Notes on an Execution(62)

Saffy always fought the urge to roll her eyes. She considered quitting therapy altogether, but she wanted to set an example for her young investigators, men who hid behind the manufactured masculinity of police work, making halfhearted gay jokes as they spit their tobacco. She was captain now. She knew how carefully they watched her.

As Saffy studied Ansel, his boots thunking up the stairs toward the Blue House, she remembered Laurie’s words, the wise, infuriating tilt of Laurie’s head. What about your child self?

Fine, Saffy thought, acquiescing, as Ansel approached the door. What about her?

Saffy still missed that little girl sometimes, alert in the top bunk as midnight rolled toward morning. Her desire had been so clear: she had wanted her mother back from the dead. She’d wondered so constantly about her father, he’d taken on a mythical sort of importance, like justice or truth, forever unknowable. Though her childhood was steeped in grief, things had been easier at Miss Gemma’s, when she knew exactly what to wish for, when that simple wanting ran beneath everything, a constant streaming current.

But it was gone now. Saffy had shed that sense of longing, had shrugged it off during her rebel teen years or her bumbling twenties. She had replaced it with case reports filed at three in the morning, backroom interrogations that made her suspects cry, seven-hour drives just to interview a witness. Saffy examined the back of Ansel’s head as he disappeared into the restaurant. She wondered what of that yearning he’d managed to shed—or maybe, more importantly, what he had held on to.

*

The interior of the Blue House was homey and bright, dingy and decaying, a family establishment that had clearly passed its peak. A tinkle came from the bell above the door, announcing Saffy’s entrance, inciting a minor pang of panic—this was a bad idea. She should drive home, catch the pizza dinner in Kristen’s backyard, a tradition after soccer games.

But it also felt necessary. Surprisingly right.

“What can I do for you?”

The woman at the hostess stand was smiling warmly. Her hair frizzed behind an elastic headband and her apron was stained with ketchup and grease. Mid-thirties, Saffy guessed. A name tag had been pinned, lopsided, to her apron. Rachel.

“Just an iced tea,” Saffy said, nodding toward the bar. She tried to sound more like herself and less like police, though the line between the two had determinedly blurred. “And where can I find your bathroom?”

As Rachel pointed her toward the back of the restaurant, Saffy scanned quickly for Ansel. It didn’t take long. He sat at a table by the window, in a rickety chair that faced a young girl. A teenager. Her hair was braided and flung over one shoulder—she looked shy, nervous.

When Saffy reached the bathroom, she locked the door, breathing through the unfamiliar sensation. Terror, new and sharp. With her underwear around her knees, Saffy exhaled into her palms, bleach and urine and fried food engulfing her in a noxious cloud. She felt foolish, paranoid. But as Saffy ran the tap water hot, rinsed her trembling hands, she could not unsee it. The longing in Ansel’s gaze. That girl was young. Too young.

Back in the dining room, a glass of iced tea waited at the end of the bar, sweating a pool of condensation onto the peeling vinyl.

“Any food today?”

Saffy shook her head, tongue thick. As Rachel disappeared back into the kitchen, the door swung shut, and Saffy saw the photograph. It was tacked to the kitchen door, printed in high quality, blown up in a frame. A small altar had sprouted up around the photo, dried flowers pinned around handwritten notes. The man in the photo smiled out from a blue-paneled wall—this very house—with a little girl on his hip, her arms twined around his neck. The image jolted Saffy into a heightened discomfort. It was not his name—Ellis Harrison—or the dates, 1977–2003, he had died at age twenty-six—or even the little girl, clearly a younger version of the teenager who sat in the corner now. It was the shape of the man’s face. The tilt of his smile. He looked very much like Ansel Packer.

“Actually,” Saffy said, when Rachel returned, “I’ll take a tuna melt.”

Saffy forced bits of sandwich into her mouth, listened hard. The placement of the bar kept her back to Ansel’s table, but she caught select words, echoing phrases. The girl’s voice. Foreclosure notice from the bank. I don’t know what we’ll do.

“How long have you been open?” Saffy asked Rachel, when the check appeared in a greasy plastic folder.

“My husband and I bought the place in ’97. Been running it ever since.”

Saffy nodded to the memorial on the kitchen door. “You run it all alone?”

Rachel leaned against the bar, exhaustion appearing in the crinkle of her eyes. “I’m not alone. I have my daughter.”

They both turned to watch. Ansel was running a hand absently through his thinning hair. The girl blushed, swirling a plastic straw around the dregs of ice in an empty cup of Coke. A stark, unreasonable fear bubbled up Saffy’s throat. Run, she wanted to scream. Get away from that man.

“How old is she?” Saffy asked instead.

“Sixteen.” Rachel rolled her eyes, brightening. “Though Blue seems to think she’s thirty.”

Saffy left a twenty on the table, floated back out to her car on quavering legs. The sun beat along the pavement, furious. Ansel and that girl.

Sixteen.

Just the age he liked them.