Seven Minutes to Noon

Frannie said. “We didn’t. But we’re trying to.”
    “But it says homicide.” Maggie’s tone was accusatory, the mere word breaching a pact that Lauren was, had to be, all right. Alice felt a trickle of nausea worm its way up her throat.
    Frannie put her billfold away and stepped forward to gently touch Alice’s arm. “We’re looking for Lauren, that’s all.”
    “Somewhere we can talk privately?” Giometti asked.
    Alice put the BE RIGHT BACK sign on the front door as Maggie led the detectives to the back room. This area had been renovated in a basic way, made clean and comfortable, with a secondhand couch, a small table and two folding chairs. Wall shelves were stacked with shoe boxes. A narrow door led to the small bathroom. Beyond a gated window was an overgrown garden neither woman had time to tend.
    The detectives sat at the table. Alice and Maggie took the couch, facing them.
    “I’m with the local PDU, the Precinct Detectives Unit,” Frannie began, “and Paul’s with the Brooklyn South Homicide Unit. He’s been detailed to this case.” She paused, reading Alice’s and Maggie’s stunned expressions. “I know what you’re thinking. The bad news is that when Lauren went missing yesterday, it resurrected an old case.”
    Suddenly Alice remembered. “Christine Craddock,” she said without hesitation.
    “Christine,” Maggie echoed. “Oh my lord.”
    They had never met her but the missing signs plastering the neighborhood two years ago made her seem like a long-lost friend. Christine Craddock had been nine months pregnant with her first child when she vanished. It had been so shocking to consider that anything truly sinister could happen in their quaint village. A localwoman, missing? A pregnant woman? The case had been a reminder that their community was just a cove in the sea of a vast city. That the city’s underbelly, snaking with subways, could belch up any threat at any time. For a few months, Christine became a local obsession. She was sorely missed by a large group of women who had never met her, at a playground she had never visited with a baby that was never born. Alice, Maggie and Lauren had read every news report and discussed the case incessantly on their park bench, on the phone and late at night with their husbands in bed. That haphazard marital chitchat that lulled you to sleep. Only Alice, a lifelong insomniac at the slightest disturbance, had lost hours of sleep over the disappearance of Christine Craddock, a woman whose smiling photo on a missing poster haunted her. Messy short brown hair. Freckles. Three earrings in her left lobe. She had last been seen crossing Union Street over the Gowanus Canal. Eventually, her cell phone was fished out of the murky water; it had been dropped midcall.
    “That’s right,” Frannie said. “There are some overlapping circumstances we feel warrant investigation. But it doesn’t mean anything other than that.”
    “I think that means a lot,” Alice said in a quiet voice. “Don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
    “What’s the good news?” Maggie asked.
    Giometti leaned forward, elbows pinioned to his knees. He had lovely, rich brown eyes with wisdom lines fanning at the temples. “We have no reason to think she’s dead. No evidence whatsoever. We never found Christine. Truth is, we really don’t know what happened to her.”
    “Years can pass,” Frannie said, “before you learn the truth. But that’s the worst-case scenario. Mostly we want to crack these right away.”
    Alice felt a shiver rise through her stomach. She read the newspaper religiously and knew the statistics, that if not found within the first twenty-four hours, a personwho went missing was usually either never found or was found dead.
    “The husband said you three are tight,” Frannie said. “But I already knew that.” She smiled more warmly than she had in the park the other day. Now Alice understood the young woman’s reserve among the group of mothers; she may as well have been visiting a different planet. Alice understood why Frannie had said her occasional visits to the playground kept her sane; what she saw in her police work had to be horrific. And why she had chosen to pay this visit; a current had passed between them that day, a moment of friendship. Alice understood all that yet had never felt more baffled. All she could see was the word HOMICIDE shining in raised black letters on Giometti’s card.
    “I’m glad it was me who