The Broken Girls(94)

“He covered up for Tim. With Helen.” The words were jumbling in her head, but she felt the urgency, the importance of getting them out before she sank into sleep again.

“I know, honey,” her father said again.

You’re going to kill him, Jamie had said. There was no going back. Not from knowing that Tim could have been stopped before he ever met Deb. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she said.

He blinked and looked down at her. “For what?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t have gone.” The words coming up through her pained throat. “I should have left it alone. But I thought— I started to wonder whether it was possible that Tim hadn’t done it. Whether it was possible that whoever had killed Deb was still out there.” She felt tears on her face. She remembered Deb, sitting in the chair by the window, but she couldn’t tell him about that. She wasn’t even sure it was real. “I kept going over the case and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”

Malcolm looked thoughtful, and then he stroked her hair again. “You were seventeen when it happened,” he said. “You had questions.” He sighed. “I didn’t have the answers, and neither did your mother. We couldn’t even answer our own questions. I’m afraid, Fee, that we left you to deal with all of it alone.”

“That isn’t it.” She was crying now, the sobs coming up through her chest as she heard Deb say, I was so scared. She pressed her face into his checked shirt, smelling his old-school aftershave and the cedar smell of the old drawer he’d pulled his undershirt from. “I should have just left it. I’m just so sorry.”

He let her cry for a while, and she felt him drop a kiss to her temple. “Well, now,” he said, and she heard the grief in his voice, but she also heard Malcolm Sheridan. Always Malcolm Sheridan. “That isn’t the way I raised you, is it? To leave things be. It’s just you and me left, Fee. That isn’t how we wanted it, but that’s how it is. And you’re my daughter.” He let her tears soak into his shirt as her sobbing stopped, and then he spoke again. “Besides, Helen’s family never had an arrest, a conviction, like we did. We can fix that, and we will.” He kissed her again. “Get some sleep. We’re going to be busy.”

She wanted to say something else, but her eyelids felt like sandpaper, and she closed her eyes. Sleep took her before she could speak.

The world was disjointed for a while, images passing by like dreams. She had a long, vivid dream of running across the field toward the trees, the dead brush scraping her shins, her breath bursting in her chest, as Garrett ran after her. Crows called in the stark sky overhead. Fiona jerked awake over and over, disoriented, before falling back into the same dream again. She had another dream of waking to the sight of her hand in Jamie’s, lying on the bed. His hand was bandaged, her fingers curled around it. She was aware of him, could see the familiar strong bones of his hand, the lines of his forearm, but she did not look up to see his face before falling asleep again.

The fever broke sometime the next day, and she sat up in the bed, sweaty and weary, drinking apple juice, as the police took her statement. Malcolm sat in the back corner of the room, listening, his sandals on over his socks, his newspaper folded on his lap.

She did not hear from Margaret Eden, but she heard from Anthony. When she was well enough to get her cell phone back from her father (“What do you need that thing for?”), she answered his call. He told her he was sorry, and he asked if there was anything he could do. She had the beginning of an idea, an itch at the back of her mind, and she asked Anthony a question. The answer he gave her put all the pieces together, and she realized it had been in front of her all along.

She had her answers now.

She would go to the Idlewild girls as soon as she was well again. But she had a suspicion that they’d come to her first.





Chapter 34


Katie


Barrons, Vermont

April 1951

This was going to work.

There was never a doubt in Katie’s mind. Still, she could feel the tense anticipation from the other girls in Clayton 3C. Roberta sat in the chair by the window, pretending to study from a textbook. CeCe pulled off her uniform and put on her nightgown, even though it was only just past lunchtime. She yanked the pins from her hair and scrubbed her hand through it, making it messy.

For her part, Katie straightened her stockings and her skirt. She polished her black shoes to a shine and put them on. She added wadded Kleenex to her bra, then put on her cleanest white blouse, adjusting it so that the fabric stretched just slightly over her enhanced chest. She pulled a cardigan with the Idlewild crest over the blouse and buttoned it demurely to her neck.

CeCe pulled off her shoes and stockings, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I really don’t know about this,” she said. Her cheeks were pale. Good, Katie thought. That makes it more believable.

It was Roberta who answered. “Just follow the plan,” she said, bending her head to the textbook. In the five months since Sonia had disappeared—since she had died, since she had been killed; they all knew she had been killed—Roberta had gone waxy and hard, rarely smiling, never laughing. Her grades didn’t falter, and she played better than ever on the hockey field, but the change was clear to Katie. Roberta had taken her grief and her anger and buried it, let it sink into her bones. She looked less like a girl now and more like a grown woman, and she had become fierce. Katie loved her more than ever.