As I ladle pasta onto my plate, I try to imagine what it would’ve been like if my dad hadn’t confessed. The evidence against him was incontrovertible: jewelry hidden in our bathroom wall, blood embedded in the seams of his truck cushions. But if he’d claimed to be innocent, would I have believed him anyway? Would I have done whatever was necessary to pay his attorney’s fees, to protect him from jail time—the same way he’d always protected me?
If there’s one thing I can thank him for, it’s saving me from ever needing to make that choice.
I grab my dinner and walk to where Zach’s sitting alone. “Mind if I join you?”
He looks up from his half-eaten pasta and must notice my sympathetic expression because he asks, “Who told you?”
“Imogen.”
“Great.” He raises his wineglass in her direction; she flushes. He nudges out the bench with his heel and gestures for me to take a seat. “It’s been a rough year.”
“Sorry.”
“Thanks.” Zach watches me from over the rim of his glass. “Not many people say that to me.”
“Say what?”
“Sorry. Most of the time, I tell people my dad was executed, and their response is ‘good.’?”
That seems unbelievable to me—until I consider my life back home. If my dad was executed tomorrow, I doubt the response from our neighbors would be any different.Good.
“I assume you’ve heard all about how awful he was.” I don’t answer, which is, in itself, an answer. “You know, I tried to hate him. I really did. I refused to take his phone calls, threw all his letters in the trash. But when his lawyer called and told me they’d set an execution date, I figured you only get one father. So, I started visiting him. And you know what? He wasn’t any different than I remembered him.”
I stare into my food. I’ve thought about visiting my dad, even went so far as to call to make arrangements. I ended up standing, motionless, in the living room for a good half hour on visiting day, limbs gone leaden, keys gripped numbly in my hand, before giving up. Fear prevented me from opening the door—not the fear that my father had changed since his incarceration, but that he’d stayed the same, of finding out that he’d been the Ellicott Creek Ripper all along. That my “father” was simply an outfit he took out of the closet and wore every day to work.
Even more than that, I was afraid of what our reunion might reveal about me. What would it mean if I looked at him, knowing what he’d done, what he really was, and still loved him?
“Have you ever been to an execution?”
I shake my head.
“You’re watching a murder. That’s what it is: You’re watching a murder through this thick Plexiglas window, and you think to yourself,My dad’s going to die if someone doesn’t stop this. We need to call the police because my dad’s about to die. But then you remember the police, the courts, they’re the murderers, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.”
He knocks back the rest of his drink. “They kept us in separate rooms, the victims’ families in one, me in the other. And when it was over, everyone gathered around the victims’ families and hugged them and cried with them. They told them it was over, that they could finally lay their loved ones to rest. Their loved ones had been dead for years. My father hadn’t even been unstrapped from the table, and do you think one person, one single fucking person, came over to offer their condolences? Instead, I left the prison and had to fight my way through a crowd of placards with slogans likePrick the Prick.”
When he slams his empty glass onto the table, some of the club members at the other end glance in our direction. They don’t come over, though.
“Sorry,” he mutters. “Sorry. It’s…”
“No. Please don’t apologize.”
I want to reassure him that he has just as much a right to his grief as they do, but before I can, he says, “That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part came a week later when I was sitting in front of my TV, and one of the women who’d been at the execution came onscreen and said it had beendisappointing. That in order to get the closure she deserved, my dad needed to suffer more. So you start wondering: Why exactly did my dad need to die? The victims’ families weren’t satisfied; future murderers aren’t going to be deterred because of what happened to him. So, what was the fucking point?”
He grabs a half-empty bottle and pours himself a refill. “And it’s not like he was the only one being punished. I ended up selling the motel, racking up credit card debt, taking out every personal loan they’d give me—and for what? Nothing I did was ever going to beenough to get him that reprieve. Then someone like Greer Woods comes along and scores an entire TV show to help rehabilitate her father’s public image. Next thing you know, bored stay-at-home moms are signing petitions and posting hourly on social media. ‘Oh, Tom Woods. He’s so tortured, so broken, but that’s all right. He was never loved enough; we can fix him.’?”
“Wait.” He’s officially lost me. “What are you talking about? That’s not why she filmed the show. She filmed it because she felt guilty for not realizing what her father was sooner, for not saving the women he killed. So, she decided to make it right by getting justice for other victims in unsolved cases.”
“Fine,” he says, holding up his hands the same way he did when Connor claimed he wasn’t raised in a cult—his gesture indicatingoh, you poor, deluded fool. “Let’s say that was her motivation. Why feature her dad in almost every episode?”
“Because she was trying to catch a murderer, and he is a murderer. It makes sense that he’d have insight that we don’t.”
“Did you watch the show?”
I nod.
“Did Tom Woods ever say anything that wasn’t common sense? ‘Look for someone these girls trusted.’ You don’t say. ‘He probably lives in the neighborhood because serial killers hunt close to home.’ Any first-year criminal psychology textbook could tell you that. Tom Woods and his irreplaceable insight was all smoke and mirrors.”
“What are you saying?”
