The Broken Girls

She should quit this, but instead she closed the file and moved two cabinets down, to the files from the 1990s. She dug out 1994, the year of Deb’s murder, and opened it.

She had never read Lively Vermont’s coverage of the murder, assuming it had been covered at all. In the 1990s the magazine hadn’t gone through its lifestyle phase yet and was still trying to be a newsmagazine, though it did its best to be the splashy kind that was in favor at the time. They’d changed the format to Rolling Stone–like larger, thinner paper and tried to put sexier stories on the cover. Ah, the last days of magazine glory, Fiona thought wistfully, looking through the year’s issues, when everyone was still making money.

She could not have explained why she was doing this any more than she could explain why she’d walked Old Barrons Road, watching the patterns of cars, in the middle of the night. Maybe it had to do with seeing a spark of Malcolm’s old spirit earlier. Whatever the reason, it was a compulsion. Her blood started prickling as she paged through the issues of the magazine, the back of her neck tightening as it had the other night. I can’t stop this. I can’t.

The murder wasn’t a cover story—that was too tabloidy for Lively Vermont—but they had covered the story after Tim Christopher’s arrest in a longish piece entitled “No Peace: Murder of a Local Girl Puts an End to Innocence in Rural Vermont.” Fiona winced at the headline at the same time her eye caught the piece’s byline: It had been written by Patrick Saller, a former staffer Fiona was familiar with who had been cut loose in one of Lively Vermont’s many staff purges and still freelanced the occasional story.

It wasn’t a bad piece; Saller had done his homework. There was a timeline of Deb’s disappearance and murder that was correct, including the clothes Deb had last been seen in (white blouse, dark green cotton pants, light gray raincoat, black knit hat) and the fact that her roommate, Carol Dibbs, had been confused about the time she’d last seen Deb because of clocks that gave two different times in their shared apartment.

The photos, too, were better than the ones taken from the wires in every news story of the day: the outside of Deb and Carol’s dorm building, looking forbidding and cold; a portrait of Deb cropped from a photo of her twentieth birthday two weeks before the murder, her hair flying, her face relaxed in a laugh. Their parents had released photos of Deb to the media when she went missing, but everyone used the more formal one, showing Deb sitting demurely with her hands in her lap; the snapshot Saller had picked was blurrier but, Fiona thought, showed Deb’s true personality better. The biggest shot was of the field at Idlewild Hall, as Fiona herself had seen it days after the body was removed, littered with wreaths and garbage.

It was as if Saller had gotten a shot of Fiona’s own memory, and she stared at it for a long time, remembering what it had felt like to stand there, wondering what the hell she had expected to see, her feet freezing in her sneakers, snot running onto her upper lip. The memory brought a wave of nausea with it, as if Fiona were temporarily seventeen again, in the middle of that dark tunnel with no way out, with strangers for parents and teachers who gave her meaningful looks. For the rest of that school year—which she’d barely passed—she’d been That Girl, the one whose sister had been murdered. It had been a year of therapy sessions and irrational anger and a sort of blank, terrifying grief, accompanied—thank you, adolescence—by a skin breakout that had refused to go away.

It’s over, she reminded herself. It’s over.

Yet twenty years later, she was sitting at a desk in the magazine’s empty offices, reading the story.

But as she scanned the article, something jumped out at her. Something she had never seen before.

It was buried in an account of the evidence, pieced together from various sources, since the trial had not yet happened. The facts were familiar. In Tim’s defense, there were no witnesses to the murder; Deb had not been raped, and had no skin cells or bodily fluids on her; though he wasn’t a straight-A student, Tim was known as a decent, good-looking guy from a good family who wasn’t violent. Counteracting this were the hairs in his backseat, the fact that he was the last person seen with her, the fact that he and Deb had fought loudly and often, including on the day she was murdered, and—most damningly—a smear of her blood on the thigh of his jeans. The blood was likely from Deb’s nose, since blood had been found in her nostrils as if she’d been hit, and it had probably been wiped there absently from Tim’s hand when she’d bled on him.

The biggest question was that of Tim’s alibi. At first, this was a blank in the narrative of Deb’s last night, like a passage that had been blacked out; but Patrick Saller had interviewed the owner of Pop’s Ice Cream, an ice-cream parlor on Germany Road, twenty minutes from the university campus. “He was here that evening,” Saller quoted the shop’s owner, Richard Rush, as saying. “Just after nine o’clock. He was alone. He ordered a cup of Rocky Road and stayed here, eating it, until we closed at ten.” Rush claimed that Tim was the only customer in the shop for much of that time, and therefore no one else had seen him. Deb’s time of death had been placed at sometime between nine and eleven o’clock.

Fiona stared at the paragraph, reading it over and over. The words blazed in front of her eyes, then blurred again.

None of this had been mentioned at the trial, or in any other coverage of the case. At trial, Tim had had no alibi for the time of the murder, claiming he had gone home alone after dropping Deb off after a fight. He admitted to hitting her and making her nose bleed, but nothing else. His lack of alibi had been part of what had brought a conviction. Tim’s testimony had never mentioned Pop’s Ice Cream at all.

If Richard Rush was his alibi, at least until ten o’clock, why hadn’t it been presented in court? It wasn’t complete, but it cast reasonable doubt on the timeline. What the hell had happened? Why would a man fighting a murder charge not present testimony like this? Had it been discredited somehow?

Leave it. Even as she was thinking it, Fiona had put the magazine down and was reaching for the phone on the empty desk she was sitting at. Leave it. She Googled Pop’s Ice Cream on her cell phone and saw that it was still in business, still on Germany Road. She used the landline to dial the number, in case the place had a call display.

“Pop’s,” said a voice on the other end of the line.

“Hi,” Fiona said. “I’m looking for Richard Rush.”

It was a long shot, but she had nothing to lose by trying. “Um,” said the voice, which was teenage and so far indistinguishable between male and female. “Does he work here?”

“He used to own the place,” Fiona said.

“Oh, right. Um. Let me get the owner.”

Fiona waited, and a minute later a thirtysomething male voice came on the line. “Can I help you?”

“Hi. I’m looking for Richard Rush, who used to own the shop in the 1990s. Do you know who I’m referring to?”

“I should.” The voice gave a flat laugh. “That’s my dad.”

“Is Mr. Rush still working, or is he retired?”

“Dad is retired. Gone to Florida,” the man said. His tone was getting cooler now, guarded. “Who am I speaking to?”

“My name is Tess Drake,” Fiona said. Tess Drake was the receptionist at her dentist’s office, and she’d always liked the name. “I write for the magazine Lively Vermont. I’m doing a follow-up story to a piece we did in 1994.”

“Well, I’m Mike Rush,” the man replied, “and I’m surprised. I don’t think Lively Vermont has ever done a piece on us. I’ve worked here since I was sixteen.”

Score again. Fiona should have been playing the slots with that kind of luck. “It wasn’t a piece about Pop’s, exactly,” she said. “It was a story about a murder that happened in 1994. A college student. Your dad was interviewed. It’s the twenty-year anniversary, and we’re doing a follow-up piece.”

“You’re talking about Deb Sheridan,” Mike said. “I remember that.”

Fiona’s throat seized for a brief, embarrassing second. She was so used to everyone tiptoeing around Deb in her presence that it was strange to hear this man, who had no idea who she was, say the name so easily. “Yes. That’s the one.”

“Horrible,” Mike said. “I remember that night.”

“You do?”

“Sure, I was working here. I told you, I started when I was sixteen. Dad had me working the store with him that night.” Mike paused, as if something uncomfortable was coming back to him. “I never really knew what to think.”

“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?”