The Broken Girls

“Oh, my God,” Fiona murmured.

“You are now looking at the main hall,” Anthony Eden said. She was beginning to see that his manner was more than stodgy politeness—he didn’t want to be here. Likely his mother had made him do this. “The building dates from 1919, and all of the wood is original. Much of it cannot be saved, of course, but we plan to restore the original wood wherever we can.”

“Is that even possible?” Fiona asked, raising her camera and snapping a shot.

“The wood experts arrive next week. There is a drainage problem on the east side of the property, so we’ve had to focus on that this first week, to halt the progress of the damp in all of the buildings.”

The staircase, as old as it was, had held, and they climbed it to the second floor, where Eden led her down a hallway littered with debris. “This was a functioning girls’ boarding school until it closed in 1979,” he said, beginning his tour guide speech. “We intend to restore it to its previous condition and reopen it to students again.”

“Girls only?” Fiona asked.

“That is the intent. My mother believes that girls should be given their own chance at a better education in order to give them a start in the world.”

They entered a classroom. “This still has desks in it,” Fiona said.

“Yes. Most of the rooms in these buildings still contain the original furniture. The school was nearly bankrupt by the time it closed, and it was mostly abandoned as the owners tried to sell off the land.”

Fiona moved into the classroom. The desks were solid wood, very old. Most of them had words and names scratched into them by generations of girls. The blackboard was still here, covered in unreadable chalk scrawls, and there were birds’ nests in the rafters. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling over time onto the floor. A poster on one wall, faded, its edges curled, depicted a line drawing of a row of happy, rosy-cheeked girls in uniforms sitting at desks, with the caption GOOD GIRLS MAKE GOOD MOTHERS!

Fiona took more shots. It smelled less musty in here than it had downstairs, but there were other smells—rotten wood and something coppery, possibly from the old pipes in the walls. Fiona moved closer to the blackboard, stepping around the empty chairs and desks. There were layers of scrawls on it—graffiti from the kids who had wandered in here. Names. Swearwords and crude drawings. There were crumbs of smashed chalk on the floor. But the blackboard was filmed over and cloudy, coated with dust mixed with old chalk dust, as if no one had been here in years.

Fiona took a few more pictures and turned to the windows. Two of the panes were cracked and broken, the sills rotted through where rain and snow had come in. The third window was intact.

“Let’s move on,” Anthony Eden said behind her. He was still in the doorway; he hadn’t come into the room. Fiona turned, and the sunlight coming through the intact window illuminated the writing on it, etched into the grime coating the glass, the lettering thin and spidery.

GOOD

NIGHT

GIRL

Fiona frowned at it. The words were fresh, the letters in the glass clear, not clouded over like the blackboard was. It had been written with something scratchy, like a fingernail.

“Miss Sheridan?” Eden said.

Fiona stared at the words for a long moment. Had someone been in here today? Had they gotten past the new locks? Who would come all the way here, bother to break in, to write graffiti like that? Why Good Night Girl? It made her think of Deb, lying on the field outside, her shirt and bra ripped open, the wind blowing over her unseeing face.

“Miss Sheridan.” Anthony Eden broke into her thoughts. “We really should move on.”

Tearing her gaze from the window, she followed him out of the room. They toured another classroom, and another. Except for the damage—water had run down the walls in one room, and a section of wall was crumbling in another—it was as if those girls had left yesterday, just stood up and walked away. Fiona paused at another broken window and looked out over the view of the common and the grounds beyond. “What’s that out there?” she asked.

Eden was in the doorway, impatient to leave again. His face had gone pale, and as Fiona watched, he pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. He glanced past her shoulder at the construction equipment that was moving busily in the distance. “That is the crew hired to deal with the drainage problem. They need to dig up an old well, from what I understand. I think we have the idea of the classrooms, don’t we? Let’s move to the dining hall.”

She followed him down the corridor again. “Mr. Eden—”

“Anthony, please.” His voice was tense.

“All right, thank you. I’m Fiona. Anthony, how long do you see the restoration taking?”

He was walking quickly toward the stairs, barely waiting for her. “It may take some time, especially to repair the fallen-in ceilings. But we are prepared to do it properly.”

“This restoration was all your mother’s idea?”

A definite chill at that. “Yes, it was.”

“I wonder if I could interview her.”

“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. My mother doesn’t wish to speak with journalists.”

We’ll see about that, Fiona thought. They had descended the stairs and he turned left, taking her through the atrium. No way was she going to be deterred from interviewing the mysterious Margaret Eden. “Why not?” Fiona asked. “Is your mother ill?”

“My mother is in perfect health. She does not wish to answer questions from reporters, that’s all.”

Fiona kept at it. “Why did she choose Idlewild? Was she a student here?”

“No. My mother is from Connecticut. My father is from Maryland.”

“Your father was an investor,” Fiona said. “Was this one of his projects? Your mother is carrying it on now—is that it?”

They had reached a back door, and Eden turned to face her. Some of the paleness had left his face, but the flush that replaced it was no healthier. “Not even close,” he said. “In fact, my father did not approve of this project at all, and forbade my mother from attempting it. He said it would lose money. It’s only now that he’s died that my mother has gone ahead.”

So that was it, then. Anthony was on his father’s side on this, and disapproved of his mother’s going against her husband’s wishes. It explained why he looked so pained to be here, so eager to keep moving. She tried for a little softening. “I’m very sorry about your father,” she said.

He stayed stiff for a second. “Thank you, Fiona.” Then he turned and opened the back door, leading her out into the common.

The cold air slapped her in the face, dispersing the close, damp smells she’d been inhaling inside. The sunlight, even in its indirect, clouded-over form, made her blink after the dimness. What the hell, she wondered, would possess Margaret Eden, a woman who was not local, to be so determined to sink her money into Idlewild Hall?

They crossed the common. In Idlewild’s heyday, this would have been a manicured green spot, made for strolling and studying in the soft grass. Now it was harsh and overgrown, the grass flattened and going brown as winter approached. The wind bit Fiona’s legs through her jeans.

They were behind the main building, thankfully facing away from the sharp-toothed mouth of the front facade. To the left, a gloomy building of gray stone and broody windows sat silent. “What is that?” she asked Anthony.

He glanced over briefly. “That is the teachers’ hall. It was flooded, I’m afraid, and I can’t give you a tour because the floors are too rotted and dangerous. The dining hall got off more lightly, so we can go inside.”

They were headed for the right-hand building, this one with large windows and double doors. “The school’s buildings all look very different,” Fiona said as they picked their way over the broken path. “Do you know anything about the architecture?”

“Almost nothing,” he replied. “There are no records still in existence of who the architects were.” He stopped on the path. “If you look here, and here”—he motioned with a black-coated arm to the roof of the main building and the roof of the dining hall—“you can see that the buildings are strangely mismatched. In fact, the southernmost windows of the dining hall provide only a view of the brick wall of the main hall. It’s a curious construction.”

“You think it was hastily planned?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “We’re still debating what to do. There is a garden in the wedge between the two buildings, so at least the school tried to put something there. But sunlight must be a problem. We’re not sure what they grew, or tried to grow.”