The Broken Girls(98)

“With money,” Katie explained, her voice soft, “we at least could investigate the matter ourselves.” She pulled up a chair at last and sat next to CeCe, crossing her legs elegantly. “I hired private investigators over the years to go over the evidence, but never with any results. The school was still open, and they wouldn’t give permission for my investigators to search the grounds. They claimed it was an old case of a runaway girl, and there was no cause. When the school closed, I begged Joseph to buy it, but unfortunately that was the one time he said no to me. He said the land was a terrible investment and he’d lose his shirt. He wasn’t willing to lose that much money to satisfy a whim of mine.” She smiled at Fiona. “But we did solve it in the end. Ourselves. I’ll tell you freely, if you want. Would you like to know who Sonia’s murderer was?”

It was the temptation, the same one that had lured her into this case, that had nearly gotten her killed. Katie Winthrop, Fiona realized, was very adept at playing off the expectations of whomever she was talking to.

“I already know,” Fiona said to her. “Though when I first looked at it, the most likely suspects were you three.” She glanced around at them. “You had access to her, and you certainly had the opportunity. Sonia was killed by something blunt to the head, not a weapon. It was a crime of opportunity, of someone who hated her seeing their chance and getting rid of her.”

The women were quiet. Katie looked amused. Roberta stared out the window, her jaw set. CeCe’s eyes were wide.

“But I never liked that theory,” Fiona went on. “The account I heard was that you were friends with her, that you liked her. Roberta brought her to the school nurse a few weeks before she was killed.”

That made Roberta turn her head. “She had a fit in the garden,” she said. “It made her think of the digging detail at Ravensbrück. A flashback, though that term wasn’t in use at the time. Sonia almost certainly had some form of PTSD. She nearly passed out.”

Fiona nodded. “You cared about her. It could have been a lie, but when you talked about her when we met, it didn’t seem like it. I should have just assumed that one of you did it and moved on.”

“But you didn’t, did you?” Katie asked softly. “How terribly clever.”

“No, I didn’t. I followed another lead.” She met Katie’s gaze. “I don’t know how you did it, but I have the feeling that what I found won’t be a surprise to you at all.”

“You won’t know unless you tell us, will you?” Katie said.

“I did some research,” Fiona said. “I learned about a woman named Rose Albert. Also known as Rosa Berlitz.”

There was a long, drawn-out minute of silence. Fiona could hear her own breathing, the beeps of machines in rooms down the hall, the clatter of someone walking by dragging an IV stand. Nurses talked and laughed quietly beyond the door of her room. The four of them were still. Roberta still looked out the window, but Katie and CeCe watched Fiona.

“Well.” Katie sat back in her chair and pressed her hands together. Her features were composed, even amused, but Fiona still had the feeling she’d impressed the older woman for the first time today. “This is interesting.”

“How did you do it?” CeCe blurted. She looked like she could barely contain herself. “You never saw the picture.”

“What picture?” Fiona asked.

“Sonia’s drawing. In her notebook.” CeCe glanced at Katie, who was giving her an icy look, and made an impatient sound. “Leave it, Katie—she already knows. Why not tell her about the book?” CeCe turned back to Fiona. “Sonia had a notebook. I gave it to her, actually—it had been a present to me, but I never used it. Sonia took it and wrote in it. All of her memories. And she drew pictures—of her family, of Ravensbrück, of the people she knew there. The notebook was in her suitcase when she disappeared.”

“The suitcase that was taken from the headmistress’s office?” Fiona asked.

CeCe ignored another dirty look from Katie. “We took it, of course. We wanted Sonia’s things back. They didn’t belong in some dusty old closet, and we thought it might hold a clue. So we took it. But we never found a clue in there, not until 1973.”

“That was the year of Rosa Berlitz’s trial,” Fiona said. “The year Rosa died.” A heart attack in her own home, the papers had said.

From her place in the window, Roberta chimed in. “I had a baby in 1973,” she said. “My son. I didn’t hear about the Berlitz trial. But when I came back to work at the firm, people were talking about it. My firm hadn’t handled the case, but it was a landmark in local legal circles. I heard the word Ravensbrück, and I started to wonder.” She turned and faced Fiona, the harsh light from the window illuminating her still-perfect skin. “I dug up the articles about the trial. A war crimes trial, and it wasn’t even front-page news.”

Fiona nodded. That was what she’d seen as well.

“I made copies of the articles and mailed them to Katie and CeCe,” Roberta went on. “I asked them if they thought it might have some bearing on Sonia, since Rosa Berlitz had lived in Burlington. It was just too much of a coincidence that she and Sonia had been close enough to cross paths. But I’m sure you thought the same thing already.”