LAUSANNE—June 2016
Over braised lamb shanks at the Brasserie Lausanne-Moudon with Jay, Kersti rehashes her conversation with M. Bueche. “It doesn’t make sense,” she says, brooding. “Madame Hamidou told us she fought Bueche to keep those girls from getting expelled. Why would she lie?”
“I’m sure it’s meaningless,” Jay says, stabbing a potato with his fork.
“And why would she tell the police about Cressida’s car accident? It was ancient history at that point. The Hamidou I remember would have protected Cressida. Not thrown her under the bus.”
“Sounds like she wanted them to know Cressida had a history.”
“Why, though?”
“So the investigation would wrap up quicker? Maybe it was the best way she could think to protect Cressida and the school.”
“You’re probably right,” Kersti says. “She adored Cressida . . . more than anyone else in that school. She would have done anything for her, as any mother would.”
Kersti thinks about it for a moment and then realizes Bueche almost had her. “It’s Bueche who’s lying,” she says decisively. “His friend was the detective on the case. He’s the one who covered it up, not Hamidou. He’s trying to throw me off.”
“Why do you think?”
“I’m sure it has something to do with the two girls who were expelled,” Kersti says. “Cressida must have found something in the ledger. What if Bueche has it?”
“You’ll never get your hands on it, Kerst. And now’s not the time to be playing Scooby-Doo.”
“I’m not playing Scooby-Doo,” she mutters indignantly.
“We’re having twins soon,” he reminds her. “Prioritize.”
“Something happened to Cressida and it was covered up. I want to know what.”
“Then let Deirdre figure it out. Surely she can afford to hire a lawyer or a private investigator.”
“We’re here, though—”
“We’re here because you’ve been chosen one of the Hundred Women of the Lycée.”
After dinner, they go back to the hotel in silence. Jay heads up to the room while Kersti goes to the lobby lounge to wait for Noa and Rafaella. She orders a ginger ale and texts Deirdre.
Need to talk to you tomorrow. Convo with Bueche troubled me. FYI you forgot the note in his office. I’ve got it.
When she looks up from her phone, she spots Noa coming through the door, smiling and waving boisterously, two long braids swinging out behind her. She’s wearing a loose poncho shirt, torn jeans, and Havaianas flip-flops. She looks plump and happy. She hugs Kersti hard.
“Don’t crush the boys!” Kersti teases.
“Hello in there!” Noa says, crouching down so she’s eye level with Kersti’s belly. “Leuk je te ontmoeten!”
“You still look sixteen,” Kersti tells her, fibbing to make her feel good.
“You look very well yourself,” Noa says.
They sit down and Noa pulls out her phone to share photos of her kids—four apple-cheeked blonds, the spitting image of Noa’s younger self.
“This is all I’ve got for the moment,” Kersti says, pulling out her eighteen-week sonogram picture.
“I’m so happy for you,” Noa says. “I have a lot of friends who went through the same thing with not such happy endings.”
“We’re grateful,” Kersti says, withholding the bit about Cressida’s eggs.
Rafaella shows up a few minutes later in a DVF wrap dress that accentuates her new fake breasts and her tiny waist. Her hair is slicked back in a ponytail, her lips inflated with collagen, her skin waxy and wrinkle-free. As with Deirdre, all the work she’s had done has rendered her age a blur, contingent upon the angle at which you catch her or the lighting in the room.
“Bonjour!” she sings, hugging and air-kissing both of them. “Holy shit! Look at us.”
“We’re grown-ups.”
“Speak for yourself,” Raf says, smiling. Lipstick on her two front teeth.
They spend the first hour catching up in much greater depth than Facebook can accommodate. As Kersti gleaned, Noa is a full-time mom—hands-on, attentive, endlessly involved in her kids’ lives. She bakes her own bread and forbids screens, choosing instead to fully engage with them when they’re home. By her account, she’s always at their schools—volunteering, fund-raising, being the class parent, going on the class trips. And in her small amount of free time, she’s usually crusading to make the world a better place for them.
Raf, for all her wealth and privilege, doesn’t seem to have made much of her life. She has no permanent address, no real career aside from a social column she writes for a Paris daily, no current or significant past relationship.
“Are you happy?” Noa asks Raf, leaning across the table.
“What does that mean, anyway?”
“Are you fulfilled, content? Comfortable with yourself?”
“Of course not.” Raf laughs. “Are you?”
“Yes,” Noa responds.
“And you, Kersti?”
“Yes,” Kersti says. And in this moment, she is.
They sit in silence for a few moments, happy to be reunited even though they’re a lifetime away from who they were at the Lycée.
“I saw Madame Hamidou today,” Kersti tells them. “She doesn’t live at Huber anymore.”
“Really? I can’t picture her not living there.”
“Maybe she got married,” Raf says.
“She wasn’t wearing a ring—”
“She’s asexual,” Noa says. “She’s married to the Lycée.”
“She’s moving back to Huber in the fall.”
“Which proves my point,” Noa says smugly.
Kersti suddenly gets that fluttering butterfly sensation in her belly. She shifts in her chair and lets out a surprised giggle. “The babies are on the move,” she says.
“I miss that,” Noa laments. “Seeing you like this makes me want to have another one.”
“Four isn’t enough?” Raf says.
“Nils and I have always talked about having six.”
“Six?” Raf rolls her eyes. “Are you going to send them all to boarding school?”
“Of course not,” Noa says, sounding offended. “I was only sent to the Lycée as a matter of safety. Because of my brother’s kidnapping.”
“Are you implying the rest of us were sent there because our parents didn’t want us?”
“I’m not implying anything.”
“It’s true, though,” Raf says. “That’s why we were all so fucked up. Look at Cress.”
“I prefer not to,” Noa says.
“I think she tried to kill herself,” Raf blurts. “No way she fell off that balcony by accident. What do you think, Kerst?”
Kersti thinks about it for a split second and then decides to tell them everything, right from the beginning. “Lille wrote to me before she died,” she begins.
Raf and Noa fall silent. She’s got their full attention now. She tells them about Lille’s letter, her first meeting with Deirdre, their suspicions that someone might have pushed Cressida off her balcony. The subsequent conversations with Magnus, the Fitherns, M. Bueche. The half-assed police investigation. Cressida’s pregnancy.
“He got her pregnant?” Noa cries.
“Wait. What if Bueche and Mrs. Fithern were having an affair?” Raf says excitedly. “Maybe Mrs. Fithern pushed Cressida and Bueche covered it up to protect her?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Noa says.
“Plus it doesn’t explain the ledger—”
“Maybe the ledger has nothing to do with Cressida’s fall,” Raf says. “Or with those girls getting expelled.”
“I agree,” Noa says. “If anyone pushed Cressida off her balcony it was because she was sleeping with Mr. Fithern.”
“Here’s the suicide note,” Kersti says, retrieving it from her purse. She hands it to Raf first, who reads it and makes a strange face, and then to Noa.
I will miß you. Im sorry
Noa looks up, frowning. “Who wrote this?” she asks.
“Cressida, supposedly.”
“No. It wasn’t Cressida.”
“How do you know?”
“This is an eszett.”
“A what?”
“Eszett. A ‘sharp s.’” Noa points to the misspelling of the word miss, which Kersti always figured was a drunken scribble. “It says ‘I will “miß” you,’ the old German way.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the eszett,” Noa states. “Only the German alphabet has that letter. Before ’96, the eszett was always used instead of ss. Words like dass and strass were spelled with a sharp s, just like in Cressida’s note.”
“So the person who write the note was German?”
“Yes.”
“It could just be a messy double s. Cress was drunk—”
“It’s an eszett.”
“Isn’t Bueche German?” Raf says.
“No. Swiss French.”
“Mahler was German,” Kersti says. And it hits her like the kaleidoscope of blindness that precedes a migraine. Could Bueche be covering up for Mahler?
The next day, Kersti takes a taxi up to the Lycée and waits outside the chemistry lab for Mme. Hamidou. When she finally emerges in her lab coat and protective goggles, Kersti pulls her aside and asks if they can speak.
“Bien sur,” she says, stuffing the goggles in her pocket.
They go outside into the sunshine, where a crowd of young smokers has gathered between classes. “They still allow smoking?” Kersti says, incredulous.
“It’s Europe,” Hamidou responds, lighting up a trademark Gauloises.
Kersti takes a few steps back and waves away the smoke. It would be bad enough if she weren’t pregnant.
“Oh, Mon Dieu,” Hamidou says, hiding the cigarette behind her back. “I’m sorry. Come.”
They move away from the smokers and Hamidou throws her free arm around Kersti’s shoulders. “It’s so good to see you,” she says. “Your year was one of my favorites. Such a special group of girls.”
“I saw Rafaella and Noa last night,” Kersti tells her.
“I’m looking forward to seeing them tomorrow.”
“Madame?” Kersti says, not sure how to bring up what she wants to say. “I don’t think Cressida fell off her balcony by accident, and neither does Deirdre. Bueche’s friend was the detective in charge of the investigation. The case was closed too quickly—”
“Bueche may be an ass, but he would never cover up a crime.”
“How can you be so sure?” Kersti asks her. “Wouldn’t he do just about anything to protect the Lycée’s reputation?”
“And its bank account.”
“Exactly.”
“Oui, mais quand meme . . .”
“Deirdre wants to reopen the investigation. Too many things don’t add up.”
“Like what?”
“There was a ledger,” Kersti says. “I think Cressida discovered something in it that had to do with Monsieur Mahler and those expulsions in 1974. It went missing the day she fell—”
“Monsieur Mahler?” Hamidou says. “What could he possibly have to do with anything?”
“I have my suspicions. But . . . well, Bueche said you were the one who wanted those girls expelled, not him. I don’t believe him, but I just wanted to check with you. . . . I think he’s still trying to cover something up.”
Hamidou sucks on her cigarette. “I can’t imagine why he would say I’m the one who wanted them expelled. C’est ridicule.”
“That’s what I thought. I just wanted to be sure.”
“What is Deirdre going to do?”
“Go to the police, I guess.”
“And what can they do now?”
Kersti shrugs. “Order a proper investigation, I hope. There’s enough new evidence to warrant it.”
Hamidou sighs and crushes her cigarette under her heel. “Tragique,” she murmurs. “Of all my girls to have wound up this way, why Cressida?”
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
Hamidou stops. She looks straight at Kersti. “You mean when she was thirteen? She told you about the abortion?”
“No. When she fell.”
Hamidou clears her throat. “She was pregnant again?”
“With Mr. Fithern’s baby.”
Her eyes close for a moment as she takes it in. She looks upset. “I did not,” she manages. “This is the first I hear of it.”
Kersti rolls onto her back and stretches.
She tucks her feet between Jay’s legs, which are warm and soft under the duvet. She’s piecing together a dream from last night—she dreamed she was lost in a forest, calling out for her mother. When she was a little girl, Anni used to tell her about the swamp forest in Soomaa, just outside of Tallinn. Soomaa meant “bog land” and its many walking trails wound through the peat bogs and bog pools surrounded by dunes, the ground carpeted with mushrooms and berries. In some places, her mother told her, the thickness of the peat layer could be as tall as four daddies. Back then Kersti’s father was like a giant to her; four times his height reached the sky. Anni’s favorite trail was the Riisa because you had to walk under a giant wood wishbone to enter it. In winter, they would snowshoe or ski through the towering pines, cold and free. Kersti always wanted to go. She imagined the Soomaa forest was enchanted, magical.
“What are you thinking about?” Jay asks her.
“Estonia. I want to take the boys there one day.”
“Of course we will.”
Next week is June 23, Jaanipäev—the night of the Estonian summer solstice—and all she can think about is celebrating with her family. Sitting around the bonfire watching her nieces run wild, knowing that in a couple of years, her sons will be running with them.
“Maybe my parents could come to Estonia with us,” she says, snuggling closer to Jay.
“They haven’t been back in fifty years,” he reminds her. “They’ll never go back.”
“I think they would.”
“What for?” Jay says. “For all intents and purposes, they still live in Estonia.”
“Toronto isn’t Tallinn.”
“Geographically, no,” he says. “But that doesn’t matter to them. What they love about Estonia is exactly what they’ve created in Toronto. It’s their world. Their culture, their language, their people. Their family.”
Kersti thinks about this in the context of Lausanne. Maybe Jay’s right. Maybe all that sentimentality and nostalgia she feels has more to do with her memories of the experience and the people with whom she shared it. Which reminds her the Lycée is one hundred years old today.
She’s been practicing her speech; she fell asleep last night rehearsing it in her head. It’s an honor and a privilege to stand up here as one of the One Hundred Women of the Lycée. I would not be here speaking about my literary career had it not been for the foundation I received as a student in the early nineties, particularly from my English teacher—
“You nervous for today?” he asks, knowing exactly where her mind has gone.
“A bit.”
“I’m proud of you,” he says. “It blows my mind how you never give up on anything. You got us pregnant when I was ready to quit. You believed enough for the both of us.”
“You’re right about that.”
He kisses the top of her head and rubs her belly. “Babe,” he says. “I’ve been thinking. I’d like to name the boys after my Bubbe Chana and Zadie Hyman. They were really special to me.”
“You want to name our sons Chana and Hyman?”
“No. I was thinking Chase and Hayden,” he says, clearly bracing for a fight. “I’ve been pretty flexible with all the Estonian stuff, with the donor. But this is something I really want and it means a lot to me. I know the names aren’t Estonian—”
“I love them.”
“You do?”
“Chase and Hayden,” she says, testing out the way they sound. “They’re kind of perfect.”
“They’re not Estonian.”
“I know that, and I don’t care. Let’s be honest, the babies aren’t really Estonian, are they?”
“Really?” he says, sitting up.
“Maybe their middle names could be Nuut and Jaagup?” she jokes.
“Chase Nuut and Hayden Jaagup,” he says. “I could live with that.”
“Or maybe Chase Jaagup and Hayden Nutt?”
“I like that, too,” he says, lying back down.
“Do you think we’ll be a normal family?” she asks him.
“Of course not.”
“What about happy?”
“I think it’s definitely a possibility,” he says pragmatically. And then, upon further reflection, he says, “Yes. Happiness is most certainly on the horizon for us.”
The phone rings on Kersti’s bedside table and they look at each other. Who would be calling their hotel? She reaches for it with a slight palpitation of dread.
“Mrs. Wax? There’s something here for you at the front desk.”
Jay is looking at her mouthing, Who is it?
“There’s something for me downstairs,” she whispers.
Kersti slides her legs out and hoists herself up off the bed, something that’s becoming increasingly difficult. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
“I’ll go down for you,” Jay offers.
“It’s fine, I’m also going to grab breakfast. The boys need a croissant immediately.”
She bends over and kisses him, throws on one of her maternity sundresses, and heads down to the lobby. The man at the front desk hands her a blank envelope. “Who left this for me?” Kersti asks him.
“I don’t know, Madame. It was left here late last night.” He looks down at a logbook and then back at Kersti. “It was just after midnight.”
Kersti thanks him and takes the envelope. On her way back to the elevator, she looks inside. There are two Polaroid pictures and a note. She removes one of the pictures and stops short.
With shaking hands, she shoves it back into the envelope and rushes over to the front desk. “Who was working last night when this was delivered?” she asks. “Can you look that up?”
“It was Afzal. He starts at five p.m. today.”
“Can you have him call my cell phone as soon as he’s in?”
“Bien sur, Madame.”
Kersti stands in the middle of the lobby for a few moments, waiting for her heartbeat to slow down. Wondering who’s left this for her. And why?
She goes back up to her room with the envelope in hand, having completely forgotten about breakfast.
“What is it?” Jay asks her. “Did you bring me a croissant?”
She wordlessly hands him the envelope.
“I don’t have my glasses—”
“You don’t need them,” she says. “Look inside.”
He opens the envelope and dumps out the contents. “Shit,” he mutters, looking at the pictures. “Who left this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“No idea,” she says, looking at a young naked girl, staring into the camera with a vacant expression. Haunted eyes. Hair spread out on the pillow beneath her. Breasts bare and one hand attempting to cover the patch of black pubic hair between her legs. The Polaroid looks old, possibly from the late seventies or early eighties. Kersti can tell the room is in Huber House but not much else.
“And this one?” Jay holds up the second Polaroid.
“It’s Cressida,” she murmurs, tears springing to her eyes.
Cressida naked. Her legs spread open, her face defiant, seductive. Posing like she wasn’t the victim, which is exactly how she would have acted.
Thinking about you is written on the Polaroid in black marker. Across her body.
“That’s not her room,” Kersti says. “It’s a room in Huber House, but not hers. That wasn’t her bed—”
“Whose was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What the hell was going on at that school?” Jay asks, putting on his reading glasses. “Nothing like this ever happened to you, did it?”
“No. No. Absolutely not. This is . . . I’m shocked.”
“Did any of the male teachers have access to your dorm?”
“Bueche, I guess. Maybe all of them. I don’t know.”
She wonders now if Mahler used to sneak in and visit certain girls, the ones he’d had access to since they were little, who’d been boarding since elementary school.
“Maybe Hamidou knew,” Kersti says, with a wave of despair. “Maybe she was part of covering it up.”
“This is one of those sexually explicit notes,” Jay says, handing it to her.
“I can’t read it,” Kersti says, getting up and going over to her laptop.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking something up.”
She types “Mahler Bobsled ’52 Olympics.” His name pops up immediately. Friedrich Mahler. “Shit.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t remember his name. It’s Friedrich.”
“Who?”
“The coach. He’s German. I thought it might be him but his name doesn’t start with C—”
“What if C was just a code name?”
“What if it was Mr. Fithern?” she says, pacing around the room. “His name is Charles. It makes the most sense. Maybe he’s just a damn good actor and he fooled me—”
“Kersti, please sit down. You’re making me nervous.”
She sits reluctantly, still trying to fit the pieces together.
“What does this all mean?” he asks her, reaching for her hand.
“Cressida was obsessed with those girls who were expelled in ’74,” Kersti says. “I never understood why, but she must have suspected they’d been sexually abused, just like she was being abused.”
“She probably figured out that whatever they spray-painted on the statue of Helvetia incriminated their abuser.”
“And got them expelled,” she adds. “Cressida was determined to get to the bottom of it . . . right up until she fell.”
“Who do you think left this for you?”
“Another of the victims.”
“Someone who’s here for the Lycée’s hundredth birthday.”
“Why give it to me, though?”
“They couldn’t tell you at the front desk who left it?”
“I’m waiting to hear.”
Kersti tosses the Polaroids and the note on the bed, feeling as sad for Cressida as she is confused. “I’m guessing there’s a lot more incriminating evidence in that ledger,” she says.
“Maybe Cressida was going to give it to someone.”
“And someone stopped her.”
“Are you going to tell Deirdre?”
Kersti lies back and stares miserably up at the ceiling. “How can I not?”
“You don’t even know who it was.”
“Someone who was there since the seventies,” Kersti says. “Whose name starts with C. Or doesn’t. You think I remember any of the teachers’ names?”
“And German.”
“Maybe.”
“We’ll start researching after your speech. All that information must be at the school—”
“My speech?” she cries. “Are you fucking kidding me? I can’t stand up there and talk about the Lycée’s hundredth birthday.”
“You’re not. You’re talking about you. This is an honor.”
“No, not anymore. I don’t want anything to do with this school.”
She reaches for the Polaroid of Cressida, drawn to it as though to a car accident. She stares into Cressida’s frozen eyes and sees there, beneath the mask of defiance, a brokenness as plain and straightforward as her beauty. Maybe she was the suicide type after all, Kersti reflects.
And then she notices something. On the very edge of the bedside table, of which only the corner is visible, there’s a pack of cigarettes. Kersti recognizes the navy blue box without having to see the brand. Gauloises.
“Look at this,” Kersti says, grabbing the note. “It’s not the same handwriting as the other C love notes. This one is from Cressida, not to her.” And she reads it out loud.
C, Thinking of you every minute. Your fingers inside me, mine inside you.
C
Kersti lets the note slip out of her hand. Jay picks it up and stares at it. “How did we miss that?” he says, his skin flushing deep red. “It’s a woman.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s Hamidou.”
“Please welcome one of our One Hundred Women of the Lycée, bestselling author and soon to be mother of twins, Kersti Kuusk-Wax.”
Kersti rises amid the applause. She decided to wear her strapless black empire sundress and ballet flats. Less chance of tripping and falling on her face. Turns out it was the right call because the sun is blazing hot today. She can already see the redness flaring up on her shoulders.
It was Jay who convinced her to come and give the speech as planned. In the end, she agreed. Not because she wants to be part of the celebration, but because she wants to confront Hamidou.
Kersti should have put it together a long time ago. Hamidou had everything to lose, everything to hide. She was the one who’d wanted those girls expelled, just like Bueche said. He hadn’t lied about that. Even telling the police about Cressida’s car accident was a way for Hamidou to plant the seed of an alcohol-related accident; it gave the police precedence.
Cressida must have threatened Hamidou the night she got the ledger. Assuming there was incriminating proof of the abuse in it, she probably warned Hamidou she was going to go to Bueche and Harzenmoser with it. Hamidou must have panicked. How could she not? She was a small slip of a woman, but she was athletic and strong. She had remarkable energy. Fueled with fear and rage, who’s to say she couldn’t have pushed a drunken eighteen-year-old off her balcony? And then faked a suicide note?
All this is going through Kersti’s mind as she makes her way across the lawn to the podium. She hasn’t seen Hamidou yet. She looked for her earlier, heart pounding, palms sweating, and was secretly relieved not to have found her.
“Bonjour,” she says, her voice a tremor. “Thank you, Monsieur Bueche.”
She looks out into the crowd and sees Jay, Noa, and Raf, front and center, beaming at her supportively. A few rows back, she spots Hamidou. Their eyes lock. Hamidou smiles and waves. Kersti holds on to the podium and lowers her eyes. She’s sweating. Trickles of water rolling down her back, clinging to the modal fabric of her dress. I know what you are, she thinks.
The audience is silent, waiting. Kersti forces a smile and draws a breath. Her heartburn is killing her. The boys are fluttering wildly inside her belly, probably feeling her stress, reacting to her nervous energy. “It’s an honor and a privilege to stand up here as one of the One Hundred Women of the Lycée,” she begins. “I would not be here speaking about my literary career had it not been for the foundation I received as a student in the nineties.”
She looks up from her notes and connects with Jay. He looks worried.
“My English teacher at the Lycée, Mrs. Fithern, used to tell me I had an unpolished diamond,” Kersti continues. “She always said, ‘You must polish your diamond.’ She encouraged me to read. She’d say, ‘Writers read, luv.’ She suggested I write a short story and I did and it was terrible and all she said was, ‘Keep polishing that diamond, luv.’”
The audience chuckles.
“I didn’t have the confidence back then to even think I could be a writer when I grew up,” Kersti says. “I knew I enjoyed writing, but it was here, at the Lycée, that I first discovered I actually had something worth pursuing.”
She’s struggling to stay focused; her mind keeps going off on tangents. Hamidou. The naked Polaroids. Cressida’s eyes. The dirty note. Who left it for her? And why now?
“But I didn’t just learn to write here,” Kersti plods on. “I also learned to observe and to absorb. We were exposed to so many extraordinary places and experiences, which helped to shape me and pave the way for a lifetime of wanting to create extraordinary places and experiences. I’ll never forget visiting Shakespeare’s birth house in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and then seeing Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Who gets to do that?”
A few people applaud. “I was a kid from Toronto,” she says, glancing up and accidentally making eye contact with Hamidou again. Child molester. Murderer. Are you still a murderer if you take away someone’s life without actually ending it? Kersti looks away, but as she’s about to resume her speech, she notices someone standing behind the last row, over by the path to the tennis courts.
Alison Rumsky.
Kersti’s mind starts racing. What is she doing here? She wasn’t supposed to come. Said she couldn’t. And then all at once, the puzzle pieces slide into place. When they met for lunch in Toronto, Kersti mentioned the ledger, how she was trying to connect it to what happened to Cressida. Alison never asked what the ledger was, didn’t show the least bit of curiosity. It was like she knew.
It never occurred to Kersti at the time that there was no reason for Alison to know about the ledger. She wasn’t even friends with them when Amoryn Lashwood sent it to Cressida. And yet she knew about it. Who told her?
It’s starting to make sense now. Her resentment toward the Lycée. Her wound, her darkness. I can’t go.
Alison was one of Hamidou’s victims.