All The Pretty Dead Girls (25 page)

Among the materials that Sheriff Miles Holland had assembled as part of his investigation over the last few weeks were various accounts of the history of Wilbourne College, culled from newspapers, catalogs, and school yearbooks.

He had suspected that none of them told the full story.

He was right.

The Wilbourne School for Young Women was founded in the fall of 1879. The brainchild of Sarah Wilbourne, the college was established to educate young Lutheran women—in order for them to make contributions not only to American society, Mrs. Wilbourne explained to her church benefactors, but also to the world community. The college’s motto, penned by Sarah Wilbourne herself, was
Service with integrity, courage, and intelligence.
It would all be wrapped in a devout Christian theology, which, Mrs. Wilbourne told her students, was what allowed them to serve at all.

Sarah had originally come to Lebanon by train from Manhattan in 1877, scouting locations for the school she was determined to found. She was favorably impressed by Lebanon’s location, its access to the railroad, and the acres of apple orchards surrounding it. Even more impressive, she told town leaders, were Lebanon’s deep Christian traditions. After she purchased a huge plot of land just outside of the city limits—Mrs. Wilbourne was a wealthy society widow from Manhattan—the architects and contractors began building. Local children often gathered to watch the majestic marble and brownstone buildings rising up from the verdant hills.

The school opened in 1879 with just thirty students, but with many more high hopes. Miss Wilbourne instilled impeccable standards. Students were required to maintain at least a B average, or they were asked to withdraw. The faculty consisted of a few Lutheran ministers and many more devout laymen whom Sarah herself had personally recruited. When Sarah died forty years later, she left her considerable fortune to further endow the school and to ensure its growth and continued excellence.

Since then, thousands of young women had walked past the bronze statue of Sarah that had been erected on the main lawn. Few of them ever even glanced at the image of the woman who started it all, who made it possible for them to be at Wilbourne College. When Wilbourne’s board of trustees voted in 1921 to go sectarian, leaving the Lutheran theology in the past, Sarah’s legacy seemed outdated to some. Still, her name was always invoked at graduation ceremonies with the reverence generally reserved for the holy saints in Catholic churches.

Yet Sarah Wilbourne had been anything but a saint—and the notion that she might be would have made her laugh scornfully.

Her origins were murky, lost in the mists of time. One would-be biographer, a woman named Kathryn Lang, had done her best to track down Sarah’s past, and although her notes were donated to the Lebanon Historical Society and therefore preserved for Miles and Perry Holland to see, Lang herself had died in an automobile accident before she was ever able to write the book. Lang had been unable to discover where or when Sarah had actually been born, but found newspaper articles that documented her marriage, when Sarah was just nineteen, to the widower and wealthy financier Silas Wilbourne. She was described as an orphan and quite beautiful, with porcelain skin, wide blue eyes, and thick silky blond hair that she wore long. Silas Wilbourne, thirty years Sarah’s senior, had discovered her working in a jewelry shop in Brooklyn when he came in to buy a diamond bracelet for his daughter. He was entranced by the girl’s beauty, and returned to the shop the next day to purchase a pocket watch for himself. He returned a third time the following day, he said, for a very special jewel: Sarah herself. He invited her to join him for dinner.

Before long, New York society tongues wagged about the beautiful young nobody with whom Silas Wilbourne was smitten. He escorted her to plays, parties, and fancy society dinners. He bought her expensive clothing and jewelry. Some society ladies presumed Sarah had become Silas’s mistress, but Kathryn Lang believed Sarah’s devout Christian faith would have prevented her from sexual relations with Silas, and that she was holding out to become the next Mrs. Wilbourne.

Kathryn Lang was right about the facts, wrong about Sarah’s reasons.

For, in fact, there was no evidence that Sarah was a Lutheran—or any kind of religious woman—until she began soliciting the church for money for her school. Wilbourne was a high Episcopalian himself, and they married in an Episcopal church. But Silas had little interest in religion, rarely attending services, and Sarah, as the dutiful wife, simply followed his lead. Indeed, in everything, Sarah seemed to subjugate herself to her husband’s will. She seemed determined to prove that those who were skeptical about their marriage were wrong. She had managed to overcome the objections of her husband’s children (both of whom were older than she was) and New York society, all of whom warned Silas against this mésalliance. It was only a matter of time, everyone reasoned, before Sarah tired of her older husband and the marriage descended into the depths of Shakespearean tragedy.

But they underestimated her—a mistake many made throughout Sarah’s lifetime.

Sarah Wilbourne was no one’s fool. She was very well aware that her entire future depended on how she conducted herself in her marriage. She didn’t care about being snubbed by the Astors or other society women. If she and Silas weren’t invited to dinners or parties by the so-called “best” people in New York, she’d put up with it. She didn’t care if her stepchildren openly despised her and slandered her all over the city. Their treatment of her turned their father against them, which was perfectly fine with Sarah—but she also understood her own conduct must be above reproach. No minor flirtations with any man, nothing that could possibly be misconstrued or built into something more serious. Her husband was madly in love with her and denied her nothing. Sarah intended to keep it that way.

And so Silas showered his young wife with gifts, and eventually he liquidated his business—at a huge profit—in order to spend more time with her. They toured Europe, Egypt, and India—and everywhere they went, observers couldn’t help but notice their devotion to each other. Men tried, from time to time, to seduce the pretty Sarah, but she cut them off with scarcely veiled contempt. As the years passed and she continued to be a devoted wife, the women who disapproved of her slowly started to come around. When Silas died, leaving her a very wealthy woman, Sarah grieved very publicly, and those around her took notice. His two children, horrified to discover they’d been cut off without a penny in his will, tried fighting her in court, desperate to wrest some of the family fortune away from her, but by now, society had rallied around Sarah. “Had my husband wanted them to have something,” Sarah told a reporter, “he would have provided for them. But he wanted them to have nothing, and simply because he is now dead does not mean I will cease abiding by his wishes.” A story circulated that Sarah, after the court ruled in her favor, approached her stepchildren, opened her purse, and handed each of them each a quarter. “That is the last cent of your father’s you will ever see,” she said before turning on her heel and walking away.

Now she was finally free to fulfill what she revealed had been her dream all along: the foundation of Wilbourne Collge. She sold the big house on the Upper West Side, and built a house for herself in Lebanon—the house that eventually became the dean’s residence. Her only concern now was the school.

The town of Lebanon never knew quite what to make of the wealthy benefactress suddenly in their midst. The ladies of the town tried to befriend her, and while Sarah was always polite, she kept her distance. No one, for example, was ever invited into her house; she gave no luncheons or parties of her own, except for whatever functions the school might host. The only people who usually saw Mrs. Wilbourne were the students and faculty of the college. Curious townspeople who tried to glean information about her and what went on in her house made no headway with her servants, who were always brought up from Manhattan, never hired locally. In the place of actual information, gossip and rumor tried to fill the gaps. Mrs. Wilbourne, some whispered, had taken a lover: a groundsman from the school perhaps, or—horror of horrors!—one of the unmarried lady faculty members.

The fact that Sarah, still a youthful, pretty woman in her early thirties, never remarried caused many eyebrows to rise. At a lunch raising money for the Ladies’ Christian Charities, one guest asked her about it. With a slight smile, Mrs. Wilbourne replied, “The college is my husband, and the only husband I need.” But around town, stories of guests from “the big city” were common—strange-looking men and women who arrived in Lebanon on the train or by coach, dressed all in black, their eyes always averted from the locals. Still, the gossip never reached a boiling point, for after all, Sarah Wilbourne’s money had helped the town, and not only by founding the college. She built the town library, funded a new city hall building on the square, and always wrote substantial checks for whatever charity approached her.

But no one knew what really went on in her big house on campus. No one ever really knew Sarah Wilbourne, and that was how she preferred to keep things.

One clipping found among Kathryn Lang’s notes was most curious, however. A visitor to the college in 1904 had congratulated her on the occasion of Wilbourne’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Describing the event in
Collier’s
magazine, the writer reported a strange smile on Mrs. Wilbourne’s face after he commented on the generation of “good, Christian girls” the school had turned out. “It was almost,” the writer observed, “as though she were laughing at the suggestion—as though there had been another motivation for building that college.”

Kathryn Lang had underlined that observation and highlighted it in yellow, probably just a few days before she died.

Sheriff Miles Holland had also read it with a keen interest.

No one knew that Sarah Wilbourne had been impressed with Lebanon for reasons that had nothing to do with its pristine location and access to the railroad. No one had made the connection between Sarah Wilbourne and those long-ago city fathers who’d been driven out of Boston with threats of burning at the stake.

When Sarah Wilbourne died, she left her mansion to the college as a residence for the dean. She also left specific and stringent instructions on the hiring requirements for any future dean—having handpicked the ones who served during her lifetime. Her plans for the college stretched well into the future. She died quite contented, knowing she had succeeded far beyond what she—and the others—possibly could have hoped.

The news of Sheriff Miles Holland’s death unnerved Ginny.

She had liked Miles. Liked him a great deal. And, unlike the lazy state police, he had been aggressively looking into the disappearance of Bonnie Warner—not to mention those of Joelle Bartlett and Tish Lewis. Ginny had been horrified to learn that two more girls had gone missing from the campus, and that the administration had kept the news from the faculty and students. But Dean Gregory had announced the dire truth yesterday, confirming reports that had been circulating on the Internet. Increased security had been added all around the school, but already some parents had insisted that their daughters return home now.

Ginny sat at her desk in her office, reading again the report in the newspaper about the sheriff’s death. His neck broken. Bruises on his body as if he’d been dropped from a great height. State cops speculated he had been climbing a tree, maybe to see something. But that made no sense. His body was discovered in the middle of the road, far away from any tree,

“What the hell is going on here?” Ginny whispered to herself.

That’s when the words of Bernadette deSalis came back to her.

It’s absurd,
Ginny told herself again.
It’s impossible. A delusional girl, made more so by a fanatic mother.

Even the sightings of other female divinities seemed proof of that. Bernadette must have been read about the goddess traditions, despite her insistence that she had not. She had read about goddesses like Ishtar and the others—and worked them into her delusions. Father Ortiz believed she was telling the truth, of course, but it was the job of a priest to believe. It was the job of an historian to doubt. To play the skeptic.

Ginny was trying.

Trying very hard to dismiss everything the girl had told her.

But if what Bernadette said was true…

Ginny shivered.

She would definitely interview her again. This was certainly a case for the book. But at the moment, the deSalis family was distraught about the health of yet another child, a teenaged son who’d suffered an apparent heart attack and who was still languishing in the hospital up in Senandaga. Ginny would check in with Father Ortiz sometime tomorrow, and see when it might be good for her to come back and finish talking with Bernadette.

Her phone rang. It was Dean Gregory’s secretary, asking her to hold the line for him. Ginny had been dreading this call.

“Ginny!” came the Dean’s voice, trying to sound warm and friendly. “How are you?”

“As well as I can be,” she replied coldly, “knowing you deliberately withheld information about two missing students.”

“Now, Ginny, it was done to prevent panic. Look at what’s happening now, with all these girls packing up and leaving before the semester is over.”

“Can you blame them?”

Gregory scoffed. “Look outside. Do you not see all the added security?”

There were indeed security guards, big burly men in green uniforms, stationed all over the campus. Many of them were armed. “How can students learn in this kind of pressure, this kind of anxiety?” Ginny asked the dean. “I hope you’ll allow the girls who leave to take incompletes, and not fail their courses.”

The dean sighed. “All of that is being discussed.”

“I just think it’s only fair—”

“Ginny, I didn’t call to debate this issue. I called to find out what you had decided about our conversation the other day.”

She gave him a small laugh. “You mean whether to scrap my curriculum and submit to the censorship of the board of trustees?”

“I see you are still being stubborn. Let’s talk on Monday, shall we, in my office?” Gregory’s voice was so damn smug. “First thing in the morning? Bright and early?”

He had threatened her last time; Ginny felt a dose of his own medicine might be a good thing. “With all the negative publicity being given to your administration over the news of the missing girls,” she said evenly, “I think it would be very unfortunate timing for a well-known teacher to start a fuss about academic freedom.” She let the words sink in. Gregory was silent; he had no comeback. Ginny didn’t think he would.

“Yes,” she told him, “I’ll see you Monday morning. Bright and early.”

He hung up on her.

Ginny laughed.