The Broken Girls(80)

But half an hour later, she was no further along. The house of Henry and Eleanor DuBois was nowhere near the address where Rose Albert was listed as living. She could not see how Rose and Sonia could have crossed paths in the space of a weekend. It didn’t help that there was no way of knowing what activities the DuBoises had done with their great-niece. Shopping? Sightseeing? Walking in the park? Eating out? If Sonia had any new-bought items or souvenirs in her suitcase, it would have given a clue as to where she had gone that weekend, but the suitcase had disappeared from Julia Patton’s office after Sonia was murdered, never to be seen again.

She was walking back toward the site of the former bus station, wishing someone in 1950 had interviewed the goddamned bus driver, when it struck her so forcefully she stopped on the sidewalk to think.

The bus ticket. That was the connection.

In 1950, you didn’t buy a bus ticket online, or from a machine at the bus station, using a credit card. You bought a bus ticket from a clerk at the station, or at a travel agent’s. Rose had worked as a clerk for a travel agent, filling out and filing the stacks of paperwork that accompanied travel bookings in the pre-Internet age.

Sonia’s relatives had bought her a round-trip bus ticket to Burlington. But when Sonia had run away to go back to school, she must have changed it.

Fiona felt the excitement building in her chest, and she started walking again, nearly jogging back toward her car. It was easy to picture: Sonia at the travel agent’s, changing her ticket while Rose sat at her desk, doing paperwork. Had Sonia seen Rose? Had she recognized her? She must have; Rose must have known that Sonia knew who she was, that she could identify her as Rosa Berlitz. She knew what bus Sonia was taking back to Idlewild. And at some point, Rose Albert must have decided that she’d have to do something permanent about Sonia, or her life would fall to pieces.

It was speculation. It wasn’t concrete. There were a million ways it could have been wrong. It was more far-fetched than the theory of one of Sonia’s friends simply caving her head in and dumping her in a well.

But if you followed it, it fit.

Sonia had been in the same city at the same time as a woman who might have been a guard at Ravensbrück, where Sonia had been a prisoner. She had visited family within blocks of Rose Albert’s home and her office. How far apart had they been, guard and prisoner? One mile, at most? The two of them in the same place in America, five years after the war ended. A coincidence, but a documented one. It fit.

Fiona thought back to the picture from the news story—Rose Albert’s calm face, her level eyes, her large pupils, her milky skin. The face of Rosa Berlitz, the guard who had put women in the gas chambers, in the ovens. If she had done that, then the death of one teenage girl would have meant nothing. Not in the face of survival. Not if a secret had to be kept.

If it was true, then Sonia Gallipeau’s murder wasn’t random, or impulsive. She had been chosen and stalked, though not in the way that Ginette Harrison had imagined. She had been under a death sentence from the moment she walked into Rose Albert’s travel agency. Followed until she was away from the city and the crowds, until the bus had driven away and she was alone on a deserted road. Rose Albert hadn’t even needed to take the bus alongside her prey; she had already known where her prey was headed. She could have traveled ahead to the bus stop in her car, parked, and waited until the bus pulled up and the girl got off.

If you were hunting for someone to murder, Ginette had said, what better person could you choose?

Her head was pounding when she got home, since she’d barely slept and she hadn’t eaten. The light was still out in the hallway on her floor—it had burned out nearly three weeks ago—and for once she was grateful for the eerie half-light that was usually an alarming security concern. Her thoughts were too heavy, too loud, and she wanted only the darkness of her apartment.

He was there. She hadn’t expected him, but somehow when she saw him, she wasn’t surprised. Jamie, sitting on the floor, next to her closed apartment door, his back against the wall, his knees up. Out of uniform, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a flannel shirt unbuttoned over it and work boots, his hair mussed. He watched her come up the hallway toward him, his expression closed and blank.

Fiona stopped in front of his feet and looked down at him in the half-light. “How long have you been here?” she asked softly.

“Not long.”

“You have a key.”

He looked up at her. The fight was gone from him, the outrage, the bluster. He just looked at her. “It took me eight months to get that key,” he said finally.

It was true. He had given her his key long before she’d given him hers, and it had been hard for her even then. Her father didn’t have a key to her place; no one did. Not ever. But at long last, she’d given Jamie one.

She’d questioned it; she hadn’t trusted it. It had scared her, so much so that she hadn’t noticed he’d been careful with it, that he always called or texted her first, that he’d gone slow. She saw that now, so clearly.

“Keep it,” she said to him, her voice hoarse.

He looked away. She should have opened the door now, invited him in if he wasn’t going to come in himself; part of her knew that. But he seemed disinclined to move, as if whatever he had to say was better here in the hallway, with the broken lights and the ugly industrial carpet. “I came here to explain,” he said.