Seven Minutes to Noon (31 page)

They hadn’t been at Simon’s long enough to coach the children on his address, though they had already started learning the street number of the Third Place house. Why had she been so stupid, not training them for the present? Saturating them instead with assumptions about their future?

“Shouldn’t we walk along Court Street?” Simon gently asked. She smelled his cologne in a waft of air, felt the steady warmth of his body as he kept pace beside her.

“Right,” Alice agreed. “They might have gone into a store.”

She had always made a point of taking them along on errands, as part of their domestic education. Urban survival skills involved levels of procurement: education, skills, money, apartments, goods. She had taught them to shop for quality and price. How to measure ingredients. Not to talk to strangers. She had taught them everything she thought they needed to know. But Nell, she remembered now, tended to scramble the last four digits of Alice’s cell number, and she didn’t know Mike’s.
Foolish,
Alice chided herself now, walking along Warren Street with the bustle of Court on the near horizon; foolish not to have insisted both children know all the family phone numbers by heart.

Alice stopped in every store along Court Street, asking if two children, a little brown-haired boy and slightly larger peach-haired girl, had been in.
No,
she heard again and again.
What’s going on? The police were just in here asking the same question.
Simon stayed on the street, eyes open, stopping any acquaintances. No one
had seen them. They moved forward as quickly as Alice could; her body was leaden, hot, the twins already taking a stance against their older siblings, trying to hold her back. She could feel Simon’s harnessed energy, nearly explosive, at her side.

Her skin bristled with droplets of sweat as she marched forward as quickly as her stubborn body would let her. They were getting close to President Street now. Close to their old home.
Oh, babies,
she silently wished,
be there, be there, be there.
They had never been outside her circle of protection before: home, school, friends, babysitter.

Sylvie.

The quicksand of dumb assumption.

Alice marched forward, grabbing deep into her lungs for breath.

“Slow a little,” Simon beseeched her, laying his warm hand on her hot arm.

The orange
DON’T WALK
light at President and Court stopped blinking just as they approached the corner. A line of cars moved steadily toward the intersection. Alice crossed anyway. Crossed and turned onto President Street. Walked and walked until, just before the first park entrance, she saw Mike’s hastily parked pickup truck angled next to a fire hydrant. The driver’s side door gaped into the street.

In front of the pickup was a squad car, red and white lights revolving in silence.

Across the park a wail of sirens grew closer. Another squad car cut through the red light on Court Street and raced the wrong way onto President, stopping behind Mike’s truck.

Alice and Simon broke into a jog.

The pickup’s motor was running, but Mike wasn’t there.

“Mike!” Alice screamed. Her voice seemed to bounce on pockets of humid air leftover from the spent storm. “Mike!”

“Alice!” Mike’s voice sailed back at her.

And then a perfectly pitched duet, high and light as it floated out of Carroll Park:

“Mommy!”

Simon couldn’t stop himself from bolting ahead. She ran behind him, gasping, holding her belly from beneath and running down the first path leading to the large central area separating the two playgrounds. Police were everywhere. Benches and asphalt and jungle gyms were drenched from the storm, but the sun was strong and neighborhood children had already gathered back for play under the wary gaze of their parents and sitters who must have been wondering why the police were crowding the park. A little boy zipped past Alice on a silver bike with training wheels. She stood in the middle of the playground, scanning the small bodies for Nell, for Peter.

“Mommy!” This time it was Peter’s voice alone, and he was laughing. “We’re right over here! Don’t you see us?”

His little face was pressed between the iron bars separating the big kids’ side from the central area. He was smiling at her. The bottom of his face was tinted green. Beside him, where he kneeled backward on a bench, Nell was pressed against Mike’s side. Mike held a partially eaten puff of green cotton candy. Nell, whose mouth was clownish with a pink haze, turned around and waved. Mike now looked over at Alice, who came through the gate and nearly fell on her children with open arms.

“Sylvie brought them into the Autumn Café during the storm,” Mike told Alice when she raised her head. His eyes were wet; he’d been crying, or making an effort not to.

The Autumn Café, just across the street on Smith. Where they had bought bagels and juices and coffees and muffins, and passed countless afternoons with their friends. The children had grown up in that place; they were known there, comfortable. Most of the college kids
behind the counter knew Nell and Peter by name. Alice felt her lungs begin to inflate.

Standing beside the bench, Simon smiled at his reunited friends. “I’ll call Maggie with the good news.” He reached into his back pocket for his cell phone.

“She probably already knows,” Mike said. “Frannie just called me from the precinct. She said we should take the kids back to Simon’s. She’s meeting us at the house so she can talk to them herself.”

Alice was grateful and astounded by how efficiently the Amber Alert had worked. Yet it was a brand-new law. What would have happened to Nell and Peter just a year ago, without it? Would the neighborhood have been a strong enough net to catch them? Alice doubted anyone in the playground would have noticed they were alone; since they were such a common sight there, they might have stayed for hours, blending into play. And then what?

“Sylvie said she’d be right back.” Nell shrugged her skinny shoulders. Her purple T-shirt, Alice saw, was wet all down the front. Peter’s too. As if they had run headlong through the rain, led by Sylvie to a port in the storm.

“How long were you there without her?” Alice combed her fingers through Peter’s hair, which had fallen into his eyes.

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Didn’t anyone ask you why you were alone?” She didn’t want to ask specifically if the police had come into the café or just now found them here; she wanted, instead, for them to supply the details.

Nell shrugged again and took a nibble of her pink cotton candy. Alice never bought it for them; Sylvie must have given them money before leaving, and they had nabbed their chance for the forbidden treat.

“We went home after it stopped raining,” Nell said. “We waited outside but no one came.”

“We forgot!” Peter giggled. Meaning, they had conspiratorially
forgotten
they didn’t live at the President Street house anymore.

“Then we came here,” Nell said. “I made Peter hold my hand when we crossed the street, Mommy, so don’t worry. Okay?”

“Okay, sweetie. Thanks.”

Frannie wanted to have them driven back to the house in one of the many squad cars that now surrounded the park, but Alice objected.

“They’re fine,” she told Frannie on Mike’s phone. “Let us walk home with them, okay? We all need to calm down for a few minutes. Please.”

“We’re going to have to question them, Alice.”

“I realize that.”

“I know it’s hard, but try not to ask them too much. The more we can hear from them on the first telling, the better.”

Simon took the pickup to look for a parking spot so the Halpern family could walk back to the house together, a single squad car trolling just behind them. Hands linked, they moved slowly, four astride along the damp sidewalk. Though Alice sensed the rubber soles of her sandals hard against the cement sidewalk, she felt as if she was skidding; holding herself fast to this moment on earth was a discipline. Her body had turned gelatinous from the agonizing afternoon. Peter’s small, damp hand tight in hers felt so fragile she could have wept. They had been abandoned for just under two hours. Abandoned in familiar territory, among familiar faces. But no matter how many people you knew in New York City, there were always strangers.

Yet strangers were not always whom you needed to fear.

At the other end of the family strand, holding on to Nell, Mike marched along with an energized bounce, still wound up from the chase. He was working hard to get the kids’ minds off the fact that Sylvie had left them alone, and was telling them every knock-knock joke he knew. Their little voices tinkled on the damp air as questions lurched through Alice’s mind. Why had Sylvie left so abruptly during the storm? Her sudden flight was so desperate. That she had taken care to leave the children somewhere familiar, where they were known, told Alice against reason that Sylvie cared about them. Though that
thought sent shivers of disgust through Alice. How could Sylvie possibly
care
? She had sewn Lauren’s hair into a pillow and embroidered her miniscule initials over Judy Gersten’s handiwork, such a creepy taunt. Or had the two women worked together? But Judy in her drunken misery didn’t seem capable of any strenuous plan. It had to be Sylvie who had killed Lauren.
Why
had she? Alice’s head began to pound as they turned up Degraw Street toward Clinton. Why had Sylvie done it? Why had she stayed these past two awful weeks? Did it have something to do with Ivy? Was her plan incomplete?

Was Ivy still here in Brooklyn?

As they climbed Simon’s front stoop, Frannie swung open the door, smiling hugely, with Dana at her side.

“Welcome home! I’ve got some popcorn and lemonade.” She was Aunt Frannie now, suggesting the children change into dry clothes, waiting for them in Simon’s kitchen, making them comfortable before beginning the debriefing.

“What a storm today, huh?” Frannie leaned forward, arms crossed together on the kitchen table. Her eyes stayed focused on Nell and Peter, offering full, irresistible attention. “What was it like being outside in the rain, waiting for your mom to pick you up?”

Nell grabbed a handful of popcorn and held it over her mouth, dribbling it in one piece at a time. “Sylvie’s my favorite babysitter. She said I’m practically old enough to babysit too. She said today I got to practice babysitting Peter.”

“It was fun!” Peter said. “We were big kids.”

Bit by bit, Frannie teased out the story of their afternoon. Dana sat off to the side, taking notes.

The children remembered the first phone call, right before the rain. Alice remembered it too: turning to see Sylvie across the street in the park, answering her phone as Peter ran in front of her, hearing the first loud clap of thunder. After the call, she gathered them up and began to lead them toward the Court Street exit in the direction of Simon’s house.

Then, her phone rang again.

After a brief call, she told the children to turn around and they walked in the opposite direction toward Smith Street and the Autumn Café. It was then that the sky opened up and they were drenched. Picturing the scene through the detectives’ eyes, Alice now saw it: the café was half a block from the subway. Sylvie had needed to go somewhere quickly. But first she brought the kids to the café, told the girl behind the counter that she had to run out for a minute and would be right back. She gave Nell a ten dollar bill. Then she left.

As the details unfolded, something began to burn in Alice’s mind.

Stop or they’re next.

It had been written some time before she arrived home in the rain. If Sylvie
had
gone directly to the subway, she couldn’t have written it. And if she didn’t write it, who did?

“Julius Pollack,” Frannie said. “We got a print hit a little while ago.”

“So it
was
Julius who wrote it!” Alice looked at Mike, holding his eyes a moment before turning back to Frannie and Dana. “Julius and Sylvie? Maybe Ivy
was
in his apartment for a while. Maybe it
wasn’t
just the tape I heard.”

“Whoa!” Dana held a palm flat to Alice, as if a gesture could stop the onslaught of forbidden assumptions. “We don’t know anything about that right now, so back up and slow down.”

“Dana’s right.” Frannie crossed her legs and cupped her palms over her top knee. “They’re still checking the print against the crime scene.”

But Alice couldn’t slow down; her mind was flying. Had Julius and Sylvie both been involved in Lauren’s death? It made sense, somehow: the older man, cynical and rich, and the naïve young woman.

Mike paced the kitchen with his fists clenched. “I’ll kill him!”

“Shh!” Alice said. “The kids!” Maggie and Simon had taken them upstairs so they could play with Ethan in the family room.

Mike’s skin blazed red; he looked as if he needed to explode but was imploding instead.

“I understand how you feel.” The corners of Frannie’s mouth dimpled with deep lines, instantly aging the young
face. “But that’s a job you won’t have to do, Mike. If Pollack’s guilty, believe me, the state and the feds will take care of him.”

She checked her watch and drained her third cup of coffee, carrying the empty mug into the kitchen. When she came out, she announced, “I’m heading back over to the precinct. There’s a lot to do. Dana’s going to stay here.”

“See ya later, chief,” Dana said with a small salute as Frannie walked to the front door with one of the uniformed cops who had been on guard.

Frannie smiled, vanishing the shadow of years from her face, and she looked almost rested. “Nestor here’s giving me a lift but Rula’s still out front.”

It seemed absurd to Alice that Dana would need to stay with them still — Sylvie was gone and Pollack was in custody — but she understood that what they knew was largely conjecture glued together with a few scraps of evidence. They didn’t truly know what had happened, not today and not to Pam and not two weeks ago, to Lauren and Ivy.

By late evening — after a Thai dinner ordered in and two bottles of white wine Alice wished she could have shared — bits of news began to filter in through Dana. The first came when the four parents were upstairs getting their children to sleep. Alice and Mike snuggled with Nell and Peter in the guest room’s double bed. Ultimately the kids would occupy their sleeping bags on the floor so Alice and Mike could sleep in comfort, though as far as Nell and Peter were concerned, they had the better deal. Maggie and Simon meanwhile put Ethan to bed together, comrades in life, apparently thrust past sex into each other’s true graces by the shock of Sylvie’s deceit. They were waiting in the living room with Dana when Alice and Mike finally came yawning down the stairs.