The Rosary Girls (7 page)

8

MONDAY, 12:50 PM

They split up for lunch. Jessica returned to the Nazarene Academy in a department Taurus. The traffic was light on I-95, but the rain persisted. At the school, she spoke briefly to Dottie Takacs, the school bus driver who picked up the girls in Tessa’s neighborhood. The woman was still terribly upset by the news of Tessa’s death, nearly inconsolable, but she managed to tell Jessica that Tessa was not at the bus stop on Friday morning, and that no, she didn’t recall anyone strange who frequently hung around the bus stop or anywhere along the route. She added that it was her job to keep her eyes on the
road
.

Sister Veronique informed Jessica that Dr. Parkhurst had taken the afternoon off, but provided her with his home address and phone numbers. She also told her that Tessa’s final class on Thursday had been French II. If Jessica recalled correctly, all Nazarene students were required to take two consecutive years of a foreign language to qualify for graduation. Jessica was not at all surprised that her old French teacher, Claire Stendhal, was still teaching.

She found her in the teachers’ lounge.
...

“Tessa was a wonderful student,” Claire said. “A dream. Excellent grammar, flawless syntax. Her assignments were always handed in on time.”

Talking to
Madame
Stendhal hurtled Jessica back a dozen years, although she had never been inside the mysterious teachers’ lounge before. Her concept of the room, like that of many of the other students, had been a combination nightclub, motel room, and fully stocked opium den. She was disappointed to discover that, all this time, it was merely a tired, ordinary room with a trio of tables surrounded by chipped cafeteria chairs, a small grouping of love seats, and a pair of dented coffee urns.

Claire Stendhal was another story. There was nothing tired or ordinary about her, never had been: tall and elegant, with to-die-for bone structure and smooth vellum skin. Jessica and her classmates had always been terribly envious of the woman’s wardrobe: Pringle sweaters, Nipon suits, Ferragamo shoes, Burberry coats. Her hair was shocked with silver, a little shorter than she remembered, but Claire Stendhal, now in her midforties, was still a striking woman. Jessica wondered if
Madame
Stendhal remembered her.

“Did she seem troubled at all lately?” Jessica asked.
“Well, her father’s illness was taking quite a toll on her, as you might expect. I understand she was responsible for taking care of the household. Last year she took nearly three weeks off to care for him. She never missed a single assignment.”
“Do you remember when that was?”
Claire thought for a moment. “If I’m not mistaken, it was right around Thanksgiving.”
“Did you notice any changes about her when she came back?”
Claire glanced out the window, at the rain falling on the commons. “Now that you mention it, I suppose she was a bit more introspective,” she said. “Perhaps a little less willing to engage in group discussion.”
“Did the quality of her work decline?”
“Not at all. If anything, she was even more conscientious.”
“Was she close friends with anyone in her class?”
“Tessa was a polite and courteous young woman, but I don’t think she had many close friends. I could ask around, if you like.”
“I would appreciate it,” Jessica said. She handed Claire a business card. Claire looked at it briefly, then slipped it into her purse, a slim Vuitton Honfleur clutch.
Naturellement
.
“She talked about going to France one day,” Claire said.
Jessica remembered talking about the same thing. They all did. She didn’t know a single girl in her class who had actually gone.
“But Tessa wasn’t one of those who mooned about romantic walks along the Seine, or shopping on the Champs-Elysées,” Claire continued. “She talked about working with underprivileged kids.”
Jessica made a few notes about this, although she was not at all sure why. “Did she ever confide in you about her personal life? About someone who might have been bothering her?”
“No,” Claire said. “But not all that much has changed since your high school days in that regard. Nor mine, for that matter. We are adults, and the students see us that way. They really are no more likely to confide in us than they are in their parents.”
Jessica wanted to ask Claire about Brian Parkhurst, but it was only a hunch she had. She decided not to. “Can you think of anything else that might help?”
Claire gave it a few moments. “Nothing comes to mind,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s quite all right,” Jessica said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“It’s just hard to believe that...that’s she’s gone,” Claire said. “She was so young.”
Jessica had been thinking the same thing all day. She had no response now. None that would comfort or suffice. She gathered her belongings, glanced at her watch. She had to get back to North Philly.
“Late for something?” Claire asked. Wry and dry. Jessica recalled the tone quite well.
Jessica smiled. Claire Stendhal
did
remember her.Young Jessica had always been tardy. “Looks like I’m going to miss lunch.”
“Why not grab a sandwich in the cafeteria?”
Jessica thought about it. Perhaps it was a good idea. When she was in high school she was one of those weird kids who actually
liked
cafeteria food. She hiked her courage and asked:
“Qu’ est-ce que vous . . . proposez?”
If she wasn’t mistaken—and she desperately hoped she wasn’t—she had asked:
What do you suggest?

The look on her former French teacher’s face told her she got it right. Or close enough for high school French.
“Not bad,
Mademoiselle
Giovanni,” Claire said with a generous smile.
“Merci.”
“Avec plaisir,”
Claire replied. “And the sloppy joes are still pretty good.”

Tessa’s locker was only six units away from Jessica’s old one. For a brief moment, Jessica was tempted to see if her old combination still worked.

When she had attended Nazarene, Tessa’s locker belonged to Janet Stefani, the editor of the school’s alternative newspaper and resident pothead. Jessica half expected to see a red plastic bong and a stash of Ho Hos when she opened the locker door. Instead she saw a reflection of Tessa Wells’s last day of school, her life as she left it.

There was a Nazarene hooded sweatshirt on a hanger, along with what looked like a home-knit scarf. A plastic rain bonnet hung from the hook. On the top shelf, Tessa’s gym clothes were clean and neatly folded. Beneath them was a short stack of sheet music. Inside the door, where most girls kept a collage of pictures, Tessa had a cat calendar. The previous months had been torn out. The days had been crossed off, right through the previous Thursday.

Jessica checked the books in the locker against Tessa’s class list, which she had gotten from the front office. Two books were missing. Biology and algebra II.

Where were they?
Jessica wondered.
Jessica riffled the pages of Tessa’s remaining textbooks. Her communications media textbook offered a class syllabus on hot pink paper. Inside her theology text—
Understanding Catholic Christianity
—there was a pair of dry-cleaning coupons. The rest of the books were empty. No personal notes, no letters, no photographs.
At the bottom of the locker were a pair of calf-high rubber boots. Jessica was just about to close the locker when she decided to pick up the boots and turn them over. The left boot was empty. When she turned over the right boot, an item tumbled out and onto the highly polished hardwood floor.
A small, calfskin diary with gold leaf trim.
...

In the parking lot Jessica ate her sloppy joe and read from Tessa’s diary.

The entries were sparse, with days between notations, sometimes weeks. Apparently, Tessa wasn’t someone who felt compelled to commit every thought, every feeling, every emotion and interaction to her journal.

On the whole, she seemed a sad girl, seeing the poignant side of life as a rule. There were entries about a documentary she had seen on three young men whom, she believed, as did the filmmakers, were falsely convicted of murder in West Memphis, Tennessee. There was a long entry about the plight of hungry children in Appalachia. Tessa had donated twenty dollars to the Second Harvest program. There were a handful of entries about Sean Brennan.

What did I do wrong? Why won’t you call?

There was one long, rather touching story about a homeless woman Tessa had met. A woman named Carla who lived in a car on Thirteenth Street. Tessa did not say how she’d met the woman, only how beautiful Carla was, how she might have been a model if life had not taken so many bad turns for her. The woman told Tessa that one of the worst parts of living out of a car was that there was no privacy, that she lived in constant fear that someone was watching her, someone intent on doing her harm. Over the following few weeks, Tessa thought long and hard about the problem, then realized there was something she could do to help.

Tessa paid a visit to her aunt Georgia. She borrowed her aunt’s Singer sewing machine and, at her own expense, made curtains for the homeless woman, drapes that could be cleverly hooked into the fabric of the car’s interior ceiling.

This was a special young lady, Jessica thought.
The last entry of note read:

Dad is very sick. He is getting worse, I think. He tries to be strong, but I know it is just an act for me. I look at his frail hands and I think about the times, when I was small, when he would push me on the swings. I felt as if my feet could touch the clouds! His hands are cut and scarred from all the sharp slate and coal. His fingernails are blunt from the iron chutes. He always said that he left his soul in Carbon County, but his heart is with me.And with Mom. I hear his terrible breathing every night. Even though I know how much it hurts, each breath comforts me, tells me he is still here. Still Dad.

Near the center of the diary, there were two pages torn out, then the very last entry, dated nearly five months earlier, read, simply:
I’m back. Just call me Sylvia.
Who is Sylvia? Jessica wondered.

Jessica went through her notes. Tessa’s mother’s name was Anne. She had no sisters. There was certainly no “Sister Sylvia” at Nazarene.
She flipped back through the diary. A few pages before the section that was removed was a quote from a poem that she didn’t recognize.
Jessica turned once again to the final entry. It was dated right around Thanksgiving of the previous year.

I’m back. Just call me Sylvia.
Back from where, Tessa? And who is Sylvia?

9

MONDAY, 1:00 PM
Jimmy Purify had been nearly six feet tall in the seventh grade, and no one had ever called him skinny.
In his day, Jimmy Purify could walk into the toughest white bars in Gray’s Ferry without uttering a word, and conversations would drop to a whisper; the hard cases would sit a little straighter.

Born and raised in West Philly, in the Black Bottom, Jimmy had endured travails from within as well as without, and he had handled it all with self-possession and a street dignity that would have broken a smaller man.

But now, as Kevin Byrne stood in the doorway of Jimmy’s hospital room, the man in front of him looked like a sun-faded sketch of Jimmy Purify, a husk of the man he had once been. Jimmy had lost thirty or so pounds, his cheeks were sunken, his skin was ashen.

Byrne found that he had to clear his throat before speaking. “Hey, Clutch.”
Jimmy turned his head. He tried to frown, but the corners of his

mouth turned up, betraying the game. “Jesus Christ. Doesn’t this place have security?”
Byrne laughed, a little too loudly. “You look good.”
“Fuck you,” Jimmy said. “I look like Richard Pryor.”
“Nah. Maybe Richard Roundtree,” Byrne replied. “But all things considered—”

“All things considered, I should be in Wildwood with Halle Berry.” “You’ve got a better shot at
Marion
Barry.”
“Fuck you again.”
“However, Detective, you don’t look as good as he does,” Byrne said.

He held up a Polaroid of the battered and bruised Gideon Pratt. Jimmy smiled.
“Damn, these guys are clumsy,” Jimmy said, bumping a weak fist with

Byrne.
“It’s genetic.”
Byrne propped the photo against Jimmy’s water pitcher. It was better

than any get-well card. Jimmy and Byrne had been looking for Gideon

Pratt for a long time.
“How’s my angel?” Jimmy asked.
“Good,” Byrne said. Jimmy Purify had three sons, all bruisers, all

grown, and he lavished all his softness—what little there was of it—on Kevin Byrne’s daughter, Colleen. Every year, on Colleen’s birthday, some shamefully expensive, anonymous gift would show up via UPS. No one was fooled. “She’s got a big Easter party coming up.”

“At the deaf school?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been practicing, you know,” Jimmy said. “Getting pretty good.” Jimmy made a few feeble hand shapes.
“What was that supposed to be?” Byrne asked.
“It was
Happy Birthday
.”
“Actually, it looked something like
Happy Sparkplug
.”
“It did?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.” Jimmy looked at his hands, as if it were their fault. He tried the

hand shapes again, faring no better.

Byrne fluffed Jimmy’s pillows, then sat down, arranging his weight on the chair. There followed a long comfortable silence only attainable between old friends.

Byrne left it to Jimmy to get down to business.
“So, I hear you got a virgin to sacrifice.” Jimmy’s voice was raspy and weak. This visit had already taken a lot out of him. The nurses at the cardiac desk had told Byrne he could stay five minutes, no longer.

“Yeah,” Byrne replied. Jimmy was talking about Byrne’s new partner being a first-day Homicide.
“How bad?”
“Actually, not bad at all,” Byrne said. “She’s got good instincts.”
“She?”
Uh-oh, Byrne thought. Jimmy Purify was as old school as you could get. In fact, according to Jimmy, his first badge was in Roman numerals. If it were up to Jimmy Purify, the only women on the force would be meter maids. “Yeah.”
“She a young-old detective?”
“I don’t think so,” Byrne replied. Jimmy was referring to the hotshot types who hit the unit running, dragging in suspects, bullying witnesses, trying to get on the clear sheet. Old detectives—like Byrne and Jimmy—pick their shots. There’s a lot less untangling. It was something you either learned, or you didn’t.
“She good-lookin’?”
Byrne didn’t have to think about this one at all. “Yeah. She is.”
“Bring her around sometime.”
“Jesus.You get a dick transplant, too?”
Jimmy smiled. “Yeah. Big one, too. I figured, what the fuck. I’m here, might as well go for a whopper.”
“Actually, she’s Vincent Balzano’s wife.”
The name took a moment to register. “That fuckin’ hothead from Central?”
“Yeah. The same.”
“Forget I said anything.”
Byrne saw a shadow near the door. A nurse poked her head in, smiled.
Time to go.
He stood, stretched, glanced at his watch. He had fifteen minutes until he had to meet Jessica in North Philly. “I’ve got to roll. We caught a case this morning.”
Jimmy frowned, making Byrne feel like shit. He should’ve kept his mouth shut. Telling Jimmy Purify there was a new case on which he would not be working was like showing a retired thoroughbred a picture of Churchill Downs.
“Details, Riff.”
Byrne wondered how much he should say. He decided to just spill. “Seventeen-year-old girl,” he said. “Found in one of the abandoned row houses near Eighth and Jefferson.”
The look on Jimmy’s face needed no translation. Part of it said how he wished he were back in harness. The other part related how much he knew that these cases got to Kevin Byrne. If you killed a young girl on his watch, there was no rock big enough to hide under.
“Druggie?”
“I don’t think so,” Byrne said.
“She was dumped?”
Byrne nodded.
“What do we have?” Jimmy asked.
We,
Byrne thought. This was hurting a lot more than he’d thought it was going to. “Not much.”
“Keep me in the loop, eh?”
You got it, Clutch,
Byrne thought. He grabbed Jimmy’s hand, gave it a slight squeeze. “Need anything?”
“Slab of baby back ribs would be nice. Side of scrapple.”
“And a Diet Sprite, right?”
Jimmy smiled, his lids drooping. He was tired. Byrne walked to the door, hoping he could reach the cool green sanctity of the hallway before he heard it, wishing that he was at Mercy to interview a witness, wishing that Jimmy was right behind him, smelling like Marlboros and Old Spice.
He didn’t make it.
“I’m not coming back, am I?” Jimmy asked.
Byrne closed his eyes, then opened them, hoping his face was fashioned into something resembling faith. He turned. “Sure you are, Jimmy.”
“For a cop, you’re a terrible fuckin’ liar, you know that? I’m amazed we ever made case one.”
“You just get strong.You’ll be back on the street by Memorial Day. You’ll see. We’ll fill up Finnigan’s and raise a glass to little Deirdre.”
Jimmy waved a weak, dismissive hand, then turned his head to the window. Within seconds, he was asleep.
Byrne watched him for a full minute. There was more he wanted to say, a lot more, but he would have time.
Wouldn’t he?
He would have time to tell Jimmy how much his friendship had meant over the years, and how he had learned what real police work was all about from him. He would have time to tell Jimmy that it just wasn’t the same city without him.
Kevin Byrne lingered a few more moments, then turned, stepped into the hall, and headed to the elevators.

Byrne stood in front of the hospital, his hands shaking, his throat tight with emotion. It took him five turns of the wheel of his Zippo to light a cigarette.

He hadn’t cried in many years, but the feeling in the pit of his stomach recalled a time in his life when he had seen his old man cry for the first time. His father had been as big as a house, a Two-Streeter, a Mummer of citywide repute, an original stick fighter who could carry four twelve-inch concrete blocks up a ladder without a hod. Seeing him cry made him small in the ten-year-old Kevin’s eyes, made him into every other kid’s father. Padraig Byrne had broken down behind their Reed Street row house on the day he learned his wife needed cancer surgery. Maggie O’Connell Byrne lived another twenty-five years, but no one had known that at the time. His old man had stood by his beloved peach tree and shook like a blade of grass in a storm that day, and Kevin had sat in his bedroom window on the second floor, watching him, crying along with him.

He never forgot that image, never would.
He had not cried since.
But he wanted to now.
Jimmy.