If CeCe was the easiest to understand, Sonia was the hardest. Pale, thin, quiet, flitting in and out of the crowds and the complicated social cliques, she seemed apart from everything, even for an Idlewild girl. She was an immigrant from France, and in the aftermath of the war, where so many of the girls had lost a father or a brother or had men come home ragged from POW camps, no one asked her about it. She’d been at Idlewild the longest of any of them.
Sonia seemed completely self-contained, as if whatever was happening inside her own head was sufficient for her. For some reason Roberta, who was swift and fit and graceful, had become smitten with Sonia, and could often be seen by her side. They were so easy together, it made Katie want that, too. Katie had never been easy with anyone. She’d always been the girl with admirers, not friends.
Sonia caught Katie’s eyes briefly and shrugged, the gesture cool and European even in her simple white nightgown. “I have no use for ghosts,” she said in her sweet, melodious accent, “though like everyone else, I’ve heard she wears a black dress and a veil, which seems a strange outfit if you are outside in the snow.” Her gaze, resting on Katie in the darkened gloom, missed nothing. “You saw something. Did you not?”
Katie glanced at the cigarette, forgotten in her fingers. “I heard her,” she said. She tamped out the smoke against the brass back of the sophomore achievement medal someone had left behind, and ground the butt with her thumb.
“Heard her?” CeCe asked.
Katie took a breath. Talking about Mary Hand felt like speaking of a family secret somehow. It was one thing to tell ghost stories in the dark, and another when you opened your locker before gym class and felt something push it closed again. There were always small things, like a feeling of being watched, or a cold patch in a hallway, that you were never quite sure you’d experienced, and you felt stupid bringing up. But this had been different, and Katie had the urge to speak it out loud. “It was in the common, on the path that goes past the dining hall.”
The girls nodded. Idlewild’s main buildings were arranged in a U-shaped square around a common, dotted with unkempt trees and weedy flagstoned paths. “That section scares me,” CeCe said. “The one by the garden.”
It scared Katie, too. No one liked the garden, even though the curriculum included Weekly Gardening, when they had to reluctantly dig through its damp, rotten-smelling earth. Even the teachers gave the garden a wide berth. “I was sneaking a cigarette after dinner, and I left the path so Mrs. Peabody wouldn’t see me—you know she smokes her own cigarettes out there, even though she’s not supposed to. I was beneath the big maple tree, and I just felt something. Someone was there.”
CeCe was leaning forward, rapt. “But you didn’t see anything?”
“There was a voice,” Katie said. “It was— I didn’t imagine it. It was right there next to me, as if someone was standing there. I heard it so clearly.”
She could still recall that moment beneath the maple tree, standing on a bed of old maple keys, her cigarette dropping to the ground, the hair standing up on the back of her neck when a voice somewhere behind her right ear had spoken. Idlewild was an old place, and the fear here was old fear. Katie had thought she understood fear until that moment, but when the voice had spoken, she’d understood fear that was older and bigger than she could imagine.
“Well?” Roberta prompted. “What did she say?”
Katie cleared her throat. “ ‘Hold still,’ ” she said.
They were all quiet for a moment.
“Oh, my God,” CeCe said softly.
Strangely, it was Sonia that Katie looked at. Sonia was sitting on the floor, against the wall beneath the window, her thin legs drawn up, her knees to her chest. She was very still, bathed in shadow, and Katie couldn’t tell if Sonia’s eyes were on her or not. Far off, a door slammed, and something tapped, like dripping water, in the ceiling.
“Why?” Sonia asked her, the French lilt soft. “Why did she say that to you?”
Katie shrugged hard, the muscles wrenching in her shoulders, even though it was dark and the other girls couldn’t see it. “I don’t know,” she snapped, her voice growing sharp before she tempered it. “It was just a voice I heard. That’s all I know.”
A lie, a lie. But how could some old ghost even know?
Hold still. She couldn’t talk about that. Not to anyone. Not yet.
“What did you do?” Roberta asked.
This was an easier question. “I ran like hell.”
Only CeCe, leaning against the headboard, gave a quick tut at the language. She’d been raised prim for an illegitimate girl. “I would have run, too,” she conceded. “I saw a little boy once. At the Ellesmeres’.” The Ellesmeres were her rich father’s family, though CeCe hadn’t been given the family name. “I was playing in the back courtyard one day while Mother worked. I looked up and there was a boy in an upper window of the house, watching me. I waved, but he didn’t wave back. When I asked my mother about it, about why the boy wasn’t allowed outside to play, she got the strangest look on her face. She told me I’d been seeing things, and that I should never say anything about that boy again, especially in front of the Ellesmeres. I never did see him again. I always wondered who he was.”
“My grandmother used to tell me about the ghost in her attic,” Roberta said. “It moved all the furniture around up there and made a racket. She said there were nights she’d lie in bed listening to trunks and dressers being dragged across the floor. Mum always said she was just an old lady looking for attention, but one summer I spent two weeks at my grandmother’s house, and I heard it. It was just like she’d said—furniture being dragged across the floor, and the sound of the old brass floor lamp being picked up and put down, over and over. The next morning I asked her if it was Granddad’s ghost doing it, and she only looked at me and said, ‘No, dear. It’s something much worse.’ ” She paused. “I never went back there. She died at Christmas that year, and Mum sold the house.”
“What about you, Sonia?” CeCe asked. “Did you ever see a ghost?”
Sonia unfolded her thin legs and stood, then gripped the window and pulled it shut. The draft of cold air from outside ceased, but still Katie shivered.
“The dead are dead,” she said. “I have no use for ghosts.”
Katie watched her silhouette in the near darkness. It had sounded dismissive, but Sonia hadn’t said she didn’t believe in ghosts. She hadn’t said she’d never seen one. She hadn’t said they weren’t real.
She knew, just as they all did.
The rain pelted the window again. Hold still, the voice in Katie’s head said again. Hold still. She hugged herself tightly and closed her eyes.
Chapter 3
Barrons, Vermont
November 2014
“Jonas,” Fiona said the next morning as she walked into the cramped offices of Lively Vermont. “Did you know that Idlewild Hall is being restored?”
The main room was empty, but Jonas’s door was ajar, and she knew he was in there. He always was. She wove past the mismatched desks and the cardboard boxes that littered the main room and headed toward Lively Vermont’s only private office, the lair of the magazine’s owner and editor in chief.
“Is that you, Fiona Sheridan?” came a voice from inside. “I haven’t seen you in days.”
She reached the door and looked in at him. He was bent over his desk, staring closely at a photograph print, the computer blank and ignored behind him. Typical Jonas. “I guess it’s a good thing I don’t work for you, then,” she said.
He looked up. “You’re freelance. It counts.”
Fiona felt herself smiling. “Not when it comes to health insurance.”
He gave her a poker face, but she knew he was teasing. Jonas Cooper was fiftyish, his gray-brown hair swept back from his forehead in neat, impressive wings, his eyebrows dark slashes over his intense eyes. He wore a red-and-black-checkered shirt open at the throat over his waffle-weave undershirt. He and his wife had bought Lively Vermont over a decade ago, and since their divorce last year he’d been trying to keep it going. “Do you have a story for me?” he asked.
“No,” Fiona replied. “I gave you one on Friday. You told me that blew the budget.”