Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (12 page)

She does not need Reginald Webster here this morning. Or any morning, for that matter. An hour and a half ago, she turned over a bag full of hundred-dollar bills to the woman who has her children. The cops seem to have deserted her after promising they’d do all they could to get her kids back, and now the money is gone, and her kids are still gone, and apparently those jackasses from the FBI are gone, too, and so is Rafe. So Alice is all alone here, except for Mr. Reginald Webster, standing here on her doorstep and looking as if he’s dressed for a regatta at the local yacht club.

“Want to have lunch with me?” he asks.

“How’d you find me here?” she asks.

“Looked up your name in the phone book. You’re listed, you know.”

“I don’t usually…”

“I’m sorry…”

“…mix business with…”

“I just thought.”

“…pleasure.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Really. I just thought… your accident and all… your foot… you might be feeling down… you might want to go out for a quiet lunch in…”

“No.”

“…a good restaurant…”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” he says.

“I have other things to do today.”

“Sure. Just thought I’d…”

“And in any event…”

“…drive by, see if you were free or not.”

“…I don’t date.”

He looks at her.

“Not since my husband died. I haven’t dated anyone. I doubt if I’ll ever date anyone ever again, as long as I live.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“Although this wouldn’t be a date, you see.”

“Then what would it be?”

“Not in that sense.”

“In what sense would it be what?”

“I guess in a sense it would just be two lonely people talking and perhaps enjoying each other’s company. Is what I thought it might be.”

“I’m not lonely,” she says.

“In that case, I was mistaken, and I sincerely apologize,” he says. “Good day, Alice, I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

He turns, and is starting toward where he parked the Mercury at the curb when she says, “Wait.”

The street is still and silent.

Webb stops, turns to face her again.

“I’ll find some other houses for you to look at,” she says.

“Please do.”

“When… this is resolved.”

He looks into her face.

“When what’s resolved, Alice?”

“This… this thing I’m going through.”

“What is it?” he asks.

She almost tells him.

But her children are still in danger out there.

“Nothing,” she says.

He nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Call me when you have some houses to show.”

“I will,” she promises.

Alice doesn’t know anyone
who was a stockbroker during the eighties who is not now a millionaire. The eighties were when you could make a killing on the Street. Eddie got into the game a little too late. After he earned his master’s, he worked too long in the business office of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, missing out on all those big downtown opportunities. He didn’t join the esteemed brokerage firm of Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich until after Jamie was born. That was eight years ago. By then the ship had sailed, and though Eddie made a very good living, and the family never wanted for anything, his chances of striking it rich on the Street were gone. He told her once that he regretted ever having gone to business school at all.

“What would you rather have done?” she asked.

“Be a pirate,” he said, and laughed.

Some pirate; he was thirty years old when they moved down here to the Cape, still wearing a crew cut, still looking like a fresh-faced bumpkin from Kansas—which impression was false, even back then when she’d first met him. Eddie was originally from Greenwich, Connecticut, son of a judge in the lower circuit court, now deceased. His mother was gone, too, both the victims of a terrible automobile accident some seven years ago. This was the main reason Eddie insisted on changing his death benefit policy to one with a double-indemnity clause, even though the yearly premiums would cost more.

“You never know what might happen,” he said.

You never know, she thinks now.

You never know that your husband will sail out into the Gulf alone like a pirate, you never know there’ll be ten-foot seas that night, and a wind blowing out of the east. You never know that your husband, an expert sailor, will drown in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, you never once in your life imagine something like this can ever happen to you.

Until it does.

She has often imagined him alone on that sloop, battling the waves that eventually washed him overboard. She has often thought if only she’d been there with him, the two of them together might have conquered whatever seas came at them, together they might have brought that boat back to shore, back to safety.

You never know what might happen.

When he left the house that night, he was wearing jeans and a paler blue shirt, a yellow windbreaker, a peaked white captain’s hat. He was wearing his hair longer. A loose shock hung boyishly on his forehead.

Had they remembered to say they loved each other? Before he left forever, had they remembered…?

Yes.

Love ya, babe.

Love ya, too.

Yes, they had not forgotten.

The phone begins ringing
almost the instant she enters the house; she rushes to it, out of breath when she gropes for the receiver. Outside, she can hear Webb starting the Mercury and pulling away from the curb.

“Hello?” she says.

“Alice, it’s Charlie. I’ve been trying you for the past fifteen minutes. What happened? Have you got the kids?”

She tells him what happened. Tells him the cops left here the same time she did this morning, tells him she saw the woman who—

“You
saw
her?”

“Yes. She’s black, Charlie.”

“She let you
see
her?”

“They have the kids, Charlie.”

And that says it all.

“She told me to go home. Said they’d call me.”

“Anybody there with you now?” he asks.

“No one. I’m alone.”

“Where the hell are the cops?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can come over this afternoon,” he says. “Shall I do that?”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes. You shouldn’t be there alone, Al.”

“All right, come,” she says.

“I’ll see you later,” he says, and hangs up.

She replaces the receiver on its cradle, and goes into the kitchen to prepare a pot of coffee for when Charlie gets here. There is a note on the refrigerator door, held there with a magnet in the shape of an ear of corn:

Sorry I have to run. The open road calls.

She looks at her watch. The coffee is taking forever to perk. It suddenly begins bubbling, and in that instant she hears a car pulling into her driveway. She goes to the drapes, parts them. A red convertible is there, the top down, a blonde at the wheel.

Jennifer Redding is here again.

This time, she lets her into the house.

All the wiretap and
tracing equipment is still sitting on the long table in the living room. Alice wonders if the police will be coming back for it. Jennifer looks at the black boxes, the dials, the switches, the trailing wires, the earphones.

“I’m having a new phone system installed,” Alice says.

“I hate new phones,” Jennifer says, peering around the room appraisingly now. “Cute,” she says at last.

“Thanks.”

“How’s the foot?”

“Beginning to itch. And throb a little.”

“Have you been driving?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“The doctor said I could drive.”

“Doctors don’t know,” Jennifer says. “I once had poison ivy all over, they said I could drive.”

Alice wonders what poison ivy has to do with driving a car.

“I called the police,” Jennifer says. “I told them what happened. They said I should have reported the accident at the scene.”

“Yes, you should have. I told you.”

“I told them I had to rush you to the hospital. They said next time I should be more careful. They thought I was a ditz. Everyone thinks I’m a ditz.”

Alice says nothing.

“It’s because I’m a blonde. Do you still have any of that fudge left?” she asks.

“I think so,” Alice says, and opens the fridge door, and looks inside for the white box she put in there earlier today. When she opens it, half the fudge is gone. Good old Rafe, she thinks.

“And you do have coffee this time, I see,” Jennifer says, and helps herself to a mug on the drain board. Sipping at the coffee, nibbling on a piece of fudge, she says, “Something’s going on here, right?”

“No. What do you mean? No.”

“Big truck outside when I came here the other day. What was that?”

“My brother-in-law drives a truck.”

“Was he the company you said you had?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you wouldn’t invite me in? So I wouldn’t meet your brother-in-law?”

“We had a lot to talk about.”

“Was it a lover instead?”

“What?”

“Was he your lover? Instead of your brother-in-law? Your truck-driver lover?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“It just seemed funny, your not letting me in the house when the only person here was your brother-in-law.”

“Look,” Alice says, “I hardly know you. You run me over the other day…”

“Run you
over,
come on!”

“Well, what would you call it? You come barreling around the corner…”

“What is it, Alice?” she asks suddenly. “Tell me. What’s happening here you’re trying to hide?”

Her blue eyes hold Alice fixed in a steady gaze.

Alice is remembering that the woman who was seen picking up her children was a blonde. Hair down to here, just about the length Jennifer Redding wears it.

“I want to help you,” Jennifer says. “I’m very smart about some things.”

“You’re not being smart now,” Alice tells her. “Look, I’m sorry I have to rush you out of here…”

“There
is
something, I know it,” Jennifer says, narrowing her eyes, and Alice realizes that she is involved here with one of those people who watch too much television and who think they are world-class snoops on the order of Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher. Either that or she is the blonde accomplice who drove that car on Wednesday.

Alice does not for a moment believe this is even remotely possible. A blonde exists; Alice is sure of that. The woman in that Shell station was definitely black and no one has yet described the driver of the Impala as a black woman. So there
is
a blonde, yes, but Alice doesn’t believe Jennifer Redding is that blonde. She believes Jennifer Redding is just a meddling pain in the ass, and she wants her out of here before that phone rings again, whenever it rings,
if
it rings, with instructions on when and where she can pick up her kids.

“I’ll find out, you know,” Jennifer says, and nods sagely, like a woman who is accustomed to solving all sorts of heinous crimes when she is not out in her red T-bird knocking down real estate brokers. She swallows what’s left of her coffee, sets the mug in the sink as if she lives here, says, “I can help you if you’d let me,” gives Alice an unexpected hug, and then marches out of the house like a model on a runway.

Alice shakes her head in amazement.

The phone rings.

She looks at the clock.

It is now almost ten past twelve. It can’t be the black woman calling, can it? Not so soon. Or can it? She yanks the receiver from its cradle.

“Hello?”

“Al? It’s Carol. Rafe just called me. Are the kids back?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait. Hope they call me. She told me to go home. She said they’d call. I’m hoping—”

“Who, Alice? Who said that?”

“The woman who has them.”

“Is it some kind of crazed person who doesn’t have kids of her own?”

“I don’t think so. She didn’t look crazy.”