Seven Minutes to Noon

been wired earlier. The technician was there, unloading equipment.
    “Got everything, Eddie?” Frannie asked him.
    “Yup. All set.”
    “Can’t leave anything in the van.” Frannie rolled her eyes. “Even in our own parking lot.”
    “So, was it good?” Alice asked.
    “It was good.” Frannie turned to Eddie. “Okay, buddy, scoot.”
    Eddie left the room and Dana plucked the tiny microphone out of Alice’s dress.
    “Carefully,” Dana said, as Alice lifted the dress over her head. The cool air on her clammy skin felt exquisite. Frannie carefully removed the wires and placed them on the table for Eddie to sort out when he returned.
    “What we learned,” she told Alice, “is that Garden Hill Realty is involved. As soon as you mentioned Judy Gersten, Cattaneo tensed. We don’t know why exactly.But I have a hunch things are going to start shaking up in the local real estate markets just about now.”
    “What next?” Alice asked.
    “We wait,” Frannie answered.
    “You mean we just go back to our regular life, except that nothing’s regular about it any more?”
    “What I mean,” Frannie said, “is you go back to normal as much as you can. And then we’ll see.”
    “What if we got away for a while?” Mike asked. “I’d like to take Alice and the kids and go somewhere.”
    In the heavy pause that followed, as Mike looked from woman to woman, Alice felt the pinch of his helplessness. He hadn’t told her in so many words, but she pretty much figured he had abandoned his plan to go to the furniture expo in Las Vegas. Day to day, they were both redefining priorities, and she knew that when he said away, he meant far away. Not just across state lines. To another country.
    “We’d rather you didn’t.” Frannie sat down, leaning her elbows on the tabletop. “It might help to have you around.”
    “Why?” The jugular vein pulsed in Mike’s neck. “So this psycho can butcher my wife? So you can catch him in the act this time? When it’s too late for us?”
    Frannie sighed deeply and sat back in her chair, the hinges of which let out a loud moan at the sudden weight of her body. She closed her eyes. Her lashes were very long, Alice noticed. And she knew: Mike’s accusations were unanswerable because they were partly true.
    “Just tell us,” Alice begged Frannie in a voice buried in whisper, “what’s going to happen next, so we can know. We need to know so we can decide.”
    Frannie opened her eyes. After a moment’s pause, she said, “We’ve got a few ideas, but we can’t share them right now.”
    So they were back to that. Alice pressed her lips shut against a vitriolic surge of frustration, helplessness, fear and grief that was threatening to erupt from her stomach to her mouth.
    “I want to go home,” she whispered to Mike.
    “Me too,” he whispered angrily. “But we can’t.”
    Alice missed her old home on President Street and yearned for her new home on Third Place. But living in Simon’s house, even just for one night, she had developed an awareness that home was not so much a place. Home was Nell and Peter and Mike, and it was her twins. Home was the dark hole in her existence where missing Lauren still hurt. Home was a good meal, a hot shower, a clean bed. Home could be anywhere.
    But still, she missed home. Even though it scared her a little, she slipped forward to the edge of her chair to make a single demand.
    “I need to get into the President Street apartment.” She looked Frannie squarely in the eye. “I need to pick up a few things.”
    And she needed to say good-bye.
    Frannie nodded slowly, thinking, and finally said, “All right. Tomorrow. I’ll arrange it.”

Chapter 32
    Mike dropped the kids off at school, then went to his workshop. Alice, with Dana, opened Blue Shoes at eleven o’clock. And then at just after two — when they had been alerted that the coast was clear — they headed over to the President Street house to gather clothes and toys and a few other things. Sylvie had agreed to pick Nell and Peter up from school in case Alice couldn’t get there in time.
    “That’s him,” Dana whispered to Alice as they passed a man wearing a Yankees cap, sitting alone in a gray Ford parked in front of the house. Meaning, he was the cop surveilling the house. He was reading a newspaper, or pretending to. They passed him without so much as a glance in his direction and entered the house with Alice’s key.
    They had only been gone a few days, yet the