to the local NPR station, which features classical music and hosts who speak in muted tones. When I look out the bow window to check that both Foresters are still there my eyes fall on the floral wallpaper, the framed pictures of girls in old-fashioned dresses, and arrangements of dried flowers and needlepoint samplers. I feel like I’ve traveled back to another era—to a school matron’s parlor sometime in the middle of the last century. Back to 1963, five years after the Refuge became a school for girls and Cora Rockwell became its first headmistress.
The Maiden Stone has claimed its latest victim; another girl has gone missing.
She sounds exactly like the kind of woman who would pick this dreadful wallpaper and collect dead flowers. Entering her world feels like squeezing into a closet full of mothballs and mildewed shawls, but it’s where Lila went before me, so I take a deep breath and follow.
The Maiden Stone has claimed its latest victim; another girl has gone missing. Noreen Bagley. At first I have to admit I barely noticed she was gone. Most of the girls went home for Fall Break and when Miss Jessym informed me that Noreen wasn’t in her English class Monday morning we agreed she might have chosen not to return.
“She hasn’t really been fitting in, has she?” Jessym remarked. “I’m not sure she’s cut out to be a Haywood Girl.”
I refrained from asking what exactly that meant since a scant five years ago a Haywood Girl was one who’d found herself in trouble. Jessym previously worked at Miss Porter’s and can be a bit of a snob. Noreen’s father, while quite well-off, is what Jessym would call nouveau riche. I did have to agree with her, though, that Noreen has not made a smooth transition to Haywood since the tragic death of her mother last autumn. She’s known to frequently burst into tears during chapel, pen lugubrious poems in English class, and mope around the woods collecting fern specimens for her Nature Book. It seemed all too likely that she had simply decided not to return after the break.
When I called her father he didn’t at first seem to know if Noreen had gone back to school or not. Which seemed strange until he explained that he had been out of town himself and Noreen had been staying in their Back Bay townhouse by herself.
“Father seems rather uninterested,” I remarked to Jessym.
“I hear he remarried—a rich widow from Providence. Did you try the housekeeper?”
I called the house again and after a long rambling speech from a Mrs. Hughes determined that Noreen had taken a train to Portland on the last Saturday of the break. Jessym and I went to her room then. She has a single in West Elm, rare for a junior but she had a letter from her family doctor saying she gets migraines and often needs to lie quietly in the dark. It was a lonely room—no pictures on the wall, just Latin declensions and French history dates thumbtacked to the wall. And a list of girls.
Barbara Hampton
Priscilla Barnes
Shirley Eames
“Who are they?” Jessym asked.
“Wayward girls,” I said, taking the list down. No one needed to see that. “Girls who ran away.”
“Hm,” Jessym said, “perhaps they gave her the idea of running away herself. Perhaps when she got to the train station she decided to take a train somewhere else. I sometimes look at the departure board in South Station and think, Wouldn’t it be jolly to take the Silver Meteor to Miami or the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago?”
“What would you do in Chicago?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t stop there; I’d keep on going. To New Mexico or California. Somewhere warm.”
“I don’t see Noreen Bagley thinking anything was jolly,” I said, looking around at the bare room. “And she has the kind of skin that splotches in the sun.”
I have to admit, though, that I was encouraged by the idea that she’d gone missing en route to Haywood. It’s been hard enough establishing a reputation for a school founded on the bones of a refuge for fallen girls. Mr. Haywood, our director, has been most particular in the selection of girls—only from the best families, he insists—and has appointed his nephew, Haywood Hull, to look over the application letters himself.
Already the girls are spreading rumors about the Maiden Stone. I caught Sloane, the groundskeeper, telling stories about girls who went missing when we were still a refuge, and I had to speak very sternly to him.