Notes on an Execution(76)

“That’s not what her sister said.”

Ansel snorted. “Hazel’s always been jealous.”

“Jealous of what?”

“Of me and Jenny, everything we had. I would never hurt her, you have to understand.”

“I understand. Jenny was the only girl for you. The only one you loved.”

“Yes.”

“But there were other girls, too.”

She let him sit with this.

“Blue Harrison,” Saffy offered.

A sudden sharpness, as Ansel folded his arms across his chest.

“How do you know about that?”

“I stopped by the Blue House for lunch. I know Rachel, and I know Blue. I know you were in Tupper Lake, staying in the motel down the road.”

“They needed help. The restaurant was going under. I was fixing up their deck.”

“What I can’t understand,” Saffy said slowly, “is what you really wanted from the Harrisons.”

“They were family,” he said simply.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

And there it was: the flash of realization, angling across his exhausted face.

“It was you,” Ansel breathed. “You’re the reason they sent me away. What did you tell them?”

“You didn’t hurt her.” Saffy ignored him. “You didn’t hurt Blue.”

“Why would I hurt her?”

“She’s the right age.”

This close, Saffy could see every pore on Ansel’s nose. The lines around his eyes seemed to squint, then narrow.

“I spent a long time looking for those girls, you know,” Saffy said. “Izzy. Angela. Lila. They were our age in school. You remember Lila, don’t you? You remember how she used to sing along to the Jeffersons theme song?”

A dazed confusion, as he puzzled her.

“Ah,” Saffy said. “You really don’t recognize me, do you?”

Saffy’s phone lay on the table between them, queued and ready. When she hit play, the opening notes of the song brought a bursting life into the concrete space. They whined, they drifted. As Nina Simone’s rasping voice filled every corner of the room, Saffy waited for the transfiguration. The saxophone moaned, stuttered—I put a spell on you. Ansel blinked fast, his focus captured.

“We were young. Eleven or twelve,” Saffy said.

It landed. A visible unrest. Ansel shifted like he wanted to stand, or run, and Saffy knew that she had snagged something. Whatever substance Ansel was made of, finally, she had touched it.

“The fox came first,” she said. “Those animals, at Miss Gemma’s house, down along the creek. Can you describe it to me, Ansel? I want to know how it felt, to hurt them.”

“It felt like nothing,” he said.

“That seems unfair,” Saffy said. “I mean, I imagine it feels good to kill something. The release. The relief. It must feel good, right? Otherwise, what’s the point?”

“It feels like nothing,” Ansel said. “Like nothing at all.”

The song accelerated into climax, ethereal and uncanny. Saffy reached into her briefcase.

“You know what these are.”

First, the barrette. Then, the bracelet. Little bits of dirt were caught in the barrette’s clip, between the bracelet’s milky pearls. A sheen of sweat had broken across Ansel’s forehead—he appraised the trinkets like an archaeologist, uncovering lost artifacts.

“I’m curious, Ansel,” Saffy said. “Why did you take these? What purpose did they serve?”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Wait, you don’t have to explain. I can tell you the story. You were at Jenny’s house for Christmas that year. You were what, seventeen or eighteen, right? Hazel told me all about it. Her parents got you those nice gifts, even after Jenny promised they wouldn’t, and you felt small and poor and insecure. You’d been carrying these trinkets for months, because you liked the memory, a reminder of a moment where you were big and important. You gave the ring to Jenny that day to feel a little taste of that power again. But then you realized what you’d done. You’d incriminated yourself—if anyone recognized the ring, you’d be in deep shit. So you got up in the middle of the night and buried the rest in the yard.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like, then?”

“I gave her the ring because it was beautiful. I wanted her to have it.”

“But you took this jewelry off those girls. When you left their bodies in the woods. You took these trinkets to remember. To relive all the sick things you’d done.”

“No,” he said, louder now. “No. Stop.”

“You got high off remembering. You relished in it. You loved—”

“Stop!” A bark of a yell. He heaved, his breath fading ragged. “I never relished in anything.”

It was like a crack of lightning. The breaking was physical, a massive shudder, the sign Saffy recognized from her many years in interrogation rooms like this one—his walls were crumbling. One more nudge, and he would shatter.

“Then why?” Saffy asked gently. “Why did you need to take these trinkets?”

Ansel reached for the bracelet, his fingers shaking wild. He could not stop himself. He slipped the delicate strand of pearl onto his hairy wrist, admiring the ivory beads, elegant and feminine.