I HAD FEWER and fewer people I could talk to about this murder case anymore. Lucky for me, Nana was still one of them.
For a few days, I’d been holding back on her. Somehow it seemed wrong to bring the extra stress into her room at the hospital. But as the days had passed, and these visits of mine turned into their own kind of normal, I started to realize something. If Nana were awake through all of this, she would have been asking about Caroline’s case every day. No doubt about it in my mind.
So I didn’t hold back anymore.
“It’s not going well, old woman. Caroline’s murder case,” I told her that night. “I’m overwhelmed, to be honest. I’ve never been in a position like this before. Not that I can remember, anyway.
“Ramon Davies is ready to take me off. The Bureau was going at it full clip, and now I don’t even know where they are on it. I’ve got the White House breathing down my neck, if you can believe that. Believe it.
“And these are supposed to be the good guys, Nana. I don’t know. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference anymore. It’s like somebody said: You can love this country and hate our government.”
It was quiet in the room, as usual. I kept the heart monitor volume down when I was there, so the only sounds besides my own voice were the hiss of the ventilator and an occasional snatch of conversation from the nurses’ station down the hall.
Nana’s condition hadn’t changed, but she just seemed sicker to me. Smaller, grayer, more distant. It felt as though everything in my life was sliding in the same direction these days.
“I don’t know where to go with any of this. One way or another, it’s going to come out, and it’s going to be huge when it does. I mean like Watergate huge, old woman. There’ll be hearings and spin, and probably no one’s ever going to know the real story—but I feel like I’m the only one who even wants to open that particular door. I want to know. I need to know.”
There was one other thing about the quiet. It meant that I could hear Nana talking back.
Poor Alex. An army of one, huh? What else have you got?
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. She’d really want to know. So I gave it some thought.… I had Sampson on my side. I had Bree, of course. I had Ned Mahoney—somewhere out there.
And I had one other rainy-day idea I’d been sitting on. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could be undone once it was started, but hey, how much rainier did I expect it to get?
I reached through the bed rail and put my hands on Nana’s. Things like touch had become more important than ever to me—any way I could connect with her, for as long as I could.
The room’s ventilator hissed. Someone laughed down the hall.
“Thank you, old woman,” I said. “Wherever you are.”
You’re welcome, she communicated somehow, and we left it at that. As always, Nana had the last word.