“It’s small things, you know?” Jamie said. “Or so it seems. His golf buddy’s speeding ticket gets thrown away. Another buddy’s nephew gets off with a warning when he spray-paints the school. The mayor’s son gets let go when he’s caught driving over the limit. Dad was still chief when I started, and everyone accepted it. We fought about it at first, but no one would back me up, and Dad was close to retirement. I started to think I could just wait it out, and after Dad was gone, I could help the force be different. Do things different. Like those old days were gone.”
Fiona remembered Garrett at the family dinner, how he’d known everything that was going on in the force. “Except it didn’t work out that way, did it?” she supplied.
Jamie was quiet for a long beat. “He’s so fucking powerful,” he said. “And Barrons is so small. I didn’t realize how bad it was, how deep it was, until I’d been on the force for years. No one questions the chief, or anything he does, because then you’re off the gravy train. Everyone on the force has it easy. Why rock the boat? They tell themselves it’s just a slip here and there, never anything serious. No one is getting hurt. You do a favor for someone; they do a favor for you. Just fill out the paperwork and go home. And I woke up one day and realized I’d been on the force for seven years, and I was starting to think that way, too. That toxic don’t-give-a-fuck. I realized I had to get away somehow, get out to save myself.” He looked up at her. “That was the night I met you.”
Fiona stared at him, speechless.
“I knew who you were,” he said. “That night. You were right. Of course I knew. But I wanted to talk to you anyway.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “You looked lost, like me. You’re Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter. You’ve lived life. You know this place, but you don’t quite buy it, don’t quite buy anything. You don’t buckle under. You’re beautiful. And your shirt was sliding off your shoulder.”
She dropped to her knees, put her hands on his shoulders. He was warm, tense, his muscles bunched beneath her hands. “Jamie,” she said. “Helen Heyer isn’t a thrown-away speeding ticket.”
He looked at her, right into her in that way Jamie had, as if he knew what she was thinking. “I know,” he said roughly, touching his fingertips to the line of her jaw. “I’m not going to drop it, Fee. I’m going to take it as far as it can go. I’m done.”
She leaned in and kissed him. He kissed her back, his hands tangling in her hair. This was so easy; this, they knew. She slid forward between his knees and ran her hands down the tops of his thighs through his jeans as he opened her mouth slowly, gently. It felt raw and familiar and real, and she knew how this would go. Sex with Jamie was never rushed; he liked to take his time, go slow, as if he was studying her. She realized now that it was because he was never entirely sure that she would be back. Because he never quite knew which time would be the last time. And neither did she.
She followed the kiss where it led, not caring if any neighbors came down the hallway, not caring that she was hungry and her knees hurt. Not caring about Idlewild or dead girls or anything but the way she could read his pulse beneath his skin.
He broke this kiss and sighed, his hands still twisted in her hair. “We’re not doing this,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
She kissed his neck, feeling the scrape of his beard against her mouth. “No,” she agreed. “Not right now.”
He let his head drop back, banging it gently against the wall. “Fuck,” he muttered.
Fiona pressed her cheek against his collarbone. He dropped a hand to the back of her neck. And they stayed like that for a long, long time.
Chapter 29
Barrons, Vermont
November 2014
Fiona woke on the sofa, her throat scratchy and her neck sore. She rolled over, looked at the mess of her apartment in the dark. There were stacks of boxes, papers. On her coffee table were her laptop and a half-eaten box of Ritz crackers. She tapped her laptop to make it wake up so she could see the time in the little display in the corner. It was six a.m.
She stared at the screen, looking at the topic she’d been reading about when she fell asleep, sometime around three. Rose Albert.
Rose’s face stared at her. The picture had been taken on the street by an enterprising photographer sometime after Rose had been arrested and granted bail. She was dignified, wearing an old-fashioned skirt and jacket and a fur stole—out of style in 1973, but giving off an air of class. At the time of the trial, she was only fifty-five, with the clear skin Fiona had seen in the other photographs of her, her mouth a firm line, her eyes so perfectly even and dark, her expression shuttered and cool. The photographer had caught her unawares, and she had put a hand to the fur stole as she walked, nearly clutching it. The few accounts Fiona had found of the trial had described her as wearing a fox fur stole. The same one.
The trial itself was not on public record; the transcripts were sealed. It had been a midsized local story in its day, worthy of a dedicated reporter and a photographer assigned to take shots from the street once or twice, but it hadn’t been front-page news. Looking at the coverage, Fiona could perfectly follow the logic of that news editor in 1973: They had to cover the story for the local angle, because there were people who knew this woman, but hell, no one wanted to read about concentration camps really. It was too depressing and out of touch. Vietnam was happening; Vietnam was real. A lady in a fur stole who might or might not have been an old Nazi was news, but not big news.
Still, the coverage was well researched and well written, making Fiona nostalgic for the heyday of reporters who were actually on staff instead of freelance, and stories that didn’t have to say “You won’t believe what happened next” in order to survive in the click-or-die Internet age. Rose Albert was a spinster living in Burlington, an immigrant from Europe after the war. She claimed to have come from Munich, where she had worked in a factory. She did admit to being a member of the Nazi Party, but she claimed that it was only a survival tactic, because under Hitler’s regime, those who did not join were suspect. Yes, she had attended rallies, but only so she wouldn’t have been denounced by her neighbors and arrested. No, she had not worked in a concentration camp, and once the war was over, she had come to America to start again, and she had been lucky enough to get the job at the travel agency.
Rosa Berlitz, the Ravensbrück guard, was a mystery. She had been recruited from one of the local German villages, a girl with no experience, and had taken to the job at once. She had chased prisoners with the dogs the Nazis had given the guards, who were trained to attack and kill. She had stood by while women were experimented on and sentenced to death, then helped carry out the murders. Who her family and friends were was unknown; what had happened to her after the war, when the Soviets liberated Ravensbrück, was also unknown. Rosa Berlitz had appeared from nowhere, tortured and killed the prisoners of Ravensbrück without flinching, and disappeared again.
There was only one known photograph of Rosa: standing in a line of other guards, being inspected by Himmler as he toured the camp. Himmler was a large figure in the picture, wearing his long coat and Nazi insignia, striding across the grounds. The women were in uniform, ranged in three neat rows, but Rosa’s face was in the back row and slightly out of focus, leaving only two dark eyes, a straight nose, a glimpse of white skin. It might have been Rose Albert, and it might not. No other record of Rosa Berlitz was left, nothing that said she had existed at all, except for the memories of the prisoners who had lived under her.
Three survivors had identified Rose Albert as Rosa Berlitz. One had died of cancer the week before the trial began; the other two had testified in court. It seemed there had been too many holes, too much missing information in the trail leading back to Rosa Berlitz, even with survivors’ testimony, and Rose had gone free. When Fiona dug further, she found that the two remaining survivors had died in 1981 and 1987.