Along Came a Spider

and find out what he did with Maggie Rose.”
    “Well, we’ve heard your arguments, Dr. Cross. Thank you for your time and efforts here,” James Dowd said at the end of the presentation. “We’ll have to let you know.”

    I decided to take things into my own hands that evening.
    I called a reporter I knew and trusted at the
Post
. I asked him to meet me at Pappy’s Diner on the edge of Southeast. Pappy’s was one place where we would never be spotted, and I didn’t want anyone to know we’d met. For both our sakes.
    Lee Kovel was a graying yuppie, and kind of an asshole, but I liked him. Lee wore his emotions on his sleeve: his petty jealousies, his bitterness about the sad state of journalism, his bleeding-heart tendencies, his occasional arch-conservative traits. It was all out there for the world to see and react to.
    Lee plopped down next to me at the counter. He was wearing a gray suit and light blue running shoes. Pappy’s draws a real nice cross-section: black, Hispanic, Korean, working-class whites who service Southeast in some way or other. But no one anything like Lee.
    “I stick out like a sore thumb in here,” he complained. “I’m way too cool for this place.”
    “Now who’s going to see you here? Bob Woodward? Evans and Novak?”
    “Very funny, Alex. What’s on your mind? Why didn’t you call me when this story was hot?
Before
this sucker got caught?”
    “Would you give this man some hot, very black coffee,” I said to the counterman. “I need to wake him up.” I turned back to Lee. “I’m going to hypnotize Soneji inside the prison. I’m going looking for Maggie Rose Dunne
in his subconscious
. You can have the exclusive. But you owe me one,” I told Lee.
    Lee Kovel almost spit out his reaction. “Bullshit! Let’s hear it all, Alex. I think you left out some parts.”
    “Right. I’m
working
to get permission to hypnotize Soneji. There are a lot of petty politics involved. If you leak the story in the
Post
, I think it will happen. The theory of self-fulfilling prophecies. I’ll get permission.
Then
you get an exclusive.”
    The coffee came in a beautiful old diner cup. Light brown with a thin blue line under the rim. Lee slurped the java, thoughtful as hell. He seemed amused that I was trying to manipulate the established order in D.C. It appealed to his bleeding heart.
    “And if you do hear something from Gary Soneji, I’ll be the second to know. After yourself, Alex.”
    “You drive a hard bargain, but yeah. That’ll be our deal. Think about it, Lee. It’s for a worthy cause. Finding out about Maggie Rose, not to mention your career.”
    I left Kovel to finish his Pappy’s coffee and begin to shape his story. Apparently, that’s what he did. It appeared in the morning edition of the
Post
.

    Nana Mama is the first one up at our house every day. Probably, she’s the first one up in the entire universe. That’s what Sampson and I used to believe when we were ten or eleven, and she was the assistant principal of the Garfield North Junior High School.
    Whether I wake up at seven, or six, or five, I always come down to the kitchen to find a light blazing and Nana already eating breakfast, or firing it up over her stove. Most mornings, it is the very same breakfast. A single poached egg; one corn muffin, buttered; weak tea with cream and double sugar.
    She will also have begun to make breakfast for the rest of us, and she recognizes the variety of our palates. The house menu might include pancakes and either pork sausage or bacon; melon in season; grits, or oatmeal, or farina, with a thick pat of butter and a generous mound of sugar on top; eggs in every shape and form.
    Occasionally a grape jelly omelet appears, the only dish of hers that I don’t care for. Nana does the omelet too brown on the outside, and, as I’ve told her, eggs and jelly make about as much sense to me as pancakes and ketchup. Nana disagrees, though she never eats the jelly omelets herself. The kids love them.
    Nana sat at the kitchen table on that morning in March. She was reading the
Washington Post
, which happens to be delivered by a man named Washington. Mr. Washington eats breakfast with Nana every Monday morning. This was a Wednesday, and an important day for the investigation.
    Everything about the breakfast scene was so familiar, and yet I was startled as I entered the kitchen. One more time, I was made aware of how much the kidnapping had entered into our private lives, the lives