Seven Minutes to Noon (27 page)

“Let it go, Paul.” Frannie opened her wallet and pulled out a dollar bill. “Here, try something else.”

“Thanks.” He threw up his hands. “But it’s the principle
of the thing. Excuse me, people.” He left them for the front desk.

Frannie used the dollar to buy Alice a bottle of water. She tried to refuse but Frannie insisted. Alice realized how thirsty she was when she drained the bottle in three gulps.

“You did good,” Frannie said.

Mike and the women gathered around Alice, pulling chairs close, leaning in.

Dana reached over to rub Alice’s neck. “Excellent.”

Alice felt her muscles begin to relax. Suddenly, she began to sweat in earnest.

“Delayed reaction to stress,” Dana said. “Come on, let’s get you into the AC.” She stood, and the rest followed with a quick scraping of chairs. Mike helped Alice up.

“Paul, we’re going in,” Frannie said. They passed him at the front desk, retrieving his lost dollar from the officer who controlled the petty cash.

They went back to the small basement room where Alice had been wired earlier. The technician was there, unloading equipment.

“Got everything, Eddie?” Frannie asked him.

“Yup. All set.”

“Can’t leave anything in the van.” Frannie rolled her eyes. “Even in our own parking lot.”

“So,
was
it good?” Alice asked.

“It was good.” Frannie turned to Eddie. “Okay, buddy, scoot.”

Eddie left the room and Dana plucked the tiny microphone out of Alice’s dress.

“Carefully,” Dana said, as Alice lifted the dress over her head. The cool air on her clammy skin felt exquisite. Frannie carefully removed the wires and placed them on the table for Eddie to sort out when he returned.

“What we learned,” she told Alice, “is that Garden Hill Realty is involved. As soon as you mentioned Judy Gersten, Cattaneo tensed. We don’t know why exactly.
But I have a hunch things are going to start shaking up in the local real estate markets just about now.”

“What next?” Alice asked.

“We wait,” Frannie answered.

“You mean we just go back to our regular life, except that nothing’s regular about it any more?”

“What I mean,” Frannie said, “is you go back to normal as much as you can. And then we’ll see.”

“What if we got away for a while?” Mike asked. “I’d like to take Alice and the kids and go somewhere.”

In the heavy pause that followed, as Mike looked from woman to woman, Alice felt the pinch of his helplessness. He hadn’t told her in so many words, but she pretty much figured he had abandoned his plan to go to the furniture expo in Las Vegas. Day to day, they were both redefining priorities, and she knew that when he said
away,
he meant
far
away. Not just across state lines. To another country.

“We’d rather you didn’t.” Frannie sat down, leaning her elbows on the tabletop. “It might help to have you around.”

“Why?” The jugular vein pulsed in Mike’s neck. “So this psycho can butcher my wife? So you can catch him in the act this time? When it’s too late for us?”

Frannie sighed deeply and sat back in her chair, the hinges of which let out a loud moan at the sudden weight of her body. She closed her eyes. Her lashes were very long, Alice noticed. And she knew: Mike’s accusations were unanswerable because they were partly true.

“Just tell us,” Alice begged Frannie in a voice buried in whisper, “what’s going to happen next, so we can know. We need to
know
so we can decide.”

Frannie opened her eyes. After a moment’s pause, she said, “We’ve got a few ideas, but we can’t share them right now.”

So they were back to that. Alice pressed her lips shut against a vitriolic surge of frustration, helplessness, fear and grief that was threatening to erupt from her stomach to her mouth.

“I want to go home,” she whispered to Mike.

“Me too,” he whispered angrily. “But we can’t.”

Alice missed her old home on President Street and yearned for her new home on Third Place. But living in Simon’s house, even just for one night, she had developed an awareness that home was not so much a place. Home was Nell and Peter and Mike, and it was her twins. Home was the dark hole in her existence where missing Lauren still hurt. Home was a good meal, a hot shower, a clean bed. Home could be anywhere.

But still, she missed home. Even though it scared her a little, she slipped forward to the edge of her chair to make a single demand.

“I need to get into the President Street apartment.” She looked Frannie squarely in the eye. “I need to pick up a few things.”

And she needed to say good-bye.

Frannie nodded slowly, thinking, and finally said, “All right. Tomorrow. I’ll arrange it.”

Mike dropped the kids off at school, then went to his workshop. Alice, with Dana, opened Blue Shoes at eleven o’clock. And then at just after two — when they had been alerted that the coast was clear — they headed over to the President Street house to gather clothes and toys and a few other things. Sylvie had agreed to pick Nell and Peter up from school in case Alice couldn’t get there in time.

“That’s him,” Dana whispered to Alice as they passed a man wearing a Yankees cap, sitting alone in a gray Ford parked in front of the house. Meaning, he was the cop surveilling the house. He was reading a newspaper, or pretending to. They passed him without so much as a glance in his direction and entered the house with Alice’s key.

They had only been gone a few days, yet the house felt eerily abandoned. Things were just where they had left them in the rush of their lives. Dishes were in the sink and Alice’s half-finished mug of tea sat on the counter by the phone. Toys were scattered where the children had left them before school that last morning.

Alice checked her watch. “How much time do we have?”

“Just what you need.” Dana sat at the kitchen table and waited.

Alice forced herself to ignore the dirty dishes and the trash that was starting to smell. She went directly downstairs,
where she collected clothes for everyone, a stack of books Nell hadn’t yet read and a small bag full of Peter’s favorite trucks and action figures. When she came upstairs, Dana had a funny look on her face.

“What?” Alice asked.

“Shh.” Dana tilted her ear toward the ceiling. Footsteps. Alice now heard them clearly.

“He’s
home
,” Alice whispered. “He wasn’t supposed to be home.”

“He just came in. Come on — we gotta go. Quietly.”

Padding through the living room, Alice noticed Judy Gersten’s peony pillow where she had left it on the couch. Veering slightly off course, she stooped to pick it up and jam it into her overflowing bag. Dana cast her a frustrated look — why was Alice stopping to get even one more thing? But this could be her last chance to take the pillow. Since bringing it home, Alice had wanted it for Blue Shoes, where with the flowers it would live as a constant reminder of Lauren. It could be a kind of shrine.

Dana opened the apartment door as carefully as possible and Alice followed her into the hallway. Except for the footsteps, all was silent. And then the footsteps stopped and Alice heard it. The baby was crying upstairs, again.

She looked fiercely at Dana, widening her eyes and angling her ear toward the stairs as if to say,
Do you hear it too? You must hear it! A baby is crying, right now, right here.

Dana mouthed,
Not now.
She shook her head and walked to the front door.

Yes, now,
Alice thought. If not now, when? Whatever the police knew about Julius and the phantom baby, if they knew anything at all, they hadn’t shared it with her. They hadn’t found a crime scene. A search warrant for Julius’s apartment hadn’t even been issued, as far as Alice knew. Unless there were still things they hadn’t told her. She didn’t know and right at this moment, she didn’t care.

She was here now. Right now. And right now, a baby was crying. Upstairs. In this house. Just above their heads.

Alice set down her bags and turned to the stairs.

“Stop!” Dana hissed. “You go up there now, you could screw up the whole case. Let us do it the right way.”

Alice hurried, climbing the stairs quickly, taking them two steps at a time. By the top of the stairs, she was panting for breath. Her belly contracted hard over her twins — a Braxton Hicks. She ignored it and continued on. Dana flew up the stairs behind her, saying, “No, Alice! Let us—”

But Alice couldn’t wait anymore. She knocked hard on Julius’s apartment door. The footsteps came loud and fast, and the door swung open. Julius stood there in his sleeveless white undershirt, flesh bulging out. His hair was a mess and his face looked haggard. The rectangular lilac glasses rested halfway down his nose.

His eyes went instantly hard. “What are you doing in my house?”

Behind him, the baby’s cries were louder but somehow less real. Alice heard a woman’s voice humming a lullaby. The baby’s cries calmed, then petered out.

Dana stood next to Alice, gun in her hand, aimed at Julius Pollack’s shabby kitchen. A white Formica table was piled with mail and newspapers. Boxes were everywhere. Behind the table, next to an old, deep porcelain sink, was a life-size sewing model with the curvaceous shape of a large woman. It was dressed in lavish but mismatched women’s clothes, as if someone had decided to bring out a favorite element of different outfits. At the foot of the model were the same silver shoes Alice had seen Julius wearing that night she first heard the baby cry.

A plate with a half-eaten sandwich sat in an uncluttered niche on the kitchen table. Julius had been eating, his chair haphazardly pushed away to answer the door. On a counter directly across the room, facing the table,
was a television. He had been watching something while he ate, and now Alice saw what it was.

Moving gently across the screen of Julius’s TV were scenes from a home video. The tiny pink face of a baby in the arms of a woman who studiously ignored the camera. A close-up of her fingertip caressing the baby’s face as it calmed. The sound of Julius’s own voice, sounding unruffled and satisfied, speaking from the video: “She’ll sleep. Let her be.”

Alice recognized the baby’s cry as it slowed to a whimper. It was the sound she had given Ivy. It was the sound of her own babies calming themselves to sleep. It was the cry that had haunted her since she first heard it. A sound she had inflated and mistaken for something it wasn’t.

It wasn’t Ivy. It was a different baby. Possibly Julius’s own baby, for whom he pined in his solitary apartment.

“What the
fuck.”
Julius’s tone was low and controlled.

“We apologize,” Dana said edgily, her gun held taut. “Alice, apologize to the man, please.”

“I’m sorry,” Alice said.

“No, you’re not,” Julius said in the same tamped-down tone, holding back floods of... what? Alice noticed a speck of mayonnaise glistening on his top lip. “But you will be.”

Alice and Dana walked quickly up President Street. The stifling afternoon was growing darker; the air felt almost wet. Leaves shivered in a staccato of quick breezes.

“What were you thinking?” Dana’s tone was stern; gone was the soft posturing of friendship.

“I was thinking there was a baby up there who needed someone to find her.”

“What if there was? Why does it have to be you?”

“If I’m the one who hears her,” Alice said, “then I’m who she gets.”

“You could have just seriously jeopardized the investigation. Do you know that?”

Walking beside Dana, Alice shifted her heavy bag from one hand to the other. “I couldn’t help myself.”

“Why not? I was standing right there. I
told
you not to go.”

“I’m a
mother,
that’s why.”

They turned onto Smith Street where the playground came into view. She could see Nell shooting down the slide and Peter on the swing being pushed by Sylvie. She wished she could turn into the park, kiss her children, discuss trivialities with Sylvie by the swings. But she had to finish this; she had to make Dana understand. And she had to absorb a new understanding herself: the crying that had haunted her had not been Ivy or any other living child, but a memory cherished by a man she loathed. A man she had thought incapable of warmth.
A man who it seemed had left behind a past that included love and, presumably, some kind of loss. There was so much Alice needed to think over.

“Someday,” Alice’s voice calmed, “when you’re a mother, you’ll understand.”

“Oh,
please
don’t start that shit about how no one can understand who doesn’t have kids.”

But it’s true,
Alice thought, though she didn’t say it. Motherhood was a transformation in your humanity and you simply could not fully understand it without experiencing it yourself. She couldn’t explain it to Dana; this was a hopeless debate.

“I shouldn’t have gone up,” Alice said, stating the simple, official fact. “You told me not to, and then I did.”

“Damn right,” Dana said. “You filed a restraining order against Julius Pollack and you just went into his apartment! Frannie’s gonna be pissed.”

“But I got something for her,” Alice said.

Dana stopped walking and looked at Alice. “What’s that?”

“The baby I heard crying upstairs wasn’t even real.”

Dana smirked. “We knew there was no baby up there! Did you think Frannie didn’t check that out? This just proves you weren’t hearing things.”

Alice was stunned by this news. “But she
knew
I would keep listening for a baby. It was making me
crazy.
Why didn’t she tell me?” Alice could still feel the seepage of exhaustion all those nights she lay awake listening for the distant cries.

Dana seemed to consider her words carefully. Alice watched her, waiting for an answer, feeling the humidity cramp around her.

“Julius Pollack had a wife and baby daughter,” Dana said. “They were killed in a car accident two years ago.”

Alice could see the tiny face squeezing out whimpers, calming under her mother’s touch. Julius’s half-eaten sandwich in the lonely apartment. The tsunami of his anger.

“It would have helped if she had told me,” Alice said quietly.