Seven Minutes to Noon

its filtering grate. She looked down into the thread of dull green water, which undulated only slightly in the tranquil air. Foryears the water had been too murky to see into, like a solid mass, or a long, old secret. Alice stared into the canal until its drab surface seemed to shimmer awake. She wanted to see the crabs and turtles and trout that had supposedly reinvigorated the canal since the old pump was fixed two years ago. For a moment she thought she saw a small, swimming creature. But it was just a passing shadow. She stared and stared until the water seemed to have collected every last bit of ambient light and reflected it back at her, making it impossible to see beneath the surface.
    The morning was gathering heat when Alice turned around and headed back up the steep hill into Carroll Gardens. She could not look at the yellow MISSING signs as she walked along Hoyt Street, past her own block, and turned up Union. Allowing herself just a quick glance at the front door of Lauren’s building, Alice kept moving. Going. Walking. One step at a time toward the Seventy-sixth Precinct.
    The detectives had urged them to come forward with anything. Anything at all could be important, Giometti had said.
    It seemed as if the canal and the streets and the neighborhood had simultaneously sealed Lauren in and spit her out. But there was one thing Alice could do. There was one seal she could break in an effort to find the truth, and that was Maggie’s lie about Ivy.

Chapter 6
    Alice climbed the steps of the Seventy-sixth Precinct, a squat concrete building with a blue-tiled facade, and was struck by its incongruity on a block of antique brown-stones. The faded modernist precinct building on western Union Street had the visual impact of a broken promise, a husk that resonated with vacated architectural and social ideals, yet housed a vital civil service.
    Just inside the entrance, a bleached-blond older woman in a purple leisure suit sat at a small desk. She greeted Alice impassively: “Yeah?”
    “Is Detective Viola or Detective Giometti in?”
    The woman picked up her phone and dialed an extension, averting her eyes from Alice. Just beyond, three uniformed officers sat at a counter, fielding phone calls and a constant frizzle of police dispatches. On the wall was a chalkboard logging the precinct’s squad cars and vans.
    “Okay,” the woman told Alice, without specifying exactly whom she had reached this early in the morning. “You wanna wait in there?”
    Alice walked through a swinging half door and entered the large common area. She stood next to a group of tables in the center of the room, glancing over bulletin boards displaying crime statistics charts and wanted posters. Her attention landed on the mug shot of a man whose face sagged so deeply that it seemed pulled by an extraordinary gravity. Across the room, a large fish tanksat on a low wooden cabinet. There was one very large fish in the tank, and beneath it, a handful of small ones swimming quickly in circles. The walls were lined with snack and soda machines, the sight of which sent a bolt of queasiness through her. Never in three pregnancies had she suffered morning sickness, which was supposed to hit you in the first trimester, though she knew as well as anyone that there were exceptions to every rule.
    Someone tapped her shoulder and she turned around.
    “You’re up early,” Frannie said.
    “I couldn’t sleep.”
    “I hear you.” Frannie looked tired, like she’d been up all night too. “I pulled the graveyard shift on rotation last night. You want to talk?”
    Alice nodded. Why else would she be there?
    She followed Frannie past a glass door that read ARREST PROCESSING (NO GUNS BEYOND THIS POINT). A glance in showed an industrial metal desk, a chair and two unoccupied cells. They walked through a doorway just to the right of Arrest Processing and up a flight of worn stairs, at the top of which a bulletin board announced the precinct’s annual Labor Day picnic, already outdated. Frannie pushed open a door announcing PDU. Alice followed her in, past a short hallway crammed with old file cabinets hand-labeled COLD CASES, WARRANTS PENDING, M/E REPORTS. The tiny hallway blossomed into a large room packed with clusters of mismatched desks. Light filtered weakly through the closed venetian blinds on a row of windows. Toward the back of the room a young Hispanic man pecked at the keys of an old typewriter. Alice noticed that for every computer in