“How was it when the family was all together? Did your parents seem happy?”
“I’m not going to trash my parents’ marriage,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you my mother was having an affair with Big Duff or anyone else. Or that my dad was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. That’s the bush you’re beating around, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know the answer. I was a child.”
Nikki didn’t try to argue. She had already stumbled over these same ruts. Her whole point in being here, talking to Ted Duffy’s eldest child, was to find new ground. She sat back and took a sip of her coffee.
“Was he a good dad when he had the chance?”
“He was tired,” she said with a weariness of her own. “He had bad moods. We were always being told not to bother him. Daddy has a hard job, Mom would always say. I could never understand why he didn’t just get a different job so he wouldn’t be so unhappy all the time.”
Nikki tried to imagine her at nine. She would have been one of those pretty, ladylike little girls. It wasn’t hard to picture her in her green plaid Catholic school uniform and black patent leather Mary Janes, her hair in two neat braids with bows. Quiet, Nikki thought, shy, even. She might have had her mother’s looks, but she didn’t have her mother’s edge. She seemed more delicate, internally fragile.
When she spoke, Nikki could hear the echo of loneliness in her voice, the confusion and rejection of a child pushed to the side. Every little girl wanted her daddy’s love and attention. Jennifer Duffy hadn’t gotten much of either from her father, by the sound of it. Those were the emotions she didn’t want to have to relive every time another cop came calling with the promise of solving her father’s case.
“I have two boys,” Nikki said. “Their dad and I are both cops. We’re divorced now, but we had our years like that, too. He was gone, working undercover narcotics. I was gone working my shift. When he was home there was always tension. Even though I was a cop, too, he thought I couldn’t really understand his world. I know it’s the same way with the Sex Crimes detectives. What they’re exposed to on a daily basis is so filthy and so foul. Even if it was possible for their spouse or their family to comprehend it, the cops don’t want to share it. They don’t want it polluting everyone’s lives. That isolation takes a toll on the family.”
Jennifer Duffy nodded almost imperceptibly as she looked down at her coffee.
“My dad was a cop, too,” Nikki went on. “He worked patrol his whole career. Old school. Never talked about the job. Never. And we weren’t supposed to ask him. If he had a bad day on the job, how would we know? He wouldn’t tell us, and we couldn’t ask. How were we supposed to know he wasn’t mad at us? Kids think everything is about them.”
“You end up feeling like he’s just a man who sometimes stays overnight,” Jennifer murmured, the memory pressing down on her.
“It’s hard.”
“But you became a cop yourself.”
“Yes. I suppose in part to feel closer to him,” Nikki admitted. She took another sip of her coffee. “Or maybe to make up for what he lacked as a parent. I’m very close to my boys. I don’t ever want them to feel separate from me the way I felt from my old man.
“Even so, it’s not easy being a cop’s kid,” she continued. “It makes you different. It sets you a little apart from the other kids.”
“Yes, it does,” Ted Duffy’s daughter murmured, as she stirred her coffee with a stick of rock sugar.
“I read in the file that you were in your room reading when your dad was shot.”
“He was chopping wood,” she said quietly. “I could hear him chopping wood. He did that when he was upset.”
“Did you hear the shots?”
“I suppose I did, but I didn’t realize it.”
Nikki pictured the scene in her mind: Jennifer Duffy propped up by pillows on the bed as she lost her loneliness in the pages of a book. The distant crack of the axe striking the wood. The distant crack of a rifle shot. A nine-year-old child wouldn’t have known the difference. And even if she had been looking out the window the instant it happened, she never could have seen into the gathering gloom of the woods where the shot had come from.
“Then it was quiet,” Jennifer said. “It was quiet for a long time. I just kept reading. I thought he must have come inside, but he was lying out there, dying.”
The mother in her made Nikki want to put her arms around the young girl in the memory. Jennifer blamed herself in the way children did because they believed their worlds revolved around them. In the active imagination of Jennifer Duffy’s nine-year-old mind, she might have been able to save her father if only she had known he was out there wounded. If only she had realized something was wrong. Instead, her father had bled out lying on the ground beneath her bedroom window.
“He was killed instantly, you know,” Nikki said softly. “There was nothing you could have done.”