Poring over the map, sipping at their coffees, he and Jennifer could easily be two tourists trying to figure out the best way to get to Sea World or someplace. Instead, they are trying to figure out the best way to get to the black woman and the blonde who have Alice’s children and incidentally $250,000 in so-called super-bills.
“Half hour’s drive from here,” Jennifer says.
“Is what the man said.”
Told her if she wasn’t back where she was supposed to be in half an hour, they’d kill the children.
Was what Garcia said, exactly.
Half an hour from the gas station here on 41 and Lewiston.
“Means what?” Rafe says. “Thirty or forty miles in any direction?”
“Depending on traffic, right.”
“Is there a scale on this thing?”
They turn the map this way and that until they find a scale of miles in the lower left-hand corner. They don’t have a ruler in the car, but it looks like an inch equals thirty miles, more or less. An inch is about the length of the top joint of Rafe’s thumb. So if the two chicks are holding the kids someplace a half hour away from the Shell station here, then using the station as the center of a circle, and using Rafe’s thumb joint as the radius…
Thirty miles to the east of Cape October would put them in the middle of the General George C. Ryan Wildlife Refuge. Is it possible they’re keeping the kids in a tent out there?
“I don’t want to go anyplace where there are any snakes,” Jennifer says. “Fuck the two-fifty.”
“Me, neither,” Rafe says.
But he wouldn’t mind facing a few snakes if it meant getting his hands on all that cash. Hell, people on Survivor did that for a lot less money.
Just southeast of the refuge, on route 884, is the town of Compton Acres, which Rafe has never heard of. About a half hour north of the Cape, on U.S. 41, there’s Port Lawrence. About a half hour south is Calusa Springs. To the west of the Cape are the offshore keys and the great big Gulf of Mexico.
“Let’s call some real estate agents,” Jennifer suggests.
On her way home from twelve o’clock Mass, Rosie Garrity picks up the Cape October Tribune. She does not begin reading it until she is in her own kitchen sipping a cup of hot tea. She knows at once that Dustin Garcia’s story is a complete lie.
First, she was right there in the Glendenning house when that black woman called and told Mrs. Glendenning she had the kids.
Next, she has met Mrs. Glendenning’s sister — Carol Matthews is her name — and she knows damn well that woman ain’t no blonde. Her hair is as brown as Mrs. Glendenning’s, the two of them could pass for twins, in fact, there ain’t no way the blonde in the blue Impala could be Carol Matthews, no way at all.
So what is this all about?
Is this some kind of cop trick?
Are they working in cahoots with the newspaper?
In which case, the police have taken some action, after all. In which case, her efforts have not been in vain. There is still hope for those two innocent little kiddies.
But what are they trying to accomplish with their lies about Mrs. Glendenning’s sister and a trip to Disney World? Rosie knows Mrs. Glendenning and her sister didn’t take their kids to no Disney World. Little Jamie and Ashley, poor dears, were picked up by a blonde in a blue Impala, all right, but that wasn’t no Carol Matthews, and there wasn’t no trip to Orlando in the offing. That was somebody working in cahoots with a black woman who called to say she had the kids and would kill them if the police were informed.
She feels like calling Mrs. Glendenning right this minute, tell her that instead of screaming at her on the phone the way she did Friday night, she should get down on her hands and knees and thank God for people like herself, Rosie Garrity, who did in fact inform the police, and who is damn glad she did!
Something’s in the wind now, she feels certain of that, all those lies in the paper.
“So what’s new today?” her husband asks.
“Bunch of lies, is what,” Rosie says.
“Who’s lying now?” he asks.
He is still in his pajamas. She hates it when he comes to the breakfast table without even throwing on a robe. Almost one-thirty, he’s still in his pajamas.
“Mrs. Glendenning,” Rosie says. “What time did you get in last night, George?”
“Little before midnight,” George says, and pours and drinks a glass of orange juice. “What’s she lying about?” he asks, and pops a pair of frozen waffles into the toaster.
“Her kids getting kidnapped.”
“Oh?”
“I told you, remember? She’s now saying they weren’t kidnapped at all.”
“Why would she do that?”
“‘Liar, liar, pants on fire,’ is why.”
“Uh-huh,” George says, totally uninterested, and pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. He butters the waffles, pours maple syrup on them, and then sits down at the table to eat. He is silent for several moments. Then, suddenly, he snaps his fingers.
“That’s who he looked like!” he says.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, George.”
“Her husband who drowned.”
“What about him?”
“I thought I saw him last night.”
“Well, that’d be some kinda miracle,” Rosie says, “seein’ as how he’s been dead these past eight months.”
“Well, of course,” George says. “I know it wasn’t him. I’m just saying it looked like him. Even though the blond hair was long, like a hippie. Besides, he was with some black girl, so of course it wasn’t him. Especially since he’s dead.”
Long blond hair, Rosie thinks.
Black girl, she thinks.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” she says aloud.
If the FBI or the local cops knew that Edward Fulton Glendenning was still alive, their check of real estate agents on the Cape and in neighboring vicinities would most likely include a search for an Edward Fulton as well as any recent renter with the initials EG. As taught in Identity Change 101, they know that a person deliberately getting lost will often use his own initials in choosing a new name, or simply use his existing middle name as his new surname. Rarely will he change his given name. He is too used to being called Frank or Charlie or Jimmy.
But the law enforcement people making phone calls in Alice’s living room do not know that Edward Glendenning is still alive, or that he is now an entirely new individual who calls himself Edward Graham. So their calls to various real estate agents and condo rental offices ask only for a possible renter named Clara Washington, the only name they have, who they know is a black woman in the company of a blonde.
Listening to them making their fruitless phone calls, Alice realizes they are merely clutching at straws. She stopped believing in God on the morning they informed her that her husband had drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. If God truly existed, He would not have allowed such a thing to happen. But now she begins praying, desperately and silently, that Clara Washington and her blond girlfriend will call again soon to tell her they’ve now “checked the money,” whatever that means, and are letting the children go. Please, dear God, she prays, let the phone ring.
It does not ring.
Instead, the doorbell does.
The first thing Holmes sees when the door to the Glendenning house opens is a chesty black woman holding what looks like a nine-millimeter Glock in her fist.