She picked up her wine and began the search.
She started with the girls’ files. Sonia’s and Roberta’s she’d already read, so she pulled Katie Winthrop’s and CeCe Frank’s. Sarah London had said that Katie Winthrop was trouble; her file backed that up. She’d been sent to Idlewild by her parents for persistent willful misbehavior, and the school had not improved her much. There were fistfights, cut classes, talking back to teachers, everything a restless teenage girl might do in the days before she could text her friends or put naked selfies on social media. For a cloistered girl with no access to drugs, alcohol, or boys, Katie’s exploits seemed painfully innocent (Hung her undergarments from a window, read an entry from her last week at Idlewild), but the school’s teachers saw her as a plague that could infect the other students. Isolation is best wherever possible, one teacher wrote, as she tends to have an effect on others. Katie left the same year Roberta did, 1953, and there was no note regarding her leaving, as the teachers were likely too busy sighing with relief.
CeCe Frank’s file was surprising. Sarah had said that she had followed Katie around, the sort of girl who fell under Katie’s spell. Fiona had pictured an eager follower, an acolyte type of girl. Yet CeCe’s actual file showed something entirely different. Her grades were on the high side of average, though Sarah London had referred to her as stupid. She was never disciplined, never got in fights, and never acted out. Sarah had called her pudgy, but she had scored good marks even in physical education, where her teacher praised her dexterity. Could be an asset to the field hockey team, went the note, but does not seem motivated to apply herself. It now looked like CeCe was the kind of girl who was kind, friendly, and far from stupid, yet never earned an ounce of praise from the adults in her life—and there could be only one reason. Her bastard heritage must have colored everyone’s perceptions in 1950. It still colored Sarah London’s perceptions now. When Fiona saw nothing in her file referring to who her father was or why she’d been sent to Idlewild, she knew she was right.
She poured herself another glass of wine and took a break from the files to Google the girls. Katie Winthrop was a dead end—twenty minutes of searching brought up nothing that remotely resembled someone who could have been the Idlewild girl. CeCe Frank’s name appeared on a list of girls belonging to a college sorority in 1954, but nowhere else. So CeCe had at least gone to college, then. Fiona wondered if her father had paid for that, too.
She returned to the boxes and leafed through the student files, looking for names that jumped out at her, but nothing did. She moved on from the student records to the other boxes: curricula, financial records, mixed detritus taken from the classrooms. She picked up the Latin textbook she’d noticed earlier—the ridiculous Latin Grammar for Girls—and leafed through it, smelling its musty old-book smell and looking at the thick yellowed pages, the fonts that weren’t in use anymore.
She noticed the handwriting halfway through the book. A line written in pencil along the edge of the page, past the margin of text. She turned the book to read the words.
Mary Hand wears a black dress and veil
She laughed like my dead little brother
Madeleine Grazer, February 2, 1935
A black dress and veil. The words froze the breath in her throat, and she had to close the book and put it down for a second. February 1935. Someone had seen the figure she saw in the sports field in 1935.
What did she show you? That is the question you need to be asking.
She picked up the book again, turned the pages, and saw more words, in a different handwriting, scrawled across the bottom of another page:
MARY HAND HAS ALWAYS BEEN HERE
Jesus. Roberta had mentioned that the girls wrote in the textbooks. If the textbooks were never changed from year to year, it made sense. This was how the Idlewild girls talked to one another, from one generation of girls to the next.
She pushed the box of textbooks aside and dug through the box of Idlewild’s own records: bills of sale, staff hiring and firing paperwork, financial sheets. She found what she was looking for almost immediately in a file called “Land History,” slim with very few pages in it. She found schematics and building plans, a map of the grounds that was dated 1940. Behind that was a handwritten map, originally done in ink and now very faded. It showed Old Barrons Road, the woods, the ravine. Within the clearing where Idlewild now stood were drawn a square marked Church and another marked Hand House. The caption at the bottom—also handwritten—said Map of original landholdings, 1915. Church burned down in 1835 and never rebuilt, though the foundation was still intact. It was signed Lila Hendricksen, 1921.
So this was, or purported to be, what had stood on the site before Idlewild was built. Fiona did a quick check in the staff records: Lila Hendricksen was listed as the school’s history teacher from 1919 to 1924.
Fiona tapped her wineglass with a fingernail, thinking. It was easy to imagine Idlewild’s history teacher, most likely a local woman, also being an amateur historian. In any case, she’d written her own notes on the history of the place and kept them in Idlewild’s files. Fiona’s gaze traveled back to the second square on the map. Hand House. There had been an actual Hand family, and they’d lived here before the school came.
She turned the page and found another sheet, this one also in Lila Hendricksen’s immaculate slanted handwriting. The page told, briefly and succinctly, the story—and the tragedy—of the Hand family.
The Hands had lived on the land for several generations, eking out a living as small farmers. By 1914 the family line had dwindled to two parents and a daughter, Mary. At age sixteen, Mary got pregnant by a local boy. Ashamed, she kept the pregnancy a secret until she gave birth one night at home. Her stunned mother assisted with the birth while her father looked on.
The baby was born dead, though Mary was convinced that her parents had killed it. Fiona wondered if she was right. In any case, when her parents took the baby away, Mary quickly became unhinged, and there was an argument. It ended with Mary’s father banishing her from the house in the cold, where Mary disappeared into the night.
Her body was found the next morning, curled up in the ruins of the old church. She wasn’t buried in the Hand graveyard plot, but instead on the grounds of the homestead, with her baby’s body beside hers. Her parents had moved away soon afterward. The land was then purchased for the use of the school, the Hands forgotten. Mary’s grave, Lila Hendricksen wrote, was situated on the south side of the burned church.
Fiona turned back to the map. She oriented the page, recalling in her head which way was north. She found the spot that was south of the square that indicated the church. Then she pulled out the map of the grounds that was created in 1940 and laid it next to Lila Hendricksen’s handwritten one. The burned church had sat roughly where Idlewild’s dining hall was now. And Mary and her baby’s grave was where the garden currently sat—the garden that was always in shade. Her baby was buried in the garden, Roberta had said.
The rumor was mostly true. What was missing was that Mary Hand was buried there, too.
Right next to the common, where the girls had passed by every day for the sixty years the school had been open.
Fiona jumped when her phone rang. She answered it eagerly when she saw who it was. “Dad,” she said.
“Well?” Malcolm asked her. “What do you say? Has history come alive?”
She stared down at the maps in front of her, at Lila Hendricksen’s record. “What?”