Pop Goes the Weasel

again. He’d already begun to think of her that way. He and Jannie missed Christine a whole lot. Twice now they’d had important women taken away from them.
    “I was working a little late, that’s all. It’s a very complicated case, Damon, but I think I’m making progress,” I said. I went to the cabinet and took out two tea bags.
    “I’ll make you tea,” Nana offered.
    “I can do it,” I said, but she reached for the bags, and I let her take them away from me. It doesn’t pay to argue with Nana, especially not in her kitchen.
    “You want some tea and milk, big guy?” I asked Damon.
    “All right,” he said. He pronounced it Ah-yite , as they do at the playgrounds and probably even at the Sojourner Truth School.
    “You sound like that poor excuse for an NBA point guard Allen Iverson,” Nana said to him. She didn’t much like street slang, never had. She had started off as an English teacher and never lost her love of books and language. She loved Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and also Oprah Winfrey for bringing their books to a wider audience.
    “He’s the fastest guard in the league, Grandma Moses . Shows what you know about basketball,” said Damon. “You probably think Magic Johnson is still playing in the league. And Wilt Chamberlain. ”
    “I like Marbury with the Timberwolves, and Stoudamire with Portland, formerly with Toronto,” Nana said, and gave a triumphant little smile. “Ah-yite?”
    Damon laughed. Nana probably knew more about NBA point guards than either of us. She could always get you if she wanted to.
    We sat at the kitchen table and drank tea with milk and too much sugar, and we were mostly quiet, but it was kind of nice. I love family, always have. Everything that I am flows from that. Damon yawned and got up from the table. He went to the sink and rinsed out his cup.
    “I can probably sleep now,” he reported to us. “Give it a try, anyway.”
    He came back to the table and gave Nana and me a kiss before he went back upstairs to bed. “You miss her, don’t you?” he whispered against my cheek.
    “Of course I miss Christine,” I said to Damon. “All the time. Every waking minute.” I didn’t make mention of the fact that I had been out late because I was observing the son of a bitch who might have abducted her. Nor did I say anything about the other detective on surveillance, Patsy Hampton.
    When Damon left, Nana put her hand in mine, and we sat like that for a few minutes before I went up to bed.
    “I miss her, too,” Nana finally said. “I’m praying for you both, Alex.”

Chapter 69
    THE NEXT EVENING at around six, I took off early from work and went to Damon’s choir practice at the Sojourner Truth School. I’d put together a good-sized file on Geoffrey Shafer, but I didn’t have anything that concretely linked him to any of the murders. Neither did Patsy Hampton. Maybe he was just a fantasy-game player. Or maybe the Weasel was just being more careful since his taxi had been found.
    It tore me up to go to the Truth School, but I had to go. I realized how hard it must be for Damon and Jannie to go there every day. The school brought back too many memories of Christine. It was as if I were suffocating, all the breath being squeezed out of my lungs. At the same time, I was in a cold sweat that coated the back of my neck and my forehead.
    A little while after the practice began, Jannie quietly reached over and took my hand. I heard her sigh softly. We were all doing a lot more touching and emoting since Bermuda, and I don’t think we have ever been closer as a family.
    She and I held hands through most of the choir practice, which included the Welsh folk song “All Through the Night,” Bach’s “My heart ever faithful, sing praises,” and a very special arrangement of the spiritual “O Fix Me.”
    I kept imagining that Christine would suddenly appear at the school, and once or twice I actually turned back toward the archway that led to her office. Of course, she wasn’t there, which filled me with inconsolable sadness and the deepest emptiness. I finally cleared my mind of all thought, just shut down, and let my whole self be the music, the glorious sound of the boys’ voices.
    After we got home from the choir practice, Patsy Hampton checked in with me from her surveillance post. It was a little past eight. Nana and the kids were putting out cold chicken, slices of pears and apples, cheddar cheese, a salad of endive and Bibb