“Let’s see what happens here, okay?”
“She’s your sister,” he says again.
“When it’s over,” she says.
“You got any wine?”
She takes an opened bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge, hands him a glass. In the living room, Sloate is on the phone again with his captain. She wanders out there to see if she can learn anything, but there is nothing new. Three o’clock seems so very far away. When she comes back into the kitchen, Rafe is just finishing his sandwich.
“You’re out of wine,” he tells her, and shakes the empty bottle in his fist. “Have you got a spare bedroom? I’ve been driving all night.”
She shows Rafe the children’s empty bedroom. Twin beds in it, one on either side of the room. Rafe looks insulted by the size of the beds, big man like him. But he finally climbs into one of them, clothes and all.
Alice goes into her own bedroom, and climbs into bed, thinking she will take a nap before three, be ready for whatever may come next.
In an instant, she is dead asleep.
The nightmare comes the way it always does.
The family is sitting at the dinner table together.
It is seven-thirty P.M. on the night of September twenty-first last year; she will never forget that date as long as she lives.
Eddie is telling her he feels like taking the Jamash out for a little moonlight spin. The Jamash is a 1972 Pearson sloop they bought used when they first moved down here to the Cape. It cost $12,000 at a time when Eddie was still making good money as a stockbroker, before Bush got elected and things went all to hell with the economy. They named it after the two kids, Jamie and Ashley, the Jamash for sure, a trim little thirty-footer that was seaworthy and fast.
But Eddie has never taken her out for a moonlight spin without Alice aboard, and this has always required making babysitter plans in advance.
“Just feel like getting out on the water,” he tells her.
“Well… sure,” she says, “go ahead.”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
“Just don’t take her out on the Gulf,” she says. “Not alone.”
“I promise,” he says.
From the door, as he leaves the house, he yells, “Love ya, babe!”
“Love ya, too,” Alice says.
“Love ya, Daddy!” Ashley yells.
“Love ya,” Jamie echoes.
In the Gulf of Mexico the next morning, an oil tanker spots the boat under sail, moving on an erratic course, tossing aimlessly on the wind.
They hail her, and get no response.
When finally they climb down onto the deck, there is no one aboard.
Alice gets the phone call at ten that morning.
She screams.
And screams.
The telephone is ringing.
She climbs out of bed, rushes into the living room. The grandfather clock reads ten minutes to two. Sloate already has the earphones on.
“She’s early,” he says.
Marcia is behind her tracing gear now.
Sloate nods.
Alice picks up.
“Hello?” she says.
“Listen,” the woman says. “Just listen.” And then, in a stage whisper, “Tell her you and your brother are okay, that’s all. Nothing else.” And then, apparently handing Ashley the phone, she says, “Here.”
“We’re both okay,” Ashley says in a rush. “Mom, I can’t believe it!”
“What can’t…?”
“Do you remember Mari—?”
The line goes dead.
“Who’s Marie?” Sloate asks at once.
“They’re alive,” Alice says. “My children…”
“Do you know anyone named Marie?”
“No. Did you hear her? They’re both okay!”
“Or Maria?”
“I don’t know. They’re alive!”
“Fifteen seconds this time,” Marcia says.
“Marie? Maria?”
“I don’t know anyone named—”
“A relative?”
“No.”
“A friend?”
“No. My children are alive. How are you going…?”
“Someone who worked for you?”
“…to get them…?”
“Marie,” he insists. “Maria. Think!”
“You think, damn it! They’re alive! Do something to—”
And suddenly the knowledge breaks on her face.
“What?” Sloate asks.
“Yes. Maria.”
“Who?”
“A babysitter. This was a long time ago, I’m not even sure she—”
“What’s her last name?”
At two o’clock that afternoon, Charlie Hobbs, at the wheel of the Chevy pickup he uses to transport his huge canvases, drives into the bus-loading area at Pratt Elementary School, and asks to talk to Luke Farraday. It is a hot, bright, sunny day on the Cape, the temperature hovering at ninety-two degrees. Charlie is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Farraday is wearing a blue uniform with a square shield, and a little black plastic name tag over the left breast pocket. L. FARRA-DAY. Yellow school buses are already beginning to roll into the lot.
Charlie has to be careful here.
The warning from whoever has taken Alice’s kids could not have been more explicit:
Don’t call the police, or they’ll die.
Charlie doesn’t want Farraday to think anything out of the ordinary has happened here. At the same time, he hopes to get a bead on that blue car.
“I’m a friend of Alice Glendenning,” he says. “She wants to thank whoever picked up her kids yesterday afternoon. Maybe you can help me.”
“Cops’ve already been here,” Farraday says. “Told ’em everything I know.”
This surprises Charlie. He hopes it doesn’t show on his face. Why would the cops have been here? Alice told him they let her go yesterday, so why…?
“Sorry to bother you again then,” he says. “She’s just eager to thank the woman.”
Farraday is a man maybe sixty-five, seventy, in there, one of the retirees who come down here to die in the sun. Charlie’s fifty-four, which is maybe getting on, he supposes. But he knew what he wanted to be when he was seventeen. Had to leave art school when the Army grabbed him, but returned to his studies and his chosen profession the moment he was discharged. He’s been painting ever since, never hopes to retire till his fingers can no longer hold a brush or the good Lord claims him, whichever comes first.
“These’d be Jamie and Ashley Glendenning,” he says. “Little boy and girl.”
“Yep, I know them. But like I told the detectives this morning—”
“That when they were here?”
“Round ten o’clock,” Farraday says.
“And you told them what?”
“Told them a young blonde woman called the kids over to the car, drove off with them.”
“What’d she look like?”
“Straight blonde hair down to here,” he says, and indicates the length of it on his neck. “Slender woman from the look of her, delicate features. Wearing sunglasses and a white little-like tennis hat with a peak.”
“She wasn’t black, was she?” Charlie asks.
“Cops asked me the same thing.”
“Was she?”
“I don’t know many black blondes,” Farraday says. Then, chuckling, he adds, “Don’t know many blondes at all, for that matter. Nor too many blacks, either.”
“How old would you say?”
“I couldn’t say. Young, though. In her thirties maybe? I really couldn’t say.”
“Called over to the kids, you said?”
“Called to them. Signaled to them. You know.”
“What’d she say?”
“Now there’s where you got me, mister,” Farraday says, and lightly taps the hearing aid in his right ear.