The Broken Girls

“Where is he now?” Katie’s low voice came through the dark when Roberta finished.

“He’s still at home,” Roberta said. “He sees doctors. Mother says he isn’t well, that Dad wants to put him in a hospital.” She forced the words out. “They’re fighting. Mother and Dad. I could see it on Family Visit Day—they wouldn’t look at each other, talk to each other. They’re ashamed of me and Uncle Van both. I know Dad works a lot. Mother’s eyes were red, and she says . . . she says it isn’t a good time to come home.”

The others talked now as Roberta subsided. A weight had lifted from her chest. Each girl spoke while the others were quiet, listening.

It went like that, night after night. Katie, with CeCe as an accomplice, began pilfering extra food from the dining hall at supper, sneaking through a door into the kitchen and taking it while CeCe kept watch. They snacked on the extra food every night after dark; they pretended that it was for all of them, but by tacit agreement they gave most of it to Sonia. With the lights out and the cold winter coming outside, they ate and listened to the radio and told their stories, one by one, detail upon detail. Katie and Thomas, the boy who’d attacked her and told her to hold still. CeCe and her mother’s accident at the beach. Roberta told them, hesitantly, about the song she’d heard on the hockey field, the same song Uncle Van had been playing in the garage that day, as if someone or something had drawn the memory straight from her mind. And the next night Katie told them about Special Detention, and the spiders, and the messages in the textbooks. And the scratching at the window, the voice begging to be let in.

Sonia spoke rarely, but when she did, the others went silent, listening, from the first word. She told them slowly, doling out piece by piece, about Ravensbrück—the layout of the barracks and the other buildings, the women and the other children she’d met there, the weather, the cold, the food, the day-to-day comings and goings of the prison, the stories the women had told. It was slow and it was hard to hear, but the girls listened to all of it, and as Sonia spoke, Roberta fancied that perhaps she felt better. That sending the experience out of her head and into words made it less immense, less impossible. They set up a signaling system for her to use if she felt another episode coming on, but Sonia didn’t use it.

They were trapped here at Idlewild. But Idlewild wasn’t everything. It wasn’t the world.

Someday, by God, Roberta thought, I’m going to get out of here. Someday we all will. And when we do, we will finally be free.

Chapter 18

Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

Jamie’s parents lived in a bungalow that had been built in the 1960s, covered with vinyl siding in the 1970s, and never touched since. It sat on a stretch of road heading out of downtown Barrons, where the houses had been built close together with neat square yards crowned by wooden porches.

Jamie’s father, Garrett Creel Jr., opened the door as they climbed the front steps. He was still massive at sixty, broad-shouldered and tall, his ruddy face emphasized by his short-cropped sandy hair. He could have worn a sign around his neck that said I AM A RETIRED POLICEMAN and no one would have batted an eye. He clapped his son on the shoulder and gave Fiona a kiss on the cheek. His lips were dry and chapped, his hand clammy, and Fiona gritted her teeth and smiled as she greeted him. The house wafted with the radiant smell of roast beef.

“Come on in, come on in!” Garrett bellowed. “Diane, they’re here.”

She came around the corner into the front hall, a small woman in a helmet of permed curls that had been in vogue somewhere around 1983, making a beeline for Jamie, who had just handed his coat to his dad. “There you are,” she said, as if he were somehow delinquent, even though he’d obediently answered her summons to dinner and arrived right on time.

She pulled Jamie down to her—he was much taller than she was, mirroring his father’s height, if not his heft or his looks—and kissed him with a loud, possessive smack, then held his face so he could not look away. She did not look at Fiona yet, and the way she held Jamie’s face, he couldn’t look at her, either.

“Your hair is still too long,” she said to her son, patting his dark blond strands. “And this beard. What is this?” She touched it with possessive fingers. “Your father spent thirty years on the force with a haircut and a clean shave.”

Jamie smiled, waited her out, and straightened when she let him go. “Mom, you remember Fiona.”

“Yes, of course.” Diane tore her gaze from Jamie and turned to Fiona. “Finally. I’ve made pot roast.”

Fiona nodded. She could do the girlfriend thing. It just took some practice, that was all. “It smells delicious,” she said.

Diane gave her a tight smile. “Catch up with your father,” she told Jamie. “Dinner is almost ready.”

Garrett was already handing them each a beer and shepherding them into the living room.

“So here you are,” he said, squeezing Fiona’s shoulder. “Jamie’s mother has been asking for this forever. You two have been together for how long now?”

Jamie shook his head. “This isn’t an interview, Dad.”

“Of course not. Just never thought I’d see the day I had Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter in my living room, that’s all.”

He said it jovially, with an unmissable undertone of disbelief, and there it was. The history that always pressed down on her, the past that never left. She was with Jamie partly because she never had to talk about it with him, but that was when they were alone. She realized now, standing in this outdated living room, listening to Jamie and his father swap news of the force, that with his family the history would always be thick. She also realized that she’d known it for the past year, which was why she’d put off coming to dinner.

As if to prove it, Garrett swigged his beer and turned to her. “I hear you were at Idlewild, Fiona. Trespassing. Climbed the fence and everything.”

Fiona clutched her untasted beer. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dad,” Jamie said.

Garrett laughed. “You look surprised. I’m good friends with Jack Friesen, who owns the security company they hired out at Idlewild. He told me about the little incident with you.”

“I’m writing a story,” Fiona managed before Jamie could take up for her again.

“Are you, now?” Garrett asked, and when he looked at her, she saw the face of the man who had testified in court twenty years ago. He’d been younger then, thinner, but his face was the same. He’d been hard then and he was hard now, beneath the florid good-old-boy look. “That seems like a strange story for you to write.”

She shrugged, keeping it light. “Not really.”

“I’d think the last place you’d want to be is at Idlewild when they found another body. But I guess I’m wrong.”

“Dad,” Jamie said again. “Enough.”

They adjourned to dinner, which Diane was serving in the small formal dining room, set with nice china. Outside the window, the Vermont night settled in, and in the darkness all Fiona could see was their own reflections in the glass.

“I talked to Dave Saunders today,” Garrett said to her as he put pot roast on his plate. “He did the autopsy on that body you found.”

Jesus, she’d thought he was retired. Retirement obviously meant nothing to Garrett Creel. “What did he say?” she asked him, sipping her beer and watching Diane’s face pinch. She likely hated talk like this at the supper table, but with a cop for both a husband and a son, she would have to put up with it in pained silence.

“There isn’t much,” Garrett said, sawing unconcernedly at his meat. “Died of a blow to the head, almost certainly. Something long, like a baseball bat or a pipe. Two blows that he can see, probably one to knock her out and one to make sure she was dead. No other injuries. She was a teenager, but small for her age. Dead at least thirty years, based on the decomposition. Has been in the well all this time, as far as he can see, since there was no evidence of animals going at her.”

Diane made a small sound in her throat that her husband ignored.

“Anything else?” Jamie asked, spooning potatoes onto his plate. He was as inured to this kind of conversation at dinner as his father was. “Did he mention any old injuries, things she might have suffered years before she died?”

“Nope,” Garrett said. “Why?”

Jamie glanced at Fiona and said, “We found some evidence that she may have been in a concentration camp during the war.”

Garrett paused and looked up, surprised. Then he whistled as Diane made another displeased sound. “Really? When did you learn this?”

“Just before we came here,” Jamie said. “I thought maybe the autopsy would show—”