The Broken Girls(79)
But first she wanted Sonia’s suitcase. “Get your slippers on and get moving,” she said to CeCe. She pinched CeCe’s cheeks so their red splotchiness wouldn’t fade yet. CeCe turned her face to Katie, then to Roberta, who dabbed water on her cheeks from the basin. Katie watched in admiration as CeCe closed her eyes for a minute, drooped her shoulders, and let her bottom lip go soft. Then she whirled and ran from the room, slamming the door behind her as if running from an argument.
It was almost too easy. Susan Brady led CeCe to the nurse, Susan chiding and CeCe choking back distressed sobs; Roberta kept watch in the hall while Katie slipped into Susan’s room and rifled through her things, looking for the key. She found it in Susan’s jewelry box, among the tiny gold earrings and a cheap paste ring. Both girls were back in their room when CeCe returned, having swallowed the requisite chalky aspirin and taken a verbal drubbing from Susan. She quickly dressed and the three of them set out, slipping down the stairs into the common, then to the main hall—the skeleton key let them in just fine—and down the hall to the headmistress’s office.
Sonia’s suitcase was in a closet at the back of the room, alongside Mrs. Patton’s winter coat and snow boots and other confiscated items taken from Idlewild girls over the years: lipsticks, cigarettes, a pearl compact and mirror, a pair of silk stockings, a glossy photograph of Rudolph Valentino—How old was that? Katie wondered—and two beautiful priceless items: a small flask of alcohol and a stack of magazines. The girls couldn’t resist: Katie pocketed the alcohol, Roberta snatched the magazines, and CeCe took the suitcase. They dropped the skeleton key in the garden, Roberta edging it beneath the soft, wet earth with the toe of her shoe.
Back in their room, they set aside the unexpected loot and went quietly through the suitcase, reverently touching Sonia’s things. The case was neatly packed, and Katie knew that no one had opened it since Sonia had packed it at her relatives’ house. Not one person—not the headmistress, not the police, not anyone—had bothered to look in the missing girl’s things.
Katie opened Sonia’s notebook, leafing through the pages as the other two girls looked on. There was Sonia’s handwriting, the portraits she’d drawn of her family and the people she’d seen at Ravensbrück. There were maps, and sketches, and pages and pages of memories, Sonia’s short life put down in her private journal. In the last pages were portraits of her three friends, drawn closely and lovingly.
Katie had already known that Sonia was dead, but looking at the notebook—which Sonia, while alive, would never have abandoned to her last breath—she knew.
This is good-bye, Katie thought, but not farewell. Someone did this. And I won’t stand for it. None of us will.
The girls closed the suitcase and went to bed.
And Katie began to think.
Chapter 28
Burlington, Vermont
November 2014
The small building that had once been the bus station in downtown Burlington was long gone. Anyone wishing to catch a bus had to go to the Greyhound station just out of town at the airport. Fiona stood on the sidewalk on South Winooski Avenue and stared at a Rite Aid that was currently closed down, the sign half-dismantled and the windows boarded. Traffic blared by on the street behind her. This was a section of town populated with grocery stores, Laundromats, gas stations, and corner stores, with a gentrifying residential area starting farther up the street. It looked very little like it would have looked in 1950, but Fiona still felt a connection, a quiet jolt of energy, knowing she was standing in the place Sonia Gallipeau had stood on the last day of her life.
She ignored the people walking by, who were giving side-looks to the woman staring at a closed-up Rite Aid, and turned in a circle. This wasn’t just a sentimental visit. Fiona was making a map.
Rose Albert. Rosa Berlitz. Had they been one and the same? Was there a way Rose Albert, in her made-up American life, could have crossed paths with Sonia?
It had taken only a little digging, cross-referenced with county tax records, to get addresses. The police record said that the ticket taker had seen Sonia at the bus station, getting on the bus. Fiona was at ground zero of Sonia’s case, the last place she was seen by anyone except the bus driver—who was never interviewed—and her killer.
But Sonia had gotten on the bus. That was witnessed. And her suitcase was found on Old Barrons Road, a few hundred feet from Idlewild. Fiona had spent a sleepless night going over it, wishing painfully for Jamie, his clever logic, his head for facts. It wasn’t easy, figuring these things out alone. And it wasn’t fun, either.
But she had come to some conclusions that she thought were the most logical, the most likely. As Sherlock Holmes said: Eliminate the impossible, and what’s left must be the truth. If she followed the Rose Albert theory, it wasn’t impossible that a woman who lived in Burlington would coincidentally be standing on Old Barrons Road, in the middle of nowhere, when Sonia Gallipeau walked by. But it was unlikely.
It was more likely that Rose Albert had come across Sonia in Burlington, before she got on the bus.
But that didn’t turn any of it into fact. The newspaper reports of Rose’s trial had stated that Rose Albert worked as a clerk in a travel agency, four streets away. Perhaps Rose had somehow spotted Sonia from her home, a fifteen-minute walk from the travel agency, while Sonia and her relatives were out enjoying their weekend. Fiona started walking down South Winooski Avenue toward the home where Sonia had stayed.