“Right.” Fiona caught Cathy’s eye, and they exchanged a brief look. The generation of people who used phrases like born on the wrong side of the blanket was rapidly disappearing, Fiona thought with a pang. “So she was Mr. Ellesmere’s child, but she didn’t have his name.”
“That’s right.” Miss London lowered her voice a little, as if someone could still overhear this bit of juicy gossip. “She was the housekeeper’s daughter. He let her have the child, but he packed her away. There was something about the mother going away for a while, too—went crazy from having a child out of wedlock, or so I heard. Brad Ellesmere didn’t have children inside his marriage, but he had more than one bastard child. It was a scandal in those days, but we kept quiet about it. It was private business. It wasn’t like now, when everybody’s business is all over the Internet, for the world to see.”
Fiona wrote down the name Cecelia. “And what was her last name, then?” she asked. “Her legal one?”
“Oh, goodness.” Miss London stroked her cheek again, but this time it was for show. She was having a good time, and she wanted to draw it out. Fiona waited patiently, her pen poised. “We all thought of her as the Ellesmere girl. There was no secret about it—Brad Ellesmere himself dropped her off at the school. She used to follow the Winthrop girl around; it was a natural pairing, the strong, pretty girl with the weaker, pudgier one. Ah yes—Frank. That was her last name. I told you there was nothing wrong with my memory.”
“No.” Fiona smiled at her. “There certainly isn’t.”
“Okay, Aunt Sairy,” Cathy broke in. “You need a rest.”
“Thank you very much for your help, Miss London,” Fiona said.
“You’re welcome. What does Sonia Gallipeau have to do with a story on the school’s restoration?”
“Part of the article is about some of the newsworthy events in the school’s past,” Fiona said smoothly. “Sonia’s disappearance is one of them. I thought that if I could track down a few of her friends, one of them might be able to give me a memory of her.”
“You’re going to have a tangle,” Miss London said practically. “Most of the girls disappeared when they left school. No one knew where they went, and frankly, there was no one who cared.”
There was a second of silence in the room as these harsh words came down. Then Cathy moved to the kitchen door. “Don’t get up, Aunt Sairy. Fiona, I’ll show you out.”
Fiona followed her through the house’s stuffy hall. At the front door, she put her boots back on and dug a business card out of her pocket, putting it in Cathy’s hand. “I appreciate you letting me talk to her,” she said. “If she remembers anything else, or if I can come back and see her again, please give me a call.”
Cathy gave her a baleful, suspicious stare, but took the card. “No one cares about Aunt Sairy anymore,” she said. “No one ever has. She’s a good woman. If you publish one bad word about her, I’ll come find you and sue you.”
It was as good a farewell as she was going to get, so Fiona took it. As she started her car and pulled out of the driveway, she wondered why Sarah London’s niece felt it was so important to insist, after all these years, that her aunt was a good woman.
She was five miles out of East Mills before she got a cell signal again, her phone beeping and vibrating on the passenger seat. She was on a back road heading to the paved two-lane that would eventually turn into Seven Points Road, her car shuddering over old potholes, but she pulled over beneath an overhang of trees and picked up the phone. In these parts, it was always best to take advantage of a signal when you could get one.
There was a message from Jamie: “Call me.” She dialed him first, bypassing his office line and using his personal cell. He picked up on the second ring.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Heading back from East Mills. I talked to the teacher.”
“And?”
“I got a few names of Sonia’s friends. I’ll start tracking them. What about you?”
There was disappointment in his voice. There was a low murmur of voices in the background, and she guessed he was inside the station, in the open desk area the cops used. “I have nothing, if you can believe it.”
“Nothing?”
“The French police came back to me. They have a birth record of Sonia Gallipeau in 1935, and that’s all. Nothing else.”
Fiona felt her heart sink. She thought of the girl’s body, curled in on itself in the well, her head resting on her knees. “No living relatives at all?”
“None. There’s a death record for her father in Dachau concentration camp in 1943. Nothing about her mother, or any siblings.”
Fiona stared out her windshield at a swirl of snow that had kicked up on the side of the road in the wind. Those words—Dachau concentration camp—had the power to give her a twist of nausea, a clammy, greasy chill of fear. “I thought the Nazis kept records of everything.”
“So did I. But I think we’re wrong. It’s like Sonia was born, and then she and her mother disappeared off the face of the earth. Until Sonia appeared on the immigration records. Alone.”
It was hard for her to make friends, Sarah London had said of Sonia, since she was quiet and not pretty. What sort of life had Sonia lived, the lone survivor of her small family in a strange country? Fiona felt outrage that she had died alone, her head smashed in, dumped in a well for sixty-four years. Deb had died alone, but she’d been found within thirty hours, buried with love at a funeral that had drawn hundreds of friends and family. She’d been grieved for twenty years, loved. Was still grieved. Sonia had simply been forgotten. “I guess we need to find the friends, then,” she said to Jamie. “Miss London said the girls were roommates, and that they were close. One of them must remember her.”
“I agree,” Jamie said. “Listen, I have to go. Give me the names, will you?”
For a second, Fiona felt the urge to say no. She wanted to do this—she wanted to be the one to track these girls down, to talk to them, to do something for the dead girl in the well. But she couldn’t do as much on her own as she could with the Barrons police force helping her. So she gave Jamie the names and hung up, staring at the deserted roadside with her phone in her lap, wondering why she felt like she’d just given the case away, let it slip from her hands.
She called her father, and the second she heard his voice, she began to feel better. “Dad, can I come by?”
“Fee! Yes, of course.” She heard the rustle of papers, the beep of the outdated computer. He was working, as always. “How far are you? Let me put tea on.”
“Give me twenty-five minutes.”
“You have something to run by me, don’t you, my girl?”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s my daughter,” he said, and hung up.
The trees waved in the wind, the bare branches overhanging the car wafting like a sultan’s fan. Fiona shivered and sank farther into her coat, unwilling to move for the moment. She had done this the other night, too—sat in her parked car at the side of the road, staring at nothing and thinking. There was something soothing and meditative about the side of a road, a place most people passed by. As a child she’d spent car rides looking out the window, thinking of the places they passed, wondering what it would be like to stop there, or there, or there. It had never been enough for her just to get from one place to another.
Now she watched as a crow landed on a stark branch on the other side of the road, its big black body gleaming as if coated with oil. It cocked its black beak at her and was soon joined by a second bird, the two of them edging cautiously along the branch the way birds do, each foot rising and falling with careful precision, the talons flexing out and curling in again as they gripped the branch. They stared at her with their small black eyes, so fathomless yet so knowing, as if they were taking in every detail of her. Near the end of the branch, having found a good vantage point, both birds were still.