The Broken Girls

“I did some research,” Fiona said. “I learned about a woman named Rose Albert. Also known as Rosa Berlitz.”

There was a long, drawn-out minute of silence. Fiona could hear her own breathing, the beeps of machines in rooms down the hall, the clatter of someone walking by dragging an IV stand. Nurses talked and laughed quietly beyond the door of her room. The four of them were still. Roberta still looked out the window, but Katie and CeCe watched Fiona.

“Well.” Katie sat back in her chair and pressed her hands together. Her features were composed, even amused, but Fiona still had the feeling she’d impressed the older woman for the first time today. “This is interesting.”

“How did you do it?” CeCe blurted. She looked like she could barely contain herself. “You never saw the picture.”

“What picture?” Fiona asked.

“Sonia’s drawing. In her notebook.” CeCe glanced at Katie, who was giving her an icy look, and made an impatient sound. “Leave it, Katie—she already knows. Why not tell her about the book?” CeCe turned back to Fiona. “Sonia had a notebook. I gave it to her, actually—it had been a present to me, but I never used it. Sonia took it and wrote in it. All of her memories. And she drew pictures—of her family, of Ravensbrück, of the people she knew there. The notebook was in her suitcase when she disappeared.”

“The suitcase that was taken from the headmistress’s office?” Fiona asked.

CeCe ignored another dirty look from Katie. “We took it, of course. We wanted Sonia’s things back. They didn’t belong in some dusty old closet, and we thought it might hold a clue. So we took it. But we never found a clue in there, not until 1973.”

“That was the year of Rosa Berlitz’s trial,” Fiona said. “The year Rosa died.” A heart attack in her own home, the papers had said.

From her place in the window, Roberta chimed in. “I had a baby in 1973,” she said. “My son. I didn’t hear about the Berlitz trial. But when I came back to work at the firm, people were talking about it. My firm hadn’t handled the case, but it was a landmark in local legal circles. I heard the word Ravensbrück, and I started to wonder.” She turned and faced Fiona, the harsh light from the window illuminating her still-perfect skin. “I dug up the articles about the trial. A war crimes trial, and it wasn’t even front-page news.”

Fiona nodded. That was what she’d seen as well.

“I made copies of the articles and mailed them to Katie and CeCe,” Roberta went on. “I asked them if they thought it might have some bearing on Sonia, since Rosa Berlitz had lived in Burlington. It was just too much of a coincidence that she and Sonia had been close enough to cross paths. But I’m sure you thought the same thing already.”

“It was me who figured it out,” CeCe said. “I saw the photo from the newspaper and I recognized her immediately. I was the one who kept Sonia’s suitcase, you see, with the notebook in it. We’d all read the notebook, but I’d read it many times over. And the minute I saw Rosa Berlitz, I recognized her face. Sonia had drawn a portrait of her from memory. Rosa had been a Ravensbrück guard.”

“Wait,” Fiona said. “Rosa Berlitz was acquitted. You’re saying you had evidence of her identity, and you didn’t go to the authorities with it?”

“We would have gone to the authorities,” Katie said quietly. “But we didn’t have time. We went to Rosa first.”

“All of us,” Roberta said.

“We went right to her house,” CeCe added. “Knocked on the door, and there she was.”

“I have to say,” Katie said, “she really wasn’t expecting us. She wasn’t an old woman, but she was a recluse, especially since the trial. She was not well.” She shook her head. “Not well at all.”

Fiona found that she was gripping the edge of the bed so hard her knuckles were white. “What did you do?” she said. “The obituary said she died of a heart attack. What did you do?”

Katie smiled at her. “We asked her questions. About Ravensbrück. About Sonia. About everything.” She shrugged. “She didn’t want to admit anything at first, but we were persistent, and Roberta has a lot of experience with witnesses on the stand in court. She was magnificent. I suppose you could say we bullied Rose a little bit, but that’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it? In any case, we made her believe that it was over, that we already knew everything there was to know. We made her believe she could be indicted not only for the Ravensbrück crimes, but for Sonia’s murder as well. She looked sick—she wasn’t well, as I say—and then she started to talk.”

“She admitted to it?” Fiona asked.

“Yes,” Roberta said. Her voice was bitter. “She knew where Sonia was going from her bus ticket. Sonia had changed the ticket at her agency. She went to the stop in her car, parked, and waited. When Sonia got off the bus, she followed her into the woods and killed her with a rotted beam from the old fence. Then she dumped the body, walked back to her car, and drove away. She was very, very sorry.”

“That dried-up old Nazi bitch,” Katie said darkly.

“Yes, she was,” CeCe added. “She wouldn’t tell us where she’d dumped the body, because she knew that would seal her case. It was her word against ours, and once a body was recovered, it was over. But we weren’t leaving. We asked and asked. We were so angry after all these years. She got agitated.”

Fiona had to ask it. “Did you kill her?”

It was Katie who answered that one. “Did you think we killed her?” she asked. “What a picture that paints. All of us standing over her, choking her—suffocating her, perhaps—in revenge. The coroner misdiagnosing it as a heart attack. The three of us sending Sonia’s killer to hell.” She nodded. “I like it. That isn’t how it happened. But I can’t say I find the picture distasteful.”

“No, we didn’t kill her,” Roberta added. “She had a heart attack. A real one. While we were there, asking over and over where we could find Sonia’s body. I think the fear and the stress just overpowered her. She fell on the floor. We thought she was faking at first, but she wasn’t. She really was dying.”

“It was a disaster,” CeCe said. “She was the only one who knew where Sonia was buried. I was so upset.”

Fiona stared at her. “So—what did you do?”

“She died,” Katie said, her voice cold and sharp. “We left. That was all.”

“You just left her there?”

Roberta snorted, the most unladylike sound Fiona had ever heard the older woman make. But it was Katie who answered.

“If that piece of Nazi garbage had killed your sister,” she said, “and then spent decades living free while she rotted in a well—what would you do?”

The room was quiet. Fiona couldn’t answer.

Katie Winthrop rose from her chair and touched Fiona on the shoulder. “I’m not a bad person,” she said. “None of us are. But this was Sonia’s killer. We’d spent our lives trying to find her when no one cared, when the police stopped looking. I think, of all people, you would understand.”

“Jesus,” Fiona breathed.

“You see what we were up against,” Katie said. “We had to be hard. We’ve always had to be hard. It was either that or break.”

“I have one more question,” Fiona said.

“Go ahead,” Katie said. “You’ve earned it.”

“Idlewild.” Fiona made herself say the word. “The restoration. Was it ever real?”

Katie shook her head, giving her the truth. “I bought Idlewild because I knew Sonia was buried there somewhere,” she said. “She had to be there. I intended to go over every inch and find her. Anthony never knew. He just thought I was misguided. He disapproved from the first, just like his father did. But that was because he didn’t know what I really wanted.”

“And now you’ve found Sonia,” Fiona said.

“I have,” Katie said softly. “I’m going to give her a proper burial. And then, my dear, you can rest easy. I’m not going to restore Idlewild. I’m going to take that place, with all of its ghosts, and I’m going to bury it. I’m going to dismantle every stick and stone until there’s nothing left, and then I’m going to leave it to rot, just like it wants to.”

Chapter 36

Barrons, Vermont

December 2014