“Did I hear waffles?”
“Aunt Cracker! That was a neat movie yesterday. And the pizza was yummy.”
“Sure was,” she said, reaching out and ruffling Sam’s hair, then touching Keely’s hair. “See kids, Katie is just fine today. It wasn’t the full-blown flu, was it, Katie? Something not quite so bad, thank God, maybe just something you ate that didn’t agree with you.”
“Could be,” Katie said. “Thank goodness it was nothing much, whatever it was.”
Katie made the largest batch of waffles ever, Miles fried up bacon, and Cracker made the coffee. The kids laughed and argued and ate until Katie thought they’d both be sick.
Forty-five minutes later, Katie dropped Keely and Sam off at the Hendricks Elementary School, with its attached preschool, only four blocks from their home. The last thing she wanted to do was go back to the house and pace and worry and wonder and make herself nuts. So she started driving. Even though she rarely saw them, she knew her two bodyguards were following her, two FBI agents assigned to protect her after the shooting in the park on Saturday, whenever she left the house.
Funny thing, but she was certain to her toes she was the one the shooter had wanted. Not Savich, not Sherlock, certainly not Miles. But who was it? She couldn’t think of a single person. For an instant, Cracker’s face flashed in her mind. No, that was impossible, surely. She decided to call her mother when she got back to the house. Talking to her mother always made her feel better. She wished her mother were with her right now, but no, that could be dangerous.
It was very cold, well below freezing, the sky an iron gray, the wind stiff. Snow was predicted by evening, the weather prediction of the first winter storm only a day late. It would stick and the kids would have a blast.
She turned the heater up a bit, and kept driving. She drove past Arlington National Cemetery, a place she’d first seen when she’d been not more than five years old. All those thousands upon thousands of grave markers had touched her deeply as a child, though she hadn’t completely understood what they meant. Now, as an adult, all her own worries disappeared in the moments she stared over those fields of white crosses. So many men, she thought, so many.
She drove around Lady Bird Johnson Park, then headed across the Arlington Memorial Bridge that spanned the Potomac. The water below was a roiling gray, moving swiftly, and looked so cold it made her lips tingle. She turned at the Lincoln Memorial when she saw the sign to Roosevelt Memorial Park. She’d first come here as a child, long before the memorial had been built, her small hand tucked in her father’s as they walked along the famous Cherry Tree Walk on the Tidal Basin near the national mall. She’d brought Keely here when she’d been a baby, just after Carlo was out of her life, with her mother and father.
She shivered. It was getting colder. She turned up the heater again. The sky looked like it would snow much earlier than this evening.
She parked her Silverado in the empty parking lot at the memorial, and looked around. There was no one here, no killers, no tourists, no workers, just her. She decided to walk through the memorial once again.
One started at the beginning, since the memorial was organized chronologically, and divided into four rooms, which really weren’t rooms since it was all outside, each room representing one of Roosevelt’s terms in office. There were quotes, displays, and waterfalls everywhere. The place was so huge you could wander around until you dropped, but Katie didn’t browse. She found herself walking directly to the third room, depicting Roosevelt’s third term, where the waterfall was much larger and much louder. There, just to the left of the waterfall, was a large sculpture of FDR, and beside him sat his dog, Fala. Katie’s dad had loved Fala, loved all the stories told about the little black Scottish terrier, who’d even had his own comic strip. She stood looking at the huge sculptured cape that covered Roosevelt, listening to the hammering of the water crashing against huge loose chunks of granite. She’d heard that the waterfalls froze sometimes in the winter. With the way the temperature was plummeting, she imagined it wouldn’t be long before they were silent, frozen in place.
Her mind flashed to her father lifting Keely in his arms, pointing to Fala, telling her a story about how he’d performed tricks on demand. How he’d wished he’d been old enough back then to go to Washington to see him in person. Oh Lord, she missed her father, wished he’d gone to a doctor earlier, but he hadn’t, just like a damned stubborn man, her mom had told her, and burst into tears. Not that it would have made much difference.
There were memories, she thought, that touched you throughout your life. She had to keep hoping that all of Sam’s terrible memories would be tempered with the laughter and joy of experiences that were sweet and good.