Notes on an Execution(74)

The scent of burnt popcorn was suddenly nauseating, chemical and repulsive.

“I’m sorry,” Corinne said. “I know this isn’t a good time for—”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Saffy hung up.

Just a week ago, she had slept outside the Blue House. A week ago, she stood across from Blue and Rachel, told them things she’d never admitted to anyone. It had provided an easy relief, a cozy sense of pride—here was Blue, the same age as the others, alive and sunburnt in her faded plastic flip-flops. Guilt came, then horror. A drip, then a flood.

Saffy had not saved anyone.

*

The woman appeared on her stoop the next evening.

Saffy’s fingers were slick with marinade, from the chicken cutlets Kristen had adamantly delivered. A dusky forest haze filtered in through the window. The cicadas hummed, restless. Saffy wiped her hands on a paper towel and padded in her socks to the door.

The woman on the porch had hair cut short. A large mole dotted her cheek. Her face was like a wound, open, smarting. Saffy recognized her immediately: in the photo from the news reports, Jenny Fisk leaned forward on a couch, smiling easy. The obituary had run in the Burlington paper—survived by her parents and her twin sister.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” the woman said. “My name is Hazel Fisk. I, um, I found something. Sergeant Caldwell sent me, she said you’d want to see.”

Saffy led Hazel to the living room, where twilight seeped in mellow rays across the rug. Saffy did not realize how attentively, unconsciously, she had studied Jenny’s face—Hazel was the shadow imprint of her sister, warped in grief.

Hazel pulled a plastic bag from her purse and handed it over, explaining. Saffy clicked open the dirt-lined box, careful not to fingerprint—when she peered inside, her throat rushed with a melancholic regret. She should have felt relief. She should have felt satisfaction. She had been right all along. But as Saffy studied the trinkets, she felt only a long, stretching sorrow, the kind of probing sadness that seemed to seep, then absorb. It looked so small, so helpless, at the bottom of the plastic bag. Lila’s purple ring.

“That ring,” Hazel said. “He gave it to Jenny the same night I saw him digging in the yard. It’s connected to this jewelry, isn’t it?”

Saffy almost told her the truth. The trinkets, what they signified. It made a crooked sort of sense: Ansel had given Jenny the ring, then realized his own incrimination. He’d linked himself to the girls—he had to get rid of the rest. Or maybe it was something else, some psychological complexity Saffy couldn’t bother to guess. It didn’t matter. The shame burned up Saffy’s throat, and the words would not come.

She had known all along. For so many years, she had watched Jenny put on lipstick in the rearview, unload shopping bags from the trunk. She had known what Ansel was capable of, and she’d done nothing but observe. Saffy could not tell Hazel about the depth of her failure—already, Hazel looked at her with a blame that could be misread as heartbreak, particularly raw. Saffy knew this expression. Her mistakes lived between them, too permanent to acknowledge.

Saffy walked Hazel back out to her car, with thanks and a promise. She would do her best for Jenny. As the headlights bumped away, Saffy stood in the driveway, a cloud of evening bugs hovering over the pavement. The implications felt heavy, a shadow Saffy could not shake. That paralyzing what-if. What if she had never followed Ansel? If she had never meddled, if she had let him stay at the Blue House? What if Ansel’s time with the Harrisons had been simple, if his intentions had been pure all along? There was a world Saffy could not bear to consider—a world that was quickly consuming her own—in which Saffy had turned Ansel into exactly the monster she needed him to be.

*

They still came, the girls. They were older now, grown into themselves. They were mothers, travelers, amateur bakers. Fans of trashy television, fans of the Mets, regional women’s pinball champions. They were avid hikers and Sunday brunchers, a trio of karaoke queens, ice cream lovers, morning masturbators, hosts of legendary Halloween parties.

The possibilities stalked and haunted—the infinite number of lives they had not lived. Often, Saffy pictured Lila, stroking her swollen belly, pregnant for the third time, praying for a girl. A girl would be more vulnerable and also more cavernous. Imagine, Lila seemed to say, from the depths of Saffy’s subconscious. There were so many things a girl could be.

*

When Hazel’s headlights disappeared from the window, Saffy put the chicken back in the fridge and poured herself a bowl of Frosted Flakes. The trinkets sat in their box, looming from the counter. She flipped open her laptop, a beacon in the blackening kitchen. There was a flight to Houston early in the morning—she booked it quickly, then dialed Detective Rollins.

Detective Andrea Rollins was one of twelve women who made up the informal group, formed after the magazine profile published. Women in Blue: The Female Rise in Law Enforcement. Saffy had been photographed alongside Rollins and the others in an embarrassingly glossy spread—in the months that followed the article, they began a sardonic email chain where they riffed and complained, bounced the theories no one else would hear. Andrea Rollins was a senior detective with Houston homicide.

“Captain Singh,” Rollins sighed into the receiver. “It’s not looking good.”

“Who found her?”