Seven Minutes to Noon (18 page)

She walked halfway up the stairs, slowly, leaning her
weight into her hand on the banister to help blunt the sound of her steps. She stopped and listened. It was utterly quiet. She moved farther up the staircase as it curved toward the upper landing.

The squeal of a door opening nearly detonated her heart.

“Alice!”

Mike stood in the foyer.

“What are you doing?”

“Shh!”

She quickly padded down the stairs. She heard footsteps in the apartment above, but no crying. The baby had quieted down.

“What’s going on?” His tone was weary, almost plaintive. It was nearly midnight and he had been at the workshop all day.

“Come inside,” she whispered.

He followed her into the apartment. She closed the door and locked it.

“Mike, listen to this,” she said, and told him everything: Julius Pollack, Metro Properties, the crying baby upstairs.

They sat at the kitchen table with the dark night quilted around their windows, diminishing the room’s size, increasing the impact of the overhead light. The middle-of-the-night space was off balance, its proportions rearranged.

“Well,” he finally said, “it’s definitely strange.”

“We should tell the detectives, don’t you think?”

Mike got up, walked quietly through the living room and opened the apartment door. The hinges screeched into the quiet.

“Shh!” Alice followed him. “What are you doing?”

Mike froze, then quietly edged himself into the front hall. Alice stood behind the partially open door, watching him. He kept perfectly still in the middle of the foyer, listening. After a minute, he looked at her and shook his head, mouthing, “Nothing.”

It was so quiet Alice could hear her own breathing.
Her body suddenly felt unbearably heavy. She turned into the living room and picked up the phone and her address book on her way to the couch, into which she sank. Mike came back into the apartment, issuing creaks and snaps and clicks as he closed the door and turned the lock.

“I didn’t hear any baby,” he said. “Are you sure you heard it?”

“Positive,” she said. “I
think.”

“Alice—”

“Mike.”

“You’re really calling the detectives?”

She nodded. Yes, she was calling Frannie, despite the uncertainty that now trilled vaguely through her.

“It’s midnight,” he said.

“They work odd shifts.” Alice flipped through the pages of her address book until she came to
P
for
police.
“They’ll either be there or they won’t.”

Mike angled himself next to Alice on the couch, watching her as she requested Detectives Viola or Giometti and waited on hold. Alice held Mike’s eyes, listening to the Muzak on the precinct’s line. The saccharine melody, meant to calm and distract, only increased her nervousness. Finally a detective Alice didn’t know came on, explaining that Frannie would be on the morning shift starting at eight, and Giometti usually got in a little after her.

“Is there anything I can help you with?” the detective asked.

Alice hesitated. “No, thanks,” she finally answered. “It can wait until the morning. Could you please tell Detective Viola I called?” She recited her name and number, ended the call and looked at Mike. “Maybe I should have told this other guy. What do you think?”

“I think you’re probably right. It can wait until morning.” Mike leaned forward and took her hand. “Let’s go to bed, okay? One of them will call us back tomorrow. Remember that thing called sleep?”

They went to bed and Mike drifted off immediately.
But Alice couldn’t sleep with the sounds, the distant cries, that echoed through her mind.
What if,
she asked herself,
Ivy is right here in this house, and all I have to do is walk upstairs and get her?
She eased herself off the bed, crept upstairs and laid on the couch, listening for a thread of sound. One more cry, she promised herself, and she would call the precinct back, get a detective over here.

Hours passed; a gray mist began to infiltrate the darkness outside. She didn’t know what time it was but it must have been close to morning. Convinced she would never sleep, she dreamed of her exhaustion, of her
desire
for sleep. When Lauren appeared in her dream, nursing newborn Ivy, who sucked greedily at an overflowing breast, Alice snapped awake. With relief she realized she had indeed slept. And then, with plunging despair, she remembered Lauren was dead. She was
dead.
She remembered Ivy and the crying baby last night.

Alice was desperate to know one way or another whether Ivy had survived Lauren’s murder. She needed to
know,
to have something to grasp so she would know what to believe and how to feel. Was she mourning or hoping? Images of Ivy plagued her. The supersoft newborn skin, the ripe smell. For a moment, sitting up on the couch, Alice closed her eyes, cradled her arms over her own bulging middle and held Ivy. She felt Ivy startle, flinching her limbs open in an inchoate certainty of free fall, and rocked her, whispering, “Shush, shush, shush.” But this Ivy, the one in Alice’s arms, didn’t cry; she had no voice. She was a vapor.

Alice let her arms fall to her sides. The crying she’d heard last night,
was
it real? She had been so upset about Julius Pollack, she couldn’t stop thinking about Ivy, it had been late at night, and she’d been all alone.
Had
she imagined it?

She got up and walked over to the front door. Cracking it open, she listened and listened, but there was nothing, just the heavy silence of early morning.

* * *

Eight a.m. came and went. The phone didn’t ring. Nell and Peter were making noise downstairs, getting dressed, when Mike appeared. He stared at Alice a moment as she sat in front of the laptop, an empty teacup at her side.

“Take a sleeping pill tonight,
please,
Alice?”

Since she had known him, his skin in the morning had a special pliability, like warm clay. She always wanted to touch him then. Crossing the kitchen, she raised her face to kiss him. His lips were soft.

“I will.”

Alice gave the kids frozen waffles, fresh strawberries and glasses of milk for breakfast. Mike quickly constructed their idiosyncratic lunches. He threw on the work clothes he had arrived home in last night, and in twenty minutes they were all three out the door. She began to clear the breakfast dishes and was just about to load the dishwasher when the phone rang.

“I’m not calling too early, am I?” It was Pam, not Frannie; but even so, Alice was glad for the call. “I just heard from our morning appointment. The owners don’t want us until later today. Can you do two o’clock?”

Alice had forgotten she was supposed to meet Pam to see another house.

“Sure, that’s fine,” Alice said. “Pam? Who works with Julius Pollack at Metro Properties?”

“He’s got a staff—”

“No, I mean his partner.”

“What partner? Pollack works alone as far as I know.”

Alice told Pam what she had read on the Internet.

“I’ll see what I can find out. If I get any info before two, I’ll call you. Otherwise I’ll just see you later, okay?”

“Thanks, Pam. See you at two.”

Alice hung up and looked at the glowing-green rubber buttons of the phone, realizing she hadn’t yet tried Frannie’s cell number. The detective answered after two rings.

“What’s going on, Alice? I got your message from last
night. I had to run out but I was going to call you back in a few minutes.”

In Frannie’s background, the rumble of an engine crescendoed, then suddenly stopped. Something clacked together rhythmically. Voices.

“I heard a baby crying last night.” Alice heard the errant hiss of anxiety in her own voice, and heard Frannie hearing it, the warble of disbelief.

“A baby.”

“Right here. Upstairs, in my new landlord’s apartment. Julius Pollack. Does that name ring a bell?”

“It rings a symphony,” Frannie said. “Go on.”

Alice described everything in detail: her encounter with Julius in the foyer when he was moving in, her continuing search for a house, Pam Short’s discovery that Lauren’s landlord — Metro — was owned by Alice’s new landlord, her visit with Tim as he packed, the crying baby upstairs last night. The pregnancies, the evictions, the coincidences that were twisting a knot in her mind.

“Did you know he was Lauren’s landlord?” Alice asked.

“We knew,” Frannie said, “but we didn’t know he was moving in there.”

“What about Christine Craddock? Was her landlord Metro too? Was
she
getting evicted from her apartment too?”

In the pulse of silence that followed, Alice heard the voices behind Frannie collide in argument.

“Alice, I have to go,” Frannie said, “but it’s good you called.”

“Do you think he’s got Ivy up there?” Alice gripped her tea bag’s paper tag, folding it with a sharp crease. The string detached and went sailing into what remained of her hours-old tea.

“It’s doubtful, but we’ll check it out.”

“What do I do about Julius Pollack? What if I hear the baby again?”

“Call us right away.”

There were so many things to
not
think about — Ivy, the baby crying upstairs, Metro’s heartless evictions, Julius’s shoes, Tim’s leaving, Maggie’s secret life, Lauren’s corpse buckling back into the canal — and they all floated like slivers of glass beneath the surface of Alice’s consciousness. What saved her from drowning in the ebbs and flows of memory and implication was the immediate goal: finding a house, getting away from Julius Pollack and the mysterious partner. And the bigger goal, the hard one, that lurked in the back of her mind: locating Ivy.

As she walked the five blocks to Blue Shoes Wednesday morning, Alice felt a trickle of nausea work its way up her throat. Exhaustion and nausea seemed in collusion, one triggering the other. Despite her promise to Mike to take a sleeping pill tonight, she wasn’t sure she would. It worried her. Thalidomide was once called safe; how much did they really know about the chemical environment of a developing fetus? She promised herself another sleeping pill only when she really needed it. Did she need it now, or would this get worse? She sensed her loose foothold on the slippery slope of panic. But she had summoned the detectives, told them about Julius, about the baby. She was doing everything possible. And now, today, she was seeing another house with Pam, trying to get her family out from under Julius Pollack’s roof.

A date, in writing... telling me when you’ll be gone.
Julius’s tough words boomeranged inside her head.

And Lauren’s:
bloodsucker.

She had the law on her side, Alice reminded herself. And if Julius did have Ivy, if he was in any way involved in Lauren’s or Christine Craddock’s deaths, it was too late now for him to elude detection. They were watching him.

She moved tenderly along Smith Street, slowing as a tidal wave of dizziness gave way to an avalanche of nausea. The next thing she knew, she was hinged over, kneeling on the dirty pavement.

She looked down to see if she had vomited; she had not. Having never fainted before, she was just as surprised by the acute embarrassment that overcame her next. Her stomach inexplicably settled and she carefully stood up. She looked around to see who had noticed her. An old man in a doorway across the street nodded soberly and waved. At the corner, a teenage girl with huge gold hoop earrings and dramatically outlined eyes in the style of a hip-hop Cleopatra stared blankly at Alice. In those eyes she saw that she had become the woman every teenage girl disavowed, and she wanted to call out,
No, you’ve got it wrong. Just you wait and see.
She pulled her purse in close and walked carefully to the corner, where she waited for the light to change. She crossed without looking at either of her witnesses.

As she walked, she felt a shadow of the nausea materializing over her. Not again. She stopped in her tracks, to let the feeling pass. Footsteps abruptly halted behind her. It was like the sudden quiet after a refrigerator’s buzz cycles off; only then do you realize how loud it had been.

Alice turned around and saw him. The limo driver was right there, so close she could touch him. Deep creases sagged the skin on a once-handsome face, and those eyes: one green, one blue. He nodded and passed her at a crisp pace. He smelled of unwashed clothes and
cigarettes. She watched him cross the street, huddled into his shoulders.

A cloud moved and the sun spilled down, blinding her just as it had before she steered the car into the bus. Everything flashed white, and for a split second the beach reappeared — she could
smell
its salts and mildews, it was so real — with the limo driver walking in his dark city clothes on the shifting sand. Smoking his cigarette, flicking his butt into an ocean that instantly absorbed it.

A horn blared. The limo driver disintegrated. The beach vanished like a pulled veil.

The teenage Cleopatra had come up close and was staring at Alice now with a mixture of indignation and concern. Under all the makeup, her eyes were a gentle brown.

“You okay, ma’am?” the girl asked.

Alice rubbed her eyes, refocusing herself on the concrete and the buildings and the natural music of everyday urban life. This she recognized clearly, and was grateful for; it was more vibrant than the beach dream that endangered her whenever it came.

“I didn’t feel well for a minute,” Alice said.

“That guy knocked into you,” the girl said. “I saw him, the a-hole didn’t even notice you.”

So he
was
real. Alice had started to wonder if the limo driver was part of a hallucination that was edging out her hold on reality.

“Thanks,” Alice told the girl, and resumed walking. As she moved forward along Smith Street, each step hit the pavement with resolve — banishing the beach, the limo driver, the dream of forgetting and escape, even the girl.

She
would
take another sleeping pill tonight, she decided. In the morning, with a clear mind, she would sort all this out.

She arrived at Blue Shoes just before eleven and switched on the lights. The gorgeous colors Maggie had chosen for the store, the blues and silvers and pale
woods, coaxed Alice away from the swallowing sensation that had grabbed her just now on the street. She opened the cash register and answered a few e-mails. Jason arrived soon after, more or less on time.