by Matt Witten
Robert put his hand on Susan’s arm. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Williams said, “I’ll need that necklace as evidence.”
Susan looked to Robert, who nodded. She took one last look at the necklace … the purple dolphin, the pink duck, the blue unicorn … and handed it over.
She thought, It’s a beautiful necklace. It caught my daughter’s killer.
She took one last look at Danny, fiercely triumphant. Then she walked out the door with Robert and Pam.
They made it out into the hallway just as Lisa stepped out of the other viewing room, escorted by the chaplain. Lisa looked totally wrung out, her hair a scraggly mess and her makeup running. Her eyes were uncertain, like she knew her brother had just gotten a reprieve for some reason, but she didn’t understand what had happened. She stared at Susan, her eyes begging for clarification.
Susan said, “Your brother’s innocent. My husband killed Amy. He’s going to prison.”
Lisa blinked, then started to weep. Susan walked toward her, and the two women fell into each other’s arms.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 4, PRESENT DAY
THE SKY WAS already dark when Susan came out onto the front steps of the prison, along with Warden Tomey, Director Williams, Pam, Robert, and Lisa. The media jostled for position and shouted out questions about the rumor the condemned man hadn’t been executed yet. Warden Tomey straightened his sport jacket and got up in front of the microphone.
“Good evening. I’ll get right to it,” the warden said. “I’ve ordered a stay in the execution of Curtis Jansen. New evidence has surfaced that strongly calls his guilt into question.”
The whole place went instantly silent. The media was too stunned to shout more questions. The only sound Susan could hear was the rushing wind.
The warden continued, “Now I’ll turn these proceedings over to Stanley Williams, the director of the North Dakota Division of the FBI.”
Williams stepped up to the mic and cleared his throat. “The North Dakota Division recently commenced an investigation based on an alternate scenario for Amy Lentigo’s murder. The investigation reached fruition this afternoon, and the FBI has now arrested a new suspect. That suspect is Amy’s father, Daniel Lentigo.”
It sounded to Susan like everybody in the entire crowd gasped at once.
She was annoyed at Williams for making it seem like the FBI was responsible for catching her husband. She had done it. It was her.
But what did that really matter? As long as Danny was in prison. Forever.
Williams went on about how the FBI never gave up on a case. Susan was too lost in her thoughts to hear it all. But after a minute or two he was finished, and Pam motioned for her to come up to the mic.
As she stepped up, she looked at Robert, standing to her right, and Lisa, on her left. Then she looked out at the crowd.
Everybody was waiting for her. She had to say something. But what? She felt so scared. Would the world judge her for not knowing what a monster her husband really was?
Well fuck it. She shook her head to shake away her fears. She’d start talking and whatever came out, came out.
“I just want to thank Agent Pappas,” she began, and nodded to Robert. “When I told him I thought Curt Jansen was innocent, he didn’t fight me. He didn’t care if it might make him look bad. He understood, we all make mistakes.” She paused. “My mistake cost Amy her life.”
She took a breath, as the truth of that sunk into her, before she continued. “But now I’ve done everything I can to make up for it. And so has Agent Pappas.”
She looked directly into one of the cameras. “Curt, when you see this video, I just want you to know, I am so sorry. Because of me, you lost twenty years of your life and suffered who knows what kind of horror. The fact that you don’t hate me now …” She felt her eyes getting wet, but fought to keep going. “You are the best man I have ever met.”
She turned to Lisa. “And I want to apologize to you too. I was so wrong about your brother.”
Lisa broke into fresh tears and hugged Susan, hard.
As Susan continued speaking, the entire country began to tune in.
At the Crow Bar in Lake Luzerne, Lenora had dropped in for a couple beers to kick off her Saturday night. Now she sat there, eyes wide, staring at the old TV above the bar along with the bartender, waitresses, and other customers.
“I’m just glad we saved an innocent man’s life,” Susan said on the TV screen.
Lenora was so utterly stunned, her glass of beer fell out of her hands and crashed to the floor.
Three hundred miles west, in Tamarack, Emily was in her backyard at 89 Ash Street throwing tennis balls to the family dog. But Emily’s mom was in the living room watching TV in shock. Susan was saying, “And we stopped my ex-husband from hurting any more innocent children.”
On the other side of town, Kyra was in her room, sitting cross-legged in bed. On her phone screen, she watched as Susan said, “Thanks to Agent Pappas, and a brave young woman in Tamarack, New York, named Kyra Anderson …”
Kyra put her hand to her heart.
Meanwhile, in North Dakota, standing on the prison steps, Susan looked out at the TV cameras and reporters and said, “… my beloved daughter, Amy, can rest in peace at last.”
EPILOGUE
NEW YEAR’S DAY
FOUR WEEKS LATER, on New Year’s Day, snow fell on the Hodge Hills Federal Penitentiary.
The barbed-wire fences and barren hills were covered in white. A foot of snow lay on the roofs of the buildings and watchtowers. It was four o’clock, time for the afternoon count, so all the inmates were back in their cells. Outside, it was quiet.
Then a side door of the administration building opened and Curt Jansen came outside, followed by Warden Tomey. Curt was dressed in civilian clothes—blue jeans and a thin green parka. He carried a small suitcase, not much bigger than a backpack, with all the belongings he was taking with him. He’d left most of his stuff behind for the other guys on the Row.
He blinked up at the sky, at the first freedom he had known in twenty years. He put down his suitcase and reached out his hands to feel the snowflakes.
Then he saw his sister, Lisa, running toward him.
Curt held out his arms.
In upstate New York, the snow was falling, too, as Susan and Robert headed toward the cemetery.
Robert was staying for a week or so at the Wagon Wheel Motel on 9-N. Last night they had walked along the Hudson for hours, talking about so many things, way back to their childhoods. When they got to the bridge over the waterfall, they kissed. It was wonderful, except she burst out crying and couldn’t stop. She was so scared he’d be frightened away. But he just stood there holding her, and at last she calmed down, and then they kissed again, and it was even sweeter.
They weren’t going any further than that, not yet anyway. She was still reeling. Since coming home from North Dakota, she’d made an appointment with a therapist in Glens Falls that Terri recommended. And she’d been going to see Parson Parsons at the church a couple times a week. Last Sunday night, they sat together in the dark church for almost an hour, not speaking, just breathing.
Susan’s mom, of course, was eager for her and Robert to close the deal already. Lenora kept whispering to Susan, “Oh my, he’s so handsome.”
Now, as Susan and Robert rode to the cemetery together, Lenora was in the back seat. She asked, “Did you hear Rumples this morning? He was purring so loud I thought it was a car motor.”
Kyra, sitting next to Lenora, answered, “Yeah, for a fourteen-year-old cat, he’s pretty kickass.”
Lenora laughed. Kyra was spending Christmas vacation in Luzerne, and Lenora had fallen in love with her, seeing her as a kindred free spirit. She was even threatening to get a flame tattoo just like Kyra’s.
The first night Kyra was there, just before she went to sleep, Susan had changed the dusty old sheets that had been on Amy’s bed for twenty years
. She’d moved Amy’s stuffed bunnies off the pillow and onto the windowsill.
Susan was beginning to get used to the changes. Last night at two a.m., when she came home, she stood in the doorway of Amy’s room, just listening to Kyra’s light snore.
As the car curved right and crested a hill, the cemetery came into view and they all fell silent. Robert drove through the gate and parked.
They got out of the car and walked through the snowy quiet to Amy’s grave. Her headstone read, “Amy Lentigo Beloved Daughter 1994–2001.”
Susan placed the pink roses she had bought this morning in front of the stone.
Kyra asked, “Can I give her my necklace?”
“Of course,” Susan said.
Kyra took off her dreamcatcher necklace and laid it next to the roses. Susan thought it looked perfect there.
“She was a happy kid,” Lenora said. “Had that big wide smile.”
Susan smiled too, remembering. She whispered, “I loooooooooooove you more than the moon looooooooooooves the stars.”
Robert put his arm around Susan, and Kyra linked her arm through Lenora’s. They stood still for a while as the white snow fell all around them.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
NINE YEARS AGO, I read an article in the Glens Falls Post-Star about a woman from a small town in upstate New York who was holding a fundraising event at a local bar. She needed money to travel to the upcoming execution of the man who had raped and murdered her young daughter twenty-two years before.
Everything about this story stuck with me: not only the tragic death, but also the woman’s dire circumstances and her quest to find justice and closure two decades later.
For years I wanted to write a novel about this, but I didn’t know what the story would be. Then one day I was having coffee with a writer friend, John Henry Davis, and he suggested: “What if the guy who’s being executed maybe didn’t do it?”
And that’s how The Necklace was born.
After I wrote the novel, I discovered something amazing. There is a woman in Idaho named Carol Dodge who devoted her life to proving that Christopher Tapp, the man imprisoned for raping and killing her daughter Angie many years earlier, was innocent. Thanks to Carol’s relentless efforts, Tapp was finally set free and the real killer, Brian Leigh Dripps, was arrested.
Talk about life imitating art!
The Necklace is not only the story of an incredibly courageous woman, it’s a story about life in the foothills of the Adirondacks, where I’ve spent a lot of time for the past thirty-five years, including living there for ten. The area has struggled in this new century, with factories and mills shutting down and tourism not quite filling the economic gap. And yet people continue to cobble livings together, raise their families, and work for a better future.
Susan, the diner waitress who’s the heroine of The Necklace, is a composite of several women I’ve known in the Adirondacks. The relationship between her and her mom—the good part, not the guilt-ridden part!—is inspired by my wife’s relationship with her mother.
Other characters are inspired by real-life people too. FBI agent Robert Pappas is based on my friend Paul Bishop, a writer who was an LAPD sex crimes detective for seventeen years. I used to teach playwriting at the Hudson Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, New York, and Curt Jansen is inspired by one of my students there, a dignified man in his thirties who had been in prison for murder for fifteen years and preferred to be called Mr. Smith instead of by his first name.
As for Kyra, the rebellious teenage girl in the novel—I’m not really sure who she’s based on. I think maybe she’s based on me!