The Broken Girls(97)

That made Katie laugh. “All right, it isn’t a state secret. I just don’t make my past public, that’s all.”

“How did you do it?” Fiona asked Katie, walking to the edge of the bed and lowering herself. “How did you change your name? And why?”

Katie still stood, her hands in her pockets. Beauty, but not the wholesome kind, Sarah London had said of Katie Winthrop in 1950. She was a discipline problem from the day she arrived until the day she left. She looked down at Fiona where she sat on the bed, and in the arched brows and the determined set of her jaw, Fiona could see that girl from sixty-four years ago. “Well, I married Joseph Eden, for one,” she said. “I didn’t want to be Katie anymore. I wanted to leave everything behind—my family, Idlewild. Not the girls, of course. But the rest of it, yes. My parents had always treated me like an embarrassment, and as Joseph’s wife I could forget about them entirely. I was young, and I thought I could start new. I told Joseph I’d always hated the name Katie, and that I wanted to be called by my middle name, Margaret, instead. I told him I wanted to leave that old wayward girl behind and start a new life as his wife.” She shrugged. “He agreed.”

“Who was Joseph Eden?” Fiona asked.

“He was my brother,” CeCe supplied. She pulled up a chair and sat on it facing Fiona, as if they were going to have a chat. Katie stayed standing, and Roberta had walked to the window, where she listened as she looked out. “My half brother, that is. We had the same father.”

“Brad Ellesmere,” Fiona said.

CeCe blinked. “Is that in my file?”

“Never mind what’s in the file,” Fiona said. “Katie married your father’s illegitimate son?”

“His heir.” This was Roberta, speaking from her place by the window. Her voice was low, commanding, and they all looked at her. “He was Brad Ellesmere’s illegitimate son, but he was also his only son. Brad Ellesmere put him in the will. He was the Ellesmere heir.”

“I see.”

“You think it’s cold,” Katie said. “I can see it in your face, Fiona. You think it makes me a manipulative bitch. I was sixteen when I met Joseph, though he waited until I was eighteen to marry me. I was sixteen, and I needed to make my own life by whatever means I had.”

Fiona swallowed. “I’m not judging you.”

“Aren’t you? You’re right. I married him because I thought he’d be useful. Because I was cold and angry. But do you know what? I ended up liking him. I made him happy. I never thought I’d make anyone happy. We were together for nearly sixty years, and we got along just fine. Not many married couples can say as much.” She smiled. “Joseph got me out of Idlewild, away from my family, away from everything. I used his money to send Roberta to law school so she could help her uncle. I used his money to send CeCe to Vassar so she could get away from her horrible mother. So she could stay away from that woman.”

“My mother was Brad Ellesmere’s housekeeper,” CeCe explained. “Having his illegitimate child was a burden to her. It was harder in those days. There was so much shame. She tried to drown me in the ocean when I was six.” She rubbed a finger lightly over her lower lip. “She really wasn’t stable,” she said, her voice almost gentle. “My father sent her for treatment after she tried to kill me, but she checked herself out and left. I went to college and became a teacher so I wouldn’t have to go home.”

“You’re a teacher?” Fiona asked.

“Oh, no, not anymore.” CeCe dropped her hand. “I quit once I got married and had children. I’d achieved what I wanted, and I was better at being a mother anyway. I preferred to raise my kids. Katie howled at me, I can tell you, but that was the one time she lost an argument with me.”

“CeCe always did want children.” Katie was still standing, looking down, watching as Fiona tried to follow the conversation. This was how the girls talked, it seemed, finishing one another’s sentences. Completing one another’s thoughts after so many years.

“CeCe was a better mother than any of us, I think,” Roberta said from her place by the window.

“That’s true,” Katie said. She had been beautiful once; Fiona could see that now. She was still beautiful. Katie glanced down at CeCe, and Fiona saw the complicated love in the look. “Without that degree, you would have married some country bumpkin at eighteen, not an engineer at twenty-seven.”

CeCe reached over and, to Fiona’s surprise, took Katie’s hand in hers and held it tightly. “She got us out of there,” she said to Fiona, still holding her friend’s hand. “All three of us. Away from our families, our pasts. Katie set us free.”

“That wasn’t all of it, though,” Roberta said. She was watching them, leaning casually against the window. “There was always a bigger plan behind that one. A bigger goal.”

“Sonia,” Fiona said. “You wanted to find who killed your friend.”

“The police wouldn’t investigate,” CeCe explained. “That was my fault. I told the headmistress that Sonia had been at Ravensbrück when I tried to explain she couldn’t have run away. I was so innocent. I had no idea that would make everyone assume she was a Jew, that it would make the investigation less important, not more. But they asked a few questions, looked in the woods for an hour or two, and filed it away. It was over.”