“You want to help us?” Sloate asks. “Or you want those kids killed?”
Garcia blinks.
“Tell me,” Sloate says. “Which?”
The voice on the phone is a new one to her.
Gravelly and thick, the voice of a habitual unregenerate smoker, it says merely, “Mrs. Glendenning?”
“Yes,” she says, and then at once, “Who’s this, please?”
“My name is Rudy Angelet, I’m an old friend of your late husband.”
Across the room, wearing the earphones, Charlie looks at her, puzzled. Alice returns a puzzled little shrug.
“Yes?” she says.
“I’d like to offer my condolences,” Angelet says.
“Thank you,” she says, and waits.
It has been almost eight months now since anyone has called to offer condolences. That first week, those first two weeks actually, the phone never stopped ringing. Then news of the drowning became ancient history, and even their closest friends stopped calling to say how sorry they were. She has never heard of Rudy Angelet, though, and she wonders why the call at this late date. So she waits. Warily.
She is wary of any voice on the phone, any knock on the door, fearful that anything she says or does might endanger the children.
“Ah, Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, “I’m sorry to bother you about this, I know you’ve been through a lot…”
“Yes, what is it?” she asks.
“…but we’ve waited what we consider a respectable amount of time before contacting you…”
Waited for what? she wonders.
“…and we feel it’s time we now met to discuss this matter of Eddie’s debt.”
“Eddie’s what?” she says.
“His debt. The money he owes us. Mrs. Glendenning, I don’t think we should discuss this further on the—”
“I don’t know anything about—”
“—telephone. Perhaps we can meet someplace for a cup of coffee…”
“I don’t even know you,” she says.
“My name is Rudy Angelet,” he says. “And your husband owes us two hundred thousand dollars. Do you know the—?”
“He what?”
“He owes us two hundred thousand dollars, Mrs. Glendenning. Do you know the diner on 41 and Randall? It’s right on the corner there. The southwest corner…”
“Look, who is this?” she says.
“Last time, Mrs. Glendenning,” he says, and the smoke-seared voice is suddenly loaded with menace. “My name is Rudy Angelet, and your husband owes us two hundred thousand dollars. We’ll be at the Okeh Diner on 41 and Randall at eleven o’clock this morning. I suggest you be there, too. We’ll have breakfast together.”
“I’ve already had breakfast,” she says.
“You’ll have it again.”
“Look, mister—”
“Unless you’d like something to happen to your kids,” he says, and hangs up.
“Who was that?” Carol asks.
“Someone who says Eddie owed him two hundred thousand dollars.”
“They always come out of the woodwork,” Charlie says knowingly.
“He threatened the kids.”
“Then call the police,” Carol says.
Alice looks at her.
“Do you see the police here?” she says. “Are the police doing anything?” she says. “The police in this fucking hick town are sitting on their fat asses while my kids—”
“Hey,” Carol says, “hey, come on, sis,” and takes her into her arms.
It is like when they were children together, growing up in Peekskill, and the kids at school taunted her by calling her “Fat Alice” because she was a little overweight. Well, a lot overweight. But maybe she ate a lot because their father beat her with his goddamn razor strop all the time, the son of a bitch. Carol could never understand why he picked on Alice and exempted Carol herself from punishment. Nothing Alice did ever seemed to please him. Carol could only figure that he resented her being born at all. Or maybe…
Well, she didn’t believe in pushcart psychology. She knew only that the moment Alice got out of that house, the moment she went off to New York and college, she shed the pounds as if they were water rolling off a tin roof. By the time she met Eddie, she was as slender as a model. Also wore her hair longer, down to the shoulders, though Eddie was wearing his in a crew cut at the time. Dirty blond and raven brunette, they made a striking pair on the streets of a city not renowned for being easily impressed.
But now Eddie is dead and a stranger on the phone has just told Alice her husband owed him two hundred thousand dollars.
“I’ll go with you,” Carol says.
“No, I’ll go,” Charlie says.
“I’ll go alone,” Alice tells them.
9
She sometimes wishes she were six feet two inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds. She wishes she could bellow like a gorilla, pound her chest, smash everything on the road ahead of her. Is that what this kidnapping is all about? she wonders. Is that what this gets down to? Her husband owing money to a man who sounds like a grizzly bear, is that it? Is that why they took her children? If so, you deserved to die, Eddie, you…
I don’t mean that, she thinks at once.
God forgive me, she thinks.
I’m sorry, Eddie, please forgive me.
Her knuckles on the wheel are white.
She takes a deep breath.
The man on the phone — Rudy Angelet, he said his name was — threatened the children. Does this mean he actually has them? Is he somehow connected with the black girl in the Shell station, oh so fucking confident, looked Alice straight in the eye, never mind worrying about later identification, Do anything foolish, and they die. Are they accomplices? Or is Alice merely wasting time here, meeting Mr. Angelet and whoever he’s having breakfast with, when she should be home waiting for a phone call? She knows there’s more than just him; he said, “Your husband owes us,” he said, “We’ll be at the diner,” so there’s more than just Mr. Rudy Angelet and his veiled threat. Are there now four of them? More than four? Is this a gang she’s dealing with, dear God don’t let it be a gang! Let it be just the black woman and her blonde girlfriend, and now Mr. Rudy Angelet and maybe one other person waiting for her at the Okeh Diner.
It is unusual to find heavy traffic on The Trail at ten forty-five on a sweltering morning in May. As Eddie once put it, only an iguana would find the Cape habitable during the summer months. And despite what the calendar says, summer starts at the beginning of May and often lingers through October, though many of the full-timers insist that those two bracketing months are the nicest ones of the year. Native residents of the Cape tend to forget that May and October are lovely anywhere in the United States. They also conveniently forget that in May down here, you can have your brain parboiled if you don’t wear a hat.
Driving toward the Okeh Diner on Randall and the Trail, Alice suddenly realizes how much she hates this place.
Hates it even more now that Eddie is dead.
Wonders why on earth they ever moved down here from New York.
Wonders what in the world kept them here all these years.
God, she thinks, I really do hate this fucking place.
She hadn’t planned on getting married so soon.
Her plan was to finish film school and then take a job as a third or fourth or fifth assistant director (a gopher, really) with one of the many companies advertising for recent film school graduates to go on location in Timbuktu or Guatemala or wherever they were shooting the latest documentary or low-budget (or even no-budget) independent film. These were learning jobs for single men or women. So marriage definitely was not in her plans.