The Broken Girls(7)

CeCe was leaning forward, rapt. “But you didn’t see anything?”

“There was a voice,” Katie said. “It was— I didn’t imagine it. It was right there next to me, as if someone was standing there. I heard it so clearly.”

She could still recall that moment beneath the maple tree, standing on a bed of old maple keys, her cigarette dropping to the ground, the hair standing up on the back of her neck when a voice somewhere behind her right ear had spoken. Idlewild was an old place, and the fear here was old fear. Katie had thought she understood fear until that moment, but when the voice had spoken, she’d understood fear that was older and bigger than she could imagine.

“Well?” Roberta prompted. “What did she say?”

Katie cleared her throat. “ ‘Hold still,’ ” she said.

They were all quiet for a moment.

“Oh, my God,” CeCe said softly.

Strangely, it was Sonia that Katie looked at. Sonia was sitting on the floor, against the wall beneath the window, her thin legs drawn up, her knees to her chest. She was very still, bathed in shadow, and Katie couldn’t tell if Sonia’s eyes were on her or not. Far off, a door slammed, and something tapped, like dripping water, in the ceiling.

“Why?” Sonia asked her, the French lilt soft. “Why did she say that to you?”

Katie shrugged hard, the muscles wrenching in her shoulders, even though it was dark and the other girls couldn’t see it. “I don’t know,” she snapped, her voice growing sharp before she tempered it. “It was just a voice I heard. That’s all I know.”

A lie, a lie. But how could some old ghost even know?

Hold still. She couldn’t talk about that. Not to anyone. Not yet.

“What did you do?” Roberta asked.

This was an easier question. “I ran like hell.”

Only CeCe, leaning against the headboard, gave a quick tut at the language. She’d been raised prim for an illegitimate girl. “I would have run, too,” she conceded. “I saw a little boy once. At the Ellesmeres’.” The Ellesmeres were her rich father’s family, though CeCe hadn’t been given the family name. “I was playing in the back courtyard one day while Mother worked. I looked up and there was a boy in an upper window of the house, watching me. I waved, but he didn’t wave back. When I asked my mother about it, about why the boy wasn’t allowed outside to play, she got the strangest look on her face. She told me I’d been seeing things, and that I should never say anything about that boy again, especially in front of the Ellesmeres. I never did see him again. I always wondered who he was.”

“My grandmother used to tell me about the ghost in her attic,” Roberta said. “It moved all the furniture around up there and made a racket. She said there were nights she’d lie in bed listening to trunks and dressers being dragged across the floor. Mum always said she was just an old lady looking for attention, but one summer I spent two weeks at my grandmother’s house, and I heard it. It was just like she’d said—furniture being dragged across the floor, and the sound of the old brass floor lamp being picked up and put down, over and over. The next morning I asked her if it was Granddad’s ghost doing it, and she only looked at me and said, ‘No, dear. It’s something much worse.’ ” She paused. “I never went back there. She died at Christmas that year, and Mum sold the house.”

“What about you, Sonia?” CeCe asked. “Did you ever see a ghost?”

Sonia unfolded her thin legs and stood, then gripped the window and pulled it shut. The draft of cold air from outside ceased, but still Katie shivered.

“The dead are dead,” she said. “I have no use for ghosts.”

Katie watched her silhouette in the near darkness. It had sounded dismissive, but Sonia hadn’t said she didn’t believe in ghosts. She hadn’t said she’d never seen one. She hadn’t said they weren’t real.

She knew, just as they all did.

The rain pelted the window again. Hold still, the voice in Katie’s head said again. Hold still. She hugged herself tightly and closed her eyes.





Chapter 3


Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

“Jonas,” Fiona said the next morning as she walked into the cramped offices of Lively Vermont. “Did you know that Idlewild Hall is being restored?”

The main room was empty, but Jonas’s door was ajar, and she knew he was in there. He always was. She wove past the mismatched desks and the cardboard boxes that littered the main room and headed toward Lively Vermont’s only private office, the lair of the magazine’s owner and editor in chief.

“Is that you, Fiona Sheridan?” came a voice from inside. “I haven’t seen you in days.”

She reached the door and looked in at him. He was bent over his desk, staring closely at a photograph print, the computer blank and ignored behind him. Typical Jonas. “I guess it’s a good thing I don’t work for you, then,” she said.

He looked up. “You’re freelance. It counts.”

Fiona felt herself smiling. “Not when it comes to health insurance.”

He gave her a poker face, but she knew he was teasing. Jonas Cooper was fiftyish, his gray-brown hair swept back from his forehead in neat, impressive wings, his eyebrows dark slashes over his intense eyes. He wore a red-and-black-checkered shirt open at the throat over his waffle-weave undershirt. He and his wife had bought Lively Vermont over a decade ago, and since their divorce last year he’d been trying to keep it going. “Do you have a story for me?” he asked.