Free The Rosary Girls by Richard Montanari Page A

Frank Wells would buy the individual serving cans of vegetables. Milk by the pint.
Jessica took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. The air was cloying and close, nearly corporeal with solitude.
“It’s like a clock.” Wells seemed to hover a few inches over his La-ZBoy, afloat on fresh grief, his fingers interlaced carefully on his lap. It was as if someone had positioned his hands for him, as if such a simple task were foreign to him in his bleak anguish. On the wall behind him was a skewed collage of photographs: family milestones of weddings, graduations, and birthdays. One showed Frank Wells in a fishing hat, his arm around a young man in a black windbreaker. The young man was clearly his son, Jason. The windbreaker bore an institutional crest Jessica could not immediately place.Another photograph showed a middle-aged Frank Wells in a blue hard hat in front of a coal-mine shaft.
Byrne asked: “I’m sorry? A clock?”
Wells stood, moving with an arthritic dignity from his chair to the window. He studied the street outside. “When you have a clock in the same place for years and years and years.You walk in that room and, if you want to know what time it is, you look at that space, because that’s where the clock is.You look in that particular space .” He fiddled with his shirt cuffs for the twentieth time. Checking the button, rechecking. “And then one day you rearrange the room. The clock is now in a new place, a new space in the world. And yet, for days, weeks, months—maybe even years—you look at the old place, expecting to find out the time. You know it’s not there, but you look anyway.”
Byrne let him talk. It was all part of the process.
“That’s where I am now, Detectives. That’s where I’ve been for six years. I look at that place where Annie was in my life, where she always was, and she isn’t there. Somebody moved her. Somebody moved my Annie. Somebody rearranged. And now... and now Tessa.” He turned to look at them. “Now the clock has stopped.”
Having grown up in a cop family, having witnessed the nightly torment, Jessica was well aware that there were moments like these, times when someone had to question the closest relative of a murdered loved one, times when anger and rage became a twisting, savage thing within you. Jessica’s father had once told her he sometimes envied doctors, for they were able to point to some incurable disease when they approached relatives in the hospital corridor, grim-faced and grimly cordial. All homicide cops ever had was a torn human body, and all they could ever point to were the same three things over and over and over again. I’m sorry, ma’am, your son died of greed, your husband died of passion, your daughter died of revenge.
Kevin Byrne edged ahead.
“Did Tessa have a best friend, sir? Someone she spent a lot of time with?”
“There was one girl who would come by the house now and then. Patrice was her name. Patrice Regan.”
“Did Tessa have any boyfriends? Anyone she was seeing?”
“No. She was... she was a shy girl, you see,” Wells said. “She did see this boy Sean for a while last year, but she stopped.”
“Do you know why they stopped seeing each other?”
Wells blushed slightly, then regained his composure. “I think he wanted to...Well, you know how young boys are.”
Byrne glanced at Jessica, signaling her to take the notes. People get self-conscious when police officers write down what they say, as they say it. While Jessica took notes, Kevin Byrne could maintain eye contact with Frank Wells. It was cop shorthand, and Jessica was pleased that she and Byrne, no more than a few hours into their partnership, were already speaking it.
“Do you know Sean’s last name?” Byrne asked.
“Brennan.”
Wells turned from the window, heading back to his chair. He then hesitated, steadying himself on the sill. Byrne shot to his feet, crossed the room in a few strides. Taking Frank Wells by the arm, Byrne helped him back to the