“Never mind what’s in the file,” Fiona said. “Katie married your father’s illegitimate son?”
“His heir.” This was Roberta, speaking from her place by the window. Her voice was low, commanding, and they all looked at her. “He was Brad Ellesmere’s illegitimate son, but he was also his only son. Brad Ellesmere put him in the will. He was the Ellesmere heir.”
“I see.”
“You think it’s cold,” Katie said. “I can see it in your face, Fiona. You think it makes me a manipulative bitch. I was sixteen when I met Joseph, though he waited until I was eighteen to marry me. I was sixteen, and I needed to make my own life by whatever means I had.”
Fiona swallowed. “I’m not judging you.”
“Aren’t you? You’re right. I married him because I thought he’d be useful. Because I was cold and angry. But do you know what? I ended up liking him. I made him happy. I never thought I’d make anyone happy. We were together for nearly sixty years, and we got along just fine. Not many married couples can say as much.” She smiled. “Joseph got me out of Idlewild, away from my family, away from everything. I used his money to send Roberta to law school so she could help her uncle. I used his money to send CeCe to Vassar so she could get away from her horrible mother. So she could stay away from that woman.”
“My mother was Brad Ellesmere’s housekeeper,” CeCe explained. “Having his illegitimate child was a burden to her. It was harder in those days. There was so much shame. She tried to drown me in the ocean when I was six.” She rubbed a finger lightly over her lower lip. “She really wasn’t stable,” she said, her voice almost gentle. “My father sent her for treatment after she tried to kill me, but she checked herself out and left. I went to college and became a teacher so I wouldn’t have to go home.”
“You’re a teacher?” Fiona asked.
“Oh, no, not anymore.” CeCe dropped her hand. “I quit once I got married and had children. I’d achieved what I wanted, and I was better at being a mother anyway. I preferred to raise my kids. Katie howled at me, I can tell you, but that was the one time she lost an argument with me.”
“CeCe always did want children.” Katie was still standing, looking down, watching as Fiona tried to follow the conversation. This was how the girls talked, it seemed, finishing one another’s sentences. Completing one another’s thoughts after so many years.
“CeCe was a better mother than any of us, I think,” Roberta said from her place by the window.
“That’s true,” Katie said. She had been beautiful once; Fiona could see that now. She was still beautiful. Katie glanced down at CeCe, and Fiona saw the complicated love in the look. “Without that degree, you would have married some country bumpkin at eighteen, not an engineer at twenty-seven.”
CeCe reached over and, to Fiona’s surprise, took Katie’s hand in hers and held it tightly. “She got us out of there,” she said to Fiona, still holding her friend’s hand. “All three of us. Away from our families, our pasts. Katie set us free.”
“That wasn’t all of it, though,” Roberta said. She was watching them, leaning casually against the window. “There was always a bigger plan behind that one. A bigger goal.”
“Sonia,” Fiona said. “You wanted to find who killed your friend.”
“The police wouldn’t investigate,” CeCe explained. “That was my fault. I told the headmistress that Sonia had been at Ravensbrück when I tried to explain she couldn’t have run away. I was so innocent. I had no idea that would make everyone assume she was a Jew, that it would make the investigation less important, not more. But they asked a few questions, looked in the woods for an hour or two, and filed it away. It was over.”
“With money,” Katie explained, her voice soft, “we at least could investigate the matter ourselves.” She pulled up a chair at last and sat next to CeCe, crossing her legs elegantly. “I hired private investigators over the years to go over the evidence, but never with any results. The school was still open, and they wouldn’t give permission for my investigators to search the grounds. They claimed it was an old case of a runaway girl, and there was no cause. When the school closed, I begged Joseph to buy it, but unfortunately that was the one time he said no to me. He said the land was a terrible investment and he’d lose his shirt. He wasn’t willing to lose that much money to satisfy a whim of mine.” She smiled at Fiona. “But we did solve it in the end. Ourselves. I’ll tell you freely, if you want. Would you like to know who Sonia’s murderer was?”
It was the temptation, the same one that had lured her into this case, that had nearly gotten her killed. Katie Winthrop, Fiona realized, was very adept at playing off the expectations of whomever she was talking to.
“I already know,” Fiona said to her. “Though when I first looked at it, the most likely suspects were you three.” She glanced around at them. “You had access to her, and you certainly had the opportunity. Sonia was killed by something blunt to the head, not a weapon. It was a crime of opportunity, of someone who hated her seeing their chance and getting rid of her.”
The women were quiet. Katie looked amused. Roberta stared out the window, her jaw set. CeCe’s eyes were wide.
“But I never liked that theory,” Fiona went on. “The account I heard was that you were friends with her, that you liked her. Roberta brought her to the school nurse a few weeks before she was killed.”
That made Roberta turn her head. “She had a fit in the garden,” she said. “It made her think of the digging detail at Ravensbrück. A flashback, though that term wasn’t in use at the time. Sonia almost certainly had some form of PTSD. She nearly passed out.”
Fiona nodded. “You cared about her. It could have been a lie, but when you talked about her when we met, it didn’t seem like it. I should have just assumed that one of you did it and moved on.”
“But you didn’t, did you?” Katie asked softly. “How terribly clever.”
“No, I didn’t. I followed another lead.” She met Katie’s gaze. “I don’t know how you did it, but I have the feeling that what I found won’t be a surprise to you at all.”
“You won’t know unless you tell us, will you?” Katie said.
“I did some research,” Fiona said. “I learned about a woman named Rose Albert. Also known as Rosa Berlitz.”
There was a long, drawn-out minute of silence. Fiona could hear her own breathing, the beeps of machines in rooms down the hall, the clatter of someone walking by dragging an IV stand. Nurses talked and laughed quietly beyond the door of her room. The four of them were still. Roberta still looked out the window, but Katie and CeCe watched Fiona.
“Well.” Katie sat back in her chair and pressed her hands together. Her features were composed, even amused, but Fiona still had the feeling she’d impressed the older woman for the first time today. “This is interesting.”
“How did you do it?” CeCe blurted. She looked like she could barely contain herself. “You never saw the picture.”
“What picture?” Fiona asked.
“Sonia’s drawing. In her notebook.” CeCe glanced at Katie, who was giving her an icy look, and made an impatient sound. “Leave it, Katie—she already knows. Why not tell her about the book?” CeCe turned back to Fiona. “Sonia had a notebook. I gave it to her, actually—it had been a present to me, but I never used it. Sonia took it and wrote in it. All of her memories. And she drew pictures—of her family, of Ravensbrück, of the people she knew there. The notebook was in her suitcase when she disappeared.”
“The suitcase that was taken from the headmistress’s office?” Fiona asked.
CeCe ignored another dirty look from Katie. “We took it, of course. We wanted Sonia’s things back. They didn’t belong in some dusty old closet, and we thought it might hold a clue. So we took it. But we never found a clue in there, not until 1973.”