The Broken Girls

She moved as quietly as she could down the corridor, blinking in the gloom, looking for Sonia. She saw the girl move through a doorway, silent as a shadow, and followed. The door had a number in cracked, faded paint: 3C.

She was in a bedroom. There had been beds in here once—two sets of bunks, by the looks of it—but they were long destroyed, the mattresses gone, the frames splintered and dismantled. An old dresser lay on its side against one wall. The room was musty and smelled like spilled beer and old, cold urine. It had been defaced and defiled and forgotten, but Fiona knew it had been Sonia’s room. That was why Sonia had come through the door.

If it had been Sonia’s room, then it was the room she’d shared with Katie Winthrop, Roberta Greene, and CeCe Frank. Shivering, Fiona sank to the floor and closed her eyes. This was the room they’d lived in, slept in. She pictured them, though she had no idea what Katie or CeCe looked like, wearing their uniforms, talking and teasing one another and arguing and whispering secrets at night the way girls did. She wondered what secrets had been whispered in this room. She wondered if this was where the girls had felt safe.

She couldn’t run anymore. She was too tired. Shaking with cold, she lay on the ground, hoping Garrett wouldn’t find her.

Fiona didn’t know she’d drifted off until she opened her eyes. She was looking at the ceiling of the bedroom, but the dark stains in the plaster were gone. The smell of beer and piss was gone. She could hear the wind moaning through the room’s only window, but no other sounds. Her body ached too much to sit up, but she turned her head and saw that the bunks were in place, the beds neatly made with green-and-blue-plaid wool blankets over them. A hockey stick leaned against one wall. There was a single wooden chair by the window, and a girl sat in it, her face turned toward the glass. She moved, and Fiona heard a gasping sob come from her throat.

It was Deb.

She wore the clothes she’d worn the day she was murdered. Her gray raincoat was belted around her narrow waist, though the black knit hat she’d worn when Tim Christopher picked her up was gone. It hadn’t been on her body, and it had never been found. Deb’s dark hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, secured at the back of her neck. She looked at Fiona from gray-blue eyes Fiona hadn’t seen in twenty years.

“Don’t let her in,” Deb said.

Fiona lifted her head from the floor. “Deb,” she said.

Deb turned back to the window. “She’ll ask,” she said. Her voice was reedy, as if heard through the blast of a windstorm. “She’ll beg. She sounds so pitiful. Don’t let her in.”

I’m hallucinating, Fiona thought, but part of her didn’t care. Her sister was beautiful, sitting there with her legs in their dark green pants crossed at the ankles, her feet in the sneakers she’d worn on her date with Tim Christopher. She was quietly, painfully beautiful, forever twenty years old. Her body, dead on the field outside, had still worn those shoes.

“Deb,” Fiona said again, scrambling to get words out. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Deb said, still looking out the window.

Fiona pushed herself up on her elbows. “Are you always here?”

Her sister was quiet for a moment, and then she answered, “Sometimes.” She sounded softly confused. “It’s all so strange. Like a dream, don’t you think?” She turned and pinned Fiona with her gray-blue gaze again. “Please don’t let her in.”

“Is it Mary?” Fiona rasped.

“It gets so cold out there.” Deb looked back out the window. “She sounds so sad.”

Fiona opened her mouth again, trying to get Deb’s attention. She had so much to say, to ask, but her sister couldn’t hear. Voices and shouts came from outside. She blinked and the room wavered. No, she thought. No. She tried to heave herself up—to touch Deb perhaps, to grab her—but her body wouldn’t cooperate. She tried clumsily to get her knees beneath her, realizing her hands were numb. “No,” she rasped out loud.

The voices sounded again, closer this time. Shouts. Fiona’s leg gave from under her, and she fell to the floor, landing softly on her shoulder, trying to get her arm beneath her. She blinked as the room wavered again.

“I was so afraid,” Deb said.

And then the room went back again, to the abandoned shell with its sticks of furniture and awful smell. Fiona lay on her side as tears coursed down her face, cold against her skin. Her teeth chattered.

There was the shuffle of fabric, the rustle of a dress in the room.

Fiona tried to close her eyes, and couldn’t.

The hem of a black dress came into her line of vision. It moved through the door of the bedroom as Mary Hand came inside. Fiona curled her knees up against her chest, unable to move, unable to scream. Unable to run. There was nowhere to go.

“I didn’t let her in,” she whispered to herself. “I didn’t.”

The hem of the black dress swept the dirty floor, the fabric so real Fiona could see the sheen of the thick black silk. Then Mary came toward her, her feet ghastly and visible below the dress’s hem. They were bare, icy white and blue with cold. Thin skin stretched over bones.

Mary took one step, and then another. Fiona screamed, the sound nothing but air forced high from her throat. Then she screamed again.

There was a shout, and someone came through the door. Two people, three. Men. Voices rang through the room. Hands touched her.

Fiona turned her head and saw that Mary was gone.

She closed her eyes and let them take her.

Chapter 33

Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

It hurt. Everything did. The world came and went—voices, sounds, hands, hot and cold. Fiona’s head was like an overblown balloon, a deafening pounding in her temples. She opened her eyes and saw an unfamiliar ceiling, heard an unfamiliar voice. She closed them again.

She woke and realized she was in a hospital bed. It was the middle of the night, and she was alone. She was painfully thirsty. Someone far down the corridor was talking in a low voice, then laughing quietly. She can’t get me here, Fiona thought with a hot wash of relief, and then she fell asleep again.

When she woke again, her father was there.

Her head was a little clearer this time. Weak sunlight came through the window; it was day, then. Malcolm was sitting in a chair next to her bed, wearing a short-sleeved button-down checked shirt, faded cargo pants, socks, and sandals. A pair of black rubber boots sat by the doorway—he always wore rubber boots in winter, then sandals inside the house. His longish gray-brown hair was tangled and tucked behind his ears, and he wore his half-glasses as he read the newspaper in his lap. He hadn’t noticed she was awake yet.

Fiona stared at him for a long moment, taking in every detail of him. “Dad,” she said finally, breaking the spell.

He lowered the paper and looked up at her over the tops of his glasses, his face relaxing with pleasure. “Fee,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back at him, though her throat hurt and her lips were cracked. “Am I okay?” she asked him.

“Well.” He folded the newspaper and put it down. “You have a lovely case of the flu, mixed with hypothermia, and frostbite was a close call. Plus the bruising on your neck. But they say you’ll be fine.”

She struggled into a sitting position, and he helped her, handing her a glass of water from the bedside table. “What happened?”

“You called me,” Malcolm said, smoothing her hair. “Remember?”

She did, though her memories were disjointed, out of order. “I wanted to tell you about Stephen Heyer.”

“Right.” He smoothed her hair again. “You left me a long message. I listened to it when I got home from the grocery store. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what the hell to do. While I was pondering it, my phone rang again. This time, it was Lionel Charters.”

Fiona put down the water glass. Her hand was shaky, but she focused on keeping the glass upright. “Lionel phoned you?”

“It was the strangest thing,” Malcolm said. “I’ve known who he is for years, of course. You know he runs a kind of informal rehab center in his old trailer? Lionel’s son died of an overdose, and ever since then, he’s let addicts stay with him while they try to dry out. It doesn’t always work. They do drugs out there, and they deal, and sometimes there’s trouble. But Lionel’s intentions are good.”

Fiona just sat, listening to his voice as he stroked her hair. He’s an old druggie, she heard Garrett Creel say. His son blew his brains out with coke. She had so much to say, so many questions to ask. But Malcolm was telling the story, and she was so tired, drifting on his voice. Once Malcolm was on his track, there was no distracting him.

“Lionel is no friend of the media,” Malcolm continued, “but he hates the police more. So he called me and said my daughter had just been on his property, looking for Stephen Heyer. That you seemed sick. He said Garrett Creel drove up, and pushed you into his car with him, and he drove off.”

“He told me . . .,” Fiona said, then drummed up her strength. “He was at the drive-in the night Deb died. He told me . . .”