The Broken Girls

This was an easier question. “I ran like hell.”

Only CeCe, leaning against the headboard, gave a quick tut at the language. She’d been raised prim for an illegitimate girl. “I would have run, too,” she conceded. “I saw a little boy once. At the Ellesmeres’.” The Ellesmeres were her rich father’s family, though CeCe hadn’t been given the family name. “I was playing in the back courtyard one day while Mother worked. I looked up and there was a boy in an upper window of the house, watching me. I waved, but he didn’t wave back. When I asked my mother about it, about why the boy wasn’t allowed outside to play, she got the strangest look on her face. She told me I’d been seeing things, and that I should never say anything about that boy again, especially in front of the Ellesmeres. I never did see him again. I always wondered who he was.”

“My grandmother used to tell me about the ghost in her attic,” Roberta said. “It moved all the furniture around up there and made a racket. She said there were nights she’d lie in bed listening to trunks and dressers being dragged across the floor. Mum always said she was just an old lady looking for attention, but one summer I spent two weeks at my grandmother’s house, and I heard it. It was just like she’d said—furniture being dragged across the floor, and the sound of the old brass floor lamp being picked up and put down, over and over. The next morning I asked her if it was Granddad’s ghost doing it, and she only looked at me and said, ‘No, dear. It’s something much worse.’ ” She paused. “I never went back there. She died at Christmas that year, and Mum sold the house.”

“What about you, Sonia?” CeCe asked. “Did you ever see a ghost?”

Sonia unfolded her thin legs and stood, then gripped the window and pulled it shut. The draft of cold air from outside ceased, but still Katie shivered.

“The dead are dead,” she said. “I have no use for ghosts.”

Katie watched her silhouette in the near darkness. It had sounded dismissive, but Sonia hadn’t said she didn’t believe in ghosts. She hadn’t said she’d never seen one. She hadn’t said they weren’t real.

She knew, just as they all did.

The rain pelted the window again. Hold still, the voice in Katie’s head said again. Hold still. She hugged herself tightly and closed her eyes.

Chapter 3

Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

“Jonas,” Fiona said the next morning as she walked into the cramped offices of Lively Vermont. “Did you know that Idlewild Hall is being restored?”

The main room was empty, but Jonas’s door was ajar, and she knew he was in there. He always was. She wove past the mismatched desks and the cardboard boxes that littered the main room and headed toward Lively Vermont’s only private office, the lair of the magazine’s owner and editor in chief.

“Is that you, Fiona Sheridan?” came a voice from inside. “I haven’t seen you in days.”

She reached the door and looked in at him. He was bent over his desk, staring closely at a photograph print, the computer blank and ignored behind him. Typical Jonas. “I guess it’s a good thing I don’t work for you, then,” she said.

He looked up. “You’re freelance. It counts.”

Fiona felt herself smiling. “Not when it comes to health insurance.”

He gave her a poker face, but she knew he was teasing. Jonas Cooper was fiftyish, his gray-brown hair swept back from his forehead in neat, impressive wings, his eyebrows dark slashes over his intense eyes. He wore a red-and-black-checkered shirt open at the throat over his waffle-weave undershirt. He and his wife had bought Lively Vermont over a decade ago, and since their divorce last year he’d been trying to keep it going. “Do you have a story for me?” he asked.

“No,” Fiona replied. “I gave you one on Friday. You told me that blew the budget.”

“For this issue, yes. But there’s always another one.”

For now, she thought. Lively Vermont was just one of several local magazines she wrote for, and it was struggling just as hard as the rest of them. “What is that?” she asked, gesturing to the photo.

“Local photographer,” he replied. He glanced down at the picture again and shrugged. “She lives in East Charlotte. The work isn’t bad. I might do a feature, if I can find a writer.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” Jonas leaned back in his vintage office chair and tossed the photograph onto a pile.

“Because I just did a story on artisanal cheese. That’s my pound of flesh for this month.”

Jonas gave her a look that said, I know you’re lying. She was. Fiona excelled at writing fluff—she had no pretensions to creating great journalism. She didn’t want to do an article about a photographer because photographers always asked her about her father. “Consider it,” he said. “If this pans out, I might dig some money out of the sofa to pay for it. Now, what is it you were shouting about when you came in?”

Fiona felt her heart speed up, as if she were about to ask about something forbidden. “Idlewild Hall,” she said. “I hear it’s about to be restored.”

Jonas looked wary, then nodded. “The new owner.”

“Who is he?”

“She. Margaret Eden. Wife of the late investment whiz Joseph Eden. Does the name ring a bell?”

It did—something to do with the economic meltdown in 2008. She’d seen his face in the news. “So he bought the property?”

“No. He died, and the widow did. She’s come up from New York to oversee the restoration, I think.”

Fiona was stung, somehow, that Jonas knew. “The Christophers owned that land for decades,” she said. “Ever since the school closed in 1979. No one told me it was sold. Or that it was going to be restored.”

A look of sympathy came over Jonas’s expression. “It wasn’t my place,” he said softly. “And the restoration has been nothing but talk until now. I didn’t think anyone would actually go ahead with it.”

“Well, it’s going ahead. I saw the construction signs on the fences when I was there last night.”

Jonas was quiet. He hadn’t been living here in 1994—he’d moved here only when he bought the magazine—but he knew about Deb’s murder, about her body dumped at Idlewild, about Tim Christopher going to prison for the crime. Everyone knew about it. There was no privacy in Barrons, not for the family of the victim of the town’s most famous murder. Even Jonas knew there was something unhealthy about Fiona visiting the Idlewild grounds.

“Don’t say it,” Fiona warned him. “Just don’t.”

He held up his hands. “Hey, it’s your business. I just run a magazine.”

She stared at him for a minute as the familiar jittery energy from last night ran through her blood. “So, do you really want a story from me?” she asked. “A feature?”

“Why do I have the feeling I’ll be sorry if I say yes?”

“Idlewild,” she said. “That’s the story I’ll write. I’ll interview Margaret Eden. I’ll look at the plans for the school. I’ll tour the property, get photographs, everything.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Jonas said. “I don’t know, Fiona.”

“It’s local color,” she said, feeling her cheeks heat up. “A new school, a revival, local jobs. No one else is covering it. It beats a feature about a photographer. Isn’t that what you want for Lively Vermont?” She looked straight into his eyes. “I’m fine with it, Jonas,” she said. “I swear, I’m fine.”

To her relief, she saw the wariness leave his eyes and his calculating editor’s side take over. He and his ex-wife, Emily, had bought Lively Vermont for its cachet as an independent Yankee think tank, but under Emily’s direction they’d turned it into a soft-toothed lifestyle magazine, the kind that ran ads for eighty-dollar candles and five-thousand-dollar handmade quilts. Jonas had always been unhappy with that—he’d wanted more, which was why he continued to hire Fiona, hoping she’d show the same journalistic chops as her famous father. “I admit it’s interesting, but I don’t have the budget for a piece that big.”

“I’ll write it on spec,” she said. “I’ll take my own pictures. You don’t even have to buy the piece. Just let me say I’m working for Lively when I call up Margaret Eden. It’ll get my foot in the door faster.”

“I see. And what do I get for letting you use the name of my magazine?”

“I’ll give you first refusal on it.” She waited as he thought it over, suddenly impatient. “Come on, Jonas. You know it’s a good deal.”

He looked like he wanted to be convinced, but he said, “You’re about to ask for something else, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Fiona said, letting out a breath. “I want to start with history. Can you let me into the archives?”