Lost Among the Living(106)

Fiona bit back the protest she could feel rising in her throat. Jamie was right. She swiveled and looked into the darkness across the road, where the old drive-in used to be, now an abandoned lot. The big screen had been taken down long ago, the greasy popcorn stand razed, and now there was only a dirt clearing overgrown with weeds behind the trees. She remembered begging her parents to take her and Deb to the drive-in as a kid, thinking with a kid’s logic that it would be an exciting experience, a sensory wonder. She’d soon learned it was a fool’s quest. Her intellectual parents would no sooner take them to the drive-in to see Beverly Hills Cop II than they would take a walk on the moon. Deb, three years older and wiser, had just shaken her head and shrugged at Fiona’s disappointment. What did you expect? “There wouldn’t have been many kids at the drive-in on a Thursday in November,” she said.

“But there were kids there,” Jamie said with the easy logic of someone whose life hadn’t been ripped apart. “None of them remembered seeing Christopher’s car. This was all covered in the investigation.”

Fiona felt a pulse of exhaustion behind her eyes, countered by a spurt of jagged energy that wouldn’t let her stay still. She turned and paced away from the hill and the lights of the gas station, toward the darkness past the hood of her car at the other end of Old Barrons Road. “Of course you think they covered everything,” she said to Jamie, her voice coming out sharper than she had intended. “You’re a cop. You have to believe it. In your world, a girl gets murdered, and Vermont’s greatest minds come together to solve the case and put the bad guys away.” Her boots scuffed the gravel on the side of the road, and the wind pierced through the legs of her jeans. She pulled up the collar of her coat as a cold shudder moved through her, an icy draft blasting through the layers of her clothes.

Jamie wasn’t rising to her bait, which was one of the things that drove her crazy about him. “Fiona, I know they covered everything because I’ve been through the file. More than once. As have you, against all the rules and regulations of my job. It’s all there in the murder file. In black and white.”

“She wasn’t your sister,” Fiona said.

He was quiet for a second, acknowledging that. “Christopher was charged,” he said. “He was tried and convicted of Deb’s murder. He’s spent the past twenty years in maximum-security prison. And, Fee, you’re still out there on Old Barrons Road at three o’clock in the morning.”

The farther she walked, the darker it got. It was colder here, a strange pocket of air that made her hunch further into her coat as her nose grew numb. “I need to know how he did it,” she said. Her sister, age twenty, had been strangled and dumped in the middle of the former sports field on the abandoned grounds of Idlewild Hall, lying on one side, her knees drawn up, her eyes open. Her shirt and bra had been ripped open, the fabric and elastic torn straight through. She’d last been seen in her college dorm thirty miles away. Her boyfriend, Tim Christopher, had spent twenty years in prison for the crime. He’d claimed he was innocent, and he still did.

Fiona had been seventeen. She didn’t much like to think about how the murder had torn her family apart, how it had affected her life. It was easier to stand on the side of the road and obsess over how Christopher had dumped her sister’s body, something that had never been fully understood, since no footprints had been found in the field or the woods, no tire tracks on the side of the road.

Jamie was right. Damn him and his cop brain, which her journalist brain was constantly at odds with. This was a detail that was rubbing her raw, keeping her wound bleeding, long after everyone else had tied their bandages and hobbled away. She should grab a crutch—alcohol or drugs were the convenient ones—and start hobbling with the rest of them. Still, she shivered and stared into the trees, thinking, How the hell did he carry her through there without leaving footprints?

The phone was still to her ear. She could hear Jamie breathing, waiting. Always waiting for her. Waiting for her to get over Deb’s death; waiting for her to change her mind and move in with him; waiting for her to become a great journalist like her father. She wondered if he would ever get tired of it. She decided not to ask.

She heard the scuff of a footstep behind her, and froze.

“Fiona?” Jamie asked, as though he’d heard it through the phone.

“Ssshh,” she said, the sound coming instinctively from her lips. She stopped still and cocked her head. She was in almost complete darkness now. Idlewild Hall, the former girls’ boarding school, had been closed and abandoned since before Deb died, the gates locked, the grounds overgrown. There were no lights here at the end of the road, at the gates of the old school. Nothing but the wind in the trees.

She stiffly turned on her heel. It had been distinct, a footstep against the gravel. If it was some creep coming from the woods, she had no weapon to defend herself. She’d have to scream through the phone at Jamie and hope for the best.

She stared into the dark silence behind her, watched the last dying leaves shimmer on the inky trees.

“What the f*ck?” Jamie barked. He never swore unless he was alarmed.

“Ssshh,” she said to him again. “It’s no one. It’s nothing. I thought I heard something, that’s all.”

“Do I have to tell you,” he said, “to get off of a dark, abandoned road in the middle of the night?”