Cross Country

little crazy.
    “Alex?”
    Bree was waiting up ahead, standing at the doorway to a room on the third floor. She didn’t move as I approached. “You sure you’re okay to be here?” she asked, speaking low so the others wouldn’t hear.
    I nodded and peered into the room.
    Behind Bree, the two little girls’ bodies were crisscrossed on an oval rag rug. A white canopy bed was broken into pieces, collapsed in on itself as if someone had jumped too hard on it.
    “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I need to see what happened here. I need to begin to understand what it all means.
Like who the hell was jumping on that bed?
”

Chapter 4
    BUT I DIDN’T even
begin
to understand the horrible murders of five family members. Not that night, anyway. I was as baffled as everybody else about the possible motivation of the killers.
    What made the mystery even deeper was something that happened about an hour after I got to the crime scene. Two officers from the CIA showed up. They looked around, then left.
What was the CIA doing there?
    It was a little after three thirty in the morning when Bree and I finally got back home to Fifth Street. In the stillness of my house, I could hear Ali’s little-boy snores wafting down from upstairs. Reassuring and comforting sounds, to be sure.
    Nana Mama had left the hood light on over the stove, and she’d Saran Wrapped a plate of the last four hermit cookies from dessert. We took them upstairs, along with glasses and a half-full bottle of wine.
    Two hours later I was still awake and still messed up in the head. Bree finally sat up and turned on the light. She found me sitting on the edge of the bed. I could feel the warmth of her body against my back, her breath on my neck.
    “You sleep at all?” she asked.
    That wasn’t really what she wanted to know.
    “I knew the mother, Bree. We went to Georgetown together. This couldn’t have happened to her. Shouldn’t have, anyway.”
    She breathed in sharply at my revelation. “I’m so sorry, Alex. Why didn’t you say so?”
    I shrugged, then sighed. “I’m not even sure if I can talk about it now,” I said.
    She hugged me. “It’s okay. No need to talk. Unless you want to, Alex. I’m here.”
    “We were best friends, Bree. We were a couple for a year. I know it was a long time ago, but . . .” I trailed off. But
what?
But — it hadn’t just been kid stuff, either. “I loved her for a while, Bree. I’m blown away right now.”
    “You want to get off the case?”
    “No.” I’d already asked myself the same question, and the answer had come just as quickly.
    “I can get Sampson or somebody else from Violent Crimes to cover. We’ll keep you up to the second —”
    “Bree, I can’t let go of this one.”
    “This one?” She ran a hand softly up and down my arm. “As compared to . . . what, Alex?”
    I took a deep breath. I knew where Bree was going with this. “It’s not about Maria, if that’s what you mean.” My wife, Maria, had been gunned down when our kids were small. I’d managed to close the case only recently. There had been years of torture and guilt before that. But Maria had been my wife, the love of my life at the time. Ellie was something else. I wasn’t confusing the two. I didn’t think so anyway.
    “Okay,” she said, stroking my back, soothing me. “Tell me what I can do.”
    I folded us both under the covers. “Just lie here with me,” I said. “That’s all I need for now.”
    “You got it.”
    And soon, wrapped in Bree’s arms, I went off to sleep — for a whole two hours.

Chapter 5
    “I SPY, WITH my little eye, a
pink
newspaper,” said Bree.
    “Over there!” Ali was quick to spot it. “I see it! It
is
pink. What kind of crazy newspaper is that?”
    To my family’s surprise and delight, I hadn’t left for work at some obscene hour the morning after I found Ellie and her family dead in their home. Today, I wanted to walk the kids to school. Actually, I wanted to do it most every day, but sometimes I couldn’t, and sometimes I didn’t. But today I needed lots of fresh air in my life. And smiles. And Ali’s giggles.
    Jannie was in her last year at Sojourner Truth, all ready for high school, while Ali was just starting out in the school world. It seemed very circle-of-life to me that morning, with Ellie’s family gone in a blink, and my own kids coming up strong.
    I put on my best cheerful dad face and tried to set aside the gruesome images of last night. “Who’s