Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

It hurt. Everything did. The world came and went—voices, sounds, hands, hot and cold. Fiona’s head was like an overblown balloon, a deafening pounding in her temples. She opened her eyes and saw an unfamiliar ceiling, heard an unfamiliar voice. She closed them again.

She woke and realized she was in a hospital bed. It was the middle of the night, and she was alone. She was painfully thirsty. Someone far down the corridor was talking in a low voice, then laughing quietly. She can’t get me here, Fiona thought with a hot wash of relief, and then she fell asleep again.

When she woke again, her father was there.

Her head was a little clearer this time. Weak sunlight came through the window; it was day, then. Malcolm was sitting in a chair next to her bed, wearing a short-sleeved button-down checked shirt, faded cargo pants, socks, and sandals. A pair of black rubber boots sat by the doorway—he always wore rubber boots in winter, then sandals inside the house. His longish gray-brown hair was tangled and tucked behind his ears, and he wore his half-glasses as he read the newspaper in his lap. He hadn’t noticed she was awake yet.

Fiona stared at him for a long moment, taking in every detail of him. “Dad,” she said finally, breaking the spell.

He lowered the paper and looked up at her over the tops of his glasses, his face relaxing with pleasure. “Fee,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back at him, though her throat hurt and her lips were cracked. “Am I okay?” she asked him.

“Well.” He folded the newspaper and put it down. “You have a lovely case of the flu, mixed with hypothermia, and frostbite was a close call. Plus the bruising on your neck. But they say you’ll be fine.”

She struggled into a sitting position, and he helped her, handing her a glass of water from the bedside table. “What happened?”

“You called me,” Malcolm said, smoothing her hair. “Remember?”

She did, though her memories were disjointed, out of order. “I wanted to tell you about Stephen Heyer.”

“Right.” He smoothed her hair again. “You left me a long message. I listened to it when I got home from the grocery store. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what the hell to do. While I was pondering it, my phone rang again. This time, it was Lionel Charters.”

Fiona put down the water glass. Her hand was shaky, but she focused on keeping the glass upright. “Lionel phoned you?”

“It was the strangest thing,” Malcolm said. “I’ve known who he is for years, of course. You know he runs a kind of informal rehab center in his old trailer? Lionel’s son died of an overdose, and ever since then, he’s let addicts stay with him while they try to dry out. It doesn’t always work. They do drugs out there, and they deal, and sometimes there’s trouble. But Lionel’s intentions are good.”

Fiona just sat, listening to his voice as he stroked her hair. He’s an old druggie, she heard Garrett Creel say. His son blew his brains out with coke. She had so much to say, so many questions to ask. But Malcolm was telling the story, and she was so tired, drifting on his voice. Once Malcolm was on his track, there was no distracting him.

“Lionel is no friend of the media,” Malcolm continued, “but he hates the police more. So he called me and said my daughter had just been on his property, looking for Stephen Heyer. That you seemed sick. He said Garrett Creel drove up, and pushed you into his car with him, and he drove off.”

“He told me . . .,” Fiona said, then drummed up her strength. “He was at the drive-in the night Deb died. He told me . . .”

“I know what he told you,” Malcolm said. “I know what Lionel saw.”

She tried to swallow hard in her rasping throat. “You knew? About Garrett’s cruiser being there?”

Her father’s hand had stopped stroking her hair. It had gone stiff and tense and still. He looked past her at the wall, his eyes unreadable. “No,” he said, his voice deceptively calm. “But I know now.”

He looked, for a second, like the stranger who had been at Tim Christopher’s trial, the stranger who had sleepwalked through her parents’ divorce. But then his face softened into mere sadness. Fiona wanted to say something, anything. “Dad,” she managed.

“Lionel let you get into that car,” her father said.

She couldn’t tell if it was a question. “He was aiming his gun,” she said. “But he couldn’t shoot.”

“He told me that, too,” Malcolm said. “I told him he should have tried harder. Then I hung up on him and called Jamie.”

Fiona thought of Jamie’s father, his knee in her stomach, his breath in her face. I knew you would do this. His hands on her throat. She must have tensed, because Malcolm smoothed her hair again.

“Where is he?” Fiona said. “Where is Garrett?”

“At the moment?” Malcolm said. “I can’t quite pinpoint. Likely a holding cell. Or maybe he’s talking to his lawyer.” He patted her shoulder as she leaned into him in relief. “Jamie couldn’t reach his father,” he said, continuing the story, “and he couldn’t reach you. So he got backup and drove to Lionel’s place. He found his father’s car parked outside the Idlewild gates.” He sighed. “I didn’t go with him, so I only heard secondhand. But from what I know, they went inside, and Garrett shot at them.”

“What?” Fiona said, pulling away from him and sitting up. Her head spun.

“Hush, Fee,” Malcolm said. “The shot nicked Jamie’s hand, but that’s all.”

“I didn’t know he had a gun,” Fiona said. Garrett must have had it stowed in the car somewhere, probably the trunk, which was why he hadn’t used it on her. “Is Jamie okay?”

“He’s fine,” her father said. “They had to return fire, but no one was hurt. They found you, in one of the bedrooms of the old dorm, calling for help before you passed out on the floor, with his hand marks on your neck. They arrested Garrett. And here we are.”

She was shaking; she should call the nurse. They must have her on some kind of medication, something for the pain and the inflammation. She was so tired. “He tried to kill me,” she said. “He tried to strangle me in the field off one of the back roads. He was going to kill me and dump me.”

“I know,” Malcolm said. “The doctors examined your neck. Garrett hasn’t talked, but the police will come to take your statement.”

“He covered up for Tim. With Helen.” The words were jumbling in her head, but she felt the urgency, the importance of getting them out before she sank into sleep again.

“I know, honey,” her father said again.

You’re going to kill him, Jamie had said. There was no going back. Not from knowing that Tim could have been stopped before he ever met Deb. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she said.

He blinked and looked down at her. “For what?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t have gone.” The words coming up through her pained throat. “I should have left it alone. But I thought— I started to wonder whether it was possible that Tim hadn’t done it. Whether it was possible that whoever had killed Deb was still out there.” She felt tears on her face. She remembered Deb, sitting in the chair by the window, but she couldn’t tell him about that. She wasn’t even sure it was real. “I kept going over the case and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”

Malcolm looked thoughtful, and then he stroked her hair again. “You were seventeen when it happened,” he said. “You had questions.” He sighed. “I didn’t have the answers, and neither did your mother. We couldn’t even answer our own questions. I’m afraid, Fee, that we left you to deal with all of it alone.”

“That isn’t it.” She was crying now, the sobs coming up through her chest as she heard Deb say, I was so scared. She pressed her face into his checked shirt, smelling his old-school aftershave and the cedar smell of the old drawer he’d pulled his undershirt from. “I should have just left it. I’m just so sorry.”

He let her cry for a while, and she felt him drop a kiss to her temple. “Well, now,” he said, and she heard the grief in his voice, but she also heard Malcolm Sheridan. Always Malcolm Sheridan. “That isn’t the way I raised you, is it? To leave things be. It’s just you and me left, Fee. That isn’t how we wanted it, but that’s how it is. And you’re my daughter.” He let her tears soak into his shirt as her sobbing stopped, and then he spoke again. “Besides, Helen’s family never had an arrest, a conviction, like we did. We can fix that, and we will.” He kissed her again. “Get some sleep. We’re going to be busy.”

She wanted to say something else, but her eyelids felt like sandpaper, and she closed her eyes. Sleep took her before she could speak.

The world was disjointed for a while, images passing by like dreams. She had a long, vivid dream of running across the field toward the trees, the dead brush scraping her shins, her breath bursting in her chest, as Garrett ran after her. Crows called in the stark sky overhead. Fiona jerked awake over and over, disoriented, before falling back into the same dream again. She had another dream of waking to the sight of her hand in Jamie’s, lying on the bed. His hand was bandaged, her fingers curled around it. She was aware of him, could see the familiar strong bones of his hand, the lines of his forearm, but she did not look up to see his face before falling asleep again.

The fever broke sometime the next day, and she sat up in the bed, sweaty and weary, drinking apple juice, as the police took her statement. Malcolm sat in the back corner of the room, listening, his sandals on over his socks, his newspaper folded on his lap.

She did not hear from Margaret Eden, but she heard from Anthony. When she was well enough to get her cell phone back from her father (“What do you need that thing for?”), she answered his call. He told her he was sorry, and he asked if there was anything he could do. She had the beginning of an idea, an itch at the back of her mind, and she asked Anthony a question. The answer he gave her put all the pieces together, and she realized it had been in front of her all along.

She had her answers now.

She would go to the Idlewild girls as soon as she was well again. But she had a suspicion that they’d come to her first.