Page 20 of The Family Cross

Sampson tried to process what Alex was telling him. “Can someone her age survive something like that?”

“We’re about to find out,” Bree said.

“How long will the surgery take, Dad?” Ali asked.

“I don’t know, son,” Alex said. “I’m staying, but you should all go home. I’ll send group texts with updates as I get them.”

“Can we call you if we feel like talking?” Jannie asked.

“I’d like that,” he said, then hugged her and kissed her forehead and did the same with Ali and Bree.

“Call if it gets too much, sugar. Call me whenever you want. As many times as you need,” Bree said.

“Will do,” Alex said.

Sampson stuck around a little while after the others left.

“Any updates on the Bridge to Nowhere case?” Alex asked.

Sampson explained about the avgas causing the explosion and the intense fire that engulfed the Audi and the corpse, then said Chief Kane had recommended he look into the culture of the community under the ghost ramp.

“Maybe the killer wasn’t some stranger to the place, you know?”

“He certainly had to have known about the Bridge to Nowhere to use it,” Alex agreed. “Which narrows the field to roughly all of Southeast DC and everyone who drives by the closed-off upper ramp.”

“I also went back and spoke to our young friend Boog.”

He told Alex what the thirteen-year-old had told him: The world beneath the Bridge to Nowhere was divided into tiered societies, with the strongest and most cunning up top. The high trolls guarded their spots fiercely, often using violence.

“He’s seen these fights?”

“He has, and he’s heard of people getting killed by high trolls on the south embankment,” Sampson said. “When it happens, Boog said they wait until dark and then drag the dead guy down to the river, and he floats off toward the Potomac.”

“If someone from the camp was involved in this case, why didn’t that happen last night?”

“Don’t know,” Sampson said. “But I plan on knowing tomorrow. Boog tells me there are two head high trolls. On the south side, it’s a vet named Hawk, and on Boog’s side, the north, it’s a woman named Lainey Locket.”

Cross smiled faintly. “Female head troll?”

“Female head high troll.”

19

BY NINE THAT EVENING, Nana Mama had been in surgery for two hours. I paced. I prayed. Then I called the rest of my family.

With my grandmother’s younger sister, Tia, now in a Maryland memory-care facility, I reached out to my aunts on my mother’s side, who said they’d start driving north to us from North Carolina first thing the next morning. When I called my brother Charlie, I got a message saying the number was no longer in service.

Finally, I called Nana Mama’s only child: my father, Jason Cross, who now lived down in Florida.

He was already distraught when he answered his cell phone. Turned out his wife, Alicia, had had a fall of her own while riding her bike that same morning and had fractured her femur and hip. She, too, was in an operating room.

My dad promised to come as soon as Alicia was stable, and I promised to keep him updated on Nana Mama’s condition.

I tried to meditate, tried to find calm, and failed. Every time the surgical suite’s double doors opened, my heart lurched into overdrive.

Eventually, I gave a nurse my cell number and asked her to text me when my grandmother was coming out of the OR, then went to the cafeteria to get coffee. On the way, I passed the chapel, thought about it, turned around, and went inside.

I knelt and started to beseech God to save my grandmother. But then I stopped. I found myself unwilling to ask for divine intervention to keep from losing her. Instead, I focused on everything about Nana that I loved, everything about her that I was grateful to have had for so long.