The Broken Girls(40)

“I know,” Fiona said. “I can sympathize. I really can. But he isn’t here, Mike. And I want to hear what you have to say.”

They were the right words. She knew it, even as the line was quiet for a moment, as he thought it over. Twenty years, and no one had ever wanted to know what eighteen-year-old Mike had seen that night, what he thought, how it had affected him. How it had frightened him.

Because it had. That twenty-year-old fear was buried deep in the tenor of his voice, but Fiona could hear it. It was like a whistle on a dog’s frequency, that fear. Only someone who felt the same would know.

“Tim Christopher came into the shop while I was working,” he said, unaware that he was slicing Fiona with every word, making her bleed. “Dad was here, too. Tim had on a red flannel shirt and jeans and a baseball cap. He was a big guy, football player size, handsome, with hands twice the size of mine. He was by himself. He ordered Rocky Road ice cream, and I took his money. Then he ate it and left. That’s a fact. That’s what happened. Except the thing is, it happened at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

Fiona’s mind calculated wildly. She knew the timeline in detail by memory. At four o’clock in the afternoon, according to the official record, Tim Christopher claimed to have been taking a walk after his last class of the day, alone. He had had a beer with friends at five thirty, the next time any witnesses could vouch for him. At seven thirty, he’d gone to Deb’s dorm room to pick her up, and the two of them had argued, with Carol Dibbs in her bedroom listening through the walls, looking at a clock that was wrong. At seven fifty, they’d left together, and Carol had watched through the window as Deb, still angry, had gotten into Tim Christopher’s car. By eleven o’clock, she was dead and lying on the field at Idlewild.

Tim claimed their argument—Deb was irrationally jealous, he said, and accused him of cheating on her—had gotten so tense that she asked him to drop her off on a downtown street. She didn’t want to be in the car with him anymore, he claimed. He’d dropped her off and driven away, angry. He pinpointed the spot to police. But despite a widespread request in the media, the investigation had never found a single witness who had seen Deb after Carol watched her get in Tim’s car, and now Tim was in prison, serving time for her murder.

A witness who had seen him from nine to ten o’clock, alone, would have made all the difference.

“I don’t understand,” Fiona managed into the phone.

“Me, neither,” Mike agreed. “I know what I saw. I know what time it was, and I damned well know the difference between four o’clock in the afternoon and nine o’clock at night. But Dad was here when Chief Creel came—I wasn’t on shift then. Dad told the chief what he’d seen, and he said nine o’clock. No one ever asked me anything—no one. When I saw that article and asked Dad about it, he got angry. My dad only ever gave me the belt three times in my life, and that was one of them. He told me never to ask about it again.”

Chief Creel. That was Jamie’s father. Fiona’s throat was dry while her hand was clammy on the receiver. “But that testimony never made it to trial.”

“I know. I don’t know what happened. Dad shut me out of everything, and like I said, no one ever asked. That was a bad time. Dad was really weird for a while. I knew it wasn’t a mistake—Dad never made mistakes like that. He never forgot anything, not the prices of his ice creams or my mom’s hair salon appointments or his kids’ birthdays. He knew four o’clock, just like I did. But then I finished school, and I moved out to go to college, and the trial was months later. And I figured Dad must have told Chief Creel he’d made a mistake, because there wasn’t anything said about Tim coming into the shop at all.”

“Okay,” Fiona managed. “Okay, I see. Should I ask your father about it?”

“He won’t talk to you,” Mike said. “And he’ll be mad as hell at me.”

It wasn’t an answer. “You’re not going to give me his number, are you?”

“No, I’m not, Miss Drake. You can get it yourself. And I’ll give you a word of advice.”

“What is it?”

“This case,” Mike said. “If you’re writing a follow-up about it twenty years later, you need to add that people here haven’t forgotten. That’s more important than the timeline or the trial—Tim was convicted because he killed that girl. I believe that. That day, I served ice cream to a man who went on to murder his girlfriend and dump her like a piece of trash. I can still see his face. I still wonder what I could have done. It affected a lot of us, even eighteen-year-old clueless punks working in ice-cream stores that nobody wanted to talk to. My sister was thirteen, and after she read the news reports, she had nightmares. My mother wouldn’t let her out alone. You have to remember what it was like in 1994. No one was on the Internet—no one had grown up looking at this stuff. My kids are growing up inured somehow, less scared than I was. But in 1994, we were scared.”

So was I, Fiona thought. “Thank you, Mr. Rush. I appreciate it.”

She hung up the phone—the receiver was slick with her sweat—and stared at the wall, unseeing. Her head throbbed. Her jaw ached. Unbidden, Sarah London’s words came back to her, the ones she’d spoken right before Cathy had come in and interrupted them.