Notes on an Execution(64)

The woman said it could take a while, Kristen had told her, attempting reassurance. The agency had been Kristen’s idea—she’d first mentioned it as they opened the box of decorative pillows they’d ordered from India. Saffy was renovating, with Kristen’s help, relying on her friend’s impeccable eye for color. A few years ago, when Saffy first started researching Indian culture—religion and art, geography and food, the basics that might have been passed on by her father—she had commissioned a framed painting of Jaipur, done by a Rajasthani artist. She’d hung it on the wall in her bedroom, an instinctual comfort she often studied as she fell asleep.

Saffy knew very little about her father. Only that he’d been a visiting student in the same University of Vermont sociology program as her mother, a young man from Jaipur who’d returned before she was born. Shaurya Singh. A recent cursory search had pulled up hundreds of men—the name, she read, translated roughly to bravery, and she pictured that strength coursing through her own bloodstream.

She refreshed her inbox now, more anxious than she’d ever admit. The agency had warned it could take months, even years, to locate a birth parent. Saffy didn’t know if her mother had shared the news of her pregnancy—if that was why he left—or whether her father was aware she existed at all. She should prepare for bad news. But none had come. She scrolled her inbox first thing every morning, all scattered hope as she scanned for the agency’s logo. It had been over six weeks.

Saffy knew she should make dinner. A frozen pizza. She should change out of her rumpled work clothes, run a comb through her hair. Instead, she texted Corinne, who would be home by now, eating dinner or watching TV or jogging through the fields behind her wife’s family farm.

Find anything?

She waited.

*

“They’re related,” Corinne said, breathless, the next afternoon. “Ansel Packer and the Harrisons.”

They’d escaped to their favorite diner, Saffy’s coffee cooling in a stained yellow mug. The station had felt too oppressive, everyone looking to Saffy for direction.

“Ansel doesn’t have any family,” Saffy said, too quickly.

Corinne raised her eyebrows. The many times they’d sat in this very booth, escaping into cold cases when they needed an outlet, spinning theories and reworking motives, Saffy had painted Ansel as a suspect. Nothing more. But Corinne’s bullshit detector was unflappable—the primary reason Saffy had hired her. Corinne’s eagle eye extended beyond detective work and into a person’s very essence. She’s like a human polygraph, Corinne’s wife, Melissa, had joked, at the late-summer bonfire they’d hosted on Melissa’s family’s property. Saffy hadn’t told Corinne about Miss Gemma’s house or the weekends she’d spent camped out in Vermont, spattering the last decade of her life, but she would not be surprised if, somehow, Corinne knew.

“Rachel Harrison was married to Ellis Harrison. They bought the restaurant and had the girl, Blue, when they were really young. He died in 2003. Cancer. I found his school files, a private academy in the city—a guidance counselor noted that Ellis was adopted, so I called the county, checked the records. And guess who had an older brother, from the same case report?”

“The baby,” Saffy murmured.

“Ellis and Ansel were abandoned on a farm just outside of town. Here’s the address, if you want it.”

Corinne slipped a corner of notebook paper across the table, which Saffy shoved quickly into her pocket.

“So why is Ansel there? At the Blue House?”

“That’s what I can’t figure,” Corinne said. “Blue is about to start her junior year at Tupper Lake High School. Rachel runs the restaurant. They only have two employees, a cook and a dishwasher. But the finances look bad, really bad. They owe back on a huge loan, and it looks like the bank will come calling soon.”

“So maybe she wants help. Money?”

“Maybe.” Corinne shrugged. “Doesn’t look like Ansel has much money, though.”

Saffy pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose, let the pressure alleviate the rising swell. “Blue wouldn’t necessarily know that. Maybe she invited him there, to ask for help. But how did she find him? And why now?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Corinne was watching her with a hapless sort of pity. Saffy gazed out the window, where the empty parking lot blistered in the sun.

“Why this case, Captain? With the Lawson trial coming up, why are we here?”

“I have a feeling.” Somewhere in the back of Saffy’s mind, Moretti rolled her eyes. The most important lesson Moretti had imparted: feelings meant nothing, until they became facts.

“Feelings won’t—”

“I know,” Saffy interrupted. “I need this, Corinne. Stay with me on this one.”

Corinne took a sip of her coffee, then shrugged. “It does seem a long way for Packer to drive. You might be right. There might be something there.”

The waitress arrived with the check. She was young, maybe twenty, freckles tossed carelessly along the ridge of her chest. Saffy wondered if this diner remembered Angela Meyer—if they talked about her still, or if she’d disappeared from the collective memory of this place. Saffy recognized, with an electric zap of surprise, that for the first time in many years, she felt wary, cautious. She felt afraid.