Seven Minutes to Noon (6 page)

“You’ll call me as soon as you hear something,” Lizzie said. “Stay on the detectives — don’t let them overlook anything. And comfort the family.”

Comfort the family.
The words rang through Alice; all they
could
do, after all, was offer Tim and Austin their physical presence and a stoic refusal to think the worst.

Lauren and Tim Barnet lived in a gray stone building with double wooden doors dead center, like the node of a spine separating the four A-line apartments from the four B-line apartments. On the building’s shallow front stoop, Nell, Peter and Ethan were fighting over who would get to ring the buzzer for 2B.

“I should because I’m the oldest.” Nell crossed her arms over her rail-thin body.

“You’re the oldest
girl,”
Ethan argued. “I’m the oldest
boy.”

“By five weeks, my young man!” Simon protested. “Now let’s stop this nonsense. We need a word with you three before going up.” His deep voice stilled them; he was a master at registering authority with the under-ten set. Alice had always liked Simon, despite his failures with Maggie. He was a soulful, creative man, an adjunct music professor, freelance pianist and composer of some reputation. He and Maggie had met in London and come to New York together. Alice had always loved listening to them speak, their accents weaving into a kind of exotic song. Poignantly handsome with his clean-shaven, pale face and shaggy brown hair, Simon possessed a strain of sensuality that was hard to contain in a marriage. You could say he was touchy-feely to a fault — as Maggie often had, magnifying the quality into faithlessness.

Simon fell silent and turned to Mike, who turned to
Alice. She wished Maggie were here;
she
would think of some way to tell the kids what was happening without, somehow, revealing their worst fears. But Maggie had gone ahead to Tim’s, and Alice had no idea what to tell the kids. Just this: tread lightly. But would they know how?

“This might not be a very happy visit,” she said, looking gravely from Peter to Ethan to Nell, who stood above them on the highest step. Her eyes, blue like Alice’s, looked skeptical. They always had fun at Austin’s.

“But Mommy—” Nell began and was hushed instantly by Alice.

“Let me finish, okay?”

All three nodded; she had this one moment to explain.

“Have you noticed anything different in the last couple of days?”

“School started this week,” Peter chirped, drawing a giggle from Ethan and a hearty eye-roll from Nell.

“Right, school started. What else?”

“I know,” Nell said. But she didn’t elaborate. Of course she knew; little pitchers had big ears, especially when they were seven.

“Auntie Lauren hasn’t been home for a couple of days,” Alice said, working to keep her tone unencumbered, “and we don’t know where she is. I’m sure she’s fine — she probably just got lost. But I don’t want you guys asking Tim or Austin any questions about where Lauren is, okay?”

“Why?” Peter asked.

Alice glanced at Mike, her eyes imploring him to say something, and he stepped forward with his own attempt to explain what they themselves could not quite comprehend.

“Well, because they might be feeling kind of nervous about it,” he said. “Maybe if we don’t talk to them about it, they’ll forget. Maybe that way they could have a little more fun tonight. Okay, guys?”

Fun.
Suddenly such a foolish-sounding word.

Nell raised her hand with an earnestness that brought a wave of love to Alice’s heart.

“Yes, sweetie?”

“What is
missing,
Mommy?”

And then her heart, which had swelled with the profoundest affection, became desiccated, inept. Of course Nell had noticed the yellow signs on the way over.

“That’s the big question,” Alice said. “We don’t really know what it means right at this moment.”

Peter jumped up.
“Now
can I ring the bell?”

“No, me!” Ethan followed him to the strip of doorbells too high for them to reach.

Simon jogged up the stoop and pressed the buzzer for 2B, eliciting staunch objection from all three children.

“Done,” he said.

As soon as Simon pushed open the heavy door, Nell, Peter and Ethan battled past each other to get in first, then ran up the flight of stairs. Maggie greeted them at the apartment door, letting the kids hustle past her, then stepped into the hallway to whisper, “It isn’t good at all in there. Just a warning.”

The apartment was eerily quiet with no sign of any of the children, which meant they had already sequestered themselves with Austin in front of the TV in Lauren and Tim’s bedroom. Alice abruptly decided they would order Chinese food from the place whose number she had memorized. They would hobble through the night as best they could, together.

Alice, Mike and Simon followed Maggie into the living room, where Tim sat hunched, strangely, on a tiny chair at Austin’s little art table between the street-side windows. Both were open, inviting bursts of warm air through the sheer white curtains. The diaphanous fabric Alice remembered Lauren choosing and fitting to the long windows now billowed dramatically. Billowed then sucked hard against the screens with the breeze’s sudden evacuation. Alice noticed a crinkle of dust, the kind of small accumulation Lauren never would have tolerated, under the art table at Tim’s feet.

There he sat, with stringy hair that had been neither washed nor brushed, inhaling deeply on a cigarette. Not once in all their years had Alice known Tim to smoke.

Alice was the first to approach him. Then Maggie. Mike. Simon. The friends huddled around Tim, who remained on the little seat as if pressed down by an unbearable load. When the long ash of his cigarette threatened to fall, Simon caught it in the cupped palm of his hand and held on to it, refusing to move.

“The police were here,” Tim finally said. His voice was thin, exhausted. “They were here all afternoon. But why?
Why
did they ask me all those questions?” He looked searchingly at Mike, who responded by settling a hand on Tim’s shoulder. They said nothing. These men, who grilled together; painted each other’s homes; hefted each other’s cartons; shared hours of debate on politics, art, movies and sports; and routinely traveled together to the Bronx to see the Yankees or to Coney Island to see the Cyclones, could find between them not a single word. Nothing to bridge Tim’s private anxiety to the fact that they were now all gathered together in the single physical body of their friendship.

“They came to us too,” Alice said.

Then Maggie: “They came to all of us.”

Tim squashed the bright ember of his cigarette into one of Austin’s open paint jars. White, now darkened with oily streaks. Three other butts had been squashed in the paint.

“They were here for
hours.”
His voice rose. He ran his hands through his unkempt hair then let them flop to his sides. The skin beneath his eyes was dark purple. “Do they actually think I had something to do with Lauren’s disappearance?
Could
they?”

“Of course not.” Mike stepped up next to Tim. “They’re just doing their job. You’re the person closest to her, so they need to ask you questions.”

The person closest to her.
Was he? He worked such long hours that, other than weekends, he was hardly
home. Who
was
the person closest to Lauren? Austin, Alice decided. And the
sisters,
of course.

“They’re treating me like a suspect,” Tim nearly whispered. “I’m a lawyer. I know what’s going on. This is a nightmare. They want answers from
me.”

One thing that was clear to Alice was that Tim did not deserve this. How could he? He was a good man who worked hard, cared for his family,
loved
them. Alice and Mike had known Tim for five years; they
knew
him. If the police suspected him of anything, they were looking in the wrong direction, losing time.

“They want answers,” Simon said in his most soothing voice, “from everyone and everywhere.”

“That’s right, Tim darling,” Maggie chimed in. “It seems to me they’re casting a wide net. That’s all. You needn’t worry.”

Her lead-footed remarks could usually be ignored, but not this one. Tim looked at her so fast and so hard, all possibility of conversation ended right there. Alice was startled by the intensity of his eyes, which held on to Maggie in a merciless, desolate glare.

It was awkward after that, but they stayed. As the night darkened, Alice became aware of a blossoming nub of mourning for the close friendship of the three families. But she reminded herself that with Lauren missing, with each word and glance a grain in the quicksand of possibility, there was no way any of them could find their equilibrium. Still, something was lacking between the friends tonight, a kind of cohesion they had grown lazily accustomed to.

Alice and Mike stayed until just before midnight, finally lugging home their sleeping children and climbing into bed, desperate for sleep.

Alice lay awake next to Mike under their soft, light blanket. The house was so quiet she could hear its nuances, its hollow sighs, every creak and moan of the wooden beams hidden behind plaster walls, the swish of
each car that passed outside the closed windows. She put in her earplugs and strapped on her eye cover, creating a private capsule of sensory deprivation. The quiet now was exquisite, the darkness total. She waited for sleep. Time passed awkwardly through her mind like an illgaited runner, and she waited, but sleep was nowhere in her body. The dissonant resonance in her mind became deafening, until finally she gave up and got out of bed.

As with most of the area’s lower duplex apartments, the bedrooms were downstairs, keeping the high-ceilinged parlor floor above for the business of daily life. Wedding-cake moldings traced the edges of the large living room, with its ornate marble fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows. Wide wooden planks creaked under Alice’s feet as she tried to move carefully, quietly, above her sleeping family. She passed through the saturated darkness, under the wide arch joining living room to kitchen. When she turned on the overhead light, the kitchen sprang into focus. Mahogany cabinets, buttery Formica counters, workhorse appliances from the 1970s all clean and ready to service a new day.

It was 3:00 a.m. She could feel her babies moving inside her body and wondered if she had woken them or if they were normally awake at this hour. She would find out soon enough. After rummaging through the fridge, she spooned some peanut butter from the jar and poured herself a glass of orange juice. She moved the laptop from the shelf by the garden door to the kitchen table and plugged it in. As she waited for it to boot up, she looked out into the dark backyard, silvery with moonlight. Her lush summer garden was as still as a photograph. She would miss it when she moved.

Once she had the kettle on the stovetop and a peppermint tea bag waited in her favorite mug, she sat down and Googled Lauren’s name. It came up a few times in association with her former life as an attorney but there was nothing about her now. No mention that she was missing. Next Alice Googled Christine Craddock. She clicked on www.christinelost.com and instantly the screen
was filled with a picture of the young, pregnant woman proudly displaying her immense belly. The Web site’s pages were neatly listed down the left side, offering different views into the lost woman’s life.

Christine Craddock had been an unmarried mother-to-be. Her baby’s father had been her graduate school professor and thesis adviser; married with a family of his own, David Jonstone had denied any personal relationship with Christine. She was preparing a paternity suit at the time of her disappearance, to be delivered to Jonstone upon their baby’s birth. It was unknown whether the professor had been aware of this. The morning of Christine’s disappearance, which was also her baby’s due date, she was overheard arguing with someone on her cell phone — the cell phone that had been found buried in silt at the bottom of the canal. The call was traced to a pay phone, so there was no way to know who had been on the other end. Christine Craddock was last seen crossing Bond Street, walking in the direction of Park Slope.

One page of the Web site was devoted to the police investigation, headed by Detective Paul Giometti of the Brooklyn South Homicide Unit. Other pages were lighter: Christine’s Family; Christine’s Favorite Movies; Christine’s Pets, A-Z; Christine’s Hopes for the Future. There was even a page called Christine’s Politics, which mostly explained her decision to become a single mother.

Alice searched every strand of the site for mention of where Christine had lived, if she had owned or rented, if there had been any trouble. But there was nothing beyond the fact that she had been in Carroll Gardens for three years.

The last time anyone had posted any comments was over a year ago. Alice closed Christine’s site and moved on to the next listings, a few old newspaper articles and a link to the National Center for Missing Adults.
Case still open.

Alice sat back under a swell of exhaustion, thinking
about how someone had cared enough to take the time to build a Web site for Christine. In the turmoil of her disappearance, someone who loved her had stayed focused on the single most important thing: finding her. Sipping the last of her tea, Alice leaned over the keyboard and Googled
Web site building.
Within half an hour she had secured a domain name: www.findlauren.com. She had a year’s worth of downloaded photographs from her digital camera, and by sunrise had put up a home page showing Lauren in July, seven months pregnant, laughing as Austin tugged a book out of her hands. It was Alice’s favorite recent photograph of Lauren because it showed so much of what was important to her: love, family and intellect. Lauren had a good life. That she had vanished felt wildly out of sync.

At the sound of the morning paper thumping against the front door, Alice knew it was time to stop. Her eyes stung from staring at the computer screen. She flipped shut the laptop, moved it back to its place on the shelf and put her mug in the sink.

The newspaper was sitting on the stoop in its blue plastic sleeve. She brought it inside and turned immediately to the Metro section. There it was, front page, above the fold.