The Broken Girls(83)

Maybe she was coming down with something. Her head was throbbing, and her throat was still sore. She dug in her cupboards and found some ibuprofen, some cold meds, an old Halls. She took the pills and popped the Halls in her mouth, wincing at its waxy old texture and menthol taste. She had no time to be sick, not now. Not yet.

She needed to settle some things.

She put on her coat and boots, pulled a thick wool cap over her still-wet hair, and walked out the door after grabbing her keys.

The dawn was gray, the wind icy and bitter, which meant only one thing: snow on the way. It was nearly December, and from now until April, Vermont would fight the winter battle as it always did. Old Barrons Road was quiet, though Fiona could see movement on the Idlewild property through the trees. The pause to retrieve Sonia’s body was over, and the restoration had started up again.

But she didn’t go to Idlewild this time. She found the rough, overgrown driveway on the left-hand side of the road instead of the right, and followed it into the overgrown weeds where the drive-in used to be. She remembered walking along Old Barrons Road, talking to Jamie on the phone. It felt like years ago. But he’d reminded her that the old drive-in had still been open in 1994. On the night Deb died, it hadn’t been running any movies, because November was the off-season, but it was still a hangout for kids who liked to drink in an abandoned lot. The police had interviewed as many of those kids as they could find, but none of them recalled seeing Tim Christopher’s car parked at the side of Old Barrons Road, which he must have done in order to dump Deb’s body.

The drive-in had closed sometime in the late nineties, and like most people, Fiona had assumed that it was an empty lot. Until she’d met Stephen Heyer in Portsmouth, and he’d told her that he’d seen her because he slept here sometimes. The old man who used to run the drive-in lets me use his place.

Her car rumbled over the dirt path, brushing the clumps of overgrown weeds. The screen was long gone, as was the popcorn stand, but a sign remained, placed along what was once the driveway where the cars would patiently line up, waiting to pay admission. It was a four-foot billboard, showing a dancing hot dog and a can of soda, doing a jitterbug on cartoon legs. WELCOME TO OUR DRIVE-IN! the lettering proclaimed. Water had damaged the edge of the billboard, and time had faded its colors, but surprisingly the vandals and graffiti artists had left it alone, a relic in the abandoned lot.

Fiona pulled the car just past the sign, to where the open lot was, and put the car in park. She was cold, her spine shivering, though she was huddled in her coat with the heat on high. Snow coming, she thought. She looked around. Where the hell does Stephen Heyer sleep in this place?

She pulled out her phone, thinking to call someone about something important, but then she stared at the display, bewildered. Her thoughts were moving too fast, spinning out of her hands. I’m not sick. I’m not. She thumbed through her contacts and almost dialed Jamie, just to hear the rumble of his voice. But she flipped past his number and dialed Malcolm instead.

She got his answering machine. She could picture it, a literal machine, an old tape-recording answering machine that sat in his phone nook—because of course her father had a phone nook—next to his nineties-era landline phone. The phone rang, and the machine whirred to life, sending Malcolm’s voice down the line, asking her to leave a message. And then a loud beep.

“Daddy,” she said, “there’s something I have to tell you.” She told him about Stephen Heyer, how he’d found her, what he’d told her. About how she’d seen Helen Heyer, who had nearly been beaten to death with a baseball bat by Tim Christopher the year before he’d met Deb. She was still talking when the machine cut her off.

She hung up.

You’ll kill him with this shit, Jamie had said.

And then her father’s voice, when she was fourteen and her mother didn’t want the distressing picture he’d taken in Vietnam framed and put on the wall. Do you think they won’t see the real world, Ginny? he’d said. Do you think the real world will never come to them?

Fiona touched her cheeks. There were tears there, though they were cold and nearly dry. She wiped them off with her mittened hands and got out of the car.

The wind stung her cheeks. She walked across the clearing that had once been the parking area of the drive-in, where everyone would have parked facing the screen. Her boots crunched on the dirt and old gravel. The sky lowered, angry and gray. She walked toward where the screen would have been, trying to see past the rise there. She couldn’t see anyone or any cars, but she noticed that the abandoned lot was scrupulously clean, free of litter or garbage, which didn’t compute with a place teenagers had been using for decades.

At the other end of the gravel she saw it. An old house, set back, nearly hidden by trees. A trailer, parked farther back in the shadows. A pickup truck on the drive. Hell, she thought, someone really does live here.

“Help you?” a voice said.

She turned to see a man of her father’s age, though heavily muscled, his head shaved in a military crew cut. He wore a thick parka, boots, and old army pants, but it was the rifle slung casually across his forearms that Fiona stared at, cradled in his grip a little like a baby.

“I’m looking for Stephen Heyer,” she said.

The man shook his head. “He’s not here.”

Fiona blinked. Her eyelids were cold in the wind. “He told me he sleeps here sometimes.”