Free The Rosary Girls by Richard Montanari Page B

overstuffed recliner. Wells sat down, positioning the oxygen tube into his nose. He picked up the Polaroid and glanced at it again. “She’s not wearing her pendant.”
“Sir?” Byrne asked.
“I gave her an angel pendant watch when she made her confirmation. She never took it off. Ever.”
Jessica looked to the photo on the mantel, the Olan Mills–type shot of the fifteen-year-old high school student. Her eyes found the sterling pendant around the young woman’s neck. Crazily, Jessica remembered when she was very young, in that strange and confusing summer when her mother became a skeleton, her mother had told her that she had a guardian angel who would look after her all her life, keeping her safe from harm. Jessica wanted to believe it was true for Tessa Wells, too. The crime scene photo made it very hard.
“Is there anything else you can think of that might help us?” Byrne asked.
Wells thought for a few moments, but it was clear he was no longer part of a dialogue, but rather adrift on his memories of his daughter, memories that had not yet turned into the specter of dreams. “You didn’t know her, of course.You came to meet her in this terrible way.”
“I know, sir,” Byrne said. “I can’t tell you how sorry we are.”
“Did you know that, when she was really small, she would only eat her Alpha-Bits in alphabetical order?”
Jessica thought of how systematic her own daughter Sophie was about everything, the way she would line up her dolls by height when she played with them, the way she organized her clothes by color. Reds to the left, blues in the middle, greens on the right.
“And then she would skip when she was sad. Isn’t that something? I asked her about it once when she was about eight or so. She said that she would skip until she was happy again. What sort of person skips when they are sad?”
The question hung in the air for a few moments. Byrne caught it, soft-pedaled it in.
“A special person, Mr. Wells,” Byrne said. “A very special person.”
Frank Wells stared blankly at Byrne for a few moments, as if he had forgotten the two police officers were there. Then he nodded.
“We are going to find whoever did this to Tessa,” Byrne said. “You have my word on that.”
Jessica wondered how many times Kevin Byrne had said something like that, and how many times he was able to make good. She wished she could be so confident.
Byrne, the veteran cop, moved on. Jessica was grateful. She didn’t know how much longer she could sit in this room before the walls would begin to close in. “I have to ask you this question, Mr. Wells. I hope you understand.”
Wells stared, his face an unvarnished canvas, primed with heartache.
“Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to do something like this to your daughter?” Byrne asked.
There was a proper moment of silence, the span of time needed for the appearance of deductive thought. The fact was, no body knew any one who could do what was done to Tessa Wells.
“No” was all Wells said.
A lot went with that no, of course; every side dish on the menu, as Jessica’s late grandfather used to say. But for the moment, it went unsaid here. And as the spring day raged outside the windows of Frank Wells’s tidy living room, as the body of Tessa Wells lay cooling in the medical examiner’s office, already beginning to conceal its many mysteries, that was a good thing, Jessica thought.
A damn good thing.
    They left Frank Wells standing in the doorway to his row house, his pain fresh and red and raw, a million exposed nerve endings waiting for the infection of silence. He would make a formal identification of the body later in the day. Jessica thought about the time Frank Wells had spent since his wife had died, the two thousand or so days that everyone else involved had gone about their lives, living and laughing and loving. She considered the fifty thousand or so hours of inextinguishable grief, each one populated by sixty horrible minutes,