The Broken Girls(17)

“Is that even possible?” Fiona asked, raising her camera and snapping a shot.

“The wood experts arrive next week. There is a drainage problem on the east side of the property, so we’ve had to focus on that this first week, to halt the progress of the damp in all of the buildings.”

The staircase, as old as it was, had held, and they climbed it to the second floor, where Eden led her down a hallway littered with debris. “This was a functioning girls’ boarding school until it closed in 1979,” he said, beginning his tour guide speech. “We intend to restore it to its previous condition and reopen it to students again.”

“Girls only?” Fiona asked.

“That is the intent. My mother believes that girls should be given their own chance at a better education in order to give them a start in the world.”

They entered a classroom. “This still has desks in it,” Fiona said.

“Yes. Most of the rooms in these buildings still contain the original furniture. The school was nearly bankrupt by the time it closed, and it was mostly abandoned as the owners tried to sell off the land.”

Fiona moved into the classroom. The desks were solid wood, very old. Most of them had words and names scratched into them by generations of girls. The blackboard was still here, covered in unreadable chalk scrawls, and there were birds’ nests in the rafters. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling over time onto the floor. A poster on one wall, faded, its edges curled, depicted a line drawing of a row of happy, rosy-cheeked girls in uniforms sitting at desks, with the caption GOOD GIRLS MAKE GOOD MOTHERS!

Fiona took more shots. It smelled less musty in here than it had downstairs, but there were other smells—rotten wood and something coppery, possibly from the old pipes in the walls. Fiona moved closer to the blackboard, stepping around the empty chairs and desks. There were layers of scrawls on it—graffiti from the kids who had wandered in here. Names. Swearwords and crude drawings. There were crumbs of smashed chalk on the floor. But the blackboard was filmed over and cloudy, coated with dust mixed with old chalk dust, as if no one had been here in years.

Fiona took a few more pictures and turned to the windows. Two of the panes were cracked and broken, the sills rotted through where rain and snow had come in. The third window was intact.

“Let’s move on,” Anthony Eden said behind her. He was still in the doorway; he hadn’t come into the room. Fiona turned, and the sunlight coming through the intact window illuminated the writing on it, etched into the grime coating the glass, the lettering thin and spidery.

GOOD

NIGHT

GIRL





Fiona frowned at it. The words were fresh, the letters in the glass clear, not clouded over like the blackboard was. It had been written with something scratchy, like a fingernail.

“Miss Sheridan?” Eden said.

Fiona stared at the words for a long moment. Had someone been in here today? Had they gotten past the new locks? Who would come all the way here, bother to break in, to write graffiti like that? Why Good Night Girl? It made her think of Deb, lying on the field outside, her shirt and bra ripped open, the wind blowing over her unseeing face.

“Miss Sheridan.” Anthony Eden broke into her thoughts. “We really should move on.”

Tearing her gaze from the window, she followed him out of the room. They toured another classroom, and another. Except for the damage—water had run down the walls in one room, and a section of wall was crumbling in another—it was as if those girls had left yesterday, just stood up and walked away. Fiona paused at another broken window and looked out over the view of the common and the grounds beyond. “What’s that out there?” she asked.

Eden was in the doorway, impatient to leave again. His face had gone pale, and as Fiona watched, he pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. He glanced past her shoulder at the construction equipment that was moving busily in the distance. “That is the crew hired to deal with the drainage problem. They need to dig up an old well, from what I understand. I think we have the idea of the classrooms, don’t we? Let’s move to the dining hall.”

She followed him down the corridor again. “Mr. Eden—”

“Anthony, please.” His voice was tense.

“All right, thank you. I’m Fiona. Anthony, how long do you see the restoration taking?”

He was walking quickly toward the stairs, barely waiting for her. “It may take some time, especially to repair the fallen-in ceilings. But we are prepared to do it properly.”

“This restoration was all your mother’s idea?”

A definite chill at that. “Yes, it was.”

“I wonder if I could interview her.”

“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. My mother doesn’t wish to speak with journalists.”

We’ll see about that, Fiona thought. They had descended the stairs and he turned left, taking her through the atrium. No way was she going to be deterred from interviewing the mysterious Margaret Eden. “Why not?” Fiona asked. “Is your mother ill?”

“My mother is in perfect health. She does not wish to answer questions from reporters, that’s all.”

Fiona kept at it. “Why did she choose Idlewild? Was she a student here?”

“No. My mother is from Connecticut. My father is from Maryland.”