The Broken Girls(39)

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?”

He sighed. “Listen, Dad would be furious if he knew I was telling you this. What the hell? I’m thirty-eight, you know? I have kids of my own, teenagers. And he’s in Florida, and I’m still worried about what my dad would say if he heard me.”