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He sighed. “Listen, Dad would be furious if he knew I was telling you this. What the hell? I’m thirty-eight, you know? I have kids of my own, teenagers. And he’s in Florida, and I’m still worried about what my dad would say if he heard me.”
“I know,” Fiona said. “I can sympathize. I really can. But he isn’t here, Mike. And I want to hear what you have to say.”
They were the right words. She knew it, even as the line was quiet for a moment, as he thought it over. Twenty years, and no one had ever wanted to know what eighteen-year-old Mike had seen that night, what he thought, how it had affected him. How it had frightened him.
Because it had. That twenty-year-old fear was buried deep in the tenor of his voice, but Fiona could hear it. It was like a whistle on a dog’s frequency, that fear. Only someone who felt the same would know.
“Tim Christopher came into the shop while I was working,” he said, unaware that he was slicing Fiona with every word, making her bleed. “Dad was here, too. Tim had on a red flannel shirt and jeans and a baseball cap. He was a big guy, football player size, handsome, with hands twice the size of mine. He was by himself. He ordered Rocky Road ice cream, and I took his money. Then he ate it and left. That’s a fact. That’s what happened. Except the thing is, it happened at four o’clock in the afternoon.”
Fiona’s mind calculated wildly. She knew the timeline in detail by memory. At four o’clock in the afternoon, according to the official record, Tim Christopher claimed to have been taking a walk after his last class of the day, alone. He had had a beer with friends at five thirty, the next time any witnesses could vouch for him. At seven thirty, he’d gone to Deb’s dorm room to pick her up, and the two of them had argued, with Carol Dibbs in her bedroom listening through the walls, looking at a clock that was wrong. At seven fifty, they’d left together, and Carol had watched through the window as Deb, still angry, had gotten into Tim Christopher’s car. By eleven o’clock, she was dead and lying on the field at Idlewild.
Tim claimed their argument—Deb was irrationally jealous, he said, and accused him of cheating on her—had gotten so tense that she asked him to drop her off on a downtown street. She didn’t want to be in the car with him anymore, he claimed. He’d dropped her off and driven away, angry. He pinpointed the spot to police. But despite a widespread request in the media, the investigation had never found a single witness who had seen Deb after Carol watched her get in Tim’s car, and now Tim was in prison, serving time for her murder.
A witness who had seen him from nine to ten o’clock, alone, would have made all the difference.
“I don’t understand,” Fiona managed into the phone.
“Me, neither,” Mike agreed. “I know what I saw. I know what time it was, and I damned well know the difference between four o’clock in the afternoon and nine o’clock at night. But Dad was here when Chief Creel came—I wasn’t on shift then. Dad told the chief what he’d seen, and he said nine o’clock. No one ever asked me anything—no one. When I saw that article and asked Dad about it, he got angry. My dad only ever gave me the belt three times in my life, and that was one of them. He told me never to ask about it again.”
Chief Creel. That was Jamie’s father. Fiona’s throat was dry while her hand was clammy on the receiver. “But that testimony never made it to trial.”
“I know. I don’t know what happened. Dad shut me out of everything, and like I said, no one ever asked. That was a bad time. Dad was really weird for a while. I knew it wasn’t a mistake—Dad never made mistakes like that. He never forgot anything, not the prices of his ice creams or my mom’s hair salon appointments or his kids’ birthdays. He knew four o’clock, just like I did. But then I finished school, and I moved out to go to college, and the trial was months later. And I figured Dad must have told Chief Creel he’d made a mistake, because there wasn’t anything said about Tim coming into the shop at all.”
“Okay,” Fiona managed. “Okay, I see. Should I ask your father about it?”
“He won’t talk to you,” Mike said. “And he’ll be mad as hell at me.”
It wasn’t an answer. “You’re not going to give me his number, are you?”
“No, I’m not, Miss Drake. You can get it yourself. And I’ll give you a word of advice.”
“What is it?”
“This case,” Mike said. “If you’re writing a follow-up about it twenty years later, you need to add that people here haven’t forgotten. That’s more important than the timeline or the trial—Tim was convicted because he killed that girl. I believe that. That day, I served ice cream to a man who went on to murder his girlfriend and dump her like a piece of trash. I can still see his face. I still wonder what I could have done. It affected a lot of us, even eighteen-year-old clueless punks working in ice-cream stores that nobody wanted to talk to. My sister was thirteen, and after she read the news reports, she had nightmares. My mother wouldn’t let her out alone. You have to remember what it was like in 1994. No one was on the Internet—no one had grown up looking at this stuff. My kids are growing up inured somehow, less scared than I was. But in 1994, we were scared.”
So was I, Fiona thought. “Thank you, Mr. Rush. I appreciate it.”
She hung up the phone—the receiver was slick with her sweat—and stared at the wall, unseeing. Her head throbbed. Her jaw ached. Unbidden, Sarah London’s words came back to her, the ones she’d spoken right before Cathy had come in and interrupted them.
We were all so horribly afraid.
Sonia.
Deb.
It was time to go back to Idlewild.
Chapter 13
Barrons, Vermont
November 2014
Fiona waited until dawn, when the sky had turned cold slate gray and the first neighbors in her building had begun to leave for work. She’d stayed home from Jamie’s last night, begging off with an excuse when he’d texted her. He hadn’t pushed.
So she’d stayed home, done her laundry, thrown out some of the more disgusting remnants in the fridge, and replaced them with fresh groceries. Her apartment was in a low-rise building on the south end of town, on a smattering of old residential streets that had once been intended as a suburb perhaps, but had frozen in size as Barrons itself had stopped growing, like a bug in amber. The rent was cheap, the building was ugly—they made nothing beautiful in the early 1980s—and the apartment itself was functional, filled with secondhand furniture she’d scoured from her parents’ spare rooms and off Internet listing sites. The only artwork on the walls was a framed Chagall print Jamie had bought back in the summer and put up himself. Fiona had wanted to argue with him about it until she saw how the print looked on the wall, with its dreamy figures floating upward, looking into one another’s eyes. She had to admit then that it was the best thing in the entire apartment, and she’d left it up.
She barely slept, and when the sky began to turn light, she rolled out of bed, showered, and pulled on jeans, a T-shirt with a gray flannel shirt buttoned over it, and her hiking boots. She zipped up her heavy late-fall coat and tucked her damp hair into a knit cap against the cold. Then she took the elevator down to the building’s small lot, got in her car, and drove toward Old Barrons Road.
She parked on the side of the road, at the bottom of the hill, near where she’d stopped the car a few nights ago. She’d studied the Idlewild property lines more than once, trying to figure out Tim Christopher’s path with her sister’s body. The west side of the property, past the woods on the other side of the sports field, bordered government land, sealed off with a high fence. The north side contained all the school’s buildings—the main hall, the dorm, the gymnasium and old locker rooms, the teachers’ hall, the cafeteria, the support buildings. Past that, the land dropped off in a slow tangle of thick, weedy brush, wet and muddy, nearly impossible to walk, three miles toward the nearest back road. The south side likewise had no access, deep with brush and freezing mud, spattered with trees, bordered by old overgrown fields. This place, on the east edge where Old Barrons Road twisted up toward the gates of the school—this place was the fastest way to get from a car to the Idlewild grounds if you weren’t driving through the front gate. If you knew your way through the gaps in the old fence.
Fiona swung her legs out of the car and got her bearings. The wind howled a gust straight down the hill, dense with early cold, and too late she realized she’d forgotten gloves. She shoved her hands in her pockets and walked toward the trees.
