'My wife, Annie, died six years ago,' Wells said, out of the blue.
Silence.
'I'm sorry,' Byrne said.
Jessica looked at Frank Wells. She saw her own father in those years after her mother had died, smaller in every way except his capacity for sorrow. She glanced at the dining room and envisioned the wordless dinners, heard the scrape of smooth-edged silverware on chipped mela- mine. Tessa had probably prepared the same sorts of meals for her father that Jessica had: meat loaf with jar gravy, spaghetti on Friday, roast chicken on Sunday. Tessa had almost certainly done the ironing on Saturdays, growing taller each year, eventually standing on phone books instead of milk crates in order to reach the ironing board. Tessa, as had Jessica, had surely learned the wisdom of turning her father's work pants inside out to iron the pockets flat.
Now, suddenly, Frank Wells lived alone. Instead of home-cooked leftovers, the refrigerator would be colonized by the half can of soup, the half container of chow mein, the half-eaten deli sandwich. Now 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-Z- Boy, 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 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, nobody knew anyone 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.
