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That seemed to please the old woman. She pulled out her own chair and lowered herself. Her hands were twisted and gnarled with arthritis, the knuckles pearly gray. “Now, please tell me about this restoration. As you can see, I’ve been reading the newspaper, which I do every day. I’ve never read anything about this.”
“That’s why I’m writing the story,” Fiona said.
Miss London seemed to consider this. “Who—who in the world is mad enough to restore Idlewild?”
It was a sentiment that so closely mirrored Fiona’s own thoughts that she paused. But there was a tinge of nerves on the edges of Miss London’s expression, on the edges of her words. “A woman named Margaret Eden,” she said, “aided by her son, Anthony.”
Miss London blinked and shook her head. “I’ve never heard of such people.”
Fiona had a list of questions in her head that she’d planned to ask, but on an impulse she skipped all of them. “Why do you think it’s mad to restore Idlewild?” she said.
“Well, of course it’s mad.” Miss London’s voice shook a little, but she maintained her composure, sitting with ramrod posture. “Of course it is. That old building . . . that old place.” She waved a twisted hand, as if Fiona should surely know what she was talking about. “Are they making it into a school?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, dear God.” The words were spoken swiftly, softly, as if they’d escaped from the woman’s mouth. Then she recovered and said, “Well, I wish them luck.”
“You were a teacher there for a long time, were you not?”
“Twenty-nine years. Until the school’s last day.”
“You must have loved it there.”
“No one loved it there,” the older woman said bluntly. “Those girls were trouble. They made life miserable for all of us. They weren’t good girls. Not at all.”
Fiona felt her eyebrows rise. “And yet you stayed.”
“Teaching is all I know, Fiona,” Miss London said, her expression growing stern. “It’s what I do. Or what I did, at least.”
“Was Idlewild the only place you ever worked?”
“I worked at a few other schools after Idlewild closed, until I retired. I’m local.” That hand wave again, as if there was no need to say all of this aloud. “Born not even half a mile from where we’re sitting now. A Vermonter all my life. I never saw the need to leave.”
In the pasty light of the kitchen, Sarah London looked much older than she had at first, her eyes watery, the corners of her mouth drooping. She was a tough old Vermonter, but that didn’t mean she’d had an easy life. “I have a photograph,” Fiona said. “Would you like to see it?”
“I suppose,” Miss London said carefully, though the gleam of interest in her eyes was a dead giveaway.
Fiona pulled a printout of the field hockey photograph from her pocket and smoothed it out over the table. Miss London looked at it for a long time. “That’s me,” she said finally. “Took over the team the year Charlene McMaster quit to get married. She barely lasted eight months. I didn’t want to do it, not one bit. But we did as we were told in those days.”
“Do you remember these girls?” Fiona asked.
“Of course I do. We didn’t have all that many students. And my memory hasn’t gone yet, praise God.”
Fiona glanced down at the photograph, the girls lined up in their uniforms. They weren’t good girls. “You even remember their names?”
“Yes, probably. Why do you ask?”
“This was taken two years after the disappearance of a student named Sonia Gallipeau,” Fiona said. “Do you remember that?”
The room rang with deafening silence.
“Miss London?” Fiona asked.
“The French girl,” Miss London said quietly, almost to herself. She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that name in over sixty years.”
“Something happened to her,” Fiona said. “In 1950.”
“She ran away, they said.” Miss London’s hand went to her face, the gnarled yet elegant old fingers stroking her cheek in an absent, thoughtful gesture. “I remember that day. My first year. She went off to see relatives and never came back.”
“What do you remember?” Fiona prompted softly.
“Everything.” Miss London’s fingers stroked her cheek again, automatic. “We searched for her, but not for long. There wasn’t much to do about a runaway girl. I never said anything, because the case was closed and we all moved on. But I always thought she was dead.”
“Why did you think she was dead?” Fiona asked.
“Don’t get me wrong. We had girls who ran away.” Miss London shook her head. “One just the year before Sonia. There’s nothing you can do about a bad apple. But I never thought Sonia would do it. She had nowhere to go, for one. She wasn’t even American. She was plain, quiet as a mouse. She wouldn’t go off hitching rides or running away with some boy. She didn’t have it in her.”
“So you don’t think she ran away.”
“I thought at first—the relatives must have done it. It’s the obvious choice, isn’t it? No one knew them. They came to see her once a year at Christmas, but that was all. Then she goes to visit and she never comes back. But they checked out the relatives and said no. They were just a couple of old people who felt sorry for her, but didn’t want to take in a girl. The wife had nagged the husband into the visit—said she felt bad, leaving the girl there for so long, with a visit only once a year. The husband didn’t want to do it—he wasn’t interested in a teenage girl, though eventually he gave in. But she’d changed her bus ticket and run away from them, too.”
Fiona waited. Miss London’s eyes were open, but she was seeing nothing, nothing but 1950. There wasn’t even a clock ticking in this house; it was so silent.
“They found her suitcase,” Miss London continued. “In the woods right off the edge of Old Barrons Road, where it meets the school gates. They found it in the weeds.”
Now it was Fiona’s turn to freeze in shock. Right where I was walking, she thought. Right where I was standing, talking to Jamie on the phone, and listening to a shuffling sound in the gravel that was just like a footstep.
The old teacher kept talking, the words spilling out. “What girl runs away with no suitcase? I ask you. Her friends were beside themselves, but the Winthrop girl left a few years later, and that girl, the Ellesmeres’ girl, left after that. I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t know what happened to any of them.”
“Wait a minute,” Fiona said. “They found her abandoned suitcase, and still everyone thought she’d run away?”
“You weren’t there,” Miss London argued. “You weren’t living with those girls. In that place. We had a girl run away the year before I came. They’d thought for sure she was dead. Then she turned up at her grandparents’ in Florida with some hoodlum in tow.” Her eyes met Fiona’s, eyes that were aged and watery but somehow hard. “Sonia ran away from her own relatives, so it was decided. I couldn’t say anything. I was new, but even then I understood.”
“Understood what?”
“You can sit there and judge. But you spend twenty-nine years at Idlewild. I was on edge every day. It’s a hard place, an awful place. I had to stay because it was my job, because I needed the money, but sometimes the girls . . . they ran. And deep down we didn’t blame them.”
“Why not?”
“Because we were all so horribly afraid.”
The back of Fiona’s neck was icy cold. “Afraid of what?”
Miss London’s lips parted, but there was a smack on the front storm door, followed by the bang of the inner door. “Aunt Sairy!” came a woman’s voice, roughened by cigarette smoke. “It’s me.”
Shoes clomped up the hallway runner, and Fiona twisted in her chair to see a woman in her late forties come to the kitchen door, her lank blond hair in a ponytail, her wide hips pressed into yoga pants beneath her parka. She was scowling. “Oh, hello,” she said, her voice darkening with suspicion.
Fiona pushed her chair back and stood up, figuring she was once again being mistaken for a salesperson, probably in the midst of snowing an eighty-eight-year-old woman into some kind of scam. “I’m Fiona Sheridan,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m a journalist writing a story about Idlewild Hall.”
The cloud left the woman’s face, and she looked at Miss London for confirmation. “Okay, then,” she said ungraciously, shaking Fiona’s hand briskly in her freezing-cold one. “I saw your car outside. Aunt Sairy almost never has visitors.”
“Cathy is my sister’s daughter,” Miss London said from her seat at the table. She had recovered her brisk teacher’s manner.
Fiona’s chance was gone. There was no way to get back what had just been about to be said—whatever that was. But she wasn’t ready to leave yet, Cathy or no Cathy. “Miss London, I’ll get out of your hair, but can I ask you a few quick questions first? Nothing too complicated, I promise.”
Miss London nodded, and Cathy banged into the kitchen, noisily doing something with the dishes in the sink. I’m watching you, her every movement said.
Fiona quickly lowered herself into a chair again. “First of all, the records from Idlewild haven’t been located. Do you remember anything about where they might have gone when the school closed?”
