The Broken Girls(82)

She followed the kiss where it led, not caring if any neighbors came down the hallway, not caring that she was hungry and her knees hurt. Not caring about Idlewild or dead girls or anything but the way she could read his pulse beneath his skin.

He broke this kiss and sighed, his hands still twisted in her hair. “We’re not doing this,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

She kissed his neck, feeling the scrape of his beard against her mouth. “No,” she agreed. “Not right now.”

He let his head drop back, banging it gently against the wall. “Fuck,” he muttered.

Fiona pressed her cheek against his collarbone. He dropped a hand to the back of her neck. And they stayed like that for a long, long time.





Chapter 29


Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

Fiona woke on the sofa, her throat scratchy and her neck sore. She rolled over, looked at the mess of her apartment in the dark. There were stacks of boxes, papers. On her coffee table were her laptop and a half-eaten box of Ritz crackers. She tapped her laptop to make it wake up so she could see the time in the little display in the corner. It was six a.m.

She stared at the screen, looking at the topic she’d been reading about when she fell asleep, sometime around three. Rose Albert.

Rose’s face stared at her. The picture had been taken on the street by an enterprising photographer sometime after Rose had been arrested and granted bail. She was dignified, wearing an old-fashioned skirt and jacket and a fur stole—out of style in 1973, but giving off an air of class. At the time of the trial, she was only fifty-five, with the clear skin Fiona had seen in the other photographs of her, her mouth a firm line, her eyes so perfectly even and dark, her expression shuttered and cool. The photographer had caught her unawares, and she had put a hand to the fur stole as she walked, nearly clutching it. The few accounts Fiona had found of the trial had described her as wearing a fox fur stole. The same one.

The trial itself was not on public record; the transcripts were sealed. It had been a midsized local story in its day, worthy of a dedicated reporter and a photographer assigned to take shots from the street once or twice, but it hadn’t been front-page news. Looking at the coverage, Fiona could perfectly follow the logic of that news editor in 1973: They had to cover the story for the local angle, because there were people who knew this woman, but hell, no one wanted to read about concentration camps really. It was too depressing and out of touch. Vietnam was happening; Vietnam was real. A lady in a fur stole who might or might not have been an old Nazi was news, but not big news.

Still, the coverage was well researched and well written, making Fiona nostalgic for the heyday of reporters who were actually on staff instead of freelance, and stories that didn’t have to say “You won’t believe what happened next” in order to survive in the click-or-die Internet age. Rose Albert was a spinster living in Burlington, an immigrant from Europe after the war. She claimed to have come from Munich, where she had worked in a factory. She did admit to being a member of the Nazi Party, but she claimed that it was only a survival tactic, because under Hitler’s regime, those who did not join were suspect. Yes, she had attended rallies, but only so she wouldn’t have been denounced by her neighbors and arrested. No, she had not worked in a concentration camp, and once the war was over, she had come to America to start again, and she had been lucky enough to get the job at the travel agency.

Rosa Berlitz, the Ravensbrück guard, was a mystery. She had been recruited from one of the local German villages, a girl with no experience, and had taken to the job at once. She had chased prisoners with the dogs the Nazis had given the guards, who were trained to attack and kill. She had stood by while women were experimented on and sentenced to death, then helped carry out the murders. Who her family and friends were was unknown; what had happened to her after the war, when the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück, was also unknown. Rosa Berlitz had appeared from nowhere, tortured and killed the prisoners of Ravensbrück without flinching, and disappeared again.

There was only one known photograph of Rosa: standing in a line of other guards, being inspected by Himmler as he toured the camp. Himmler was a large figure in the picture, wearing his long coat and Nazi insignia, striding across the grounds. The women were in uniform, ranged in three neat rows, but Rosa’s face was in the back row and slightly out of focus, leaving only two dark eyes, a straight nose, a glimpse of white skin. It might have been Rose Albert, and it might not. No other record of Rosa Berlitz was left, nothing that said she had existed at all, except for the memories of the prisoners who had lived under her.

Three survivors had identified Rose Albert as Rosa Berlitz. One had died of cancer the week before the trial began; the other two had testified in court. It seemed there had been too many holes, too much missing information in the trail leading back to Rosa Berlitz, even with survivors’ testimony, and Rose had gone free. When Fiona dug further, she found that the two remaining survivors had died in 1981 and 1987.

Rose Albert was acquitted, but later that year she was found dead in her home. The coroner declared the cause of death a heart attack, and she was quietly buried, her death a footnote in the back pages.

Fiona peeled herself off the sofa. She felt hideous, as if she’d gone on a bender, though all she’d done was sit in her dark apartment and read. She put coffee on and got in the shower, but that only made her shiver no matter how hot she turned the water tap. She washed quickly and got out again, then dried off. She gulped her coffee and tried not to think of Jamie, of what he was doing right now. Of Garrett Creel. Of Tim Christopher with a baseball bat, coming up the walk behind Helen Heyer.