“So you don’t think she ran away.”
“I thought at first—the relatives must have done it. It’s the obvious choice, isn’t it? No one knew them. They came to see her once a year at Christmas, but that was all. Then she goes to visit and she never comes back. But they checked out the relatives and said no. They were just a couple of old people who felt sorry for her, but didn’t want to take in a girl. The wife had nagged the husband into the visit—said she felt bad, leaving the girl there for so long, with a visit only once a year. The husband didn’t want to do it—he wasn’t interested in a teenage girl, though eventually he gave in. But she’d changed her bus ticket and run away from them, too.”
Fiona waited. Miss London’s eyes were open, but she was seeing nothing, nothing but 1950. There wasn’t even a clock ticking in this house; it was so silent.
“They found her suitcase,” Miss London continued. “In the woods right off the edge of Old Barrons Road, where it meets the school gates. They found it in the weeds.”
Now it was Fiona’s turn to freeze in shock. Right where I was walking, she thought. Right where I was standing, talking to Jamie on the phone, and listening to a shuffling sound in the gravel that was just like a footstep.
The old teacher kept talking, the words spilling out. “What girl runs away with no suitcase? I ask you. Her friends were beside themselves, but the Winthrop girl left a few years later, and that girl, the Ellesmeres’ girl, left after that. I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t know what happened to any of them.”
“Wait a minute,” Fiona said. “They found her abandoned suitcase, and still everyone thought she’d run away?”
“You weren’t there,” Miss London argued. “You weren’t living with those girls. In that place. We had a girl run away the year before I came. They’d thought for sure she was dead. Then she turned up at her grandparents’ in Florida with some hoodlum in tow.” Her eyes met Fiona’s, eyes that were aged and watery but somehow hard. “Sonia ran away from her own relatives, so it was decided. I couldn’t say anything. I was new, but even then I understood.”
“Understood what?”
“You can sit there and judge. But you spend twenty-nine years at Idlewild. I was on edge every day. It’s a hard place, an awful place. I had to stay because it was my job, because I needed the money, but sometimes the girls . . . they ran. And deep down we didn’t blame them.”
“Why not?”
“Because we were all so horribly afraid.”
The back of Fiona’s neck was icy cold. “Afraid of what?”
Miss London’s lips parted, but there was a smack on the front storm door, followed by the bang of the inner door. “Aunt Sairy!” came a woman’s voice, roughened by cigarette smoke. “It’s me.”
Shoes clomped up the hallway runner, and Fiona twisted in her chair to see a woman in her late forties come to the kitchen door, her lank blond hair in a ponytail, her wide hips pressed into yoga pants beneath her parka. She was scowling. “Oh, hello,” she said, her voice darkening with suspicion.
Fiona pushed her chair back and stood up, figuring she was once again being mistaken for a salesperson, probably in the midst of snowing an eighty-eight-year-old woman into some kind of scam. “I’m Fiona Sheridan,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m a journalist writing a story about Idlewild Hall.”
The cloud left the woman’s face, and she looked at Miss London for confirmation. “Okay, then,” she said ungraciously, shaking Fiona’s hand briskly in her freezing-cold one. “I saw your car outside. Aunt Sairy almost never has visitors.”
“Cathy is my sister’s daughter,” Miss London said from her seat at the table. She had recovered her brisk teacher’s manner.
Fiona’s chance was gone. There was no way to get back what had just been about to be said—whatever that was. But she wasn’t ready to leave yet, Cathy or no Cathy. “Miss London, I’ll get out of your hair, but can I ask you a few quick questions first? Nothing too complicated, I promise.”
Miss London nodded, and Cathy banged into the kitchen, noisily doing something with the dishes in the sink. I’m watching you, her every movement said.
Fiona quickly lowered herself into a chair again. “First of all, the records from Idlewild haven’t been located. Do you remember anything about where they might have gone when the school closed?”
“I don’t know anything about any records,” the old woman said, as Cathy banged a glass especially loud on the counter behind her.
“Okay,” Fiona said. “You mentioned Sonia’s friends. Can you tell me anything else about them?”
“Those girls were her roommates in Clayton Hall, the dorm” came the answer, called straight up from the old woman’s memory. “They were together often. It was hard for her to make friends, I suppose, since she was quiet and not pretty. I remember thinking it was unusual to see girls like that become friends. They didn’t fit.”
“Didn’t fit? How?”
“Oh, Lord.” She waved a hand again, and Cathy ran the water in the sink in a rushing jet, nearly drowning her out. “The Winthrop girl, for one. She was trouble through and through. She was a bad influence. The Greene girl was nice enough, but we all knew she’d had a mental breakdown at home and stopped talking for months. Quiet, but touched in the head, that one. The Ellesmere girl came from a good family, but not properly, if you know what I mean. She was stupid, too. Not like Sonia.”
Fiona pulled her notebook and pen from her pocket, the first time she’d done so. “What were their names? Their full names? Starting with the Winthrop girl?”
“It was a long time ago,” Cathy complained from the sink. “Aunt Sairy shouldn’t have to remember names.”
“I do,” Miss London insisted, her teacher’s voice so icy that Cathy was immediately silenced. “The Winthrop girl’s name was Katie. Her people were from Connecticut, I think—good people, though their daughter had gone bad. She was a discipline problem from the day she arrived until the day she left.”
“Where did she go? Home?”
“No. God knows. I think she found a boy or something. It wouldn’t surprise me. She had that kind of look—the kind that boys go crazy for. Beauty, but not the wholesome kind.” She shook her head. “The one that was touched in the head was Roberta Greene—she was on the field hockey team.” She pulled the photo printout toward her and stabbed a finger at one of the girls. “That’s her right there.”
Fiona nodded, trying not to show how excited she was. Roberta Greene was the girl she and Jamie thought might have become a lawyer. She couldn’t have been too “touched in the head” to get through law school and pass the bar. “She had a breakdown, you say?” Maybe there were medical records somewhere.
“Stopped talking. There was a suicide in the family, I believe, or an attempted one, and she witnessed it.”
“That’s terrible.”
Miss London shrugged. “We didn’t have social services or child psychologists in those days. We didn’t have Oprah or Dr. Phil. Parents just didn’t know what to do. They were at the end of their rope, and they sent her to us.”
“Okay.” Fiona steered the old woman’s memories back. “The last girl, the stupid one. You said her name was Ellesmere?”
Behind her, Cathy finally gave up and stood watching them, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Miss London answered, “The Ellesmeres were a prominent family in those days. The girl—Cecelia was her name; I have it now—was the daughter of Brad Ellesmere, but born on the wrong side of the blanket, if you know what I mean.”