The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  When you looked at it that way, it was unmissable. There was a church only several hundred feet away—one of New England’s historical specialties, redbrick with a tall, elaborate white steeple, as pretty as a wedding cake. The clock embedded halfway up the steeple showed the time. Fiona left the parking lot and made her way toward it, crossing the cobblestone walks. She got close enough to the front to read the sign and see that it was called the North Church, and that it dated from 1671, the building itself from 1855. The front doors were open, a cloth Welcome sign propped up outside them. Fiona circled around toward the back.

  She didn’t see anyone—just more tourists and retirees, and a panhandler sitting on the ground, leaning against the church wall, his knees drawn up. That struck her as odd, since panhandlers were rare in tourist areas like this one, most of them moved along by private security or the cops. She looked at the panhandler again and realized he was watching her.

  He was a man, thin and stringy as a kid, in his thirties, his long hair combed back from his forehead. On second look, Fiona realized he wasn’t panhandling at all; he had no sign or overturned hat. He was just sitting against the wall, looking at her. His face was pale and pitted, his eyes sunken, his clothes of good quality but well-worn. He wasn’t homeless, but a man down on his luck, sick perhaps, used to sitting on the cold ground and watching crowds go by.

  She walked up to him and held out the note. “Are you looking for me?”

  His eyes didn’t leave her face as he looked up from his low position on the ground. He watched her for a long time. She saw uncertainty in his gaze, and calculation, and anger mixed with fear. Be careful with this one, she told herself.

  Finally, he smiled and stood up, bracing himself against the church wall. “Hi, Fiona,” he said.

  She stepped back, glad now that they were in an open square in daylight, with people around. This had been a mistake. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m sorry about the note,” he said, watching her reaction. “I didn’t know how else to approach you. It seemed the best way.”

  “Okay, well, I’m here now. How do you know me, and what do you want?”

  The man shifted his weight. Now that they were face-to-face, he made no move to come closer. “My name is Stephen,” he said. “Stephen Heyer.”

  She shook her head. He wasn’t sick, she realized now; he was healthy, his eyes sharp and unclouded. The gray of his skin and his matchstick thinness spoke of addiction instead.

  He looked away, past her shoulder, as if considering what to say. He really hadn’t planned this, she thought. He’d likely thought she wouldn’t follow the note. He scratched the back of his neck with a restless hand. “I followed you here from Barrons.”

  Fiona’s blood went cold.

  “You met with that woman,” Stephen Heyer continued. “I thought maybe . . . But I don’t recognize her. I don’t know who she is.” He looked back at her face, and she saw something naked in his eyes, a desperation that looked painfully familiar. “Does she have something to do with Tim Christopher?”

  Fiona took another step back as if she’d been slapped. “Fuck off,” she said to him, with all the icy cold she could summon into her voice, denying her fear, her sudden shakiness. She turned and walked away.

  She could hear him behind her, trailing her. “Wait,” he said. “You’ve been going to Idlewild. To the restoration. I’ve seen you there.”

  What the hell was this? Some stupid game? She kept walking. “Leave me alone or I’ll call the police.”

  “I go to Old Barrons Road, sleep there sometimes,” he said, still following her, as if he was compelled to explain. “The old man who used to run the drive-in lets me use his place.”

  “You go there to get high?” she shot back over her shoulder.

  “No, no,” he protested. “I have some problems, yeah, but that’s not why. That’s not what I’m getting at.”

  Her mind was racing. If he was a Barrons local, he must have known about Deb. He was around her own age, the right age to have been a teenager when it happened. She racked her brain again for the name Stephen Heyer, trying to put it in context, but she was sure she’d never heard it before, that he hadn’t gone to her high school. She pegged him as some kind of creep, a ghoul, maybe looking to scare her for money. She did not need this shit. She really did not.

  “I’ve seen you,” he said. He was following at her shoulder. He gave off a curiously diminished vibe, as if he was so low on life force that he couldn’t be dangerous. Fiona knew by instinct that she didn’t have to run or scream; if she got in her car and drove away, he’d simply recede, defeated. So she strode purposefully toward the parking lot. “That red hair,” he continued. “It’s unmistakable. I’ve seen you, Deb Sheridan’s sister, the journalist, coming back to Idlewild. Looking, looking, right? They’re restoring it, and you can’t stay away. I figure you must be looking, looking. You think I don’t understand, but I do.”

  Fiona turned and stared at him. He wasn’t lying; he was telling the truth, at least as he knew it. “Listen,” she said to him. “Whatever you think you know, I do not give a shit. Do you understand? Stop following me, or I’ll call the cops. Whatever crazy shit is in your brain right now, I suggest you forget about it. Forget about me. I am none of your business.”

  “You want answers,” Stephen said. He didn’t seem high, but she wondered how long it had been since his last fix. “Closure, right? That’s what they call it. The therapists and group sessions and grief counselors. They don’t talk about what a load of bullshit that is.” He stared at her, and she saw frustration behind his eyes, some kind of crazy pain that spiraled through him, undulled by drugs. He gestured down at himself. “You think I got this way because I got closure?”

  Her mouth was dry. “Closure for what?”

  “You’re not looking hard enough,” Stephen said, echoing his own note. “I’ve been looking for closure for twenty years. Just like you. But I looked harder. And I found you.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what the hell that means.”

  “I know how it feels.” He was strangely eloquent now, his eyes bright, an evangelist speaking the truth he knew best. “You’re all in here”—he tapped his temple—“and you can’t get out. It goes round and round. You’re thinking, thinking—always fucking thinking. The therapists and the grief counselors, they don’t understand. They want you to talk and write things down and share, but nothing makes it go away. I did drugs. You go walking at Idlewild.”

  It was as if he were hitting her with the words, punching her in the stomach. “Did you know my sister?” she rasped.

  “No,” Stephen Heyer said. “But I want Tim Christopher dead.”

  “What—” She tried to get a grip, sound rational. “Are you some kind of death penalty advocate?” Vermont didn’t have the death penalty.

  “I don’t give a shit about the death penalty,” Stephen said, his eyes alight. “I just want him dead. Not for what he did to your sister. For what he did to mine.”

  There are moments when everything shifts, when the world becomes eerily like the kaleidoscope toy given to children, where with the turn of a cheap plastic knob everything changes, becomes different. Fiona looked at the man in front of her and the calm of downtown Portsmouth disappeared; the colors changed; the air smelled different. Everything flew upward, scattered, and landed again. Her head throbbed.

  “Who was your sister?” she asked him. “What did Tim do?”

  “Who is my sister?” he corrected her, his voice bitter. “Helen Elizabeth Heyer, born July 9, 1973. Would you like to meet her?”

  Her voice was a rasp, but she didn’t hesitate, the words slipping out of her as they always did when she was buzzed like this, restless, the madness in her blood. “Yes,” she told Stephen. “I would.”

  “My car is parked over there,” he said, pointing down the street. He sm
iled when he saw her expression. “How the hell do you think I followed you to New Hampshire? I’m a fucking addict, not a bum. It’s a blue Chevy. I’ll pull out and wait for you.”

  “Where are we going?” Fiona asked him, her temples pounding.

  “Back to Vermont,” he said. “I’ll lead the way. You follow.”

  chapter 25

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  The Barrons police department was emptying out at five o’clock, the day staff packing up and going home. They kept a dispatcher on at night, but in a town as small as Barrons, that was all that was needed. A few cops were kept on call in case of emergencies, and a duty officer stayed on until midnight in case of evening domestic disputes, noise complaints, or bar customers that got out of hand. The parking lot was nearly empty when Fiona pulled in, though Jamie’s SUV was still there.

  Holding a file folder in her hand, Fiona walked through the front door and saw the dispatcher sitting behind the front desk. He looked to be nearly seventy, and he was peacefully leafing through a fishing magazine. He looked up with some surprise.

  “Help you?” he said.

  He knew who she was. Of course he did. If he didn’t know she was Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter, dating a fellow cop, she’d eat her journalism diploma. But she said, “I’m looking for Jamie Creel. Is he around?”

  “Are you here to report a crime?” he asked.

  “I’m here to see Jamie.”

  The dispatcher slid a clipboard across the desk at her. “You’ll need to sign in. Name, address, identification.”

  It was bullshit. This was Barrons, not Rikers Island. “Just tell me where to find him.”

  His hairy white eyebrows rose on his forehead. “I’ll have to get my supervisor’s approval to let a journalist in here.”

  “If you know I’m a journalist, then you know my name.” She slid the clipboard back across the desk at him. “Go ahead and write it down.”

  She walked past before he could protest.

  She’d never been inside here, even when Deb died. The cops had interviewed her at the house, sitting in the living room, her parents beside her. I last saw my sister on Sunday, when she visited for dinner. No, I haven’t talked to her since. No, I don’t know where she could have gone. And then, after the body was found: No, she never mentioned anyone following her or threatening her. Yes, I’ve met Tim Christopher. No, I didn’t talk to her that night. They had been exhausted, those cops that interviewed her. Bewildered, maybe in over their heads. Neither of them had been Garrett Creel.

  Jamie was at his desk, a tiny cubicle in the open main room of the station, in front of a 2000-era desktop computer. He was in uniform, though his hat was off and the top buttons of his uniform shirt were undone, the white T-shirt he wore underneath it contrasting with the navy blue. He had obviously heard Fiona’s voice, because he was already watching her when she came around the corner from the front dispatch desk, and his eyes, flat and wary, watched her come toward him.

  “There a problem?” he said.

  “Can we talk somewhere?” she asked him.

  His gaze stayed on her face for a minute, and she knew he was reading her, the fact that she wasn’t here for personal reasons. What did he expect? That she’d bring whatever they had to his work while he was on shift to try to hash things out? He knew her better than that.

  His eyes darted briefly to the back of the dispatch desk, and then to the others in the room—a cop putting his coat on, another standing by the coffee machine—and pushed back his chair. “Come with me.”

  He led her to an interview room, a closet-sized space with two chairs and a table between them. There was no two-way glass, like on TV cop shows. Fiona wondered if Tim Christopher had ever been in this room, if he had ever sat in one of these chairs.

  “What’s going on?” Jamie asked, clicking the door shut behind them.

  Fiona looked at him. Jamie: tall, broad shoulders, dark blond hair worn slightly long and brushed back from his forehead, scruff of gold on his jaw. She’d missed him—but when Jamie wore his uniform, he was less familiar to her, less like the man who had first said Hi to her in a bar on a Friday night. The uniform did that, made him a different man. “Do you know the name Helen Heyer?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “Think,” she said. “Assault case. Unsolved. She nearly died.”

  Jamie put his hands on his hips, forefingers hooked over his hip bones, the classic pose of the cop pulling you over, and narrowed his eyes, thinking. “No, I don’t think so. When was this?”

  “She was assaulted in 1993,” Fiona said. “She was twenty. She’s forty-one now.”

  “I was eight in 1993,” Jamie said.

  “But it doesn’t sound familiar?” Fiona persisted. “She was found just outside the back door of her parents’ home. She’d probably been on the back walkway, coming to the door, when it happened. Someone used a weapon on her, likely a baseball bat. Nothing stolen. She was nearly dead when her father opened the back door to take the garbage out, but her blood was warm. It was quick and silent.”

  Jamie was staring at her. Behind his eyes, she could see him thinking, calculating. Going over the angles. He was telling the truth; he probably didn’t know the case she was talking about.

  But he knew she wasn’t here for a random reason. He knew she was going somewhere. And he was trying to figure out where it was. There was no baffled confusion in his face, just a closed-off determination to figure out what angle she was going to come from, so he could put up a defense before she got there.

  “Did she live?” he asked her. “You didn’t say ‘murder.’”

  “She lived,” Fiona said, swallowing down the lump in her throat. “She’s in a long-term-care hospital in Bowfield. Her cognitive functions were damaged, and she can’t care for herself. She can barely form words, can barely do the most basic functions of life. She hasn’t spoken a complete sentence since the assault.” She held up the file folder she’d been carrying in her hand. “I went to see her this afternoon. No one was ever arrested, Jamie. No one saw the attack, and Helen can’t name her attacker. She was supposed to be dead.”

  Jamie shook his head. “What does this have to do with me, Fee?”

  She slapped the file down on the table, harder than she’d intended. Keep it under control, Fiona. Keep to the facts. “It’s interesting,” she said, opening the folder and pulling out the printouts of newspaper articles that she’d made at home in her apartment before coming here. “It was a big story at the time. The police went to the local media to ask for help. Anyone who had seen the crime, anyone who had seen a stranger in the neighborhood, was asked to call in a tip. It was tragic, a pretty twenty-year-old girl beaten nearly to death, her life destroyed on her parents’ doorstep, left for her daddy to find when he took out the garbage. Beaten while her parents were inside, eating supper and watching Jeopardy!” She spread the articles out. “But not one of these pieces reported what her brother told me this afternoon. Helen had a boyfriend—a new boyfriend. He was big, handsome, rich, and she was excited. His name was Tim Christopher.”

  Jamie had been looking down at the printouts—the school photo of Helen Heyer on the top page, her lovely oval face, framed by dark hair that she had placed smoothly over one shoulder for the photograph, smiling for the camera—but when she said Tim’s name, he looked up sharply. “What?”

  “Her parents didn’t know,” Fiona said. “The relationship was physical, and her parents would have been horrified that their daughter had given up her virginity—but her brother found out about it. She swore him to secrecy, begged him not to tell their parents about Tim. She was swept up by him. She thought Tim was wonderful, most of the time. According to her brother, there were occasions she was quiet and withdrawn because she and Tim had had a fight. But then she’d forgive him, and all would be well agai
n.”

  Except for the part about not telling her parents, it was Deb, her exact pattern with Tim, except further back in time. Deb had been so excited to be dating Tim. She was twenty, and thought that the world held bigger and better things for her than life in Barrons with her nerdy parents and their middle-class income. She’d seen wide horizons with Tim, probably because he’d promised them to her. And Helen was Deb, a year before Deb met Tim and died.

  She watched the knowledge flicker across Jamie’s face. She read him closely. He hadn’t known about Helen, yet he didn’t register surprise or even shock. What settled into the corners of his eyes was a heavy kind of knowledge, as if he was hearing something he hadn’t known but could have guessed would happen. Still, his voice was tense, defensive. “Did they think Tim was a suspect?”

  “When Helen’s brother told the cops about Tim, they questioned Tim. At his parents’ home, not at the station. One conversation, and then they dropped it.”

  “Then he must have had an alibi.”

  “He said he was at the movies at the time—alone. Nothing to back it up. He also claimed that he had never met Helen Heyer, had no idea who she was, and certainly was not dating her.”

  “Maybe he was telling the truth.”

  She stared at him in shock. “You realize you’re talking about the man serving life in prison right now.”

  “Just because he committed that crime doesn’t mean he committed this one.” Jamie sighed. “Fiona. I told you, I know nothing about this case. But if there was no arrest, it’s because the officers in charge of the investigation didn’t find enough evidence to arrest a suspect. It’s their job to close cases, their job to chase these things down. You’re looking for something that isn’t there.”

  “Isn’t there?” she nearly shouted. “If the police had done their job, even a little, Tim would have been arrested before Deb even met him. She would be alive.”

  “Assuming Tim did this,” Jamie countered, indicating the articles strewn on the table. “This girl was hit with a baseball bat, not strangled. She was left at her parents’ house, not dumped in a field. Deb was seen with Tim dozens of times, while this girl was not. What evidence do you have that he was dating her at all?”