Seven Minutes to Noon (30 page)

“Get one of the techs in,” Frannie told Dana.

As Alice kneeled in front of Lauren’s chopped-off hair, it was all she could do to stop herself from weeping. The cacophonous pile of hair. The riot of hard evidence. Sickening detail. What would it tell?

Was there more than Lauren’s hair in the pile?

Was Ivy’s hair in there too?

Dana gently placed her hands under Alice’s elbows and lifted her off the floor.

One of the forensics techs came in with a large paper bag. He gathered all the hair into the bag, sealed it and marked it with what must have been the code name for the case:
Mommy Killer.

“Get it right over to Forensics.” Frannie’s voice cracked slightly, but she regained herself. “I’ll call that guy who owes me a favor. I want DNA evaluation on every different hair strand he finds.” Frannie got on her phone and started talking, her words blurring as a storm began to murmur through Alice’s mind.

Nell and Peter.

“The babysitter.” Dana’s tone was soft, but probing. “Sylvie. What’s her full name?”

“Sylvie Devrais,” Frannie answered.

Where were they?

The front door squealed open and cracked shut. Footsteps hurried through the front hall.

“Alice!” It was Mike. Finally.

Alice faced the archway connecting living room to front hall. “In here!”

He walked in, looking hot and tired and almost crushed.

Why was it so quiet? Where were the kids?

“Didn’t you stop at Maggie’s?” Alice asked.

“No one’s home,” Mike said in a tone burdened by both certainty and plea.

“Sylvie said they were there. I told her you’d be stopping by.”

“I rang the bell over and over. No one answered. I thought maybe they came over here.”

“Maybe I misunderstood,” Alice thought aloud. “Maybe she meant they were with Maggie at the store.”

“No,” Mike said, looking from face to face. “I thought the same thing. I called Maggie and she said she hadn’t seen them. Ethan went somewhere with Simon this afternoon. Sylvie’s only got our kids.”

What was he telling her? It was
wrong.

“Where are my children?” she demanded, turning to Frannie. “Where are they!”

A rivulet of sweat traveled Mike’s jawbone as he too turned to Frannie for answers.

“Hello?” Maggie’s voice called from the front hall. She rushed into the living room, black and white polka-dotted skirt flouncing around her knees. “Did the children turn up? Why are the police here? Will someone please tell me what is going on?”

“Mags,” Alice said. “Sylvie said she was taking the kids to your place to get them out of the rain. I thought she had Ethan after school today. I asked her to watch Nell and Peter at the park for a little while—”

“Simon’s taken Ethan to the dentist. Sylvie knew the plan.”

Maggie’s attention was snared by the window on which the words were still slightly visible. It took her a moment to decipher them backwards, then she read out loud: “‘Stop or they’re next.’
They?”

And suddenly Alice knew.
They
were not her unborn twins, but her Nell and her Peter.
Her babies.
Alice ran to the window and pressed her hands against the glass, clawing at the underside of the backward words. Screaming. “You fucking bastard!”

Mike followed her to the window and pulled her fist off the glass before it shattered. His face was rigid with anger. “I’m going out to look for them.”

“Wait,” Frannie said. She got on her cell phone and spoke rapidly with someone on the other end. “Sylvie Devrais. Is our guy still on her?”

“Your guy?” Mike glanced at Alice; he had to be thinking the same thing, that Sylvie was being followed just as Alice had been. Tested. Watched. If so, then had they all been under surveillance? Mike, Maggie, Simon, all the friends? Had Frannie thought all along that the killer was among them?

Had she been right?

“When?” Frannie asked.

An infinite beat of silence. Frannie’s brow pinching over darkening eyes. The world ending. Or beginning. A suffocating transformation of time.

Alice stopped breathing.
One, two, three. One, two, three.
It didn’t work.

“I can’t breathe!” she whispered to Mike.

He turned around and stared at her as if she had spoken a foreign language.

“What?”

“I can’t—”

“Did she have two kids with her, a boy and a girl?” Frannie listened a moment, then ordered, “Put an APB on Sylvie Devrais. And get an Amber Alert out on the kids.
Right now.”

“I knew she was trouble.” Maggie’s voice snapped into the stunned silence that followed. “I just knew it. The little bitch.”

“I’m going out to look for them,” Mike said again.

“I’m coming with you.” Alice turned quickly to the living room’s archway, the passage out of the house, toward her children. Then a spiral of nausea lassoed her and she stopped, bringing both hands to her forehead, resisting gravity.

“Alice?” Mike had his arm around her. “Sit down, sweetie.”

“She better stay here,” Frannie said, steering Alice to the couch. “Mike, you go ahead. I’m trying to reach the cop on Sylvie’s surveillance; he hasn’t been answering his phone, but when I reach him, he’ll tell us where to look. Give me your cell number.”

They traded numbers and Mike left. Alice sank into the couch, choking back the bile of her helplessness. She wanted to be with Mike out on the streets, looking, not sitting here. “I can’t stand this,” she cried. “We should have left town last week.”

Everyone kept quiet; no one denied her that claim, because it was true. They should have left. They should have. And now it was too late.

It was the longest hour in history — a black hole for any mother; for Alice, a nightmare whose edges she had skirted blindly these past two weeks. She had never once feared for Nell’s or Peter’s safety. All this time, she had been looking in the wrong place. Making assumptions. Trusting blindly.

Sylvie.

How could it be?

Alice’s mind swirled with numbers. Dates and times. All the hours she had entrusted her children to Sylvie.

But had she been completely wrong? Weren’t Julius Pollack and Sal Cattaneo and Judy Gersten all somehow involved in this? Sylvie worked for Judy. Judy was close with Sal. Sal was Julius’s secret partner. All the victims were involved with Metro Properties.

What other secrets bound them?

Stop or they’re next.

Nell. Peter.

Stop what, exactly? Making trouble? Creating noise? Collaborating with the police?

And why, why, why hadn’t the detectives told her the children may have been in danger? If they were having Sylvie followed, it was for a reason. The same reason they had
all
been followed.

The detectives knew all along.

It was one of them.

And they watched, and they waited, until something happened.

Alice sat on the couch with Maggie, frozen in the eddying coil of her thoughts as Frannie and Dana paced the living room, working their cell phones. Forensics was long gone to the lab with bags and slides of evidence. Photos to develop. Piles of hair and pillow casings to analyze.

Simon arrived into the chaos with Ethan, set him up in front of the TV upstairs in the family room, and joined the vigil in the living room. He sat next to Maggie on the couch, pressed against her, squeezing hands. Their comforting of each other comforted Alice. She wanted to be part of them, part of their passion, to be anyone but herself — because at this moment, more than any other moment in her life, she was completely alone.
Alone.
She was not part of Maggie and Simon’s deep, if muddled, love; she was a woman, a mother, on the verge of unbearable loss.

Minutes dragged by until, finally, the first dribble of news came in.

“They’ve got Pollack,” Frannie said. “He’s cooperating. Dana, you stay here. Paul’s coming in from Jersey; they’re wrapping up the crime scene. He’s meeting me at the precinct. The FBI’s getting in on this. We’ll have to debrief them.”

Dana nodded, stopping in front of a long window, the butterscotch late afternoon drenching her in sun. She looked like a coin, Alice thought. Dark and golden and powerful. Flat. Unreal.

“I’ll keep you posted.” Frannie strode across the room, her worn black sneakers quiet on the wooden floor. “It shouldn’t be long before we pick up Sal Cattaneo and Judy Gersten for questioning. And we’ll start seeing lab reports. It’s gonna be a long night.” She paused to speak to Alice, Maggie and Simon, stunned observers surreally dotting the living room. “If we’re lucky, we’ll start to get some answers tonight.”

How could
luck
still be thought to play into this mudslide of bad news? Alice wanted to reel the word back into Frannie’s mouth. To stop her speaking altogether. To make her leave
now.
Get some answers
now.
There was nothing anyone could say to mollify Alice. Or one thing, just one:
We found them. All of them. Nell and Peter. Ivy.

In the vacuum of Frannie’s departure, Alice turned toward the windows. Outside, fistfuls of leaves gleamed with raindrops on the tall, old trees that shaded Clinton Street.

“What now?” Maggie asked.

No one answered. There
was
no answer. Or it was the same answer.
Nell and Peter. Ivy.

Soon word came that Sal and Judy had been added to Frannie’s collection at the precinct. Alice vaguely wondered how their presence would be handled with just one small interview room. Unless there were others, a labyrinth of cell-like rooms Alice hadn’t been introduced to. A secret world in the basement. Or on a floor
above. Alice didn’t really know what went on in the Seventy-sixth Precinct. Or in the neighborhood. Or, for that matter, in the larger, mysterious world beyond her own. It was a secret world that had stolen her friend, and now her children. She closed her eyes and sank her head against Maggie’s shoulder.

Suddenly a blinding light filled the living room.

“What the hell is that?” Simon sprung up and went directly to the windows. “Television reporters,” he spat, yanking closed the voluminous curtains.

The room now was dark and Maggie got up to turn on all the lamps.

“I better make a statement,” Dana said, “or they’ll be on us all night.”

All night,
Alice thought. Would it be that long?

Dana called Frannie for approval and to discuss her statement. She would confirm the Amber Alert, but name no suspect in particular. “Under investigation,” Dana said. “Got it.” She disappeared outside for ten long minutes, then came back inside to join the wait. No matter how many seconds ticked by — seconds into minutes; a slow, torturous drip of time — the lights beyond the drawn curtains never dimmed.

In the wait, Alice’s mind unhitched briefly onto a single possibility that she could see as clearly as that distant beach, as clearly as the faces of her children: had whoever killed Lauren and stolen Ivy also come here this afternoon to write a threat to Alice on Simon’s window? If it had been Sylvie, had she detoured her escape for a bout of graffiti? Hailed a taxi and stopped here just long enough to leave behind a final threat? With Nell and Peter in the backseat, watching? They had always said Sylvie was so much fun. Did they have even a single inkling that, for the moment she left them alone, they should run? Had her beloved children squandered their single opportunity for escape?

What if Sylvie
had
put them in a cab? Already taken them far out of the neighborhood? With Mike circling the local streets in his pickup, spinning his wheels, tightening
the noose of his panic while she sat here, helpless and useless, drowning in hers.

Alice shook her head in a futile effort to dispel such thoughts. She had been wrong before; she could be wrong now.

No assumptions.

One, two, three.

There was no more breath. There were no more thoughts. There was only time, long hard strands of it, tightening around her throat. And waiting.

Finally into the dread silence a cell phone rang — Dana’s crescendoing chimes — and she flipped it open.

“We’ve been trying to reach you!... What?... You’ve been in the
subway
?... Where is she?... You what?”

Dana ended the call and faced the fragile group.

“That was Danny, your Andre Capa,” she told Alice with a regretful sigh. “He lost Sylvie just outside Kennedy airport.”

“She’s taking Nell and Peter to the airport?” Alice stood up. The nausea came over her in a wave but she didn’t care; she would dive into it, push against it, fly above it. She couldn’t sit here another second.

“Wait.” Dana grabbed Alice’s arm. “The kids weren’t with Sylvie when she went into the subway. She was alone. Alice, they aren’t with her.”

“Where are they, then?” Her voice seemed to ping through the room. She didn’t care how awful it sounded. “Let me go!”

“Come on.” Simon stood next to her. “I’ll go with you, Alice.”

She flung the door open and held the railing as she ran down the front stoop. At the bottom step she felt her balance give way, felt herself toppling forward. Simon’s hands caught her from behind, grasping an elbow and a shoulder, steadying her.

“Slow down,” he told her. “Get your bearings.”

The depth and authority of his voice stilled her certainty that she could fly up and over the rooftops and treetops of Brooklyn. That with enough velocity she could defy gravity. That with the superpower of her determination, her beloved children would appear in the distance, uniquely recognizable, shimmering with vitality, beauty, life.

But her body overrode her confidence, froze her in place.

“Let’s go.” Simon stood in front of her, holding out a hand. Alice noticed the scratched gold of his wedding ring. Had he never taken it off? “Come on now.”

She stood up. A mere human. A mother, searching.
With Simon at her side she began to walk along Clinton Street in the direction of their old home.

“What are you thinking, Alice?”

“President Street.” She stepped out of a patch of shade into an expansive pool of burning sun. Puddles of rainwater dotted the sidewalk; she walked into them, over them, past them. “That’s the one address they have memorized.”