The Broken Girls(22)

CeCe opened her mouth to protest, but to her amazement Sonia swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She swayed for a second, then held out her hand. “Give me the water,” she said, her voice a rasp, her French accent sharpened by exhaustion.

A knock came on the door. “Ladies.” It was Lady Loon. “What is going on in there?”

Katie nodded to Roberta, and Roberta stood and opened the door. “Nothing, Miss London,” she said. “Sonia had a fit of dizziness, but she’s well now.”

Sonia had been gulping the water, but she lowered the glass and looked at the teacher. “I hate blood,” she said clearly.

Lady Loon ran a hand through her disastrous hair. “Afternoon class starts in twenty minutes,” she said. “Anyone not in attendance will be noted for detention. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Miss London,” CeCe said.

The teacher looked helplessly up the hallway, then down again, then wandered off toward the stairwell.

CeCe looked at the faces of the three other girls. What had happened in the dining hall had nearly given Sonia a nervous breakdown. What could be so horrible that it could be brought back by the sight of two girls fighting? She usually felt like the stupid one, but she thought maybe she was starting to see. She didn’t know everything about her friends, but these were Idlewild girls. Idlewild girls were always here for a reason. They were rough, like Katie, or impassive, like Roberta, because something had made them that way. Something they instinctively understood in one another. They hadn’t known what exactly was wrong with Sonia—they still didn’t know—but they had recognized it all the same.

Please don’t take me there, Sonia had said. CeCe didn’t know what it meant, but it was something terrible. Maybe more terrible than anything the rest of them had seen.

CeCe hadn’t been wanted, not by either her father or her mother, but she’d always been safe. She’d never been in the kind of danger that she thought Sonia was seeing behind her eyes. She’d never had anything really bad happen to her. Not really bad.

Except for the water. That day at the beach with her mother, years ago, swimming in the ocean. Looking up through the water, unable to breathe, and seeing her mother’s face. Then nothing.

But the water had been a long time ago. And it had been an accident.

And as CeCe’s mother had told her, girls had accidents all the time.





Chapter 7


Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

It was a twenty-minute walk over the hardened, muddy ground to the well. Fiona walked behind Anthony Eden, glancing at his black-clad back as he scrambled in his expensive shoes. She kept her hand on her camera so it wouldn’t bounce against her chest, and she was grateful she’d remembered to wear her hiking boots. She had simply followed him from the dining hall after he got the call, without a word, and so far he was so flustered he hadn’t yet thought to send her away.

Through the gaps in the trees she glimpsed the sports field, where Deb had been found. There was nothing there now but empty, overgrown grass. Closer were the indoor gymnasium and girls’ lockers, the building dilapidated and falling down. In the eaves of the overhang at the edge of the building, she could see tangles of generations of birds’ nests.

The workmen were gathered in a knot. One of them had pulled out a large plastic tarp of cheerful, incongruous blue and was attempting to unfold it. The others watched Anthony as their foreman stepped forward.

“Are you certain?” Anthony said.

The man’s face was gray. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s pretty clear.”

“It isn’t a hoax? Teenagers have been using this property to scare each other for years.”

The foreman shook his head. “Not a hoax. I’ve been in this business twenty years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Anthony’s lips pursed. “Let me see.”

They led him around the rise. There was a digger of some kind and a backhoe, both of them parked and silent. Dug into the slope of the rise was a huge ragged hole, the edges of mud and crumbling brick. Though it was full daylight, the center of the hole was pitch-black, as if it led into the depths of somewhere light could not go.

“In there,” the foreman said.

There was a smell. Wet, rancid. Digging into the back of the brain, traveling down the spine. Anthony took a large flashlight from one of the workmen and approached the hole, carefully climbing over the mud and the broken bricks in his leather shoes. Swallowing the smell, Fiona followed at his shoulder.

He clicked on the flashlight and shone it into the blackness. “I don’t see anything.”

“Lower, sir. You’ll see it.” The foreman paused. “You’ll see her.”

Her.

Fiona stared at the circle of light, watching it move down the well. The far wall was still intact, the bricks damp and slimy. Her hands were cold, but she couldn’t put them in her pockets. She couldn’t move as the light traveled down, down.

And then, her.

She was not a hoax.

The girl was folded, her knees bent, tucked beneath her chin. Her head was down, her face hidden, as if bowed with grief. Rotten strands of long hair trailed down her back. One hand was dropped to her side, hidden in the darkness; the other was curled over one shin, nothing but a translucent sheen of long-gone skin over dark bone. The shin itself was a mottled skeleton. Her shoes, which had probably been leather, had long rotted away, leaving only rubber soles beneath the ruins of her feet. But there were ragged remains of the rest of her clothes: a thin wool coat, mostly decayed away. A collar around her neck that was the last of what had once been a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. A skirt, discolored with mold. Threads dangling from her skeletal legs that had once been wool stockings.