Seven Minutes to Noon

who wrote it!” Alice looked at Mike, holding his eyes a moment before turning back to Frannie and Dana. “Julius and Sylvie? Maybe Ivy was in his apartment for a while. Maybe it wasn’t just the tape I heard.”
    “Whoa!” Dana held a palm flat to Alice, as if a gesture could stop the onslaught of forbidden assumptions. “We don’t know anything about that right now, so back up and slow down.”
    “Dana’s right.” Frannie crossed her legs and cupped her palms over her top knee. “They’re still checking the print against the crime scene.”
    But Alice couldn’t slow down; her mind was flying. Had Julius and Sylvie both been involved in Lauren’s death? It made sense, somehow: the older man, cynical and rich, and the naïve young woman.
    Mike paced the kitchen with his fists clenched. “I’ll kill him!”
    “Shh!” Alice said. “The kids!” Maggie and Simon had taken them upstairs so they could play with Ethan in the family room.
    Mike’s skin blazed red; he looked as if he needed to explode but was imploding instead.
    “I understand how you feel.” The corners of Frannie’s mouth dimpled with deep lines, instantly aging the youngface. “But that’s a job you won’t have to do, Mike. If Pollack’s guilty, believe me, the state and the feds will take care of him.”
    She checked her watch and drained her third cup of coffee, carrying the empty mug into the kitchen. When she came out, she announced, “I’m heading back over to the precinct. There’s a lot to do. Dana’s going to stay here.”
    “See ya later, chief,” Dana said with a small salute as Frannie walked to the front door with one of the uniformed cops who had been on guard.
    Frannie smiled, vanishing the shadow of years from her face, and she looked almost rested. “Nestor here’s giving me a lift but Rula’s still out front.”
    It seemed absurd to Alice that Dana would need to stay with them still — Sylvie was gone and Pollack was in custody — but she understood that what they knew was largely conjecture glued together with a few scraps of evidence. They didn’t truly know what had happened, not today and not to Pam and not two weeks ago, to Lauren and Ivy.
    By late evening — after a Thai dinner ordered in and two bottles of white wine Alice wished she could have shared — bits of news began to filter in through Dana. The first came when the four parents were upstairs getting their children to sleep. Alice and Mike snuggled with Nell and Peter in the guest room’s double bed. Ultimately the kids would occupy their sleeping bags on the floor so Alice and Mike could sleep in comfort, though as far as Nell and Peter were concerned, they had the better deal. Maggie and Simon meanwhile put Ethan to bed together, comrades in life, apparently thrust past sex into each other’s true graces by the shock of Sylvie’s deceit. They were waiting in the living room with Dana when Alice and Mike finally came yawning down the stairs.
    “She’s done it!” Maggie spoke first, excitedly, with a tinge of anger in her tone. “She’s slipped right out of our fingers!”
    “Sylvie?” Mike asked.
    “Seems so,” Simon answered.
    “What happened?” Alice addressed Dana, who seemed most likely to have a reliable answer.
    Dana was sitting on the piano bench, legs crossed in the lotus position. “Frannie just buzzed me. We’ve pinned her down on the F train to the E to Jamaica. She caught the sky train to JFK, which is where Danny lost her. But now we’ve got an eyewitness who saw her at the Air France counter.”
    “She left the country,” Alice said.
    “Someone called her and told her the crime scene was found.” Mike’s eyes were bright in a face pale as clay. “That second call at the park today!”
    “The call scared her,” Alice said. “She had to leave.”
    “And so she’s fled back to France,” Simon added. “Where extradition is hard-proven.”
    Dana listened with a therapist’s calm as the friends’ guesswork unscrolled, but didn’t say what she was clearly thinking: no assumptions. Alice remembered the core philosophy of this strange journey and stopped talking.
    Assumptions were as lethal as doubt.
    “Frannie and Paul are giving a news conference in a few minutes,” Dana said, “if you feel like watching. You can get the facts.”
    They all went upstairs to the family room and turned on the television. Most of the local stations had gathered for a live news conference held by Detectives