Seven Minutes to Noon (5 page)

He opened his own wallet:
DETECTIVE PAUL GIOMETTI,
60
TH PRECINCT, HOMICIDE.

“Homicide?” Alice blurted.

Maggie hurried around the counter, took one look at Giometti’s identification and said, “You found Lauren, didn’t you?”

“No,” Frannie said. “We didn’t. But we’re trying to.”

“But it says
homicide.”
Maggie’s tone was accusatory, the mere word breaching a pact that Lauren was, had to be, all right. Alice felt a trickle of nausea worm its way up her throat.

Frannie put her billfold away and stepped forward to gently touch Alice’s arm. “We’re looking for Lauren, that’s all.”

“Somewhere we can talk privately?” Giometti asked.

Alice put the
BE RIGHT BACK
sign on the front door as Maggie led the detectives to the back room. This area had been renovated in a basic way, made clean and comfortable, with a secondhand couch, a small table and two folding chairs. Wall shelves were stacked with shoe boxes. A narrow door led to the small bathroom. Beyond a gated window was an overgrown garden neither woman had time to tend.

The detectives sat at the table. Alice and Maggie took the couch, facing them.

“I’m with the local PDU, the Precinct Detectives Unit,” Frannie began, “and Paul’s with the Brooklyn South Homicide Unit. He’s been detailed to this case.” She paused, reading Alice’s and Maggie’s stunned expressions. “I know what you’re thinking. The bad news is that when Lauren went missing yesterday, it resurrected an old case.”

Suddenly Alice remembered. “Christine Craddock,” she said without hesitation.

“Christine,” Maggie echoed. “Oh my lord.”

They had never met her but the missing signs plastering the neighborhood two years ago made her seem like a long-lost friend. Christine Craddock had been nine months pregnant with her first child when she vanished. It had been so shocking to consider that anything truly sinister could happen in their quaint village. A local
woman, missing? A
pregnant
woman? The case had been a reminder that their community was just a cove in the sea of a vast city. That the city’s underbelly, snaking with subways, could belch up any threat at any time. For a few months, Christine became a local obsession. She was sorely missed by a large group of women who had never met her, at a playground she had never visited with a baby that was never born. Alice, Maggie and Lauren had read every news report and discussed the case incessantly on their park bench, on the phone and late at night with their husbands in bed. That haphazard marital chitchat that lulled you to sleep. Only Alice, a lifelong insomniac at the slightest disturbance, had lost hours of sleep over the disappearance of Christine Craddock, a woman whose smiling photo on a missing poster haunted her. Messy short brown hair. Freckles. Three earrings in her left lobe. She had last been seen crossing Union Street over the Gowanus Canal. Eventually, her cell phone was fished out of the murky water; it had been dropped midcall.

“That’s right,” Frannie said. “There are some overlapping circumstances we feel warrant investigation. But it doesn’t mean anything other than that.”

“I think that means a lot,” Alice said in a quiet voice. “Don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“What’s the
good
news?” Maggie asked.

Giometti leaned forward, elbows pinioned to his knees. He had lovely, rich brown eyes with wisdom lines fanning at the temples. “We have no reason to think she’s dead. No evidence whatsoever. We never found Christine. Truth is, we really don’t know what happened to her.”

“Years can pass,” Frannie said, “before you learn the truth. But that’s the worst-case scenario. Mostly we want to crack these right away.”

Alice felt a shiver rise through her stomach. She read the newspaper religiously and knew the statistics, that if not found within the first twenty-four hours, a person
who went missing was usually either never found or was found dead.

“The husband said you three are tight,” Frannie said. “But I already knew that.” She smiled more warmly than she had in the park the other day. Now Alice understood the young woman’s reserve among the group of mothers; she may as well have been visiting a different planet. Alice understood why Frannie had said her occasional visits to the playground kept her sane; what she saw in her police work had to be horrific. And why she had chosen to pay this visit; a current had passed between them that day, a moment of friendship. Alice understood all that yet had never felt more baffled. All she could see was the word
HOMICIDE
shining in raised black letters on Giometti’s card.

“I’m glad it was me who caught the case.” Frannie’s eyes were dark as coal, Alice now noticed, with a swallowing depth. “We’re going to find her. Together. Okay?”

Alice and Maggie both nodded in agreement. Yes, together they would find Lauren. And she would be fine. Still pregnant with Ivy. Together they would rewind time two days and start over.

“So tell us about Lauren.” Frannie looked at Alice, then Maggie. “Tell us everything you can think of about her.”

“She’s our sister,” Maggie said.

Frannie glanced at Giometti, who sat slightly back in his chair, eyes glued to Maggie.

“Like
a sister,” Alice clarified.

“When was the very last time you saw her?” Frannie asked.

Alice’s reaction was to assume Frannie already knew the answer — the detective had been with them — but she didn’t say that. Instead she reiterated the facts: “That afternoon at the park. When I kissed her good-bye.”

“Same for me,” Maggie said. “We said good-bye at the park.”

Frannie and Giometti listened as Alice and Maggie finished each other’s sentences, sharing the story of their last afternoon with Lauren. Where one erred, the other corrected; often they overlapped for emphasis. They were eager to tell the detectives everything they could to help clarify the picture of Lauren’s life. Frannie was particularly interested in Lauren’s relationship with Tim. Alice felt slightly uncomfortable divulging the details of Lauren’s private life, but knew she had to if it might help. Giometti pulled a small pad and pen from his shirt pocket and began taking occasional notes so selectively that Alice cringed each time he leaned over to write.

“They have a good marriage,” Alice said.

“He’s a solid husband,” Maggie added. “She has few complaints.”

“What complaints?” Frannie asked.

“Nothing, really,” Maggie said. “He works late all the time. Things like that.”

“They were happy,” Alice added.

Maggie corrected her: “They
are
happy.”

Alice held her tongue on the next thought:
Well, they’re not happy now, and neither are we.

“They’ve been under a lot of pressure lately,” Alice said. “Their landlord’s been trying to evict them and they’ve been fighting it.”

“Lease?” Giometti’s pen hovered above the pad.

“It expired, but they wanted to renew,” Alice explained. “Their apartment’s rent-stabilized, so they had the right to renew. Their landlord’s Metro Properties.” She watched as Giometti wrote it down, feeling some satisfaction at having informed the authorities of the offense. “I’m getting evicted too,” she blurted out, regretting it the instant Maggie’s eyes rolled to the ceiling.

“Let’s not get off the point, darling,” Maggie said.

“Do you live in the same building as Lauren?” Frannie asked Alice.

“No, I live in a two-family house on President Street. Lauren lives in an eight-unit building on Union.”

“It’s a coincidence,” Maggie clarified to the detectives, in case they hadn’t figured it out themselves. “One has nothing to do with the other. Lauren’s problem is institutional, so to speak, whereas Alice has the misfortune of occupying the space of someone who wishes to move into his own house.”

Maggie’s commandeering of the issue grated. “The thing is” — Alice tried to clarify a thought that had barely congealed in her mind — “I’m six months pregnant and I got my Thirty Day Notice yesterday. Lauren was six months pregnant when she got her Thirty Day Notice almost three months ago. Doesn’t that have to mean something?”

“Maybe,” Frannie said. “Or maybe not. It’s kind of stroller city around here. And we’ve been seeing a lot of forcible evictions. Mostly legal, by the way. No one’s ever happy about it.”

“It’s called gentrification.” Maggie reached over to smooth a wrinkle out of Alice’s sleeve. “That’s really all I’ve been trying to say. It’s why Blue Shoes can exist. There is a price for everything, is there not?”

Neither Alice nor the detectives tried to answer Maggie’s rhetorical question. Of course there was a price for everything. But what exactly was the commodity at issue? Shoes? Real estate? A woman’s life?

“What’s Lauren’s due date?” Frannie changed the subject, to Alice’s relief.

“September fifteenth,” Alice answered. “But Austin was a week early and she thought she might deliver early the second time too.”

“Why?”

“Just a hunch, I guess,” Alice said. “Bodies follow patterns — you know, habits — in childbirth just like everything else.”

“Does she know if she’s having a boy or a girl?” Frannie asked.

“No,” Maggie answered quickly.

Alice was caught off guard by the lie. She leaned forward
to speak, but changed her mind and sat back. She didn’t want to bluntly contradict Maggie. But why, she wondered, had Maggie told them that?

There were more questions and more answers until Lauren’s life had been outlined and colored in. At the end, Alice and Maggie were given business cards for both detectives.

“Call us with anything you think of,” Frannie said.

“Anything at all could be important,” Giometti added.

“Don’t hesitate, okay?” Frannie reached out to squeeze Alice’s hand, then Maggie’s, offering both a supportive smile. Alice never would have imagined a police detective to be so friendly, but then she had never known one.

“Thank you so much,” Alice said. “We’ll help in any way we can.” Alice kept her gaze from twitching toward Maggie, whose secretive withholding of Ivy was resonating through every word they spoke. She wondered if the detectives could feel it, smell it, somehow intuit the lie. It didn’t seem like it, though, by the gracious, un-freighted tone of their good-byes.

“We’ll be in touch,” Frannie said. Giometti leaned forward to shake both their hands. They walked together across the store, this time not even glancing at the shoes. Giometti opened the door with a forcefulness that sent a shivering ring through the welcome bell.

Alice watched the detectives’ blue sedan pull away. For some reason she couldn’t pin down, the fact that Frannie was driving came as a mild surprise. As the car wove into traffic, Alice wondered if she should have spoken up when she had the chance.

“She’s too
nice nice
to be a cop,” Maggie said, un-stacking three boxes that had been delivered earlier that morning.

“What’s wrong with nice? Maybe she really cares.” Alice removed the
BE RIGHT BACK
sign from the door and tucked it behind the nearest display case, on which pairs of summer pastel stilettos offered themselves at half price.

“Only
we
care about Lauren.” Maggie clicked open an Exacto knife, dragging the blade swiftly across the top of one box and pulling open the cardboard flaps. “You, me and Tim. And Austin, of course. You know that, Alice.”

Maggie had a point. There was caring and there was
caring.
Lauren was a Minnesota transplant whose parents had died in quick succession while she was in college, her mother of breast cancer and her father apparently of heartbreak. An only child, she had cultivated her friendships into family. Tim had also lost both his parents and so it was always the Barnets who hosted the holidays for those who weren’t going
home
to original families. Their apartment
was
their home and their friends
were
their family. Lauren had once honored her two best friends by declaring them her sisters, which is what Maggie had meant in answer to Frannie’s question. Alice and Maggie were Lauren’s true, chosen sisters, a declaration that had been both a promise and a bond.

“But Maggie,” Alice said, “why did you stop me from explaining about the evictions? You made my comments seem so... trivial. And why did you lie about Ivy? What was the point of that? We
know
Lauren’s having a girl.”

“We can’t give away every little bit of her,” Maggie said in the too-patient tone of an older sister tired of explaining the obvious. She sliced open the second box, then the third.

“But it’s just information,” Alice argued. “Ivy is a fact.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “Ivy
is
a fact. Not was, but is. How will you feel when Lauren turns up with some perfectly sane explanation and we’ve broadcast her most precious secret?”

“Nothing about this is
sane,
Mags.”

“True.” Maggie lifted her chin with magisterial confidence. “Nonetheless, I say we hold her trust until we know for sure. Really, Alice, it’s the least we can do.”

By afternoon the neighborhood was buzzing with the
investigation. A sizable task force had been deployed to canvass the neighborhood for anyone who had seen Lauren Barnet yesterday between dropping Austin off at school that morning, and two thirty when she failed to meet Alice at the park. Everyone who came into Blue Shoes talked about it. All day long, Alice and Maggie talked and talked until they were all talked out.

Even Alice’s mother, Lizzie, kept calling from Los Angeles to check in for updates. “So?” she would begin, instead of “hello.” Or, “Anything yet?”

“Nothing, Mom,” Alice answered. “We’re still waiting.”

“Waiting’s not good, babydoll,” Lizzie said in her typically energized voice. “The thing is to find something you can
do,
not just to keep busy but to push things
forward.”
Lizzie ran a successful film production studio; she didn’t tolerate inaction very well.

“The detectives are working on it, Mom.” Alice heard the hollowness of her own voice, its emptiness of purpose from so much talk and hope and fear and, finally, no new information to digest.