Don’t get too comfortable, Malcolm had warned Jonas as they sat in Malcolm’s living room, Fiona looking on in amusement. I’m retired. I’m not writing for you all the damn time. But Fiona knew better. Her father was writing—that was what mattered. The Tim Christopher cover-up, as painful as it was, had shaken something loose. It had reawakened her father’s desire to get out into the world and get something done. Just as it had reawakened hers.
Fiona was writing, too. Sonia Gallipeau was just the beginning. She was going to write real stories for the first time in her life. Her focus was going to be the unsolved cases, the missing loved ones who were never found, the cold cases that stayed unsolved. She was going to write about what mattered, whatever the cost. And Jamie was going to help her, lending the expertise gained from ten years as a cop.
As soon as the Idlewild bodies were buried.
There was no story about Mary Hand. That wasn’t why she was here, taking pictures. She was taking pictures because, after so many years of suffering in silence, someone needed to document this.
“I hope no one is going to be sick,” Anthony said. He was standing next to CeCe, watching the coffin come out of the ground, and he was clearly talking about himself.
The girls were quiet, the three of them lined up, watching. They had stood exactly this way at Sonia’s memorial service four days ago, a solemn line of old women in vigil for their friend. Sonia was buried properly now, in a cemetery beneath a headstone bearing her name.
The coffin was placed on crude wooden struts, and the crew foreman approached again. “What do we do?” he asked Katie. Fiona lowered the camera. She felt Jamie take her hand in his.
Katie blinked at the foreman as if waking up. “Open it,” she said.
Anthony stared at her. “Mother,” he said. “I don’t think we can just do that.”
Katie looked at the foreman. “Can we do that?”
The foreman looked back at his crew, then shrugged. “We should probably call the cops,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter to me. A coffin this old, it’s just a few old bones.”
“What do you think, former policeman?” Katie asked Jamie.
Jamie’s gaze was fixed on the coffin. His hand was warm on Fiona’s. “I say open it,” he said.
“Then do it,” Katie told the foreman.
Roberta pulled a handkerchief from somewhere in her winter coat and held it to her nose. “What are we going to do with her?” she asked Katie as the crew foreman walked back to the grave.
“We’ll bury her,” Katie said. “Properly, like we did with Sonia. Mary and her baby. Then she’ll go away.”
“I don’t want to see it,” CeCe said, but she didn’t move.
Fiona heard something behind her and turned.
There was nothing there.
She turned back, but she heard the sound again. A footstep.
There was a rushing sound in her ears, and a strange smell that was almost nutmeg. Fiona peered into the shadows and saw Mary standing at the edge of the trees in her dress and veil, watching them. She was holding a tiny, swaddled baby in her arms.
From behind Fiona, the crew foreman said, “Hand me that crowbar.” There was a cracking sound of wood. CeCe cried out.
“Jesus,” Jamie said.
Still, Mary watched. Fiona stood frozen, her hands still on her camera.
“My God,” Katie said softly. “Oh, my God. It’s her.”
Mary didn’t move.
“I guess we’ll call someone,” the crew foreman said.
“You’re right, Katie,” Roberta said. “We’ll have to bury her. We’ll have to bury both of them.”
In Mary’s arms, the baby moved sleepily. Fiona blinked. Mary vanished into the shadows of the trees.
And then there was nothing but the windblown field, the blank winter sky, the breath of cold wind. And silence.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editor, Danielle Perez, for believing in this book and championing it from the first. Thanks to my agent, Pam Hopkins, for helping me through the process of writing something new and scary. My mother, brother, and sister keep me grounded, and my husband, Adam, keeps me (mostly) sane. Molly and Sinead read an early version of the book and talked me off a ledge, and Stephanie read a later version and talked me off still more ledges. Thanks, guys.
For research on Ravensbrück, I am indebted to the work of Sarah Helm, first in A Life in Secrets and then her heartbreaking work on Ravensbrück itself, If This Is a Woman. Any errors are my own. Any readers looking for fiction about Ravensbrück should read Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein.
And thank you to every reader who has ever sent me an e-mail or a Facebook message, every book club that has picked up one of my books to read, and every blog or reviewer who has bothered to write about my work. This simply does not happen without you.