Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

Jamie’s parents lived in a bungalow that had been built in the 1960s, covered with vinyl siding in the 1970s, and never touched since. It sat on a stretch of road heading out of downtown Barrons, where the houses had been built close together with neat square yards crowned by wooden porches.

Jamie’s father, Garrett Creel Jr., opened the door as they climbed the front steps. He was still massive at sixty, broad-shouldered and tall, his ruddy face emphasized by his short-cropped sandy hair. He could have worn a sign around his neck that said I AM A RETIRED POLICEMAN and no one would have batted an eye. He clapped his son on the shoulder and gave Fiona a kiss on the cheek. His lips were dry and chapped, his hand clammy, and Fiona gritted her teeth and smiled as she greeted him. The house wafted with the radiant smell of roast beef.

“Come on in, come on in!” Garrett bellowed. “Diane, they’re here.”

She came around the corner into the front hall, a small woman in a helmet of permed curls that had been in vogue somewhere around 1983, making a beeline for Jamie, who had just handed his coat to his dad. “There you are,” she said, as if he were somehow delinquent, even though he’d obediently answered her summons to dinner and arrived right on time.

She pulled Jamie down to her—he was much taller than she was, mirroring his father’s height, if not his heft or his looks—and kissed him with a loud, possessive smack, then held his face so he could not look away. She did not look at Fiona yet, and the way she held Jamie’s face, he couldn’t look at her, either.

“Your hair is still too long,” she said to her son, patting his dark blond strands. “And this beard. What is this?” She touched it with possessive fingers. “Your father spent thirty years on the force with a haircut and a clean shave.”

Jamie smiled, waited her out, and straightened when she let him go. “Mom, you remember Fiona.”

“Yes, of course.” Diane tore her gaze from Jamie and turned to Fiona. “Finally. I’ve made pot roast.”

Fiona nodded. She could do the girlfriend thing. It just took some practice, that was all. “It smells delicious,” she said.

Diane gave her a tight smile. “Catch up with your father,” she told Jamie. “Dinner is almost ready.”

Garrett was already handing them each a beer and shepherding them into the living room.

“So here you are,” he said, squeezing Fiona’s shoulder. “Jamie’s mother has been asking for this forever. You two have been together for how long now?”

Jamie shook his head. “This isn’t an interview, Dad.”

“Of course not. Just never thought I’d see the day I had Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter in my living room, that’s all.”

He said it jovially, with an unmissable undertone of disbelief, and there it was. The history that always pressed down on her, the past that never left. She was with Jamie partly because she never had to talk about it with him, but that was when they were alone. She realized now, standing in this outdated living room, listening to Jamie and his father swap news of the force, that with his family the history would always be thick. She also realized that she’d known it for the past year, which was why she’d put off coming to dinner.

As if to prove it, Garrett swigged his beer and turned to her. “I hear you were at Idlewild, Fiona. Trespassing. Climbed the fence and everything.”

Fiona clutched her untasted beer. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dad,” Jamie said.

Garrett laughed. “You look surprised. I’m good friends with Jack Friesen, who owns the security company they hired out at Idlewild. He told me about the little incident with you.”

“I’m writing a story,” Fiona managed before Jamie could take up for her again.

“Are you, now?” Garrett asked, and when he looked at her, she saw the face of the man who had testified in court twenty years ago. He’d been younger then, thinner, but his face was the same. He’d been hard then and he was hard now, beneath the florid good-old-boy look. “That seems like a strange story for you to write.”

She shrugged, keeping it light. “Not really.”

“I’d think the last place you’d want to be is at Idlewild when they found another body. But I guess I’m wrong.”

“Dad,” Jamie said again. “Enough.”

They adjourned to dinner, which Diane was serving in the small formal dining room, set with nice china. Outside the window, the Vermont night settled in, and in the darkness all Fiona could see was their own reflections in the glass.

“I talked to Dave Saunders today,” Garrett said to her as he put pot roast on his plate. “He did the autopsy on that body you found.”

Jesus, she’d thought he was retired. Retirement obviously meant nothing to Garrett Creel. “What did he say?” she asked him, sipping her beer and watching Diane’s face pinch. She likely hated talk like this at the supper table, but with a cop for both a husband and a son, she would have to put up with it in pained silence.

“There isn’t much,” Garrett said, sawing unconcernedly at his meat. “Died of a blow to the head, almost certainly. Something long, like a baseball bat or a pipe. Two blows that he can see, probably one to knock her out and one to make sure she was dead. No other injuries. She was a teenager, but small for her age. Dead at least thirty years, based on the decomposition. Has been in the well all this time, as far as he can see, since there was no evidence of animals going at her.”

Diane made a small sound in her throat that her husband ignored.

“Anything else?” Jamie asked, spooning potatoes onto his plate. He was as inured to this kind of conversation at dinner as his father was. “Did he mention any old injuries, things she might have suffered years before she died?”

“Nope,” Garrett said. “Why?”

Jamie glanced at Fiona and said, “We found some evidence that she may have been in a concentration camp during the war.”

Garrett paused and looked up, surprised. Then he whistled as Diane made another displeased sound. “Really? When did you learn this?”

“Just before we came here,” Jamie said. “I thought maybe the autopsy would show—”

“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.

She looked at Jamie and wanted to tell him that his father had made Richard Rush lie about Tim Christopher’s alibi. There was no way to prove it. Garrett would deny it, and so, she was sure, would Richard. There was only Mike Rush’s word, and Mike had already said he wasn’t interested in invoking his father’s anger. Mike hadn’t known he was talking to Deb Sheridan’s sister when he told the story, because Fiona had lied to him. She had lied without a second thought, and if she had to do it over again, she would do it without a second thought again. And again.

But she wouldn’t tell Jamie. There was no point. He was a cop; his father was a cop; his grandfather was a cop. There was no need to make him believe. There was just hurt and anger, and confusion. Even if they patched it up, she’d hurt him again. Or he’d hurt her. Again.

“Jamie,” she said.

“Don’t.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, then dropped it again. “Fee, we can’t do this. Just . . . for now, okay? There’s too much shit going on. Just for now.”

She stared down into her lap. The anger had gone as quickly as it came, and now she felt shaky and a little ashamed. But Jamie was right. She couldn’t do this right now. Not even for Jamie.

Still, the idea of getting out and going home alone made her ill. For the first time, she wondered: When will this be over?

But she already knew the answer to that. So she got out of the car.

When he drove off, she stood watching for a moment, her hands in her pockets.

When his taillights disappeared, she turned and climbed the stairs to her apartment.