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“I’ll ask Dave to look again, but he didn’t see anything,” Garrett said. “Concentration camp, maybe you’d see broken bones, broken teeth.” He stabbed his fork into a bite of meat. “She would have been a young girl then. If she was starved, maybe that’s why she didn’t grow very big. Malnutrition. It’s amazing she wasn’t gassed.”
“Garrett, please,” Diane was forced to say.
“Sorry, Mom,” Jamie said, but he turned back to his father and said, “Her family didn’t make it.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing,” Garrett said. “To go through all that just to get killed and dropped in a well. Who would kill a girl like that? Sounds like something a Nazi would do, except she came all the way across the ocean to get away from those bastards.” He shook his head. “I was always proud that my dad went over there to help us beat those sons of bitches.”
“Garrett,” Diane said again, and Fiona dropped her gaze to cut her meat.
After supper, which felt interminable with tension, Diane busied herself in the kitchen again, cleaning up, and Jamie helped her. Fiona was left alone in the family room with Garrett as a football game played on mute on the TV. She stared at the screen silently, utterly uninterested in football, until she glanced at Garrett and realized he was looking at her.
And suddenly, she was finished being polite. Just finished. “Listen,” she said to Garrett, knowing the words were a bad idea even as she said them. “Jamie isn’t in the room. I know you don’t want me here. I’ll admit, I don’t want to be here, either. Having dinner with the man who found my sister’s body isn’t my idea of fun.”
He blinked at her, momentarily surprised, but there wasn’t a shred of sympathy in his expression. “What you don’t understand,” he said, “is the influence you have on him. The kind of influence he doesn’t need.”
It took her a second to follow. “Jamie?” she asked. “You think I have an influence on Jamie?”
“He can’t move up if he’s dating you,” Garrett said. “No one trusts a cop who’s in bed with a journalist.”
It was probably true, but Jamie had never said anything about it to her. He’d never shown any resentment. He’d also never shown any burning ambition to move up, which was probably what was bothering Garrett. “That’s his decision,” she said.
Garrett shook his head. “People don’t always make the best decisions,” he said. “So few people understand that you have to look out for your own best interests. All the time. Sometimes I think Jamie understands that least of all.”
She stared at him. This conversation was surreal. “Jamie is a good man.”
“What do you know about it?” he asked softly, and suddenly she knew, in a perfect premonition, that he was about to hurt her. That he was about to hurt her hard. “Tim Christopher was a good man, too, before his life was ruined.”
For a second, she had no words at all. “What did you just say?” she managed.
“I’ve always wondered,” Garrett said. “A witness who saw them arguing, and a drop of blood on his leg? That’s circumstantial evidence.” He shrugged, but the look he gave Fiona was deep and sharp. “Maybe he was railroaded. Don’t you ever wonder?”
“Stop it.” The words came out like someone else’s voice. “Just stop.”
“I’m not the only one,” Garrett said. “Because you can’t leave it alone.”
There was the snap of the dishwasher closing in the kitchen, the rush of water. Diane laughed at something Jamie said.
“It’s been twenty years,” Garrett said softly. “You think Jamie doesn’t tell me?”
Fiona felt her dinner turn in her stomach, a rush of acid up her throat.
“Wandering around on Old Barrons Road,” Garrett said. “Climbing the Idlewild fence. Deep down, you wonder about it just the same as I do. You’re a mess, sweetheart.”
His gaze was fixed on her, the same gaze he’d used to pin liars and wrongdoers in thirty years of policing. “I was one of the first called out to that field,” he told her. “Some kids called it in. I had just come on shift. The only other cop on shift was Jim Carson, and he was barely twenty. No way would I let a kid like that be the first at a body. I took him with me, sure. But I knew it had to be me.”
Fiona was silent now, unable to look away.
“Everyone remembers,” Garrett said. “Everyone remembers, but no one remembers it quite like I do. Before the circus descended, when it was just Jim and me and the crows in the quiet of that field, looking down. I looked at her and thought, Whatever this is, this will be the worst thing this town has ever seen. This will be the beginning of the end.” He blinked. “It really was, wasn’t it? It really was. Tim’s life was over. The Christophers left. People locked their doors after that.”
“You told Richard Rush to lie,” Fiona said. The words were hard, but they came. The idea she’d had since she’d read the article and talked to Mike Rush about his father. “You went into his shop and you made him do it somehow. You told him to say that Tim Christopher was there at nine o’clock. And he did. But he must have retracted it for some reason, because it never made it to court.” When I saw that article and asked Dad about it, he got angry, Mike Rush had said. 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.
“Are you going to do this?” Garrett asked her, his eyes on her, never leaving her. “Are you going to do it, twenty years later? Those are serious words, Fiona. I suggest you take them back.”
But she wouldn’t stop, not now. “Why did you make him lie?”
“What’s going on here?”
Jamie stood in the doorway, watching them. His gaze flickered to his father, then to Fiona.
“Thanks for coming, son,” Garrett said, his voice cold. “I think the evening is over.”
Jamie was quiet the entire drive home, his jaw tight. Fiona looked briefly at him, at the lights of passing cars washing over his profile, and then she looked away, watched out the window.
He didn’t speak until he pulled up in front of her apartment building, and then he put the SUV in park without turning it off. “It was something to do with Deb, wasn’t it?” he said, still staring ahead. “What you and my father were arguing about. It was something to do with this obsession of yours that won’t go away.” He paused. “You made him angry. What did you say to him?”
She stared at him. “No one is allowed to make the great Garrett Creel angry—is that it?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jamie said, and his voice was almost as cold as his father’s. “What did you say to him, Fiona?”
And suddenly she was angry, too, so furious her hands were shaking. “I told you this was a bad idea. I warned you it wouldn’t work.”
“You said you’d try. A couple of fucking hours. You didn’t even try to get along.”
“Is that what everything is about with you?” she asked, lashing out at him, taking out all the anger she couldn’t unleash on Garrett. “Just getting along?”
“Those are my parents.” His voice was rising. “That’s my dad.”
“Jamie, you’re twenty-nine.”
He stared at her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“He baited me. He started when we walked in, and he twisted the screws when he was left alone with me. He defended Tim Christopher, Jamie. This was what he wanted to happen.” And she’d given in to it. She’d walked right into the trap. What did that say about her?
“Dad wouldn’t do that,” Jamie said. He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe you misunderstood. God, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”
“You’re dating a journalist,” she said. “You’re a cop, and you’re dating Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter. Your family hates it. I’m sure your fellow cops hate it. Your sacred brotherhood. And I didn’t misunderstand anything. Tell me, do you and your dad ever sit around over beers and shoot the shit about my sister’s case?”
Jamie went still and said nothing.
“You knew,” she said to him. “That night we met at the bar. You knew who I was. You knew more about my sister’s case than I did. Your father was the first on the scene with my sister’s body. How did you think this would work, Jamie? Why the hell did you talk to me at all?”
“Don’t put this on me,” he shot back, furious. “You’ve always known, Fee. From that first night, you knew who my father was. He was chief of police in 1994. You knew he worked that case. You sat through the entire fucking trial, all the testimony, read the papers. So why the hell did you talk to me?”
The silence descended, heavy and tight.
This is why, Fiona thought. This is why I haven’t done this, ever. Not with anyone. Why I’ve always said no.
Because there was always Deb. And there always would be. Easy or no easy.
