The Broken Girls(88)

CeCe looked at her mother’s shocked face, felt the puddle growing on the floor beneath her, listened to the baby scream, and started to cry.





Chapter 31


Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

Garrett drove in silence as his car bumped down the drive and onto Old Barrons Road. Fiona leaned back against the seat, pain throbbing up the back of her neck into her skull. Despite the blast of the heater, her hands and feet couldn’t get warm.

“What did Lionel say to you?” Garrett said after a minute.

“What?” Fiona managed.

“You know he’s an old druggie, right?” Garrett said. “Him and his son both. His son blew his brains out—with coke, but he blew his brains out just the same. Lionel has pulled this ‘recovering’ bullshit for thirty years, but I know better. Do you understand?”

“He seemed honest to me,” Fiona said.

“He’s a liar,” Garrett said, and she felt him turn toward her. “Fiona, you have to tell me what he said to you. Right now.”

She would never forget it as long as she lived. “He said you were in the car with Tim Christopher the night my sister died,” she said. “That it was your car.” She looked around. Not this car, no. It wasn’t this car. Garrett had been a cop then, and it had been a cruiser. “That was why no one saw Tim’s car that night,” she said, the words forming slowly. “They saw a cop car instead. But that doesn’t make sense, because you didn’t kill Deb.”

“Of course I didn’t kill your sister,” Garrett said.

“Tim did,” Fiona said, repeating it to herself, because this was the truth—despite everything, despite twenty years of searching and doubting, despite the confusion and the pain, despite what felt like hot pokers inserted into her brain, this was the truth that had not changed. She rearranged the facts, and then, in a brief flash, her mind worked and she understood. “All that talk about Tim being railroaded was bullshit. Tim killed her, but it was you who helped him clean it up. Just like you did with Helen Heyer.”

Garrett sighed. “It was a long time ago, Fiona,” he said, as if she were bringing up some petty grievance. “Twenty goddamned years.”

“What was it?” Fiona asked him. Fear was in her throat, on the back of her tongue. She should never have gotten in the car with him. She should run, but the car was moving. He sat with his hands on the wheel, navigating them over the bumpy back road, and he didn’t even look angry. “What was the agreement? Tim killed girls, and then he called you to clean it up for him?”

“Believe me, I didn’t like playing janitor,” Garrett said, “but it had to be done. The Christophers were important people around here. Good people. Tim had a great future. I did favors for them; they did favors for me. That’s how it works. They had a lot of pull, and if I didn’t help, they’d have replaced me with someone who would. I couldn’t exactly turn them down. And in the end, it didn’t even work, did it? All that risk, all that danger to cover him up, and Tim has been in prison for two decades.” He sounded disgusted. “I risked everything—my career, everything. And just because he got sloppy, they blamed me. After everything I did for them, for Tim. I thought we were friends, colleagues—family, even. They felt more like family than my own wife and son. But Tim screwed up, and suddenly if any of it had come out in court, they’d have hung me out to dry without a second thought. That’s what happens when you deal with certain types of people, Fiona. They use you, and they don’t thank you. They just get what they want from you for as long as they can.”

Fiona stared at him as his words washed over her in waves. “What do you mean, he got sloppy?”

He glanced at her. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that, since she was your sister. I’m just trying to be straight with you here. And I need you to be straight with me.”

She felt like screaming. “What do you mean, he got sloppy?”

“Calm down. I’m not talking about a serial killer here. He had a temper, that’s all, and some girls made him mad. Helen . . . I couldn’t do anything about Helen, but no one had ever seen him with her, so it was easy to drop it.” He glanced at Fiona again. “But your sister—I knew from the minute they called me that Tim was done. Her father was a journalist, for God’s sake. Everyone had seen them fighting, had seen her get in his car. Tim called me and said she’d made him mad, it had gone too far, and I had to help him fix it. Someone would be looking for her soon. I had to think fast, and I didn’t have a lot of options. We had no chance to take her over the state line.”

Deb, Fiona thought. My God, Deb.

“The Christophers owned Idlewild then,” Garrett went on. “I thought we’d dump her there, quick, and I’d be able to go back later and do it proper without attracting any suspicion. It was the only thing I could think of to do. So we moved the body from Tim’s car to my cruiser, and while he dumped her, I distracted Lionel and the kids at the drive-in. I told Tim to hide her in the trees, but the idiot had to put her in the middle of the field like she was a goddamned display. A rush job—he just dropped her and ran, even after I told him not to. How stupid can you be?”

Deb, lying in that field, her shirt ripped open. Dropped like trash in the middle of the field, waiting to be seen. Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land . . . Fiona’s head hurt so much.