“Have you?” Fiona asked, her voice a rasp.
“Every girl who went to Idlewild saw Mary. Sooner or later.” Spoken quietly, matter-of-factly, the madness of seeing a ghost turned into an everyday thing.
Fiona could see honest truth in the other woman’s eyes. “What did she show you?” she asked. She hadn’t wanted to admit to Margaret Eden what had happened, the strangeness of her deepest, most painful memories made real. But it felt different to tell Roberta. Roberta had gone to Idlewild; she knew.
“It doesn’t matter what she showed me,” Roberta said. “What did she show you? That is the question you need to be asking.”
“I don’t understand it,” Fiona said. “Who was she? Mary Hand?”
“There were rumors.” Roberta shrugged. “She died when she was locked out in the cold—that was one. Another was that her baby was buried in the garden.”
Fiona thought of the damp garden, the shape she’d thought she’d seen from the corner of her eye. No. Not possible.
“There was a rhyme,” Roberta continued. “The girls passed it down. We wrote it in the textbooks so the next generation of girls would be equipped. It went like this: Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land. She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again!” She smiled, as if pleased she’d recalled all the words. “I don’t know the answer, Fiona, but I lived at Idlewild for three years, and I can tell you what I think. I think Mary was there before the school was. I think she is part of that place—that she was part of it before the first building was even built. We were in her home. I don’t know what shape she took before the school was built, but it’s what she does—takes shapes, shows you things, makes you hear things. I have no doubt that she was a real person at some point, but now she’s an echo.”
Fiona’s throat was dry. She thought of the figure she’d seen, the girl in the black dress and veil. “An echo of what?”
Roberta reached across the table and touched the space between Fiona’s eyes with a gentle finger. “What’s in here,” she said. “And what’s in here.” She pointed to Fiona’s heart. “It’s how she frightens us all. What is more terrifying than that?”
Chapter 22
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
November 2014
Fiona was shaking when she got back into her car. Her skin was too tight and her eyes burned. I’m cracking up, she thought, digging in her purse to find an old elastic band. She pulled her hair back into a tight, rough ponytail and swiped the elastic onto it, listening to it snap. Ghosts and dead babies and murdered girls. What next?
She put her hands on the steering wheel, though the car was still parked, and took a deep breath. She was in a paid lot on Islington Street, and someone had papered the lot with flyers while she’d been in the coffee shop with Roberta, slipping their annoying advertisement onto every windshield. The paper flapped in the damp wind. She’d have to get out and pull it out from under her wiper, a task that suddenly seemed exhausting.
The interview with Roberta spun in her mind, and she tried to sort through it. Why hadn’t she used her recorder to catch everything? It was habit, yet she hadn’t even brought the recorder in her bag this morning. In desperation, she pulled out her notebook and pen and wrote her thoughts while they were fresh.
She knew about Ravensbrück, she wrote. Sonia must have told her. Deflected my question about it.
This was the tactic she had to take, she realized, going back over the conversation. Not to note what Roberta had said, because so much of what Roberta had said had confirmed things Fiona already knew. She needed to think about the things Roberta had deflected, as quickly and neatly as if she’d been hitting shots back over the net in a tennis match.
She knew the Idlewild records had been lost, Fiona scribbled. How? The only way is if she has looked for them.
That made her think for a minute. It didn’t stretch the imagination that as an adult and a lawyer Roberta would have made an inquiry, looking for something about her old friend’s disappearance. Once she was no longer a girl, she had used her powers as a lawyer to free her uncle and make his life as right as she could. She might have tried to make things right in Sonia’s death as well, especially as she had been convinced Sonia was murdered. Perhaps she had gotten access to the same missing persons file Jamie had pulled from the Barrons police, the one that said nothing at all. The existence of the Idlewild files had been Roberta’s only slip; she hadn’t known about it, and she had been avidly interested. It had been one of the only times in the interview that Fiona had gotten a peek beyond the calm, careful facade.
So the next question Fiona wrote was the only logical one: Does Roberta know who did it?
And then: Is she hiding it?
She had been truly grieved when she’d heard about Sonia’s body being found in the well—that hadn’t been an act. But Fiona made herself go back over that moment, carefully. What Roberta had shown was sadness and pain. What she hadn’t shown was surprise.
Fuck. Fuck. Fiona could have banged her forehead on the steering wheel. She had seen that, but it had been too fast, and she’d been too caught up in her own shit. She’d been outwitted by a seventy-nine-year-old woman. A woman who had spent thirty years as a successful lawyer, but still . . . Never assume, Fiona, Malcolm said in her mind.
From its place on the passenger seat, spilled out of her purse, her phone rang. She jumped, and for a second a wild hope sprang up in her that it was Jamie. But it wasn’t—it was Anthony Eden. What did he want? To summon her to another meeting with his mother? She’d had enough of frustrating old women for today. She ignored the call and flipped the page in her notebook to a fresh one.
She wrote a heading: Potential Suspects.
It seemed like in sixty-four years no one had done even this basic piece of logic, so she would do it herself. She started with the obvious choice, the one the headmistress had been so convinced of.
A boy.
That meant Sonia had had some kind of illicit romance. She would have had to keep it from the school, because they would surely have expelled her if they knew. It would have had to be a local boy, since in the pre-Internet, pre-Facebook days, there was no way she could have met a boy from anywhere else. It seemed unlikely, but Fiona kept it on the list, because if it was true, then Sonia’s roommate and friend Roberta had likely known. And it was believable that she had kept her friend’s secret all this time.
She wrote another possibility: a stranger.
The tale loosened, wove into a different pattern. This was Ginette Harrison’s theory that Sonia had been targeted. The killer-on-the-road theory, a predator passing through, perhaps a deliveryman or some other worker at the school. I didn’t see the face of a single man for three years, Roberta had said. The truth, or a lie? Why would Roberta cover it up if a gardener had killed her friend? Or, for that matter, a stranger on the road? She had to circle back to the fact that Roberta might be lying to her for reasons Fiona couldn’t see.
If Roberta was covering something, that led to: One of the girls did it. Perhaps Roberta herself, or CeCe Frank, or Katie Winthrop.