The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  “You saw Tim Christopher in the shop that night? The night of the murder?”

  “He was here, yes.”

  There was a hesitance in his voice that tripped Fiona’s wires. “But?”

  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.

  It was dark in the thicket of trees, even though the canopy of leaves was gone. The trunks were narrow, packed dense, hard to see past. As the light came through the other side of the trees, Fiona saw Anthony Eden’s new fence, a high chain-link with signs posted warning trespassers to keep away. Keeping the kids out, as well as the vagrants and the curious people and any other locals who had been using this land since the school closed in 1979.

  Gritting her teeth at the cold metal against her bare hands, Fiona climbed the fence. By the time she got to the top, she was sweating beneath her coat. Normally she ran for exercise, a route she did around her neighborhood and back, but lately she’d fallen off the wagon.

  From her high vantage point, she could see across the grounds. The main school building loomed off to her left, its teeth bared at her in the dim light. I see you, it seemed to leer. Behind it were the shapes of the school’s other buildings, blurred in shadow. Farther toward the other end of the property she could see the ruins of the well, indicated by the last strips of police tape that had cordoned off the site. Beneath her was the edge of the sports field. There was no one in sight, and no cars sounded on the road behind her through the trees. Fiona swung her leg over the top of the fence and started down the other side.

  What the hell are you doing here, Fiona? The question came as her hiking boots hit the ground. It was Jamie’s voice, as clear as if he were standing at her shoulder, shaking his head. She walked across the field and toward the buildings as the wind buffeted her hat. She shoved her hands in her pockets again.

  She had no interest in getting inside any of the buildings, even though she’d watched Anthony key his security code into the main keypad and memorized it in case she needed it later. She skirted past the main building, forcing herself to stop and look up into its grim face, to stare at its blank windows and sagging roof. She tried to picture Sonia here, standing where she was right now, having escaped an unknown hell in Europe only to come to a strange country and face this forbidding building, her new home. Had she felt relief, or had she been just as frightened here as she’d been in some godforsaken concentration camp?

  Past the main building, she followed the same path she and Anthony had walked, toward the dining hall. As she passed the garden, icy cold in its dank shadows between buildings, her phone vibrated with a text. Fiona took out her phone and swiped it with a numb finger. It was Jamie.

  Why do I have the feeling you’re not home in bed right now?

  Fiona stopped, staring down at the words. How the hell did he know? She wiped tears of cold from her eyes and typed a reply. Wrong. I’m snug under my covers, asleep.

  His reply was immediate. Oh shit. Where are you?

  Fiona blew out a frustrated breath. She didn’t mean to make him worry; she really didn’t. He didn’t have to. She could handle it. She was handling it. She quickly typed I’m fine and sent it, then dropped the phone back into her pocket.

  From the corner of her eye, a shadow moved in the garden.

  She turned and looked. It was an animal, perhaps—a fox or a rabbit. Gone now. But from the corner of her eye, the shape had been . . . strange. Nothing like an animal. Smooth, sinuous, like something bent, bowing its head to the ground.

  Over the silence came a faint high-pitched sound. Fiona turned back, facing the way she’d come, listening. Voices? No, not voices, exactly. Music. Someone was playing a song, back out past the main building, in the direction of the field.

  She started toward it. She couldn’t catch the tune, exactly, though it sounded familiar—it was too far away, the wind whipping it and dispersing it. Who the hell was at Idlewild, playing music at this hour? Some teenager with an MP3 player? She started to jog as she rounded the side of the main building, her heart speeding up. Someone was here, messing around—there was no reason to be afraid. But there was something about the music—the familiar rhythm and cadence of it, which her brain hadn’t quite placed—that made her wonder if she was alone here. That made her realize she was armed with absolutely nothing with which she could defend herself.

  There was no one in front of the school, no one visible on the muddy half-dug road or in the dark stand of trees. No one at the gate. The music didn’t come from there anyway—it was coming from the direction of the field.

  There was someone in the field.

  Fiona stopped dead when she saw the figure. It was a woman, small and slight—a girl, perhaps. She wore a black dress that was long and heavy, a costume from a bygone era. She faced away, looking off at nothing over the field, utterly still.

  What the hell was going on? There had been no one in sight when she’d straddled the fence minutes ago. Fiona approached the girl, consciously making noise so she wouldn’t startle her, noting that the girl had no coat in the cold. “Hello?” she called as she started over the field, her boots sinking into the cold muddy grass. “Hello there?”

  The girl didn’t move. Wind bit into Fiona’s hands, snaked down the neck of her coat, making her nose run. The girl didn’t turn, didn’t move. She was wearing some kind of hat or hood, black, so Fiona couldn’t see the back of her head clearly. The music grew stronger, and sounded like it was coming from the trees. She recognized it now, the familiar tune sung in the familiar voice, a song she’d heard a thousand times: Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” Deb’s favorite song, the one she’d danced to in her room most often, mouthing the lyrics and doing hip-popping disco moves as her little sister, Fiona, watched and clapped.

  Fiona slowed, hesitated. That song, with its peppy beat overlaid by Gloria Gaynor’s vulnerable yet determined voice, had been difficult to avoid for the past twenty years. It was still a popular song, so much so that Fiona had trained herself to no longer think of Deb when she heard it. She made herself think of pink pantsuits and multicolored stage lights and fresh-faced girls wearing fake eyelashes and blush, instead of her sister in her pajamas, standing on the bed, pointing cheesily across the room. But why was this song playing now, over the cold landscape of Idlewild Hall at dawn on a November morning?

  The sky seemed to lower, and as the sun came up behind the clouds, the morning light turned a strange white shade, turning the trees dark and the ground vibrant, every detail visible in sudden perfection. Fiona took a step and kicked something with the toe of her boot. She looked down and saw it was a wreath of plastic flowers.

  That’s it, she thought with certainty, listening to the wind flap in the fabric of the strange girl’s dress over the strains of Gloria Gaynor’s voice. This is a dream.

  Because strewn over the grass between her and the girl was a litter of flowers, wreaths, cards, teddy bears—the detritus people leave at the site of grief. The same detritus that had been left in this place after Deb’s body was found. Fiona looked around and realized, belatedly, that the girl was standing in the exact spot that Deb had lain with her coat open and her shirt torn, her eyes open to the empty air.

  She looked down again. ANGEL, read one of the handwritten cards, the writing now blurred and soaked. She toed another cheap bouquet of plastic flowers, bright yellow daffodils and pink roses. Next to it was a crumpled cigarette package, cellophane winking in the light
. The same garbage she’d seen when she’d come here at age seventeen. It’s a dream. A nightmare. I’m still in bed. I never got up.

  She raised her gaze to the girl again. She hadn’t moved. Fiona was closer now, and she could see the girl’s narrow shoulders, the weave of the thick fabric of her dress. The wind picked up a scrap of fabric, blowing it around her head, and Fiona realized it was a veil. Beneath it, Fiona caught a glimpse of golden brown hair tied tightly at the back of the girl’s neck.

  There was something otherworldly about her, but since this was a dream, Fiona decided not to be afraid. “Who are you?” she asked, thinking, She looks so real, I can see her breathing. “What are you doing here?”

  No answer. No acknowledgment that the girl knew Fiona was there. Fiona had just lifted her hand to touch her—what the hell? It was a dream—when she heard her voice being called. A deep male voice shouting her name in the wind.

  She turned. A man in a black coat was striding over the field toward her. Anthony Eden.

  “Fiona!” he shouted.

  Did he see the girl? Fiona glanced back over her shoulder and froze. The girl was gone. She looked down; the wreaths and cards were gone, too. Gloria Gaynor was silent.

  “Are you trespassing?” he asked as he came closer. He was out of breath, flustered, his thinning hair blowing in the cold wind. “That is not a good idea. Security is just coming on shift. If they’d seen you, they would have called the police.”

  “I—” Fiona couldn’t speak. She was still in shock from what she’d just seen—whatever it was. Am I losing my mind? “I was just—”

  “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here.” He took her arm and tugged her gently, pulling her across the field toward the main building. “It’s a good thing I came by this morning to check on the progress and saw your car, or you would have been in trouble. I can’t think of why you came. I hate this place, myself.”