Seven Minutes to Noon

Maggie talked and talked until they were all talked out.
    Even Alice’s mother, Lizzie, kept calling from Los Angeles to check in for updates. “So?” she would begin, instead of “hello.” Or, “Anything yet?”
    “Nothing, Mom,” Alice answered. “We’re still waiting.”
    “Waiting’s not good, babydoll,” Lizzie said in her typically energized voice. “The thing is to find something you can do, not just to keep busy but to push things forward.” Lizzie ran a successful film production studio; she didn’t tolerate inaction very well.
    “The detectives are working on it, Mom.” Alice heard the hollowness of her own voice, its emptiness of purpose from so much talk and hope and fear and, finally, no new information to digest.
    “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.

Chapter 5
    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 toAlice. 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