Page 31

“Bessie ain’t here,” the man said.

The girl blinked. “Can I come in and wait until she gets back?”

“Nope.”

Regina felt a surge of emotion in her throat. “I’m supposed to be staying here with her.”

“Heard that, but Bessie never ran it by me, and this is my place, so you go on and scat.”

“Where do I go?” she asked, unable to stop the tears now.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” the man said, and shut the door.

Regina wandered back to the bus station as darkness fell. She was hungry and thirsty and scared when she crawled behind a trash bin outside the station and slept with her head on her box.

Shortly after dawn, a cop found her. When Regina told him her story, he bought her a sandwich and a Coke.

“You’re lucky it was me who found you,” said the officer, whose name was Gabriel Faulks. “I know some good people.”

Officer Faulks called Sandy and Linus Calvin to come to the bus station. Linus was a plumber, and Sandy cooked for the priests at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. She and Linus were a warm couple who hadn’t been able to have children of their own, but as Linus declared with a big kindly laugh, “We see it as a command from our Lord to take in strays.”

“That’s right,” his wife agreed. “Can you read and write, Regina?”

“I know my ABCs and my numbers, ma’am.”

“Well, we’ll build on that,” Sandy said and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “You’ll be reading books in no time. There’s nothing grander in life than reading, dear. If there’s one thing I can teach you, it’s what a good book can do for you.”

29

THE SWELLING IN NANA MAMA’S brain continued to abate, Dr. Sydney Ames told us, but because of the episodes of arrhythmia, Nana Mama would stay heavily sedated for a second night.

Bree went home around nine that evening after telling me that she had hit a wall of shell companies when she tried to figure out who owned the condemned apartment building on New York Avenue behind which the first burned body had been found. Sampson had gone home earlier to be with his daughter, Willow.

I sat by Nana Mama’s side, bowed my head, and talked to her about some of our best moments. I told her how happy and proud I’d always been to have her support and love and how much it meant to me to have her there with me when I graduated from high school, then Georgetown, and then the master’s and PhD programs at Johns Hopkins.

She was there in the front row of both my weddings. Afterward, Nana was the first one to hug me in celebration. She was always the first.

“Nothing good in my life would have happened without you,” I choked out. “None of it.”

I could have sworn I heard her sigh. I looked up at her, but she didn’t move. I slept fitfully in the chair beside her for the second night in a row, waking every time a nurse came in to check her vitals, then dozing off again, cycling through the hours before dawn.

My cell phone buzzed at five a.m. with a call from Sampson.

“Kind of early for a check-in,” I said, yawning. “There’s no change, and I haven’t slept for more than—”

“Sorry to hear that, but we’ve got another torched body near a homeless encampment. They called us first. Do you want in, or do I pass it to those detectives at the other precinct, Hayes and Winthrop?”

I glanced over at my grandmother. Sydney said she’d be by around ten a.m., which gave me five hours. “I’m in.”

“Grab you out front in ten minutes.”

The crime scene was in far Northeast DC, less than ten blocks from the squat where the first torched body had been found and three miles as the crow flies from the Bridge to Nowhere. The homeless encampment was strung out through a brushy, narrow ravine between a row of old warehouses and the back of a seedy commercial street.

We were greeted by a young patrol officer, Gayle Rowland, and followed her to the crime scene. As we ducked under the yellow police tape, I was aware that there were silhouettes of people in the trees at the edge of the ravine, watching us silently.

“No one saw anything?” I asked.

“They say no. And no one heard anything except the music from the club until it closed at two thirty a.m., which is normal.”