Seven Minutes to Noon

right?
    “When?” Frannie asked.
    An infinite beat of silence. Frannie’s brow pinching over darkening eyes. The world ending. Or beginning. A suffocating transformation of time.
    Alice stopped breathing. One, two, three. One, two, three. It didn’t work.
    “I can’t breathe!” she whispered to Mike.
    He turned around and stared at her as if she had spoken a foreign language.
    “What?”
    “I can’t—”
    “Did she have two kids with her, a boy and a girl?” Frannie listened a moment, then ordered, “Put an APB on Sylvie Devrais. And get an Amber Alert out on the kids. Right now.”
    “I knew she was trouble.” Maggie’s voice snapped into the stunned silence that followed. “I just knew it. The little bitch.”

Chapter 37
    “I’m going out to look for them,” Mike said again.
    “I’m coming with you.” Alice turned quickly to the living room’s archway, the passage out of the house, toward her children. Then a spiral of nausea lassoed her and she stopped, bringing both hands to her forehead, resisting gravity.
    “Alice?” Mike had his arm around her. “Sit down, sweetie.”
    “She better stay here,” Frannie said, steering Alice to the couch. “Mike, you go ahead. I’m trying to reach the cop on Sylvie’s surveillance; he hasn’t been answering his phone, but when I reach him, he’ll tell us where to look. Give me your cell number.”
    They traded numbers and Mike left. Alice sank into the couch, choking back the bile of her helplessness. She wanted to be with Mike out on the streets, looking, not sitting here. “I can’t stand this,” she cried. “We should have left town last week.”
    Everyone kept quiet; no one denied her that claim, because it was true. They should have left. They should have. And now it was too late.
    It was the longest hour in history — a black hole for any mother; for Alice, a nightmare whose edges she had skirted blindly these past two weeks. She had never once feared for Nell’s or Peter’s safety. All this time, she had been looking in the wrong place. Making assumptions. Trusting blindly.
    Sylvie.
    How could it be?
    Alice’s mind swirled with numbers. Dates and times. All the hours she had entrusted her children to Sylvie.
    But had she been completely wrong? Weren’t Julius Pollack and Sal Cattaneo and Judy Gersten all somehow involved in this? Sylvie worked for Judy. Judy was close with Sal. Sal was Julius’s secret partner. All the victims were involved with Metro Properties.
    What other secrets bound them?
    Stop or they’re next.
    Nell. Peter.
    Stop what, exactly? Making trouble? Creating noise? Collaborating with the police?
    And why, why, why hadn’t the detectives told her the children may have been in danger? If they were having Sylvie followed, it was for a reason. The same reason they had all been followed.
    The detectives knew all along.
    It was one of them.
    And they watched, and they waited, until something happened.
    Alice sat on the couch with Maggie, frozen in the eddying coil of her thoughts as Frannie and Dana paced the living room, working their cell phones. Forensics was long gone to the lab with bags and slides of evidence. Photos to develop. Piles of hair and pillow casings to analyze.
    Simon arrived into the chaos with Ethan, set him up in front of the TV upstairs in the family room, and joined the vigil in the living room. He sat next to Maggie on the couch, pressed against her, squeezing hands. Their comforting of each other comforted Alice. She wanted to be part of them, part of their passion, to be anyone but herself — because at this moment, more than any other moment in her life, she was completely alone. Alone. She was not part of Maggie and Simon’s deep, if muddled, love; she was a woman, a mother, on the verge of unbearable loss.
    Minutes dragged by until, finally, the first dribble of news came in.
    “They’ve got Pollack,” Frannie said. “He’s cooperating. Dana, you stay here. Paul’s coming in from Jersey; they’re wrapping up the crime scene. He’s meeting me at the precinct. The FBI’s getting in on this. We’ll have to debrief them.”
    Dana nodded, stopping in front of a long window, the butterscotch late afternoon drenching her in sun. She looked like a coin, Alice thought. Dark and golden and powerful. Flat. Unreal.
    “I’ll keep you posted.” Frannie strode across the room, her worn black sneakers quiet on the wooden floor. “It shouldn’t be long before we pick up Sal Cattaneo