Seven Minutes to Noon

and Judy Gersten for questioning. And we’ll start seeing lab reports. It’s gonna be a long night.” She paused to speak to Alice, Maggie and Simon, stunned observers surreally dotting the living room. “If we’re lucky, we’ll start to get some answers tonight.”
    How could luck still be thought to play into this mudslide of bad news? Alice wanted to reel the word back into Frannie’s mouth. To stop her speaking altogether. To make her leave now. Get some answers now. There was nothing anyone could say to mollify Alice. Or one thing, just one: We found them. All of them. Nell and Peter. Ivy.
    In the vacuum of Frannie’s departure, Alice turned toward the windows. Outside, fistfuls of leaves gleamed with raindrops on the tall, old trees that shaded Clinton Street.
    “What now?” Maggie asked.
    No one answered. There was no answer. Or it was the same answer. Nell and Peter. Ivy.
    Soon word came that Sal and Judy had been added to Frannie’s collection at the precinct. Alice vaguely wondered how their presence would be handled with just one small interview room. Unless there were others, a labyrinth of cell-like rooms Alice hadn’t been introduced to. A secret world in the basement. Or on a floorabove. Alice didn’t really know what went on in the Seventy-sixth Precinct. Or in the neighborhood. Or, for that matter, in the larger, mysterious world beyond her own. It was a secret world that had stolen her friend, and now her children. She closed her eyes and sank her head against Maggie’s shoulder.
    Suddenly a blinding light filled the living room.
    “What the hell is that?” Simon sprung up and went directly to the windows. “Television reporters,” he spat, yanking closed the voluminous curtains.
    The room now was dark and Maggie got up to turn on all the lamps.
    “I better make a statement,” Dana said, “or they’ll be on us all night.”
    All night, Alice thought. Would it be that long?
    Dana called Frannie for approval and to discuss her statement. She would confirm the Amber Alert, but name no suspect in particular. “Under investigation,” Dana said. “Got it.” She disappeared outside for ten long minutes, then came back inside to join the wait. No matter how many seconds ticked by — seconds into minutes; a slow, torturous drip of time — the lights beyond the drawn curtains never dimmed.
    In the wait, Alice’s mind unhitched briefly onto a single possibility that she could see as clearly as that distant beach, as clearly as the faces of her children: had whoever killed Lauren and stolen Ivy also come here this afternoon to write a threat to Alice on Simon’s window? If it had been Sylvie, had she detoured her escape for a bout of graffiti? Hailed a taxi and stopped here just long enough to leave behind a final threat? With Nell and Peter in the backseat, watching? They had always said Sylvie was so much fun. Did they have even a single inkling that, for the moment she left them alone, they should run? Had her beloved children squandered their single opportunity for escape?
    What if Sylvie had put them in a cab? Already taken them far out of the neighborhood? With Mike circling the local streets in his pickup, spinning his wheels, tighteningthe noose of his panic while she sat here, helpless and useless, drowning in hers.
    Alice shook her head in a futile effort to dispel such thoughts. She had been wrong before; she could be wrong now.
    No assumptions.
    One, two, three.
    There was no more breath. There were no more thoughts. There was only time, long hard strands of it, tightening around her throat. And waiting.
    Finally into the dread silence a cell phone rang — Dana’s crescendoing chimes — and she flipped it open.
    “We’ve been trying to reach you!... What?... You’ve been in the subway ?... Where is she?... You what?”
    Dana ended the call and faced the fragile group.
    “That was Danny, your Andre Capa,” she told Alice with a regretful sigh. “He lost Sylvie just outside Kennedy airport.”
    “She’s taking Nell and Peter to the airport?” Alice stood up. The nausea came over her in a wave but she didn’t care; she would dive into it, push against it, fly above it. She couldn’t sit here another second.

Chapter 38
    “Wait.” Dana grabbed Alice’s arm. “The kids weren’t with Sylvie when she went into the subway. She was alone. Alice, they aren’t with her.”
    “Where are they, then?” Her voice seemed to ping through the room. She didn’t care