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.
*
It was an accident, what happened to the girls from 1990. It was a moment of passion, it was meticulously planned, it was a serial killer passing through town. It was someone’s father, someone’s uncle, someone’s wayward brother. Maybe—just maybe—it was Ansel Packer. At a certain point, the why of it ceased to matter, lost in the crucial question of who. The injustice felt brutal, unnecessarily savage. The years of thinking and watching, then the world’s inevitable forgetting. At a certain point, they all became Marjorie Lawson, spread-eagled on the floor, demanding something better.
*
Monday morning at the station, and the bullpen was bustling. Lieutenant Kensington rapped on Saffy’s office door, jaunty with two knuckles, his uniform freshly pressed, hair slicked back. His wedding ring glinted dully from his finger. Kensington’s wife had always hated Saffy—the troopers loved to spread rumors about Saffy and Kensington, rivals working side by side. She shook them off, along with her annoyance. Kensington was a prick, and a middling detective, but he glided up the ranks on the clean, easy strength of his charisma.
“The DA is asking for an update,” Kensington said, rocking onto his heels.
“We don’t have one,” Saffy said.
“What can I do?” he asked, his voice gurgling with empathy. Saffy marveled at the guts of him, standing there chastely, like he had not created this problem in the first place. Kensington had gotten drunk one night, recognized a member of the jury, approached the man on his barstool, and started talking. He’d been saved by his uncle, the long-standing and well-respected captain of Troop C. If Saffy had made Kensington’s mistakes, she would have been fired immediately.
“Get me Corinne,” Saffy said. She had perfected this tone, both warm and dismissive. She made a point to keep herself level at work—nothing like the previous captain, who had once punched straight through a car window.
Two days had passed since Saffy tailed Ansel to the Blue House, and the images haunted, clouding her focus. Even as she led that morning’s debrief, answered rambling questions, and assigned a list of tasks, Saffy pictured them. Ansel and that girl, calm at the diner’s table. The meeting had carried the blushing tension of a first date, a concept Saffy could not reckon with the fact of the girl’s mother, standing casual behind the bar. She hadn’t been able to sleep, remembering how Blue had looked at Ansel, so clearly yearning. She could not parse exactly what she had witnessed.