“It was a tragedy,” he agrees, placating her. “A terrible tragedy. Madame Harzenmoser and I brought in the police at once and gave them everything they needed to conduct their investigation. We opened up the school to them. Whatever they needed. But if Detective Lashwood ruled it an accident, it wasn’t our place to disagree or challenge him.”
“He ruled it an accident by nine o’clock in the morning?” Kersti says. “How is that even possible?”
“Are you accusing me of something?”
“Yes,” Deirdre responds, straightening her back. “Of persuading your friend to say it was an accident and shut the whole investigation down as quickly as possible.”
“There was plenty of evidence to warrant a proper investigation,” Kersti adds. “But that would have been terrible publicity for the Lycée. It would have damaged your reputation.”
“Of course it would have,” says Bueche. “But I wouldn’t have stood in the way of an investigation. I don’t have that kind of pull with the police.”
“We know how important the Lycée’s reputation is.”
“The students matter far more—”
“Monsieur Bueche,” Deirdre implores softly. “You didn’t want talk of suicide or extramarital affairs with students or the whiff of a possible crime to go public, so you asked your school chum to cover it up. At least tell us the truth. It’s not a crime.
“I’m accountable, too,” Deirdre continues. “I stood by and allowed it to be covered up. I let you and Madame Harzenmoser do nothing because I was protecting Cressida’s reputation—”
“Mrs. Strauss,” Bueche says, still cool and composed. “The truth is the gendarmes did search Cressida’s room that morning. What they found was a half-empty bottle of vodka. She’d been smoking outside on her balcony. Besides that she’d had that car accident a couple of years before—”
“How did the police know about her car accident?”
“I think it was Madame Hamidou who told them when she was questioned.”
“Why? It had nothing to do with anything. Why would she tell them about that?”
“She was trying to be helpful, I suppose,” he says. “It showed Cressida had a history of reckless behavior and heavy drinking. The police made their ruling based on the facts they had at the time. Did they probe enough?” He shrugs, cocks his head to the side. “Perhaps not. But I assumed they did the best they could with what they found. The suicide note came later. We didn’t see any point in reopening an investigation because of the note. Who would it have served? Certainly not you or your family, Madame Strauss. Not our students.” He pauses for a moment, seeming to gather his thoughts and carefully choose his next words. “I assure you that nothing I ever did was with the intent to conceal anything or protect anyone.”
He stands up and comes around to the other side of the desk. “Why bring it all back up now?” he asks Deirdre, his voice softening. “Is there a point? What can be done, really?”
“If someone pushed my daughter, I want to know. At the very least, I want it acknowledged.”
“It’s not going to be easy after all this time,” he says. “But I’ll support whatever you decide. If it’s what you need, I’ll help any way I can. Is there something you want me to do?”
“I’ll let you know,” Deirdre says, standing up. “I just want to say that you did Cressida a huge disservice by impeding a proper investigation. As did I.”
“Nothing was done intentionally.”
“Thank you for your time, Monsieur Bueche.”
Deirdre tucks her purse under her arm and hurries out of the office. Kersti notices the forgotten suicide note on Bueche’s desk and grabs it.
On her way out, she remembers something and stops. “Monsieur Bueche?” she says, turning back to him. “Why did you expel those two girls in 1974?”
“I beg your pardon?” he says, confused.
“Amoryn Lashwood’s friends were expelled in ’74. I know it was for vandalism, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Do you know what they wrote?”
“No. But it was just a couple of words on the statue—”
“The matter was very grave.”
“Students have committed far worse offenses and not been expelled,” Kersti points out. “Cressida included.”
“Those girls were also doing drugs and causing trouble. Madame Hamidou felt very strongly they had to be expelled and the Helvetia Society meetings banned.”
“Madame Hamidou did?”
“Oh yes, she was quite passionate about it,” he recalls. “She thought it was best for the school and I had to agree. It doesn’t happen often that we agree, I assure you. But she convinced me it was the right thing to do for the Lycée.”
Chapter 30
LAUSANNE—June 1998
Cressida holds the leather ledger in the palm of her hands with great reverence, as though it’s some sacred text, the Bible or one of the Vedas. It’s brown with embossed gold letters on the cover that say ledger. It reminds Kersti of her father’s old bookkeeping ledgers when she was a kid. He used to sit in the den after supper with a cup of vodka and piles of receipts and invoices, and enter numbers into columns. He’d have a black pen and a red pen, and there were always a lot of red numbers on the pages.
Cressida opens it slowly, her fingers noticeably trembling. On the first page, tucked deep into the fold, there’s an old photograph, square with a white border and the date in typeface. April 1974.
Cressida pulls it out. It’s a picture of the Helvetia statue, flanked on either side like sentinels by two long-haired teenage girls, their solemn faces backlit by the pale moon, their hands placed defiantly on their hips. The statue has a helmet of black hair spray-painted atop, which, Kersti thinks, must have been a bitch to clean and restore in a single night. There’s a word spray-painted on the Swiss cross of her shield, but it’s impossible to read in the dark, grainy picture. The engraved plaque at Helvetia’s feet is also defaced. Certain words in the slogan, which they can’t read but know by heart—“Preparing Young Women to Become Citizens of the World”—are crossed out and scrawled over with other words, also illegible.
Cressida turns it over and discovers a handwritten note on the back.
Do with this ledger what you wish. I’ve got no objections whatever you decide, only personal regrets. Amoryn El-Bahz.
“What does she mean by that?” Kersti asks her.
“I don’t know,” Cressida answers, but her voice has a strange tremor. “There must be something in here. . . .”
Lille is silent.
“What did they write on the statue?” Kersti says, holding the picture right up to her nose. “Can you see at all?”
“No. Can you?”
Neither Kersti nor Lille can make out the spray-painted words in the picture.
“Why would she send this to you?” Lille asks Cressida.
“I guess because I asked her about it.”
“Why would they expel those girls for spray-painting a couple of words on the stupid statue?”
No one responds. Cressida opens the ledger, handling the thin yellow pages carefully between her fingers.
September 18, 1973. 23:00. Frei House.
Minutes:
Present:
Amoryn Lashwood—President
Brooke Middlewood—Vice President
Tatiana Greenberg—Secretary
Caris Yaren
Fernanda Manzanares
Karen Kim
Donna Murthy
Agenda:
Initiation/ Pledge Night. Sept 30
Dinner for new Taps. [Beside which various restaurant options were scribbled]
Autumn Charitable Events:
Lycée’s own Battle of the Sexes?
“Watergate” Ball ?
The dinner bell rings while the three of them still have their noses buried in the ledger, before they’ve even managed to get beyond the first page.
“Bring it to the dining hall,” Kersti sa
ys.
“Are you crazy?” Cressida snaps. “I don’t want everyone to see it.”
“Who cares?”
“I have to go through it page by page.”
“There’s a lot,” Lille says. “All the minutes from every meeting—”
“She wouldn’t have sent this to me if there wasn’t something worth finding in it,” Cressida says.
“Check the very last page,” Kersti says, growing excited at the possibility of discovering some potentially epochal secret.
Cressida quickly turns to the back page, searching for whatever shocking secret she believes lies within its hallowed pages. It’s dated April 4, 1974. It says only Easter Cuckoo Festival, Sunday Ap 14.
The rest of the page is blank.
“Mesdemoiselles!” Hamidou shouts from the hall. “Souper!”
Cressida slaps the ledger shut. “Meet me back in my room after study hall,” she tells them.
“I’ve got an AP tutorial,” Lille says. “I’ll come here straight after.”
“I’ve got a volleyball match at Aiglon,” Kersti says. “Playoffs.”
“Then we’ll meet after lights-out.”
“Aren’t you sneaking out to see Magnus?”
“I’ll wait for you,” she says impatiently. “Just come to my room as soon as you can. I’ll have found something by then.”
Something. That voluptuous secret, with its claws already in their flesh. What is it Amoryn Lashwood wants Cressida to know? And why Cressida? Simply because she was the one audacious enough to ask?
It’s all Kersti can think about as Cressida shoves the ledger under her duvet and they file out of the room silently, giddy, conspiratorial.
On the dinner chalkboard downstairs, Charcuterie.
“Cold cuts,” Lille mutters. They groan and split up, heading off with resignation to their assigned tables.
As Kersti rolls a cold ham slice around a cornichon, making a wet slimy cigar that she dips in hot mustard, her mind goes back to the ledger and the scandal they might uncover inside it. She wonders if Cressida is somehow connected to it. Why else would Amoryn write a note like that to her? Do with this ledger what you wish.
Kersti’s excitement begins to turn to unease, a languidly creeping fear with tendrils reaching into every part of her body. She doesn’t know why but she feels an ambiguous sense of dread. There’s a voice in her head telling her that Cressida is somehow mixed up in something bad. Why else would she be so inexplicably consumed with what happened to those girls unless she had a personal, vested stake in it?
Kersti looks across the dining room and finds Cressida. Her heart surges. In spite of everything that’s happened over the last four years, she knows they’re kindred spirits. They always have been. Their friendship isn’t something Kersti ever sought or had to work hard for; it simply was, from day one, when they shared chopes and secrets. Cressida is the one person who’s always understood Kersti, who never judged her or expected anything from her other than for her to simply be Kersti. Cressida’s done hurtful things, she’s made mistakes, but her love for Kersti has never been in question.
Their eyes lock. Kersti smiles but Cressida’s expression is remote. She doesn’t smile back.
Chapter 31
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.
The Finishing School Page 21
