The Broken Girls(28)
She circled her thoughts back to the task at hand. “It’ll take some searching, but if we split it up, it won’t take as long,” she said. She opened her e-mail and called up a message from her in-box. “There’s almost nothing about Idlewild online,” she said. “Most boarding schools have alumni associations or something, but Idlewild was different. When it shut down, it just disappeared.”
“Not the usual kind of student bonding,” Jamie said.
“It wasn’t a happy place for most of those girls, I think. They were sent there because they were problem kids. As far as I can tell, no one has ever planned a reunion, or tried to. Facebook gave me nothing, either. So I called the local historical society.”
The Barrons Historical Society, it turned out, consisted of two old widowed sisters who kept copies of newspapers and random other papers willed to the society in a rented office that was open for only four hours a week. They might have seemed like dotty eccentrics on the surface, but Hester, the sister Fiona had talked to, had knowledge of Barrons that rivaled Jamie’s.
“I’ve never been there,” Jamie said.
“You’d probably love it,” Fiona told him. “However, they had next to nothing about Idlewild Hall—only a few class photographs. I had the woman I talked to scan and e-mail them to me.” Fiona had been prepared to drive to the office and do that herself instead of asking an elderly woman to do it, but Hester had surprised her, saying that she and her sister were in the process of trying to digitize the entire archive. “The pictures are interesting, but not particularly useful. Except one.” She called it up in her e-mail and turned her screen so he could see. Eleven girls stood on the lawn in front of Idlewild, each girl holding a field hockey stick. They wore field hockey uniforms, and they were carefully posed, the girls on each side angled inward, their shoulders overlapping. Despite the sports uniforms, they all looked formal: unsmiling white girls of varying shapes and sizes, staring into the lens, waiting for the picture to be taken. At the left end was a woman who was obviously a teacher, though she looked to be only in her early twenties. Neat handwriting across the top stated: Idlewild Girls Field Hockey Team, 1952. Two years after Sonia’s death.
Fiona let Jamie look at the photo, and then she clicked to the next attachment. It was a scan of the back of the photo, which was covered in the same neat handwriting, the ink only slightly faded over time.
Jamie leaned forward. “Shit,” he said. “This is a list of their names.”
“It’s the only photo with handwriting,” Fiona said. She clicked back to the photo itself and pointed to the pixels of black and white, the blur of girls’ faces. “One of these girls must have known Sonia. And if we dig, somebody must still be alive.”
It was nearly one o’clock when they found her.
The beer was long gone, and Fiona’s eyes hurt, moving dryly in her skull as if they were made from the cracked volcanic ash of Pompeii. She was no stranger to Internet searches; she was something of an expert at them, in fact. A journalist had to be in this day and age. But she was soft, she realized. She’d spent too much time looking up gluten-free brownie recipes and ways to use egg cups to make Christmas decorations, and she’d never tried to find this many people from so long ago.
Most of the girls in the photograph, as far as they could tell, were dead. Four of the eleven, frustratingly, had such common names that it was impossible to pin down who they might be; since few Idlewild girls were local, they could have been born anywhere, so records searches were no good. One girl, Roberta Greene, a tall, pretty girl with a braid of pale hair, had possibly become a lawyer in New Hampshire under a married name. That was interesting, and Fiona wondered how an Idlewild girl had ended up with an expensive law school education. But it was Jamie who hit the jackpot, and he hit it with the teacher.
“Sarah London,” he said. “Never married. Retired teacher, member of the East Mills Ladies’ Society.” He turned his laptop toward her, showing her the society’s Web page complete with photo, and gave a tired smile that even this late, even with her ashy eyes, made Fiona’s stomach flutter. “Thank God for old spinsters,” he said. “I’ll get an address from the DMV tomorrow.”
It was a lucky break. They went to bed at last, and even though they were both exhausted, they pulled each other’s clothes off in silence. Fiona didn’t need any words as she slid her fingers through his hair, as he kissed the tender skin along her jawline and just below her ear, as he flexed his arms around her and pulled her in tight. As she hooked her legs over the backs of his thighs and smelled the scent of his skin and let all her thoughts spiral away as sensation took over.
After, Jamie dressed and curled up against her back in his T-shirt and boxers, asleep before his head hit the pillow. Fiona lay on her side with her knees up, her eyes open, feeling the weight of his arm over her waist and the deep, soothing rhythm of his breathing, and as she did so often, she thought about Deb.
Fiona had been at Tim Christopher’s murder trial, sitting in the front seats reserved for the victim’s family. She’d thought she’d get an argument when she said she wanted to go, but by the time of the trial it felt like her parents had been snatched by aliens that inhabited their bodies, leaving them silent and apathetic, barely able to look her in the eye. Maybe a seventeen-year-old girl shouldn’t have been there, but it didn’t matter. She’d gone.