Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(24)

“I remember.”

“I’d called ahead, and there she was waiting for me, and I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t her. Little bitty thing.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Khaki shorts, T-shirt, and no shoes,” he said, smiling. “She made me roll up my pants legs and take off my shoes to go for a walk on the beach.” He laughed and shook his head. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her because she was so beautiful and so tiny, like a doll, but strong, you know?”

“Fierce,” I said.

“Yes.”

Although I knew the answer, I asked, “When did you know you loved her?”

Sampson didn’t reply for a few moments; his lower lip trembled as he looked into the middle distance and smiled sadly.

“In about an hour, I liked her,” he said. “I liked her even more when she invited me to dinner that night. But I knew I loved her, head-over-heels love, when I went up there the second time, and she put on ‘One Night with You’ and we danced on the porch of that beach house. I could feel her every breath, her every heartbeat, like it was my own.”





CHAPTER 26





THE REST OF THAT DARK day came at us in waves.

Bree had been with Willow, Sampson and Billie’s seven-year-old daughter, since she woke up. Bree came out on the porch, hugged John, and told him how much she loved him and how much she had loved Billie. Then we stayed on the porch to give him space for the terrible deed he had to do.

We sat quietly on the glider Billie had had installed because she loved the one we had on our front porch. We held hands and tried not to anticipate the pain that was not long coming. Willow’s crying came in short, sharp gasps, like the fabric of her heart was ripping.

“Oh my God,” Bree said. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands.

I rubbed her back. “She’s going to need you.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m wondering if I’m up to it.”

“You have to be. We all have to be. They’re family.”

She got a tissue out and dabbed at her eyes before looking at me. “I adore you,” she said. “Desperately. I want you to know.”

I kissed her softly as Willow’s crying died down. “I can feel it. I hope you can feel my love for you.”

Bree nodded. “Always. And now I think we’re needed inside.”

She squeezed my hand, and we steeled ourselves to take as much of the burden as we could from Sampson. Bree brought Willow out to the porch and got on Billie’s glider with her and held her close while John and I went into his home office.

Another wave of pain crashed around us when Sampson got hold of Billie’s grown children to tell them their mother had died of a massive heart attack caused by the damage done to it by Lyme disease.

Andrew, an attorney in Boston, was dumbstruck. “I thought … she said she’d beaten it, John.”

“We all thought she had, even the doctors. You heard them, Andrew,” Sampson said. “We were going for a walk this morning and she collapsed in my arms, but not before telling me how much she loved you and Kari.”

Andrew choked up and then cried, “I can’t believe this. I mean, why Mom? She had so much left to give.”

His younger sister, Kari, had much the same reaction when Sampson reached her at the advertising agency she worked at in New York. She screamed, sobbed, and then demanded to know what had happened.

Sampson was a rock for them, answering every question, then he asked them to come to Washington to help prepare for their mom’s funeral. They said they’d come as soon as possible.

Sampson, drained by those two calls, went off to be with Willow. I called the medical examiner’s office to request that Billie’s body be treated with kindness until the undertakers came for her.

When John returned, he slumped down in an overstuffed chair and closed his eyes. “I’ve been shot three times in my life. This is worse than all of them combined.”

“I wish I could tell you different, but you’re going to feel that way off and on for a long time.”

Tears seeped out from under Sampson’s closed eyelids. “It feels like we were two trees so close that our roots and branches were all combined, and something I can’t even explain just grabbed hold of her and tore her right out of the ground.”

I listened quietly. This was the aftershock of grief, the phase of trying to find a way to psychologically accept a tragic loss. I’d talked many people through this. It’s easier when you don’t know the victim. But Billie had been like a sister to me, and I was still struggling to find a way to accept her death in my own heart.

Sampson made his hands into fists and sat upright, shaking his head.

“I’m no good to anyone like this,” he said.

“You’re allowed time, John. Lots of it.”

“There will be time,” he said firmly. “But not now. I have to stand up for Billie when she needs standing up for.”

“Let’s do that,” I said, and we called the rectory at St. Anthony’s to arrange for a funeral Mass the following Saturday. Then we contacted Billie’s favorite restaurant and organized a reception for mourners there after the funeral.

Bree and I stayed until midafternoon, when we knew John’s stepchildren were on their way and Willow was taking a nap.