Seven Minutes to Noon (10 page)

“The medical examiner finished the autopsy and I’m going to tell you what he found. Can you hear this now?” He looked at Tim.

Tim nodded, stroking Austin’s heaving back.

“You might want to take the boy into another room,” Giometti said.

“Let me.” Maggie got up from the couch. Her eyes were swollen and Alice knew she just couldn’t take any more right now. She leaned over Tim and took Austin into her arms, carrying him out of the living room and down the hall, whispering, “Shh, baby, shh, shh.”

Outside, a shadow passed over the sun. The room darkened and the chandelier’s glass pendants emptied of light. Frannie put an arm around Alice’s shoulder, bracing her.

“It’s important for all of you to know the details in case any of it rings a bell. We’re going to find Lauren’s killer, and all of you could play an important part in helping us.” Giometti glanced carefully at each face, making sure they felt his regret at having to present them with the facts. “There are things a body tells, final messages you might say. Are you ready?”

No one answered. How could they possibly be ready for this?

“Lauren was shot in the cranium with a .22 round-nose bullet that went in right here.” He twisted around and pressed a finger into the hollow nook at the base of his head. “The bullet lodged itself in the front of her skull. This kind of injury tells us she died instantly. She felt no pain, none at all, other than—” He stopped himself.

The moment of fear.

“Following her death, the attacker removed her dress.”

Tim cringed and sputtered, “Oh no.”

“There was no evidence of sexual assault.”

Giometti let that statement hang a moment in the air, meager balm, and then continued. Frannie tightened her grip on Alice’s shoulders.

“A crude Caesarean section was performed. The placenta was left inside her body. An attempt was made to close the incisions with electrical tape. Her dress was put back on after the procedure, which we know due to the condition of the dress. At some point, probably right away, she was transferred to the canal.”

Alice’s attention snagged on
transferred.
The word had a technical quality, removed from emotion; it wasn’t violent enough for what had happened to Lauren.
Thrown. Pitched. Dumped.

“The crystal of Lauren’s watch was smashed, probably after she was shot. This tells us two things: that she fell against a hard surface, and the exact time of the attack. Her watch stopped at eleven fifty-three. That’s the official time of death.”

Eight minutes after the artist smiled at her. Seven minutes before she was to have arrived at Pilates. Lauren’s life ended at exactly seven minutes to noon. A shadow passed through Alice’s mind, and stopped, as on a sundial separating darkness from light. Before from after. Halting time at one precise moment. Halving her consciousness of reality — love, friendship, trust, honor, truth, and
this
— into two incompatible parts.

“Our major liability now is that we haven’t found the
crime scene,” Giometti continued. “There should be a lot of blood somewhere but we haven’t found the spot, and if it’s outdoors, then time is against us. Time and weather. If we’re lucky, the crime scene will be somewhere indoors.”

Lucky.
Alice’s stomach lurched and she clamped her throat against it.

“The medical examiner’s already signed off on his ruling. It’s murder, which is going to give a lot more magnitude to the investigation. The baby is now officially missing. Because a pregnant woman disappeared once before in the same area, the feds are deciding if they’re going to put the FBI behind us. It’s not an interstate crime but there’s a possibility the baby might have been moved, crossed jurisdictions, which is when the feds normally come in. Basically we’ve got three intersecting cases here. The pregnant woman who disappeared two years ago by the canal. Lauren’s murder. The missing baby. They’ve been dredging the canal all day and they’re going to keep dredging it until they’ve covered every square inch of it. But so far, nothing.”

Frannie disengaged her arm from Alice’s shoulder, leaving her cold. Leaning forward to look squarely at Tim, she said, “Someone took great pains to separate your baby from Lauren. There’s a good chance it’s still alive.”

It.
Suddenly Alice understood the usefulness of the generality. And she understood how the media was working with the police in agreeing to leave out the detail of the baby’s gender. They were holding something back, one remaining morsel of truth. A single secret, to tease out Lauren’s killer.

The next morning, Alice huddled in bed, listening to the sounds of her family upstairs in the kitchen. A chair scraping across the floor. Footsteps. Dishes clanking. The ebb and flow of familiar voices. Mike was getting the kids ready for school, a respite for which she had not needed to ask him.

A bright seam of light joined the curtains where they fell loosely together. Alice felt starved for darkness and quiet and rest. All night she had lain here, her brain grinding up the spent truth of Lauren’s brutal death. Assembling and dissembling it. Adding lurid colors and dimensions that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Seeing the knife and the bloody fleshy parting of Lauren’s skin and muscle. The exposure of her bone.
Seeing
it. Ivy curled inside her mother for the last time. Shocked by the sensation of air against her newborn skin. The ratchet of her first cry as it hurled into a deaf universe. Without love, who would hear her?

What did they suffer, those two females, as they were forced out of and into the world?

And Alice asked herself:
If fear was a giant wave overcoming me, what would I do? Dive into it or turn and run away?
Fear
the fear, or surrender to it?

She lay on her side, caressing the taut capsule of her twins. They were quiet — sleeping, she presumed — and she didn’t want to wake them.

Close to eight thirty, a cascade of footsteps carried
Mike, Nell and Peter out of the house. It was quiet. Alice closed her eyes and tried to sleep but could find no bridge out of her misery. She missed Lauren so badly it hurt; it was the worst and strangest pain she had ever felt in her life.

The phone began to ring and Alice tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t let up. Finally she reached for the bedside extension.

“It’s all set,” Lizzie said.

“Mom?”

“I’m on the plane right now.” She spoke in the crisp, bossy tone with which she had nudged and guided Alice through childhood. “I’ll be at LaGuardia at ten past one.”

“You’re coming today?”

“Babydoll, I canceled four meetings but who cares? Mike called me. First comes first and that’s you. Big kiss. Don’t get me — I’ll take a cab.”

“No, Mom, I always pick you up.”

“Not today, you don’t. I’ll—”

Alice hoisted herself to sitting and put some strength into her voice. “We’re not opening the store today, and if I sit around the house, I’ll go crazy. Let me do this for you. Give me your flight number. I’ll get there early.”

Alice showered and dressed. On the kitchen table she found a note from Mike:
Call me when you wake up.
He had probably gone to the workshop and would leave as soon as she phoned him, rush home to try to protect her from her own anguish. She didn’t want him to save her from this, nor did she want him to use her as a distraction from whatever he himself was experiencing. She would leave him, for now, in the quiet of his workshop, where he didn’t have to smile or talk or comfort her, where all he had to do was sand a single piece of wood to perfect translucence. Discover and enhance the direction of the grain. Understand it for what it was. What Alice needed right now, she knew, was her mother. Lizzie was coming; that was enough.

Alice forced herself to eat something, for the babies,
but had trouble getting down even a single piece of toast. She drank a few sips of milk, which immediately triggered the queasiness she was growing to dread.

Because traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway was wildly unpredictable, she decided to leave early. She could already feel the distraction of the journey prying her back toward the mundane bliss of the everyday world. The one from which people didn’t vanish and weren’t murdered. The one that used to be so real to her and now seemed ephemeral. The one where her children lived and to which she needed to find a road back.

She locked up the front door and turned down the stoop into a wash of sunshine, wishing she had thought to bring her sunglasses. Still on her own block, she encountered the first yellow sign.
MISSING.
Lauren’s smiling face, inviting a search.
MISSING,
not
DEAD.
Alice ripped the sign off the light post and crumpled it up. She threw it in the garbage can on the corner of President and Smith. Across the street, she could see the little kids’ side of the playground, bustling with prenap toddlers, mothers building new friendships and nurturing old ones. She didn’t know how she would ever be able to go back there. But she would; her children would demand it. The playground made her cry again so she looked away, down Smith Street. Horns were blaring. Up ahead an intersection was blocked. Yellow rectangles glared from light posts, tree trunks, electric junction boxes.
MISSING
transformed into
FIND MY BABY PLEASE FIND IVY DON’T WASTE A MINUTE FIND HER SHE’S OUT THERE ALL ALONE.
Alice ripped down every sign she saw, crying more uncontrollably with each removal.

Where was Ivy? Where
was
she? She needed a mother and Alice could
be
that mother. Without a mother, Ivy could know nothing about herself.

Alice was glad not to run into anyone she knew. Only strangers witnessed her fury as she ripped down the signs and crushed them and threw them in the trash. Weeping. Destroying. Raging against what had happened to her
sister.
Every block had at least one storefront under construction
and twice she tore signs from their temporary plywood fronts. She couldn’t remember taping them here; it must have been Maggie.

Finally the punctuation of yellow signs stopped. She walked steadily forward, dizzy from fatigue. Degraw Street between Hoyt and Bond, where they parked the family car in a cheap lot — Mike kept his pickup truck on the street since he used it all the time — was deserted. Almost deserted. A gray-haired man turned around and walked in the other direction as soon as she stepped onto the block; he looked vaguely familiar from behind but she couldn’t place him. She undid the parking lot’s padlock with her key and pulled open the massive iron double doors. The sound of gravel underfoot was oddly reassuring. She opened all the windows of their old green station wagon before squeezing into the driver’s seat. The air conditioner hadn’t worked for two years; it was an ’88, not worth repairing. Sweat glued her thighs to the vinyl seat.

It was a relief to be driving, moving,
going.
On Bond, where she had to drive for a block before turning left up Douglass Street, she caught a fetid whiff of the canal just to her right. She hated that smell and drove faster. The farther she distanced herself from the canal and Bond Street and Hoyt Street and Smith Street the better. She couldn’t wait to get onto the highway. When she turned left onto Court Street, she knew she should have slowed down as usual — with so many cars and trucks double-parked in front of stores, the driving was always a nerve-wracking zigzag — but she didn’t slow down. The yellow signs were everywhere and she couldn’t get to them, rip them down. Erase what had happened to Lauren, to Tim, to Austin — and to her. She felt suddenly that she had to get out of Brooklyn and for a moment, when she pictured the airport, she considered the possibility of getting on a plane. She could do it, buy a ticket and leave. Maggie could run the store. Mike and the kids could join her wherever she went. They could go to France, Italy, Greece, Mexico — forget about everything.
Her mind was just capturing the aqua clarity of water, broad pale beaches, an endless horizon, when up ahead she was jolted to a near stop by a knot of traffic. She had to get out of it, to keep herself focused on the vast ocean with its quiet promise that nothing really mattered but the turning of the earth. A shaft of sunlight exploded against her windshield. She squinted into it, veering sharply right at the next corner.

She felt the scrape and jolt of her collision with the bus before she even saw its hulking form. The impact threw her against the steering wheel and a spasm passed through her middle.
Her babies.
Her hands flew to her belly, which had contracted against the shock. Hardened in a Braxton Hicks contraction, or just hardened.

Panic saturated her, making her almost drunk, unable to think. She tried to drive forward. Backward. Nothing worked. The side of her car was locked against the front corner of the bus, which had squealed to a complete stop.

A tall black man standing on the corner was waving to her. His ragged clothes seemed to be draped over a too-thin body. An absurdly large cross made of bumpy aluminum foil hung around his neck.