The Broken Girls(56)

Fiona clutched her untasted beer. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dad,” Jamie said.

Garrett laughed. “You look surprised. I’m good friends with Jack Friesen, who owns the security company they hired out at Idlewild. He told me about the little incident with you.”

“I’m writing a story,” Fiona managed before Jamie could take up for her again.

“Are you, now?” Garrett asked, and when he looked at her, she saw the face of the man who had testified in court twenty years ago. He’d been younger then, thinner, but his face was the same. He’d been hard then and he was hard now, beneath the florid good-old-boy look. “That seems like a strange story for you to write.”

She shrugged, keeping it light. “Not really.”

“I’d think the last place you’d want to be is at Idlewild when they found another body. But I guess I’m wrong.”

“Dad,” Jamie said again. “Enough.”

They adjourned to dinner, which Diane was serving in the small formal dining room, set with nice china. Outside the window, the Vermont night settled in, and in the darkness all Fiona could see was their own reflections in the glass.

“I talked to Dave Saunders today,” Garrett said to her as he put pot roast on his plate. “He did the autopsy on that body you found.”

Jesus, she’d thought he was retired. Retirement obviously meant nothing to Garrett Creel. “What did he say?” she asked him, sipping her beer and watching Diane’s face pinch. She likely hated talk like this at the supper table, but with a cop for both a husband and a son, she would have to put up with it in pained silence.

“There isn’t much,” Garrett said, sawing unconcernedly at his meat. “Died of a blow to the head, almost certainly. Something long, like a baseball bat or a pipe. Two blows that he can see, probably one to knock her out and one to make sure she was dead. No other injuries. She was a teenager, but small for her age. Dead at least thirty years, based on the decomposition. Has been in the well all this time, as far as he can see, since there was no evidence of animals going at her.”

Diane made a small sound in her throat that her husband ignored.

“Anything else?” Jamie asked, spooning potatoes onto his plate. He was as inured to this kind of conversation at dinner as his father was. “Did he mention any old injuries, things she might have suffered years before she died?”

“Nope,” Garrett said. “Why?”

Jamie glanced at Fiona and said, “We found some evidence that she may have been in a concentration camp during the war.”

Garrett paused and looked up, surprised. Then he whistled as Diane made another displeased sound. “Really? When did you learn this?”

“Just before we came here,” Jamie said. “I thought maybe the autopsy would show—”

“I’ll ask Dave to look again, but he didn’t see anything,” Garrett said. “Concentration camp, maybe you’d see broken bones, broken teeth.” He stabbed his fork into a bite of meat. “She would have been a young girl then. If she was starved, maybe that’s why she didn’t grow very big. Malnutrition. It’s amazing she wasn’t gassed.”

“Garrett, please,” Diane was forced to say.

“Sorry, Mom,” Jamie said, but he turned back to his father and said, “Her family didn’t make it.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a thing,” Garrett said. “To go through all that just to get killed and dropped in a well. Who would kill a girl like that? Sounds like something a Nazi would do, except she came all the way across the ocean to get away from those bastards.” He shook his head. “I was always proud that my dad went over there to help us beat those sons of bitches.”

“Garrett,” Diane said again, and Fiona dropped her gaze to cut her meat.

After supper, which felt interminable with tension, Diane busied herself in the kitchen again, cleaning up, and Jamie helped her. Fiona was left alone in the family room with Garrett as a football game played on mute on the TV. She stared at the screen silently, utterly uninterested in football, until she glanced at Garrett and realized he was looking at her.

And suddenly, she was finished being polite. Just finished. “Listen,” she said to Garrett, knowing the words were a bad idea even as she said them. “Jamie isn’t in the room. I know you don’t want me here. I’ll admit, I don’t want to be here, either. Having dinner with the man who found my sister’s body isn’t my idea of fun.”

He blinked at her, momentarily surprised, but there wasn’t a shred of sympathy in his expression. “What you don’t understand,” he said, “is the influence you have on him. The kind of influence he doesn’t need.”

It took her a second to follow. “Jamie?” she asked. “You think I have an influence on Jamie?”

“He can’t move up if he’s dating you,” Garrett said. “No one trusts a cop who’s in bed with a journalist.”

It was probably true, but Jamie had never said anything about it to her. He’d never shown any resentment. He’d also never shown any burning ambition to move up, which was probably what was bothering Garrett. “That’s his decision,” she said.

Garrett shook his head. “People don’t always make the best decisions,” he said. “So few people understand that you have to look out for your own best interests. All the time. Sometimes I think Jamie understands that least of all.”