The Broken Girls

“Then how do I know you were sent to Idlewild after witnessing your uncle attempting suicide with a pistol? It wasn’t covered in the newspapers at the time.” She’d checked, of course. Journalistic habits died hard.

Roberta pressed her lips together, thinking. Then she said, “My uncle Van came home from the war with a severe case of PTSD, though that term didn’t exist at the time. He was very ill, but everyone simply told him to move on and it would get better.” She blinked and looked out the window. “When I was fourteen, I walked into our garage to find him sitting in a chair, bent over, holding a gun in his mouth. The radio was playing an old GI song. He was weeping. He hadn’t known anyone was home.”

“What happened?” Fiona asked softly.

“I started screaming. Uncle Van looked up at me, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t blow his brains out while I watched. So in a stupid way, I saved his life.” She turned to look at Fiona again. “I couldn’t talk after that. I don’t know why; I simply couldn’t. It was some kind of shock or stress. We had no knowledge in those days to help people. We barely have it now.” She paused. “So my parents sent me to Idlewild, and while I was away, they sent Uncle Van to a mental hospital and had him locked up against his will. Instead of having any feeling for him at all, they thought he was a disgrace to the family. I was a disgrace, too, because I’d had to see a psychiatrist, which in those days was a shameful thing to do. I had exemplary parents, as you can guess.”

“I’m so sorry,” Fiona said. “You didn’t think your uncle was crazy?”

“No. I was sad for him, sorry for him. He felt horrible about what I had seen, that I’d stopped speaking, that I was being sent away. It was another burden of guilt on him. My parents’ marriage fell apart the following year, and they thought I was better off away at school—that shame again, you see. When I left Idlewild, I went to law school partly so I could legally find a way to set my uncle free. To set men like him free of their ashamed families. To prevent men like my uncle from having their freedom, their assets, their homes and children, taken away. That day in the garage ended up shaping the rest of my life.”

“So after everything that happened,” Fiona said, “your parents paid for law school?”

Roberta blinked. “If one wants something very badly, I suppose, one can find a way.”

Another nonanswer, delivered smoothly and easily. Roberta Greene was a lawyer through and through. “And did you?” Fiona asked. “Get your uncle out?”

Roberta smiled. “Oh, yes. I got Uncle Van out. It took time, but I helped him get a job, set up his life again. There weren’t many tools to help him with his problems, but I gave him what I could. Things got better. He got married in 1973, when he was in his fifties. His wife was the woman who had lived next door to him for years and had always secretly wanted to marry him. They were married twenty years, until he died. I spent much of my career doing pro bono work for other veterans. It was the best part of the work for me.”

“Did you have children?”

“Yes. My husband, Edward, died of cancer last year. Our son lives in Connecticut, and our daughter lives in Sydney, Australia. I have no grandchildren. But they are both happy, I think. At least, I tried to raise them to be as happy as they can be. Happier than I was. My husband helped with that.”

“What about your other friends from Idlewild?” Fiona asked, hoping that the talkative mood would continue. “Cecelia Frank and Katie Winthrop. Did you keep in touch with them? Do you know where I could find them? I’d like to interview them as well.”

But Roberta shook her head. “No, dear. It was over sixty years ago. I’m sorry.”

“Miss London told me the four of you were good friends.”

“We were. We stuck together. But we fell apart after Sonia died. We were all so certain she was murdered, but no one would listen to us. No one at all.”

“What about the headmistress, Julia Patton? She wouldn’t listen to you?”

“No. Is there anything about Sonia’s disappearance in the files?”

It was said calmly, but Fiona sensed that Roberta wanted to know. Badly. The files were news to her, and she was burning with curiosity, though she hid it well.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Fiona said. “There doesn’t seem to have been much of an investigation. And there was that bullshit theory about a boy.”

The words were out before she thought them, and she surprised herself with them. She’d never realized until this minute that the boy theory made her angry. That someone would dismiss the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old Holocaust survivor as an impulsive everyday tramp’s hooking up with a boy and running away without saying good-bye, without even her suitcase. She wanted to dig Julia Patton and Garrett Creel Sr. out of their graves and shake them, shout at them. If you’d only listened, maybe you could have saved her before she died. Now we’ll never know.

She looked up to see Roberta watching her from across the table. There was a faint smile on her lips, as if she knew exactly what Fiona was thinking. “Bullshit, indeed,” she said.

Fiona swallowed. She was tired, off her game. She was losing control of this interview, if she’d ever had it. “A few more questions,” she said, trying to sound businesslike. “Do you know a woman named Margaret Eden?”

Roberta shook her head. “No, dear, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

“Or her son, Anthony Eden? They’re the ones who bought and are restoring Idlewild.”

“Then I feel sorry for them, but no, I don’t know them.”

“Can you think of a reason they’d want to restore the school?”

That brought the smile again. “People who don’t know Idlewild look at it and think it might be a good investment. They are quite wrong.”

Fiona met her gaze straight on. “Why are they wrong? Is it because of Mary Hand?”

There was not a whisper of surprise, of derision, of deflecting humor on Roberta’s face. Only a softening around the eyes, which looked remarkably like pity. “She’s still there, isn’t she?” she said. “Of course Mary is still there. You’ve seen her.”

“Have you?” Fiona asked, her voice a rasp.

“Every girl who went to Idlewild saw Mary. Sooner or later.” Spoken quietly, matter-of-factly, the madness of seeing a ghost turned into an everyday thing.

Fiona could see honest truth in the other woman’s eyes. “What did she show you?” she asked. She hadn’t wanted to admit to Margaret Eden what had happened, the strangeness of her deepest, most painful memories made real. But it felt different to tell Roberta. Roberta had gone to Idlewild; she knew.

“It doesn’t matter what she showed me,” Roberta said. “What did she show you? That is the question you need to be asking.”

“I don’t understand it,” Fiona said. “Who was she? Mary Hand?”

“There were rumors.” Roberta shrugged. “She died when she was locked out in the cold—that was one. Another was that her baby was buried in the garden.”

Fiona thought of the damp garden, the shape she’d thought she’d seen from the corner of her eye. No. Not possible.

“There was a rhyme,” Roberta continued. “The girls passed it down. We wrote it in the textbooks so the next generation of girls would be equipped. It went like this: Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land. She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again!” She smiled, as if pleased she’d recalled all the words. “I don’t know the answer, Fiona, but I lived at Idlewild for three years, and I can tell you what I think. I think Mary was there before the school was. I think she is part of that place—that she was part of it before the first building was even built. We were in her home. I don’t know what shape she took before the school was built, but it’s what she does—takes shapes, shows you things, makes you hear things. I have no doubt that she was a real person at some point, but now she’s an echo.”

Fiona’s throat was dry. She thought of the figure she’d seen, the girl in the black dress and veil. “An echo of what?”

Roberta reached across the table and touched the space between Fiona’s eyes with a gentle finger. “What’s in here,” she said. “And what’s in here.” She pointed to Fiona’s heart. “It’s how she frightens us all. What is more terrifying than that?”

Chapter 22

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

November 2014

Fiona was shaking when she got back into her car. Her skin was too tight and her eyes burned. I’m cracking up, she thought, digging in her purse to find an old elastic band. She pulled her hair back into a tight, rough ponytail and swiped the elastic onto it, listening to it snap. Ghosts and dead babies and murdered girls. What next?