Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(12)

Bree got angry then. “What can we do about it?”

“Until Sparkman publishes, nothing,” I said. “But I told him I had Craig Halligan on retainer if he chooses to post a libelous story.”

“Do you?”

“I met him last year and gave him a dollar in case I ever needed his services.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

She gave me a hug. “You never cease to amaze me, Alex Cross.”

“Get a room, you two,” Nana Mama said. “But before you do, I need someone to set the table.”

As we did, I told Bree what Barbara Taylor had said about Randall Christopher’s wife suspecting he was having an affair.

“She mention evidence?”

“Just that they hadn’t made love in months.”

My grandmother had the oven open and was peering inside at the roast chicken. “That’s the first real sign of relationship disintegration,” she said. “If a man isn’t looking to his wife in the bedroom, he’s looking in some other bedroom.”

Both Bree and I stopped setting the table to gape at Nana Mama. We were still staring when she set the chicken on the stove and turned to us.

“What are you two looking at?” she asked.

I smiled. “Nothing, Nana. It’s just not often I hear someone in her nineties talking about that kind of thing.”

She shot me a withering look. “Shows how much you know. It’s all most eighty-and ninety-year-olds talk about because they spend so much time watching daytime television and that’s all that’s talked about on daytime TV.”

“C’mon,” Bree said.

“It’s true,” she said. “Don’t believe it? Look up the rise in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among octogenarians.”

“I’d rather not,” I said.

“Sky-high,” Nana Mama said. “Especially in those assisted-living facilities.”

My son Ali came into the room. “What’s sky-high?”

My grandmother frowned. “A subject not for young men.”

“I’m ten,” he said indignantly.

“Nana Mama was talking about the number of people who make it to ninety these days,” Bree said.

“Oh,” he said, then looked at me. “Were the murders of Mr. Christopher and the vice president’s ex-wife professional hits, Dad?”

Ali, in addition to rock climbing, had long been interested in detection. At times, in our opinion, that interest had been borderline unhealthy. I said, “You know we can’t talk about active cases.” That irked Ali, but he said, “There are all sorts of theories already on the web.”

“You want to try to ignore the internet,” Nana Mama said. “It’s for idiots.”

“Well, the idiots all think that Mrs. Willingham is to blame because Mr. Christopher was such a good guy.”

My daughter, Jannie, came into the kitchen, upset. “He was a great guy. I can’t believe it. Everyone’s talking about it. Tina and Rachel are destroyed.”

My stomach sank. “They heard up at camp? Did their mother break the news to them?”

She shook her head, on the verge of tears. “They found out on Facebook hours ago, Dad, and they can’t find their mom. They said she’s not answering her cell.”

“She’ll call in soon, I’m sure,” Bree said.

The doorbell rang and Sampson called out, “Hello?”

I called back, “We’re in the kitchen, John.”

Sampson, his wife, Billie, and their seven-year-old daughter, Willow, appeared in the doorway. “Smells good in here,” John said.

Billie, ordinarily one of the most vivacious women on the face of the earth, nodded and smiled weakly. “It always smells good in here.”

“Just like I like it,” Nana Mama said, turning from her stove. “How are you, Willow?”

“Good,” Willow said, looking at my grandmother’s cookie jar.

Nana Mama winked at her, then turned to Sampson’s wife. “And you, Billie?”

“Getting better every day, Nana,” Sampson said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “She walked two miles this morning.”

“Two miles,” Bree said. “That’s huge!”

Billie smiled broadly. “I just wish I could do it without feeling so tired afterward.”

Sampson said, “The cardiologist said that will pass. He said in two weeks he’ll be taking the gizmo out of her chest.”

Billie had been stricken with Lyme disease that went un-diagnosed long enough to precipitate a crisis in the emergency room when her heart rate dropped to twenty beats per minute. Luckily, a sharp ER doc had questioned Sampson about her exposure in the woods. It turned out that Billie had gone hiking in Pennsylvania a month earlier. Even before the blood test came back positive for Lyme, the doctor was pumping her full of the antibiotics that saved her life.

“Have you all eaten?” Nana Mama asked.

“We don’t want to impose,” Billie said. “Just stopped in to say hi, though I think John wants to talk with Alex.”

Sampson nodded.

“Nonsense, you’re family,” Nana Mama said. “Ali, can you set three more places? We need to fatten Billie up a little.”