, his clever logic, his head for facts. It wasn’t easy, figuring these things out alone. And it wasn’t fun, either.

But she had come to some conclusions that she thought were the most logical, the most likely. As Sherlock Holmes said: Eliminate the impossible, and what’s left must be the truth. If she followed the Rose Albert theory, it wasn’t impossible that a woman who lived in Burlington would coincidentally be standing on Old Barrons Road, in the middle of nowhere, when Sonia Gallipeau walked by. But it was unlikely.

It was more likely that Rose Albert had come across Sonia in Burlington, before she got on the bus.

But that didn’t turn any of it into fact. The newspaper reports of Rose’s trial had stated that Rose Albert worked as a clerk in a travel agency, four streets away. Perhaps Rose had somehow spotted Sonia from her home, a fifteen-minute walk from the travel agency, while Sonia and her relatives were out enjoying their weekend. Fiona started walking down South Winooski Avenue toward the home where Sonia had stayed.

But half an hour later, she was no further along. The house of Henry and Eleanor DuBois was nowhere near the address where Rose Albert was listed as living. She could not see how Rose and Sonia could have crossed paths in the space of a weekend. It didn’t help that there was no way of knowing what activities the DuBoises had done with their great-niece. Shopping? Sightseeing? Walking in the park? Eating out? If Sonia had any new-bought items or souvenirs in her suitcase, it would have given a clue as to where she had gone that weekend, but the suitcase had disappeared from Julia Patton’s office after Sonia was murdered, never to be seen again.

She was walking back toward the site of the former bus station, wishing someone in 1950 had interviewed the goddamned bus driver, when it struck her so forcefully she stopped on the sidewalk to think.

The bus ticket. That was the connection.

In 1950, you didn’t buy a bus ticket online, or from a machine at the bus station, using a credit card. You bought a bus ticket from a clerk at the station, or at a travel agent’s. Rose had worked as a clerk for a travel agent, filling out and filing the stacks of paperwork that accompanied travel bookings in the pre-Internet age.

Sonia’s relatives had bought her a round-trip bus ticket to Burlington. But when Sonia had run away to go back to school, she must have changed it.

Fiona felt the excitement building in her chest, and she started walking again, nearly jogging back toward her car. It was easy to picture: Sonia at the travel agent’s, changing her ticket while Rose sat at her desk, doing paperwork. Had Sonia seen Rose? Had she recognized her? She must have; Rose must have known that Sonia knew who she was, that she could identify her as Rosa Berlitz. She knew what bus Sonia was taking back to Idlewild. And at some point, Rose Albert must have decided that she’d have to do something permanent about Sonia, or her life would fall to pieces.

It was speculation. It wasn’t concrete. There were a million ways it could have been wrong. It was more far-fetched than the theory of one of Sonia’s friends simply caving her head in and dumping her in a well.

But if you followed it, it fit.

Sonia had been in the same city at the same time as a woman who might have been a guard at Ravensbrück, where Sonia had been a prisoner. She had visited family within blocks of Rose Albert’s home and her office. How far apart had they been, guard and prisoner? One mile, at most? The two of them in the same place in America, five years after the war ended. A coincidence, but a documented one. It fit.

Fiona thought back to the picture from the news story—Rose Albert’s calm face, her level eyes, her large pupils, her milky skin. The face of Rosa Berlitz, the guard who had put women in the gas chambers, in the ovens. If she had done that, then the death of one teenage girl would have meant nothing. Not in the face of survival. Not if a secret had to be kept.

If it was true, then Sonia Gallipeau’s murder wasn’t random, or impulsive. She had been chosen and stalked, though not in the way that Ginette Harrison had imagined. She had been under a death sentence from the moment she walked into Rose Albert’s travel agency. Followed until she was away from the city and the crowds, until the bus had driven away and she was alone on a deserted road. Rose Albert hadn’t even needed to take the bus alongside her prey; she had already known where her prey was headed. She could have traveled ahead to the bus stop in her car, parked, and waited until the bus pulled up and the girl got off.

If you were hunting for someone to murder, Ginette had said, what better person could you choose?

Her head was pounding when she got home, since she’d barely slept and she hadn’t eaten. The light was still out in the hallway on her floor—it had burned out nearly three weeks ago—and for once she was grateful for the eerie half-light that was usually an alarming security concern. Her thoughts were too heavy, too loud, and she wanted only the darkness of her apartment.