Notes on an Execution(69)

Saffy held up her badge, a confession. “New York State Police. Can you go get your mother?”

By the time Rachel came out of the kitchen, Saffy had filled with a sickening doubt. Rachel wrapped an arm protectively around her daughter’s shoulders, confused, afraid. This was unprofessional, Saffy knew—not illegal, but certainly not wise. But when Blue bit her lip, anxious, she looked exactly how she had in Saffy’s dream, holding that pile of bones on the porch.

“Can you tell me about your relationship with Ansel Packer?”

“What’s this about?” Rachel asked.

“Please, it’s important. Why is he here?”

“He’s my uncle,” Blue said. “My dad’s brother. We didn’t even know he existed until last month, when my grandmother let it slip. My dad died without knowing he had any biological family, so I reached out. I thought we should know him.”

“What do you want from him?” Saffy asked.

“Nothing,” Blue said slowly. “He’s building a new deck for the back. He’s . . . well, he’s family.”

Saffy’s own paranoia deflated, a wheezing exhale. It was stupidly simple. Uncomplicated all along. But that didn’t mean the danger had disappeared. Saffy thought of the bedsheet, tight around Lawson’s neck, bruised and battered blue.

The story came out then, a spew of excess detail. Saffy told them about the bodies—the way the girls had scattered, as though reaching for escape. She told them about the ring, glinting from Jenny’s finger. She even told them about the fox, congealing on her bedsheets. Rachel’s face hardened as she listened, while Blue’s crumpled into unmistakable devastation. When Saffy finished talking, there was a long, throbbing pause. Her own regret seemed to wait, pregnant in the ravaged humidity.

“I don’t understand,” Rachel said. “Why isn’t he in jail? Why hasn’t he been arrested?”

It occurred to Saffy that there were many ways to hurt—not all of them physical. An ice machine grumbled in the distance.

“The short version is that the evidence didn’t hold,” Saffy said. “I’m giving you this information for your own safety. Please, just stay away from him.”

And Saffy left them like that, stunned behind the bar, her phone number clutched in Rachel’s hand. Call me if you need anything. As Saffy walked out of the restaurant, she memorized their shapes—two women, hurt but not fatally—and she knew that she was done. All these years, she had been watching Ansel Packer to see how his pain compared to her own. But it seemed Ansel had learned how to bury the past; it was time for Saffy to start her own digging.

*

That night, Saffy let herself into the station. Two o’clock in the morning, and the building was dead empty. The computers loomed, blinking asleep, her office pitch-dark. Saffy groped for her desk chair, calming with the immediate sense of authority as she sank into the leather. It was unprofessional, what she’d done. But if she couldn’t make a difference in this job—the job that had vacuumed everything else in her life into extinction, the job that seesawed between nightmare and rhapsody—then at least she could make a difference somewhere. The lump in Saffy’s throat cracked then burst. That old refrain echoed, inexhaustible. What do you want?

She wanted to be good, whatever that meant. As Saffy gazed up at the ceiling, hot tears burning down her cheeks, she prayed that the difference between good and evil was simply a matter of trying.

*

There would be no retrial. On the Monday they’d spent so long preparing for, Saffy gave her investigators the day off. Instead of clocking in at the station, instead of answering the many calls from the superintendent’s office, from Lawson’s defense attorney, from the hungry reporters, Saffy visited the cemetery.

Her mother’s grave was unkempt. Saffy brought flowers, but she hated how they looked, alive against the mossy gray headstone. As she crouched in the grass and placed the flowers against her mother’s name, etched permanent in granite, her mother’s voice returned to her, a rare and precious moment of clarity. You’ll see, Saffy girl. The right kind of love will eat you alive.

Rachel had called, her voice shaky but certain: She had sent Ansel away from the Blue House. His truck had disappeared from Tupper Lake. Where did he go? Saffy had asked. I don’t know, Rachel had told her. That would have to be enough. This obsession had held her in its grasp far too long. This case would remain open, a permanent mystery.

But Saffy knew her mother had been right—this had to count as some form of love. The kind that stalked, the kind that hunted. A love startled like a sound in the night. As Saffy knelt at her mother’s grave, forehead pressed to the gritty stone, the realization felt almost like a molting. Self to self. There to here. A wonder, a burden, this endless growing.





1 Hour




Your witness is here, the chaplain says.

Fifty-six minutes, and the dread is a sieve. A sluggishness has arrived, but it lifts with these words—everything lightens, your muscles stretching alert.

Blue, you say. She came.

She is older now. She does not want to see you. She does not want to talk. You will not lay eyes on her until she appears in the witness box—seven years have passed since that Blue House summer. She must be different. But it does not matter how Blue has grown. To you, she is eternally sixteen. To you, Blue will always be that teenager at the hostess stand, thumbs poked through the holes in her sweatshirt sleeves.