Seven Minutes to Noon

absorbed the information. Alice noticed that Frannie continued to look unperturbed. She had been questioning Judy Gersten at the precinct. Alice could picture it: Judy unraveling in the cold light of the interview room, rubbing the table’s long, deep scratch with her fingertip, over and over, as if it were a thread she yearned to pluck from history and weave into a better past.
    “It was nineteen seventy-three,” Pam continued. “Abortion was legalized just that year. But Judy loved Sal—”
    “Judy Gersten had Sal Cattaneo’s baby?” Alice blurted out. “And he still married Angie?”
    “Because he believed Angie was pregnant, and she was his designated wife, and that was how it was here back then. Before he even had a chance to find out she wasn’t pregnant, and that Judy was going ahead with having her baby anyway... let’s just say Angie’s father didn’t give him much choice.”
    “Wait a minute,” Ray said. “Isn’t her father Anthony Scoletto?”
    “You got it.” Pam took a breath. There was more. “You don’t say no to the Scoletto family. And Sal probably loved Angie. They were children together, already family. So they married. And she never had that baby or any other baby. But Judy, she was independent, and she was angry, and she was in love, so she went ahead and had her baby.”
    “So where is it?” Ray asked. “It would be grown up by now.”
    “Thirty years old,” Alice said, as heat fanned through her body. Her simple question to Pam — who was Julius Pollack’s partner — had led to someone taking pains to try to kill Pam and disguise it as suicide. “Did Judy raise the baby?”
    “She chickened out at the last minute,” Pam said. “There weren’t many single mothers back then. There wasn’t even a word for it. Babies born out of wedlock were still called bastards.”
    Or little bitches, Alice thought, as it all came clear. She lowered her face into her hands.
    “She gave it up for adoption. It was a little girl, adopted by a French family — father was a diplomat. They went back to France when Judy’s daughter was still an infant.”
    Now Frannie’s expression flinched, just slightly. But Alice saw it. So Judy hadn’t confessed this part. Which meant she had wanted to hide it. But why?
    “Judy tried to find the baby but she never could,” Pam continued. “It caused her a lot of pain, and I think that’s where the drinking comes in. Do you know, she still loves Sal and they still do business together? But he’s still married to Angie.”
    “Go figure.” Esther shook her head.
    “Let me guess.” Alice looked up. “Judy never found her daughter. But her daughter found her.”
    “Bingo,” Pam said.
    Pam’s biggest mistake wasn’t discovering the secret history of Judy Gersten and Sal Cattaneo, but tossingoff a gossipy comment to Sylvie at the end of a workday. “What a day I’ve had,” she had said to Sylvie as they closed up the office together the evening before the attack. “Please, whatever you do, don’t tell me you were adopted.” Sylvie had looked at her with such sharp surprise that Pam didn’t pursue it, and she certainly didn’t explain to the young assistant the details of their boss’s past.
    The next morning, Sylvie arrived unannounced at Pam’s house, just before Pam was to have met Alice at the Third Place house.
    “Judy told me to come,” Sylvie said with her sweet smile.
    Sylvie shared some coffee with Pam. Pam had planned on walking to the Third Place house, but Sylvie complained of having hurt her foot at the gym, so it was decided they would drive. They went together to the downstairs garage and settled into the car.
    “Sylvie turned to me with the worst look on her face,” Pam said soberly. “She had a gun. I told her she was out of her mind. Then she stuck the thing into the side of my neck.”
    That was the last thing Pam remembered.
    They didn’t stay long at the hospital after that. Pam was depleted by the conversation, and the detectives had what they needed. Alice kissed Pam on the forehead, promising to visit again soon. She smelled antiseptic now; Alice missed the baby-powder scent.
    “I’ll take your picture next time you come,” Ray promised. “I’ll put it in the album.”
    “Okay.” Alice shook his hand, and hugged Esther. “Take good care of her.”
    “Why wouldn’t we?” Esther offered a smile of yellowed, crooked, eighty-year-old teeth, which Alice suspected were all hers. “She’s