The Broken Girls(38)
She had the file she’d pulled from the archives under her arm, so she walked to the scarred old cabinets on the wall to replace it. But with the drawer open and the file in her hand, she paused.
There are references to the Christophers in there, Jonas had warned her.
He was right. She’d seen it when she read the file: a photograph from the opening of the Barrons Hotel in 1971, showing Henry Christopher, dubbed a “prominent local investor and businessman,” standing next to the mayor, wearing a tuxedo and shaking hands while smiling at the camera. He was young, his resemblance to his future son sharp and distinct. At his shoulder was a cool, pretty blond woman in a shiny silk dress, smiling tightly at the camera. In true 1971 style, she was listed in the caption only as “Mrs. Christopher.” Ilsa, Fiona thought. Her name is Ilsa.
She stared at the two faces, both young and attractive, a couple who was married and rich and had it all. Their son, who would grow up to kill Deb, would be born in three years, an only child. When Tim went to prison for murder, Henry and Ilsa left Vermont.
Fiona had glossed over this picture when she’d first seen it, flinching away as one does when seeing an unexpected picture of something gory or dead, but now she made herself look at it. She waited for some kind of emotion to overcome her—hatred of these two people, or resentment, or grief. None of that happened. Henry kept smiling from his chiseled, handsome face and Ilsa kept looking slightly uncomfortable, and Fiona felt nothing but a churning in her gut.
Henry Christopher looked at ease next to the mayor, as if they knew each other well. The Barrons Hotel had closed after barely four years, unable to stay afloat.
Henry Christopher and the mayor, selling Barrons a bill of goods and smiling about it.
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.