Notes on an Execution(36)

“Hi, hi, come in,” Kristen said. “I just popped the pizza in the oven. I hope you’re not starving.”

Saffy shed her shoes while Kristen chattered. Kristen’s house had been Jake’s until six months ago, when he’d asked her to move in—already, Saffy could see where her friend had taken over. Little calligraphy signs and pillows with needlepoint catchphrases like Laughter Is the Best Medicine and It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere! Kristen’s technician’s apron had its own hook in the front hall, glitter smeared across the fabric. Kristen was obsessed with the impending Y2K disaster, and as they crept closer to the New Year, her fixation only grew. She had lined every shelf in the house with stores of canned food and tubs of bottled water.

“Do you mind?” Kristen asked, sheepish, as she pulled half a bottle of chardonnay from the fridge.

Saffy shook her head. Moretti had a set of unbreakable rules—no substances, however casual. By the time Saffy applied to the NYSP, she had gotten entirely clean, with no proof of her past, no arrest records or criminal charges.

“Are you okay?” Saffy asked, as they settled on the couch, Kristen’s fingers fidgeting the stem of her wineglass.

“I’m fine,” Kristen said.

A long quiet.

“Lila,” Saffy said finally.

She and Kristen rarely talked about those years, in which Saffy had drifted through the underbelly of this unforgiving town, mirroring Lila’s downward spiral. Now, Saffy wanted to tell Kristen how the drugs had felt, melting through her veins, how she’d passed entire days lying on a dusty mattress. How she’d known Lila’s life and then grown out of it—how Lila had not gotten the chance to do the same.

“Kristen,” Saffy started. “Do you remember Ansel Packer?”

“Of course,” she said. “That kid was so weird. He was transferred too, when Miss Gemma got sick. Aren’t you working that robbery case?”

“Moretti got me transferred to this one. To Lila’s.”

“God, that woman loves you.”

“I don’t know why she—”

“Oh, shut up,” Kristen said. “You’re the best young investigator they’ve seen in decades. And besides, you make a good story, Saff. Wayward teen turns her life around. You’re like a detective from a TV show, the poor little orphan haunted by her past. Plus, you found that missing boy all on your own—”

“Ansel Packer,” Saffy interrupted. “Do you remember anything strange about him? Anything worrying?”

“I remember he had this way of staring. Like he was trying to figure out how useful you’d be.”

“Anything else?”

“Come on, Saff. He was just a kid. It’s not healthy to go back like this.”

But what else was there? There was only going back. Tracing the lines, there to here. Self to self.

“You know,” Kristen said. Her chin quivered. “For a detective, you’re not very observant, are you?”

Her grin was celestial as she held up her hand. On her left ring finger, Kristen wore a small band studded with twinkling diamonds.

Saffy could not name the despair. It was shallow, crude, the sour taste of milk gone bad. She registered it only long enough to twist herself, arrange her face into the appropriate expression of joy. Kristen let out an excited, shrieking squeal, and the bitterness cracked and fled as Saffy pulled her friend in for a hug. She let the smell of Kristen’s hair products engulf her, with the knowledge she’d harbored for a while now—Kristen was Saffy’s only family, and soon Kristen would not belong to her.

They talked through the evening. They forgot about the movie and about the pizza; it burned so badly that the kitchen filled with smoke and they could only eat the blackened pepperonis off the top. They fell asleep like they used to, head to toe, Kristen’s foot nestled warm beneath Saffy’s shoulder.

The obsession burrowed sometime in the night. Saffy woke up still wearing her jeans, her hand wedged between the couch cushions, that old smell lingering noxious in her throat. Marshy grass, sunscreen. Decomposing skin. The decay of those squirrels, little arms splayed helpless. Kristen was gone—at some point, Jake must have come home. As Saffy studied the detritus of their night, the bloody pizza stripped of its cheesy skin, Kristen’s wineglass greasy with fingerprints, she felt queasy.

Early Sunday morning, and the country roads were empty. Saffy rolled down the window of her patrol car, let the fresh air kiss her oncoming headache. The autumn sun blasted through the trees, dancing shadows along the pavement.

Finally, she reached the trailer park.

It was farther out from the rest of them, Olympia had told her. Like, all the way back. It didn’t look like there should be anything over there.

A mile from where they’d found the bodies, Saffy counted twelve mobile homes. They loomed in the morning mist, arranged in the vague shape of a V. She could hear a small dog yapping, a television murmuring. A phlegmy cough. Saffy climbed out of her car, creeping past a Rottweiler on a chain, its nose twitching at the crunch of her boots.

Olympia was right. At the very edge of the property, there was a single trailer, set fifty feet back from the rest, nearly invisible in the thicket of ruby red trees. Saffy walked circles around the plot, her badge clutched loose in her palm, still wearing her jeans and wrinkled top from the day before.