Seven Minutes to Noon

wasn’t there.
    “Mike!” Alice screamed. Her voice seemed to bounce on pockets of humid air leftover from the spent storm. “Mike!”
    “Alice!” Mike’s voice sailed back at her.
    And then a perfectly pitched duet, high and light as it floated out of Carroll Park:
    “Mommy!”
    Simon couldn’t stop himself from bolting ahead. She ran behind him, gasping, holding her belly from beneath and running down the first path leading to the large central area separating the two playgrounds. Police were everywhere. Benches and asphalt and jungle gyms were drenched from the storm, but the sun was strong and neighborhood children had already gathered back for play under the wary gaze of their parents and sitters who must have been wondering why the police were crowding the park. A little boy zipped past Alice on a silver bike with training wheels. She stood in the middle of the playground, scanning the small bodies for Nell, for Peter.
    “Mommy!” This time it was Peter’s voice alone, and he was laughing. “We’re right over here! Don’t you see us?”
    His little face was pressed between the iron bars separating the big kids’ side from the central area. He was smiling at her. The bottom of his face was tinted green. Beside him, where he kneeled backward on a bench, Nell was pressed against Mike’s side. Mike held a partially eaten puff of green cotton candy. Nell, whose mouth was clownish with a pink haze, turned around and waved. Mike now looked over at Alice, who came through the gate and nearly fell on her children with open arms.
    “Sylvie brought them into the Autumn Café during the storm,” Mike told Alice when she raised her head. His eyes were wet; he’d been crying, or making an effort not to.
    The Autumn Café, just across the street on Smith. Where they had bought bagels and juices and coffees and muffins, and passed countless afternoons with their friends. The children had grown up in that place; they were known there, comfortable. Most of the college kidsbehind the counter knew Nell and Peter by name. Alice felt her lungs begin to inflate.
    Standing beside the bench, Simon smiled at his reunited friends. “I’ll call Maggie with the good news.” He reached into his back pocket for his cell phone.
    “She probably already knows,” Mike said. “Frannie just called me from the precinct. She said we should take the kids back to Simon’s. She’s meeting us at the house so she can talk to them herself.”
    Alice was grateful and astounded by how efficiently the Amber Alert had worked. Yet it was a brand-new law. What would have happened to Nell and Peter just a year ago, without it? Would the neighborhood have been a strong enough net to catch them? Alice doubted anyone in the playground would have noticed they were alone; since they were such a common sight there, they might have stayed for hours, blending into play. And then what?
    “Sylvie said she’d be right back.” Nell shrugged her skinny shoulders. Her purple T-shirt, Alice saw, was wet all down the front. Peter’s too. As if they had run headlong through the rain, led by Sylvie to a port in the storm.
    “How long were you there without her?” Alice combed her fingers through Peter’s hair, which had fallen into his eyes.
    Peter shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “Didn’t anyone ask you why you were alone?” She didn’t want to ask specifically if the police had come into the café or just now found them here; she wanted, instead, for them to supply the details.
    Nell shrugged again and took a nibble of her pink cotton candy. Alice never bought it for them; Sylvie must have given them money before leaving, and they had nabbed their chance for the forbidden treat.
    “We went home after it stopped raining,” Nell said. “We waited outside but no one came.”
    “We forgot!” Peter giggled. Meaning, they had conspiratorially forgotten they didn’t live at the President Street house anymore.
    “Then we came here,” Nell said. “I made Peter hold my hand when we crossed the street, Mommy, so don’t worry. Okay?”
    “Okay, sweetie. Thanks.”
    Frannie wanted to have them driven back to the house in one of the many squad cars that now surrounded the park, but Alice objected.
    “They’re fine,” she told Frannie on Mike’s phone. “Let us walk home with them, okay? We all need to calm down for a few minutes. Please.”
    “We’re going to have to question them, Alice.”
    “I realize that.”
    “I know it’s