Seven Minutes to Noon

we’ve got three intersecting cases here. The pregnant woman who disappeared two years ago by the canal. Lauren’s murder. The missing baby. They’ve been dredging the canal all day and they’re going to keep dredging it until they’ve covered every square inch of it. But so far, nothing.”
    Frannie disengaged her arm from Alice’s shoulder, leaving her cold. Leaning forward to look squarely at Tim, she said, “Someone took great pains to separate your baby from Lauren. There’s a good chance it’s still alive.”
    It. Suddenly Alice understood the usefulness of the generality. And she understood how the media was working with the police in agreeing to leave out the detail of the baby’s gender. They were holding something back, one remaining morsel of truth. A single secret, to tease out Lauren’s killer.

PART TWO

Chapter 10
    The next morning, Alice huddled in bed, listening to the sounds of her family upstairs in the kitchen. A chair scraping across the floor. Footsteps. Dishes clanking. The ebb and flow of familiar voices. Mike was getting the kids ready for school, a respite for which she had not needed to ask him.
    A bright seam of light joined the curtains where they fell loosely together. Alice felt starved for darkness and quiet and rest. All night she had lain here, her brain grinding up the spent truth of Lauren’s brutal death. Assembling and dissembling it. Adding lurid colors and dimensions that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Seeing the knife and the bloody fleshy parting of Lauren’s skin and muscle. The exposure of her bone. Seeing it. Ivy curled inside her mother for the last time. Shocked by the sensation of air against her newborn skin. The ratchet of her first cry as it hurled into a deaf universe. Without love, who would hear her?
    What did they suffer, those two females, as they were forced out of and into the world?
    And Alice asked herself: If fear was a giant wave overcoming me, what would I do? Dive into it or turn and run away? Fear the fear, or surrender to it?
    She lay on her side, caressing the taut capsule of her twins. They were quiet — sleeping, she presumed — and she didn’t want to wake them.
    Close to eight thirty, a cascade of footsteps carriedMike, Nell and Peter out of the house. It was quiet. Alice closed her eyes and tried to sleep but could find no bridge out of her misery. She missed Lauren so badly it hurt; it was the worst and strangest pain she had ever felt in her life.
    The phone began to ring and Alice tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t let up. Finally she reached for the bedside extension.
    “It’s all set,” Lizzie said.
    “Mom?”
    “I’m on the plane right now.” She spoke in the crisp, bossy tone with which she had nudged and guided Alice through childhood. “I’ll be at LaGuardia at ten past one.”
    “You’re coming today?”
    “Babydoll, I canceled four meetings but who cares? Mike called me. First comes first and that’s you. Big kiss. Don’t get me — I’ll take a cab.”
    “No, Mom, I always pick you up.”
    “Not today, you don’t. I’ll—”
    Alice hoisted herself to sitting and put some strength into her voice. “We’re not opening the store today, and if I sit around the house, I’ll go crazy. Let me do this for you. Give me your flight number. I’ll get there early.”
    Alice showered and dressed. On the kitchen table she found a note from Mike: Call me when you wake up. He had probably gone to the workshop and would leave as soon as she phoned him, rush home to try to protect her from her own anguish. She didn’t want him to save her from this, nor did she want him to use her as a distraction from whatever he himself was experiencing. She would leave him, for now, in the quiet of his workshop, where he didn’t have to smile or talk or comfort her, where all he had to do was sand a single piece of wood to perfect translucence. Discover and enhance the direction of the grain. Understand it for what it was. What Alice needed right now, she knew, was her mother. Lizzie was coming; that was enough.
    Alice forced herself to eat something, for the babies,but had trouble getting down even a single piece of toast. She drank a few sips of milk, which immediately triggered the queasiness she was growing to dread.
    Because traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway was wildly unpredictable, she decided to leave early. She could already feel the distraction of the journey prying her back toward the