Seven Minutes to Noon (21 page)

“You mean she didn’t do this to herself?” Alice asked, understanding in that moment why the detectives were there. They were homicide detectives; they didn’t investigate suicides. They must have thought that someone had tried to harm Pam.

“Is Pam all right?” Alice asked Ray.

“She’s in a coma. Someone put my baby in a coma.” He began to cry.

Esther came up next to him and draped a thin arm around his shoulders. “Shh, we’re gonna get our baby back. You’ll see.”

The fingers of Giometti’s right hand drummed the marble counter one time, quickly, as if practicing scales. Frannie was quiet and still, not smiling; her gaze rested on Alice but gave nothing away. Alice felt she was intruding on something. She hardly knew Pam, not really, and had a strong feeling no one would argue her out of cutting her visit short.

Glancing at her watch, she said, “I’d like to see Pam when you think she’s ready for visitors.”

“Tell me your number,” Esther said. “I have a perfect memory.”

Alice recited her phone number. Esther listened closely, nodded, then began unloading the containers of food from the counter into the refrigerator.

“Good luck,” Alice told Ray.

Though he was still crying, he slipped off his stool. He was quite short, she saw now, about five foot four. Joining Esther at the counter, he pushed aside a few containers until he found a tray covered with aluminum foil cinched around the edges.

“Brownies,” he said. “Esther’s watching her figure
and I’m on a heart-healthy diet. Pam mentioned you had kids. We tried, but for us it never happened. Here.” He handed Alice the tray. “If I eat these, she’ll kill me. That she would happily do.”

“Thank you. Nell and Peter will love these.” Alice leaned over to kiss Ray’s cheek, then left him with the detectives.

“Go straight home,” Frannie said, causing Alice to turn around in the kitchen doorway and look at the young woman with her rose-colored sunglasses perched atop her black hair.

“But I have to open the store.”

Frannie leaned forward on her elbows. “Have your guy out there take you home. He can open the store himself.”

“Why?” Alice asked.

But Frannie didn’t answer. The tense set of her expression made it clear there was more, but it would have to wait.

KILLER ON LOOSE IN CARROLL GARDENS,
by Erin Brinkley.

Alice’s pulse jumped when she read the headline, the first thing she saw when she pulled the morning paper out of its blue plastic sleeve. It had been such a busy morning, hustling the kids off to school, cooking and getting the stew over to the Shorts’, and she hadn’t had time to look at the paper until now.

The lead article was not long, but there were associated articles and she wanted to read them all so she wouldn’t miss anything. She sat down at the kitchen table and forced herself to read carefully, not to skip ahead.

A Brooklyn real estate broker who was found Thursday by a neighbor asphyxiated in her car was a victim of foul play. Pam Short had in fact been shot in the neck and left in the car by her attacker, who turned on the engine and abandoned the fifty-year-old woman to die in her private garage. But in the botched murder attempt, the .22 round-nose bullet that had meant to kill Ms. Short bounced off her jawbone instead and lodged in a pocket of fat on the side of her neck.

Alice read the details in horror, forcing her mind to slow down as she scrambled for new information between the cramped lines of the newsprint, which resonated
with truths — some unproven, some plainly chilling — from her own small life.

Pam Short appears to have no enemies in the tightly knit community in which she has lived and worked for over twenty years. She has been married to her husband, Ray Short, an antiques dealer, for seventeen years. Nor is there any record of mental illness or suicide attempts in Ms. Short’s history.

Although the location of the gunshot wound might have indicated self-infliction, attempted suicide has been ruled out by a forensic pathologist. Ms. Short’s hands were free of barium antimony, lead deposits that collect on the fingers and palm of someone who has recently shot a gun. There was also no sign of the blood spatter or tissue particles, known as blockback, that are found on ten percent of suicides.

In a related development, the New York City Criminalistics Laboratory has determined that the bullet used in the attack on Ms. Short was shot by the same gun used nearly two weeks ago to kill Lauren Barnet, also of Carroll Gardens. Ms. Barnet was nine months pregnant at the time of her murder. Her unborn baby has not been found, and is currently being treated as a missing person by Brooklyn’s Seventy-sixth Precinct.

The article continued toward the end of the Metro section, and this was where Alice found the related pieces on Christine Craddock and Lauren. The sight of Lauren’s photograph, a straight-on glance at the photographer, had the effect of a final valediction.
Over,
it said. Gone. Lauren had become a stepping-stone in the path of a madman. Alice couldn’t bring herself to read the article, not yet. She went first to Christine Craddock’s.

Christine’s story had advanced since new interest had been turned on it by Erin Brinkley. Alice imagined the
reporter as young,
hungry
as they said in the trade, willing to go farther and faster than the police, unencumbered by doubt or due process. Ms. Brinkley had found someone who had spoken with Christine the morning of her disappearance. Alice was sure this was new information; she would have remembered reading it on Christine’s Web site or the older articles. The last person to see Christine was not the man at the local deli, where she had bought a small bottle of water just before she vanished, but Andre Capa, the artist who lived in the round house on the Gowanus Canal.

Andre Capa — so now he had a name. The artist whose sculptures awed and entertained passersby, spraying them with toxic water. Who sat on the bridge with his easel, from time to time, painting the rough horizon. Andre Capa. The last person to see Lauren alive, eight minutes before her death. And now, the last person to see Christine Craddock.

Andre Capa had been standing on the Carroll Street Bridge, photographing his latest fountaining sculpture — a twisted-wire angel spewing canal water from her mouth — when he saw a hugely pregnant woman stop on the Union Street Bridge about a hundred feet down the canal. He saw her bend forward in apparent pain, stopped taking pictures of his angel, and turned his lens on the woman who he assumed was in labor. One of the pictures was printed next to the article. It showed a distant bridge on which a blurry woman leaned into the railing. Her head was tilted forward, her elbow bent, as if she was trying to stop herself from falling. Asked if she did fall, Capa said that no, she pushed herself back up and slowly continued across the bridge. Asked why he hadn’t come forward with the information at the time, he explained that he never read the news, didn’t own a television, and within days after Christine’s disappearance had left the country for Bali where he kept a second home.

“I called to her,” the article quoted Capa as saying, “and asked if she needed help. She said no, she was in
labor and was on her way to Methodist Hospital.” Ms. Brinkley answered the reader’s next potential question about why Christine hadn’t called herself a cab to get to the hospital, stating that new wisdom advised pregnant women to walk in the early stages of labor.

Alice remembered her own early labor, doubling over in excruciating pain every couple of minutes. Eventually, walking became impossible. How far, she wondered, had Christine made it before she was unable to go on?

She turned back to the article about Lauren — her peaceful photograph — and with a stab at her heart read what amounted to an obituary.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Lauren Barnet suspended her career to stay home with her children. She leaves behind her husband, Tim Barnet, and five-year-old son, Austin.

Leaves them behind.

Yet they too were now gone, having left behind everything they had known of their life with Lauren.

Alice pushed the newspaper across the kitchen table in disgust. How was this happening to people she knew? In her own neighborhood? In her
home
?

The house was eerily silent. Even Julius didn’t seem to be home, or if he was, she couldn’t hear him moving around upstairs as she sometimes did. Outside, a car rumbled past. The bones of the house creaked and moaned.

She picked up the phone and called the precinct, leaving a voice mail for Frannie: “Please call me back. I’m sitting here going crazy. Did you read the paper today? I think that artist is after me.” She hung up, feeling part angry and part ashamed. She knew her message made her sound paranoid, but why shouldn’t she be?

She pushed a spray of breakfast crumbs into a pile on the table in front of her. She had to think this through.

Andre Capa.

Maybe he was the limo driver. Maybe he worked for Metro. Maybe ridding Julius Pollack of his more stubborn tenants was his day job. But what would they want with the babies?

To get her mind off the gruesome details of Pam’s attack and everything else —
everything
— she took a pad of paper and a pen and started a shopping list.
Milk, bread, oranges, graham crackers,
the simplest of things. Then, without meaning to, she started a new list, and another, jotting lists for anything that came to mind.
Moving. Baby Prep. Kids/School. Blue Shoes.
She needed a way to unknot and streamline her goals and thoughts and worries and plans. Then she decided to try listing the things that kept her up at night, not just what needed to be accomplished during the day.
Lauren/Ivy. Phantom Baby. Pam. Julius/Partner. Capa/Stalker. Investigation. News. Fear of Being Next.

She called Frannie’s numbers, then Giometti’s, and left more messages. “Call me.” Mike’s voice mail answered. “Call me. Please.” She sat with her hand heavy on the phone and thought: Mags.

Maggie answered her home phone right away.

“Have you read this morning’s paper?”

“Alice? No, I haven’t. What’s wrong?”

She described her morning to Maggie, who listened in uncharacteristic silence. Within fifteen minutes, she was at Alice’s front door.

“If Mohammed can’t come to the mountain—” Maggie brushed Alice’s cheek with a kiss as she walked in without invitation, but then she didn’t need one.

“Jason’s opening the store,” Alice said. “I can’t go out. I’ve been ordered to stay here and wait, but I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I—”

“Slow down, darling.” Maggie sat Alice at the kitchen table, brought her a glass of water, then settled in close enough to touch knees. “I’m not worried about the store, I’m worried about you. You’re a complete mess. Haven’t you slept?”

Alice shook her head. “Not much.”

“But the sleeping pills.”

“I’m pregnant, Mags—”

“Didn’t your doctor say they’re safe?”

“Thalidomide was safe too, remember?” It was the
first time in days Alice had voiced that particular concern, it having slipped beneath so many others. She brought her hands to her face, rubbed off a new grip of anxiety, set them back in her lap. “All those babies born with partial limbs.”

“That was decades ago.” Maggie touched Alice’s cheek with a soft fingertip. “And the car accident. Your insomnia is dangerous. You must keep some perspective.”

“I’ll take one tonight,” Alice promised halfheartedly. “I will.”

“Tell you what.” Maggie uncrossed her legs. “I’m taking you out to lunch.” She stood up. “Come on, get your purse. It’s a lovely day outside. Let’s go.”

“I’m already out to lunch.” Alice tried to joke but her effort fell flat. “Anyway, Mags, I can’t leave. Frannie told me to stay home.”

“Right. Well, then, let’s see what I can rustle up here.” Maggie got up and began to search the refrigerator and cupboards. “Personally I’ve never understood the American obsession with tuna fish, but when necessity calls, one makes do.” She opened two cans of tuna and began mixing in mayonnaise, washing lettuce, toasting bread.

“Maggie, I have a confession to make,” Alice said to Maggie’s back as she worked.

Maggie swiveled to look at Alice briefly enough to say, “Yes?” then returned to her lunch making.

Alice told her everything: her visit to Frannie, the crying baby, the stalker. When she was finished, she felt tremendously relieved. “I don’t know why I didn’t speak up sooner, Mags. I’ve been getting tied up into knots. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Maggie said. She delivered two plates with sandwiches to the table, along with a small bowl of carrot sticks, which she placed between them. “I am, after all, the queen of nondisclosure. But really, Alice. You’ve been hearing a
baby
? And you have a
stalker
? You
are
discreet.”

“Not really,” Alice said. “Just tired and overly hormonal.”

“I think you’re doing beautifully,” Maggie said, “considering.” She reached across the table and patted Alice’s hand.

“What do you mean?”