Seven Minutes to Noon

thing.”
    Lizzie peered up at Maggie through her calico-framed glasses, then broke into a wry smile and reached up to pinch Maggie’s cheek. “It’s gorgeous, bubbelah.”
    Maggie forced a smile. “Think I’ll see if we have the makings of some real English scones. You must be starving, Lizzie darling. Shall I make you eggs and bacon as well?”
    “Make for everyone,” Lizzie said, plopping down on the couch and sighing deeply. “We’ll eat together.”
    Alice sat with her mother on the couch, holding thenewspaper on her knees, still in its blue plastic sleeve. She was dying to open it, to learn Erin Brinkley’s latest discoveries, but knew that the minute she did, the knot of anxiety that had taken up residence in her chest would instantly tighten. She and Maggie had deliberately avoided the paper all morning, and now here it was in her hands.
    “How was your flight, Mom?”
    Lizzie grazed the backs of her fingers along Alice’s cheek. “How are you, babydoll? I’ve been so worried.”
    “I’m fine.” Alice felt the crinkle of the thin plastic under her fingers. “Okay, it’s been a nightmare. But it’s over now.”
    “Let’s hope.” Lizzie yawned. “Any chance an old lady could get a strong cup of joe around here?”
    “Coming right up, Mom.”
    When Alice returned to the living room five minutes later, Lizzie had removed her shoes and was stretched out on the couch, reading the newspaper. The blue plastic sat crumpled like an abandoned skin on the coffee table, next to the Metro section. Alice set down the mug of coffee and picked up the newspaper. And there it was, the latest.
    In a lead article headlined FALSE IDENTITY STYMIES POLICE, Erin Brinkley claimed that Sylvie Devrais simply never existed. Another woman, Christina Dreux, had been given up at birth by Judy Gersten and raised in Paris by French parents, but there was no trace of Ms. Dreux having ever been in New York. According to her adoptive parents, Ms. Dreux had been a rebellious teenager who had left home at the age of seventeen, returning, humbled, after a year. Christina eventually trained as an obstetrics nurse but never worked as one. How she had earned a living was unclear. French authorities were in the process of reopening cold cases from the last decade, in search of missing pregnant women.
    In “International Black Market for Babies,” Brinkley revealed that the lack of a coherent database, linking missing babies and children internationally, created ahuge loophole for traffickers in illegal adoption. Each case had to be investigated separately, taking large amounts of time and resources, and requiring a motivated investigator. Therefore, as soon as a baby or child crossed a border, it was nearly impossible to find him or her.
    In “Slumlord Faces Grand Jury,” Brinkley continued her exposure of Julius Pollack and Sal Cattaneo, citing individual cases of illegal evictions and the transformation of rent-regulated apartments into top-of-the-market cash cows. She also described the worst of the many harassment cases they had faced, making Alice shiver. Her encounters with him were nothing compared to what some of the other tenants had endured: withheld heat, deliberately broken windows, ignored rats.
    Finally, in “A Secret History,” Brinkley described the entwined backgrounds of Metro Properties and Garden Hill Realty, splaying open the long relationship of Sal Cattaneo and Judy Gersten. Erin had somehow gotten her hands on the photograph Alice had seen in Judy’s apartment, and it accompanied the article. She wrote about Angie Cattaneo and the childhood romance that withered in a childless marriage. Finally, Brinkley tied in the other stories, with a long-lost illegitimate daughter returning to reap havoc in a scenario rife with opportunity for blackmail and deception. She brought it only as far as that, being unable to reliably demonstrate Sylvie’s role, or lack of role, in the real estate angle of the story. But Brinkley made it plain what she believed, that Sylvie’s goal was an age-old, lethal combination: revenge and money.
    Brinkley couldn’t print it outright in the newspaper, because the assumed conclusion of her long story relied so much on conjecture, but at the end of the article the implication was clear: Had Sylvie tried to destroy her birth parents by targeting pregnant tenants undergoing illegal evictions, then used her training as an obstetrics nurse to deliver the babies and sell them on