Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (7 page)

“Stay right there by the phone,” Christine says, and hangs up, and goes back to the blue Impala she’s parked at the curb alongside the phone booth. She begins driving at once, searching for the next pay phone along the Trail. She is not positive about how telephone traces work, but she thinks maybe they can close in on specific locations if not specific phone numbers. She called on a cell phone last night, from where the two of them are holding the kids, but they decided together that it would be safer if she called from pay phones this morning.

She pulls off the road as soon as she spots one in a strip mall. She gets out of the Impala again, walks over to the plastic phone shell, and dials Alice’s number.

She looks at her watch.

12:10
P
.
M
.

She hears the phone ringing on the other end, once, twice…

“Hello?”

“Have you got the money?” she asks.

“Not yet,” Alice says.

“What’s taking you so long?”

“There are securities to sell. It isn’t easy to raise that much cash overnight.”

“When will you have it?” Christine asks.

There is a silence on the line.

Someone coaching her for sure. Hand signals, or scribbled notes, whatever. She is not alone in that house.

“I’m still working on it.”

“Work on it faster,” Christine says, and hangs up. She looks at her watch again. The call took fifteen seconds, going on sixteen. She does not think they can effect a trace in that short a time. She goes back to the car, and drives along the Trail until she spots another pay phone. It is 12:17 when she calls the house again.

“Hello?”

“Get the money by this afternoon at three,” Christine says. “We’ll call then with instructions.”

“Wait!”

“What? Fast!”

“How do I know they’re still alive? Send me a Polaroid picture of the two of them holding today’s
Tribune.
”

“What?”

“Send it Fed Ex.”

“You’re dreaming,” Christine says.

The sweep hand on her watch has ticked off twenty seconds.

“I’ll call you at three,” she says.

“Are my children all right? Let me speak to Ashley, ple—”

Christine hangs up.

“Twenty-five seconds this
time,” Marcia says.

Sloate is already on the new phone link to the Public Safety Building downtown. Alice listens as he tells his commanding officer that they’ve had no luck with a trace. He tells him the woman is demanding the money by three this afternoon. The big grandfather clock in the hallway now reads twenty minutes to one.

“So what do we do?” he asks. “We’ve got till three o’clock.”

“Let me think on it,” Steele says, and hangs up.

Alice is pacing the room. She whirls on Marcia, where she is sitting behind her equipment. “Why haven’t you been able to trace the calls yet?” she asks.

“She’s never on the line long enough,” Marcia says.

“We can put men on the moon, but you can’t trace a damn call coming from around the corner!”

“I wish it
was
just around the corner. But we don’t know
where
she’s—”

“I don’t want you here!” Alice shouts. “I want you all out of here! I’ll handle this alone from now on. Just get out! None of you knows what the hell you’re doing, you’re going to get my children killed!”

“Mrs. Glendenning…”

“No! Just get out of here. Take all your stuff and leave. Now! Please. Get out. Please. I’m sorry. Get out.”

“We’re staying,” Sloate says.

She is ready to punch him.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, “but we’re staying.”

And then, infuriating her because it reminds her again of her father when he used to take a razor strop to her behind, “It’s for your own good.”

When Rafe arrives
at a quarter past one that afternoon, Alice has no choice but to tell him what’s going on. He looks as if he doesn’t believe her. Doesn’t believe these are detectives here. Doesn’t believe her kids are missing, either. Thinks this is all some kind of afternoon pantomime staged for his benefit. Stands there like a big man who needs a shave and a drink both, which he tells Alice he really
does
need if all she’s telling him is true. She pours him some twelve-year-old scotch from a bottle Lane Realty gave her at Christmastime. The other brokers all got bonuses, but she hadn’t sold a house yet. Still hasn’t, for that matter.

“What happened to your foot?” Rafe asks, noticing at last.

“I got hit by a car.”

“Did you report it?” he says.

“Not yet,” she says.

My kids have been kidnapped, she thinks, and everybody wants to know if I reported a goddamn traffic accident.

She takes him into the kitchen, and searches in the fridge for something she can give him to eat.

“You tell Carol about this?” he asks.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My kids are in danger.”

“She’s your sister.”

“This okay?” she asks, and offers him a loaf of sliced rye, a wedge of cheese, and a large hunk of Genoa salami.

“You got mustard?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“You should call her,” he says.

“Let’s see what happens here, okay?”

“She’s your sister,” he says again.

“When it’s over,” she says.

“You got any wine?”

She takes an opened bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge, hands him a glass. In the living room, Sloate is on the phone again with his captain. She wanders out there to see if she can learn anything, but there is nothing new. Three o’clock seems so very far away. When she comes back into the kitchen, Rafe is just finishing his sandwich.

“You’re out of wine,” he tells her, and shakes the empty bottle in his fist. “Have you got a spare bedroom? I’ve been driving all night.”

She shows Rafe the children’s empty bedroom. Twin beds in it, one on either side of the room. Rafe looks insulted by the size of the beds, big man like him. But he finally climbs into one of them, clothes and all.

Alice goes into her own bedroom, and climbs into bed, thinking she will take a nap before three, be ready for whatever may come next.

In an instant, she is dead asleep.

The nightmare comes the
way it always does.

The family is sitting at the dinner table together.

It is seven-thirty
P
.
M
. on the night of September twenty-first last year; she will never forget that date as long as she lives.

Eddie is telling her he feels like taking the
Jamash
out for a little moonlight spin. The
Jamash
is a 1972 Pearson sloop they bought used when they first moved down here to the Cape. It cost $12,000 at a time when Eddie was still making good money as a stockbroker, before Bush got elected and things went all to hell with the economy. They named it after the two kids, Jamie and Ashley, the
Jamash
for sure, a trim little thirty-footer that was seaworthy and fast.

But Eddie has never taken her out for a moonlight spin without Alice aboard, and this has always required making babysitter plans in advance.

“Just feel like getting out on the water,” he tells her.

“Well… sure,” she says, “go ahead.”

“You sure you don’t mind?”

“Just don’t take her out on the Gulf,” she says. “Not alone.”

“I promise,” he says.

From the door, as he leaves the house, he yells, “Love ya, babe!”

“Love ya, too,” Alice says.

“Love ya, Daddy!” Ashley yells.

“Love ya,” Jamie echoes.

In the Gulf of Mexico the next morning, an oil tanker spots the boat under sail, moving on an erratic course, tossing aimlessly on the wind.

They hail her, and get no response.

When finally they climb down onto the deck, there is no one aboard.

Alice gets the phone call at ten that morning.

She screams.

And screams.

The telephone is ringing.

She climbs out of bed, rushes into the living room. The grandfather clock reads ten minutes to two. Sloate already has the earphones on.

“She’s early,” he says.

Marcia is behind her tracing gear now.

Sloate nods.

Alice picks up.

“Hello?” she says.

“Listen,” the woman says. “Just listen.” And then, in a stage whisper, “Tell her you and your brother are okay, that’s all. Nothing else.” And then, apparently handing Ashley the phone, she says, “Here.”

“We’re both okay,” Ashley says in a rush. “Mom, I can’t believe it!”

“
What
can’t…?”

“Do you remember Mari—?”

The line goes dead.

“Who’s Marie?” Sloate asks at once.

“They’re alive,” Alice says. “My children…”

“Do you know anyone named Marie?”

“No. Did you hear her? They’re both okay!”

“Or Maria?”

“I don’t know. They’re
alive
!”

“Fifteen seconds this time,” Marcia says.

“Marie? Maria?”

“I don’t know anyone named—”

“A relative?”

“No.”

“A friend?”

“No. My children are alive. How are you going…?”

“Someone who worked for you?”

“…to get them…?”

“Marie,” he insists. “Maria.
Think
!”

“
You
think, damn it! They’re alive! Do something to—”

And suddenly the knowledge breaks on her face.

“What?” Sloate asks.

“Yes. Maria.”

“Who?”

“A babysitter. This was a long time ago, I’m not even sure she—”

“What’s her last name?”

At two o’clock that
afternoon, Charlie Hobbs, at the wheel of the Chevy pickup he uses to transport his huge canvases, drives into the bus-loading area at Pratt Elementary School, and asks to talk to Luke Farraday. It is a hot, bright, sunny day on the Cape, the temperature hovering at ninety-two degrees. Charlie is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Farraday is wearing a blue uniform with a square shield, and a little black plastic name tag over the left breast pocket.
L
.
FARRA
-
DAY
. Yellow school buses are already beginning to roll into the lot.

Charlie has to be careful here.

The warning from whoever has taken Alice’s kids could not have been more explicit:

Don’t call the police, or they’ll die.

Charlie doesn’t want Farraday to think anything out of the ordinary has happened here. At the same time, he hopes to get a bead on that blue car.

“I’m a friend of Alice Glendenning,” he says. “She wants to thank whoever picked up her kids yesterday afternoon. Maybe you can help me.”

“Cops’ve already been here,” Farraday says. “Told ’em everything I know.”

This surprises Charlie. He hopes it doesn’t show on his face. Why would the cops have been here? Alice told him they let her go yesterday, so why…?

“Sorry to bother you again then,” he says. “She’s just eager to thank the woman.”

Farraday is a man maybe sixty-five, seventy, in there, one of the retirees who come down here to die in the sun. Charlie’s fifty-four, which is maybe getting on, he supposes. But he knew what he wanted to be when he was seventeen. Had to leave art school when the Army grabbed him, but returned to his studies and his chosen profession the moment he was discharged. He’s been painting ever since, never hopes to retire till his fingers can no longer hold a brush or the good Lord claims him, whichever comes first.

“These’d be Jamie and Ashley Glendenning,” he says. “Little boy and girl.”

“Yep, I know them. But like I told the detectives this morning—”

“That when they were here?”

“Round ten o’clock,” Farraday says.

“And you told them what?”

“Told them a young blonde woman called the kids over to the car, drove off with them.”

“What’d she look like?”

“Straight blonde hair down to here,” he says, and indicates the length of it on his neck. “Slender woman from the look of her, delicate features. Wearing sunglasses and a white little-like tennis hat with a peak.”

“She wasn’t black, was she?” Charlie asks.

“Cops asked me the same thing.”

“Was she?”

“I don’t know many black blondes,” Farraday says. Then, chuckling, he adds, “Don’t know many blondes at
all,
for that matter. Nor too many blacks, either.”

“How old would you say?”

“I couldn’t say. Young, though. In her thirties maybe? I really couldn’t say.”

“Called over to the kids, you said?”

“Called to them. Signaled to them. You know.”

“What’d she say?”

“Now there’s where you got me, mister,” Farraday says, and lightly taps the hearing aid in his right ear.

“Couldn’t hear what she said, is that it?”

“Knew she was calling over to them, though. Waving for them to get in.”

“And they just got in.”

“Got in, and she drove off with them.”

“In a blue car, is that right?”

“Blue Chevrolet Impala.”

“Notice the license plate?”

“No. Told the cops the same thing. Wasn’t looking for it.”

“Florida plate was it, though?”

“Must’ve been, don’t you think?”

“Why’s that?”

“Cause it was a rental car.”

“How do you know?”

“Had a bumper sticker on it. ‘Avis Tries Harder.’”

Bingo, Charlie thinks.

The call from Captain
Steele comes at twenty minutes to three.

“What does Oleander Street look like right this minute?” he asks Sloate.

“Empty. No traffic at all, nobody parked.”

“Do you think they’re watching the house?”

“No.”

“If I sent somebody over right now, with those bullshit hundreds from the Henley case, can he drive right into the garage?”

“Yes. It’s a two-car garage, there’s only the vic’s car in it right now.”

The vic, Alice thinks.

She is pacing the floor near the table where Sloate sits with the phone to his ear. The vic.

“I’ll call when he’s on his approach. You can raise the door then.”

“Got it.”

“I’m sending Andrews and Saltzman to check out that babysitter,” he says. “You think there’s any meat there?”

“I hope so.”

“Meanwhile, when your lady calls, tell her you’ve got the money.”

“Okay.”

“And set up a drop.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think they know we’re already in this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Stay in touch.”

Sloate puts the phone back on its cradle.

“What?” Alice asks.

“He’s sending two of our people to talk to Maria Gonzalez.”

”They found her then?”

“Yes. And he’s sending someone else here to—”

“No! Why?”

“With bogus bills.”

“Bogus…?”

“Counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.”

“No. If anyone’s watching the house…”

“He’ll be driving right into the garage.”

“If they smell something fishy…”

“They won’t, don’t worry.”

“These are my
kids
we’re talking about!”

The grandfather clock now reads 2:45
P
.
M
.

In fifteen minutes, the woman will call again with instructions.

“When she calls,” Sloate says, “tell her you have the money. That’s the first thing.”

“They’ll know the bills are phony.”

“No, they won’t,” he says. “These are confiscated super-bills. The Federal Reserve loaned them to us when we were working another kidnapping case down here.”