The Broken Girls(74)

Jamie was right that almost nothing about the two crimes matched, but Fiona knew it in her gut. They didn’t match because Tim Christopher had a temper. The crimes hadn’t been planned; he’d simply done what was easiest in his white-hot rage when a girl made him angry. Strangled her in his backseat. Hit her with a baseball bat. Whatever made her shut up for good. He was so careless he’d rubbed Deb’s blood on the thigh of his jeans as an afterthought.

The ice in Jamie’s voice: What’s a little more misery for the pile?

Screw it. Fiona opened the cupboard under the sink and pulled out the bottle of wine she kept there for emergency purposes. It had been there since last Christmas, because very few things counted as big enough emergencies for Fiona to drink chardonnay, but screw it. Her sister was dead, her love life was a mess, she had no career to speak of, and she was scooping crackers in peanut butter alone in her apartment. It was time for a glass.

She had just taken a sip, making that involuntary shudder that always accompanied the first swallow, when her cell phone rang. It was Anthony Eden again. She sighed and answered it. “Fiona Sheridan.”

“Fiona,” Anthony said. “I’ve been getting calls from the press about the body found at Idlewild. What do I say to them?”

“Calls? From who?”

He listed two names Fiona didn’t recognize, probably second-stringers or freelancers. “Word has gotten out,” he said. “What do I say?”

Fiona picked up a cracker and jabbed at the jar of peanut butter. She wasn’t hungry anymore. “Tell them you have no statement yet,” she advised him. “You’re waiting for the police to notify next of kin. That’s how it works. The next of kin hears it before the media does.” Sonia Gallipeau had no next of kin, but the ruse would work for a while.

“All right,” he said, sounding relieved. “And one more thing.”

“What is it?”

“I hear you somehow found the Idlewild records.”

That surprised her. “How the hell do you know that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Anthony said. “The records weren’t on the grounds when Mother and I bought the property. I thought they were lost. I’d like to have them back.”

Margaret, Roberta, and now Anthony—it seemed a lot of people were looking for the records. But she was not in the mood to be nice. “You can’t have them,” she told him. “I need them for research.”

“But they’re part of the Idlewild property.”

“When they were sent to the dump in 1979, they ceased being Idlewild property,” she said. “They became garbage. Which makes them mine.”

“Fiona, I would really like those records.”

“Then get a court order,” Fiona said, and hung up.

She sipped her wine again. He hadn’t answered the question of how he knew she had the records. Roberta knew, but Anthony didn’t know her. He could have been in touch with Sarah London, or Cathy. Or his mother could have been making an educated guess.

She looked at the boxes, stacked in her living room. They seemed to stare back at her.

She picked up her wine and began the search.

She started with the girls’ files. Sonia’s and Roberta’s she’d already read, so she pulled Katie Winthrop’s and CeCe Frank’s. Sarah London had said that Katie Winthrop was trouble; her file backed that up. She’d been sent to Idlewild by her parents for persistent willful misbehavior, and the school had not improved her much. There were fistfights, cut classes, talking back to teachers, everything a restless teenage girl might do in the days before she could text her friends or put naked selfies on social media. For a cloistered girl with no access to drugs, alcohol, or boys, Katie’s exploits seemed painfully innocent (Hung her undergarments from a window, read an entry from her last week at Idlewild), but the school’s teachers saw her as a plague that could infect the other students. Isolation is best wherever possible, one teacher wrote, as she tends to have an effect on others. Katie left the same year Roberta did, 1953, and there was no note regarding her leaving, as the teachers were likely too busy sighing with relief.

CeCe Frank’s file was surprising. Sarah had said that she had followed Katie around, the sort of girl who fell under Katie’s spell. Fiona had pictured an eager follower, an acolyte type of girl. Yet CeCe’s actual file showed something entirely different. Her grades were on the high side of average, though Sarah London had referred to her as stupid. She was never disciplined, never got in fights, and never acted out. Sarah had called her pudgy, but she had scored good marks even in physical education, where her teacher praised her dexterity. Could be an asset to the field hockey team, went the note, but does not seem motivated to apply herself. It now looked like CeCe was the kind of girl who was kind, friendly, and far from stupid, yet never earned an ounce of praise from the adults in her life—and there could be only one reason. Her bastard heritage must have colored everyone’s perceptions in 1950. It still colored Sarah London’s perceptions now. When Fiona saw nothing in her file referring to who her father was or why she’d been sent to Idlewild, she knew she was right.

She poured herself another glass of wine and took a break from the files to Google the girls. Katie Winthrop was a dead end—twenty minutes of searching brought up nothing that remotely resembled someone who could have been the Idlewild girl. CeCe Frank’s name appeared on a list of girls belonging to a college sorority in 1954, but nowhere else. So CeCe had at least gone to college, then. Fiona wondered if her father had paid for that, too.