The Broken Girls(104)

Not long now, Fiona thought, watching the men.

“Oh, thank God,” Katie said. “The girls are here.”

Fiona glanced around briefly to see Roberta and CeCe approaching, bundled just as deeply as Katie was, their arms linked. Jamie accompanied them, making sure neither woman stumbled on the frozen mud of the drive. Roberta looked grim, but CeCe gave a polite wave.

“Good God,” Roberta said when they got close. “This place is even worse than I remember. Is it going to take long?”

“What is that smell?” CeCe asked. “Oh—it’s the garden. Now I remember.” Her expression went hard as the memories hit. “Disgusting.”

It was. Even in the frigid cold, as soon as the crew had overturned the first layer of frost-crusted earth, a damp, hideous smell had come from this square of land, as if it exhaled bad breath in their faces. The crew had said something about drainage and clay and pH, but Fiona hadn’t bought it. The smell was Mary and her baby. It always had been.

Jamie moved to stand next to Fiona’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked her softly.

“This is nice of you,” Fiona murmured back. “You didn’t have to come.”

She turned, and their eyes met for a long moment. He gave her half a smile as her throat went dry. “I wanted to,” he said.

Fiona tore her gaze away and stared ahead again.

“I’m taking you for a beer after this,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s early.”

“Okay,” she said, feeling her cheeks warm. It felt like a first date.

“Katie,” Roberta complained as Fiona focused her camera on the garden again. “Your son is trying to give me tea.”

“Take it,” Katie said. “It makes him happy.”

“I’d rather have hot chocolate,” CeCe said. “It would cheer me up. I like hot chocolate better. I don’t really want to see a dead body. Oh, no. I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I do that when I’m nervous.”

She went quiet, and Fiona knew that either Katie or Roberta—or both—had taken her hand.

Without CeCe’s chatter, there was only the flap of plastic and the wind again. The work crew, hired by Katie, had been here for five hours already, and the light would fail soon. But the square they were examining wasn’t very big, and the soil was loose and wet despite the weather. They’d already gone deep, the small backhoe parked by men working by hand with shovels. Finally, the crew foreman made his way around the hole in the ground to Katie, a serious look on his face.

“We’ve hit something,” he said. “Wood.”

A coffin. Mary’s parents had left her outside to die, but they’d buried her and her baby in a coffin.

It took another forty minutes, but the coffin was uncovered and lifted from deep under the old garden. It was rotted, rough, makeshift, clearly homemade. The stench that accompanied it, even in the brisk winter wind, was so bad that the men of the work crew raised their scarves over their noses and mouths.

Fiona smelled it, too, but she kept her hands on the camera, taking shots as the coffin emerged from the ground. She had written most of her piece on Sonia Gallipeau, the sad story of her life and death. Jonas was going to use it as part of his relaunch of Lively Vermont—at long last, he was changing the magazine’s focus from soft-pedaled tourism stories to the kinds of in-depth local coverage he wanted to run. He’d sold his half of their house out to his ex-wife, taken the money, and invested it in the magazine while he lived in the room over his elderly mother’s garage. Strangely, he was in a better mood than ever since he’d done it. I feel like I’m twenty again, he’d said.

Part of his jubilation came from the fact that the cover story of the new Lively Vermont wasn’t going to be about Sonia Gallipeau at all. It was going to be an exclusive article by the legendary Malcolm Sheridan, excerpted from his forthcoming book about the 2008 financial crash. Jonas had worked out a deal for the first new writing from Malcolm Sheridan in twenty years, and even living in his mother’s garage couldn’t dampen his joy.

Don’t get too comfortable, Malcolm had warned Jonas as they sat in Malcolm’s living room, Fiona looking on in amusement. I’m retired. I’m not writing for you all the damn time. But Fiona knew better. Her father was writing—that was what mattered. The Tim Christopher cover-up, as painful as it was, had shaken something loose. It had reawakened her father’s desire to get out into the world and get something done. Just as it had reawakened hers.

Fiona was writing, too. Sonia Gallipeau was just the beginning. She was going to write real stories for the first time in her life. Her focus was going to be the unsolved cases, the missing loved ones who were never found, the cold cases that stayed unsolved. She was going to write about what mattered, whatever the cost. And Jamie was going to help her, lending the expertise gained from ten years as a cop.

As soon as the Idlewild bodies were buried.

There was no story about Mary Hand. That wasn’t why she was here, taking pictures. She was taking pictures because, after so many years of suffering in silence, someone needed to document this.

“I hope no one is going to be sick,” Anthony said. He was standing next to CeCe, watching the coffin come out of the ground, and he was clearly talking about himself.

The girls were quiet, the three of them lined up, watching. They had stood exactly this way at Sonia’s memorial service four days ago, a solemn line of old women in vigil for their friend. Sonia was buried properly now, in a cemetery beneath a headstone bearing her name.