Alice in Jeopardy

8

By midnight, they have already fucked once and are lying naked on Jennifer’s king-sized bed in a bedroom overlooking a small lagoon in her backyard, getting ready to have another go at it, from the look of things. Rafe feels no guilt whatever; he has done this many times before, with many different women. In fact, he feels exhilarated. She is more spectacularly beautiful than he could have prayed for, lying beside him now with her Miss Clairol Blondest Gold hair spread on the pillow, her legs spread below where her unbleached coal-black hair tufts in crisp anticipation, one hand lying palm up on the pillow above her head, the other hand already stroking his cock again.

The combination of black and blond is somehow very exciting. My head may be fake, it seems to declare, but, baby, what you get down here is the real thing. Moreover, his being able to witness the disparity brings a sense of greater intimacy to their nakedness. Here I am, her bush is saying, this is what I’m really like, and you alone are privileged to see it. Me alone, and ten thousand other guys, Rafe thinks, but he’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth or any other open orifice.

What she’s doing now is positioning herself so that she can maneuver the head of his cock against her nether lips. She does this with total disregard for his own needs or desires. It is as if his cock isn’t even attached to him. She uses it like a dildo, pushing the head this way and that until she finds her clitoris and then rubbing herself against it gently at first and then more vigorously and then straddling him completely and sliding herself onto him, wet and open and savage and totally absorbed with pleasuring herself alone. She seats herself firmly and deeply, grabbing her breasts in both hands, working the nipples with thumbs and forefingers, head thrown back, blonde hair above, black below, it is almost like having two women in bed with him.

She keeps him deep inside her, insistently moving her clitoris against his shaft, locked onto his cock, lost in herself, tossing her head, murmuring cunt and fuck and cock and yes and do it and fuck me, and then pulling herself back just on the edge of orgasm, and gliding up to the head of his cock again, almost losing it, capturing it again at the very last moment, and then sliding down deep again, repeating the action, over and over again and again and again, his hands clutching her ass, yes, fuck me, she says, and then screams aloud and hangs above him in agonizing orgasm and flings herself onto him, breasts crushed against his chest, mouth seeking his, tongue lashing, oh jesus, she murmurs, oh jesus.

This is what’s nice about fucking a stranger, Rafe thinks.

She doesn’t bring up the wife again until half an hour later. They always bring up the wife after they’ve been royally fucked, Rafe thinks. Never miss an opportunity to bring up the wife. It’s like they’re thinking, Well, you son of a bitch, now that you’ve had your way with me, let’s discuss this small matter of the little woman back home. They never put it quite that way, of course, he has never met a woman that stupid. Actually, there’s no woman on earth who will ever say exactly what she means. With women, you’ve always got to decode what they’re saying. If a woman says, “Do you think Hawaii is really as nice as they say it is?” what she really means is “I’ve booked a room for two weeks at the Royal Tahitian.” That is the way women talk. The only time women talk straight is when they’re fucking. But that’s not the woman talking, it’s the cunt. The cunt is saying fuck me, not the woman.

That was half an hour ago.

Now it’s the woman talking.

“So tell me,” Jennifer says, “is Atlanta a nice place to live?”

Meaning, “So tell me about this goddamn wife of yours in Atlanta.”

“It’s okay, I guess,” he says.

“Did you ever live anyplace else?”

He almost tells her he spent a year and four months in Reidsville, Georgia, at the correctional facility there.

Instead, he says, “Born and raised there.”

“Your wife, too?”

Here it comes, he thinks.

“No, she’s originally from Peekskill. That’s upstate New York.”

“So how’d she end up in Atlanta?”

Meaning “So how did you meet this fucking wife of yours?”

“She was going to college in Athens. University of Georgia. That’s about sixty miles northeast of Atlanta.”

“So what’d you do? Meet at a prom or something?”

“No, my sister was going to school there, too.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

She nods. She is sitting beside him on the bed, cross-legged, still naked. Her lips are only a trifle pursed. She is thinking this over. About to get pissed off that she went to bed with a married man. And enjoyed it. All of this is beginning to eat at her.

“You are so beautiful,” he says.

Rescue operation.

“Mmm,” she says, and nods again, and pulls a little face.

He is about to get kicked out of here in the middle of the night unless he says something very smart very soon. He knows she won’t believe him if he tells her he doesn’t love his wife, which isn’t true, anyway, or at least he doesn’t think it’s true. He has been to bed with a lot of different women since he met Carol, but never once has he ever stopped loving her, he supposes, although he has to admit that never once has he ever felt like this in bed with another woman. Just lying here beside Jennifer, he is beginning to get hard again. And this is without touching her again or anything, this is just remembering what happened half an hour ago, thirty-five minutes ago. He wonders if he should call her attention to the fact that he is getting hard again, give a wink in the direction of old Willie there, who has a mind of his own, and who certainly isn’t thinking about Carol in a motel someplace on I-495.

“Let me tell you something,” he says.

“Sure, tell me something,” she says.

Meaning, “But make it fast because you’re going to be out of here in ten minutes flat.”

“The minute I saw you…”

She is already rolling her eyes in disbelief.

“…I knew you were going to mean more to me than any woman I’d ever met in my life.”

Meaning what? he wonders.

She seems to be wondering the same thing. A moment ago she was turned slightly away from him, sitting there like a doubting Indian maiden with a black bush but incongruous blue eyes and blonde hair, legs crossed at the ankles, head erect and staring straight ahead, hands palm up in her lap, but now she turns her head to him and looks him directly in the eyes, wanting to know — though not asking — what he means by what he just said. Is this some bullshit line he gives to small-town girls all over the south and southwest? What exactly does he mean when he says she will mean more to him than any other woman he’s ever met, or words to that effect?

“That’s why I called you,” he says. “I couldn’t let you just walk out of my life,” he says. “I had to see you again, Jennifer. And as it turns out, I was right, wasn’t I?” he asks rhetorically. “I have never in my life felt this way with another woman.”

Meaning exactly what? her eyes are still asking.

“I mean about someone,” he says. “I’ve never felt this way about another woman,” he says. “The way I feel about you,” he says.

“And how exactly is it that you feel?” she asks.

She almost sounds prim. Almost sounds like a schoolteacher. He wonders if she’s a schoolteacher. He realizes that he knows hardly anything at all about her, and here he is telling her he’s never felt this way about another woman, whereas even he himself doesn’t know what the hell that means. But she’s waiting for an answer.

He is tempted merely to nod at old Willie down there, who is now standing erect after merely hearing Rafe’s feeble attempt at describing how he feels, present the evidence of a rock-hard cock to the court not forty minutes after he and Jennifer fucked for the second time, I mean what does that have to say about how a man feels about a woman, huh, Jennifer?

“Does anyone call you Jenny?” he asks, and places the tip of his forefinger on one rounded knee.

“No,” she says, and brushes his hand aside.

“Jenny,” he says, “I feel as if—”

“Don’t call me Jenny,” she says. “My name is Jennifer.”

“I’m sorry, Jennifer,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, and nods.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks.

“You’re the one doing the talking.”

“I’m married,” he says, “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t expect to meet you, I didn’t expect to fall in love with you, I’m sorry all to hell, but these things—”

“You what?” she says.

He blinks at her. What was it he just said?

She seems to notice his cock. At last. She glances at it slyly, but does not reach to touch it.

“Say it again,” she says.

“I’ve never felt this way before in my life,” he says.

“That’s not what you said.”

“What did I say?”

“You said you didn’t expect to fall in love with me.”

“That’s true, I didn’t.”

“Say it again.”

“I didn’t expect to fall in love with you.”

“Are you in love with me?”

“I think I’m in love with you, yes.”

“Think?” she says, and seizes his cock.

“I’m in love with you, yes,” he says.

“Say it.”

“I love you.”

“Say ‘I love you, Jennifer.’”

“I love you, Jennifer.”

“Say it again.”

“I love you, Jennifer.”

“Again.”

“I love you, Jennifer. I—”

“What about your wife?”

“Fuck her,” he says.

“Fuck me instead,” she says, and rolls onto him.

Afterward, he begins to learn a little bit about her. She’s been divorced for a year and a half, she tells him, used to be married to a lawyer who still practices in Sarasota. Was married for three years before she discovered he was playing around with this redhead in his office, another lawyer, who wore minis shorter than Ally McBeal ever did.

“Which is one of the reasons I didn’t want to start up with you,” she says.

“Because I’m a redhead?” he asks, which he isn’t. “Or because I wear minis?”

“Because you’re a married man who plays around,” she says.

“All married men play around.”

“You’d better not ever cheat on me,” she says.

“We’re not married,” he says.

“But you love me, right?” she says.

“It would appear so, yes.”

“There’s that tic again.”

“I love you, yes,” he says.

He’s beginning to believe it himself.

She tells him that she’s been working in a jewelry boutique out on Willard, which is how she happens to know Ronnie’s Lounge, but that she’s been thinking of maybe starting her own business, if she can get her wonderful ex to make his damn alimony payments when he’s supposed to…

“I’m supposed to get a thousand dollars a month, but he’s always late with his check,” she says.

“Yeah,” Rafe says.

He’s thinking the one thing he doesn’t need in his life is paying alimony to an ex-wife, no matter how much you love another woman, if in fact you do love her, now that Willie has shrunken back into his shell again. She does indeed have a splendid rack, though, and a lovely ass, and he can’t get over the blonde hair and black bush, which he still thinks is entirely trusting of her to expose herself that way. He is beginning to think he’s never been quite this intimate with another woman in his life, which is perhaps what he meant when he said he’d never felt this way about another woman, which maybe is being in love, after all. He is beginning to get a little confused.

“Did you ever go to bed with Alice?” she asks out of the blue.

This is now three o’clock in the morning. Around three in the morning, they all ask you out of the blue to start cataloging all the women you’ve ever slept with. He’s almost forgotten this about women. You have to know this about women if you ever hope to survive. He’s glad he’s remembering it now. Before it’s too late. Too late for what? he wonders. And feels confused again.

“No, hey,” he says, “what kind of a bounder do you take me for?”

“Bounder, huh?” she says, and giggles.

It pleases him that he can make a beautiful woman like this one giggle. Not that Carol isn’t beautiful. It’s just that she doesn’t giggle much, anymore. Well, two growing boys, who would giggle anymore?

“A bounder and a rounder, too,” he says, pressing his luck, and damn if she doesn’t giggle again. “But I would never hit on my own sister-in-law.”

“Then what was your truck doing parked outside her house?” she asks.

“I told you. I stopped by to see her. I do that all the time. She’s my sister-in-law!”

“Then why wouldn’t she let me in?”

“Because…”

“Because the two of you were alone in there. And if I know you…”

“No, no, we weren’t alone.”

“Then who was there?”

“The police.”

“The police? Why?”

So he has to explain that his little niece and nephew were kidnapped…

“Get out!”…and that the people who kidnapped them asked for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, which the police supplied for Alice to drop off Friday morning…

“That poor woman!” Jennifer says.

“Yeah, and she still hasn’t got the kids back,” Rafe says.

“What do you mean the police supplied it? Where’d they get that kind of money?”

So he has to explain that the Treasury Department supplied the bills for another kidnapping down here a couple of years ago, and that the bills were these counterfeits called super-bills…

“Get out!” she says again.…which are so good it’s impossible to tell them from the real thing.

“Which is what I tried to explain to these former business associates of mine,” Rafe says, “but they wouldn’t buy into it.”

“Wouldn’t buy into what?”

“Well, these people are criminals, am I right?” Rafe says. “The ones who kidnapped Alice’s kids?”

“So?”

“So what harm would it do if someone took that money from them? I mean, they’re criminals, am I right? Serve them right, am I right?”

“I’m still not following.”

“And also, the money is fake besides.”

She shakes her head, totally bewildered.

“What we’ve got,” he explains, “is a pair of chicks sitting out there on two hundred and fifty grand in fake money so good you can’t tell it from the real thing. So what if some enterprising souls relieved them of that money? It’s fake, anyway, am I right? And they’re criminals in the bargain. So where’s the harm?”

“Two chicks, huh?” Jennifer asks.

“It would appear so, yes.”

“All we have to do is find them,” she says.

“That’s all, baby,” he says.

For some reason, he’s getting hard again.

Alice’s phone rings at 8:45 A.M.

Charlie is still asleep on the living room sofa. She grabs for the receiver at once.

“Hello?”

“Alice, it’s Frank. How are you?”

Her boss at Lane Realty.

“Fine, Frank.”

“How’s your foot?”

“Okay.”

“Are you able to get around?”

“Pretty much so.”

“Do you think you’ll be coming in today?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Still in pain, are you?”

“No, Frank, it’s just… the foot’s in a cast, you know…”

“Yes, so I understand.”

“…and it’s a little clumsy driving. Maybe Aggie can handle any appointments I have for today…”

“Is that what you’d like me to do?”

“Yes, Frank.”

“Give these various listings to Aggie?”

“I’m sure she can handle them.”

“When do you think you’ll be coming back to work, Alice?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Sundays are big, too.”

“Yes, I know.”

“O-kay, Alice,” he says, and sighs heavily. “Let me know when you’re ready to come back, will you?”

“I’ll let you know, Frank.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Get better.”

And hangs up.

They know the blue Impala was followed yesterday, but they do not yet know that Avis has given up the license plate number. Even so, they are reluctant to drive the car again, or even to leave it where they’ve parked it on the mainland. They check the Yellow Pages under CAR RENTAL AGENCIES, find the nearest location for a Hertz place, and call to reserve a car for Clara Washington. It is Christine who arrives at the Henderson Grove outlet in a taxi that morning.

She shows the clerk behind the counter the same fake driver’s license, and charges the car rental to the same fake American Express card. The man from whom they purchased the credit card in New Orleans told them it was a “thirty-dayer,” his exact words, meaning it would be good for thirty days before Amex recognized it as a phony. He assured them that the driver’s license, however — which also cost them a sizable bundle — would never be challenged. Christine doesn’t know that the FBI has already flagged both the license and the credit card. But in any event, the Hertz people say nothing about her credentials, and she drives off in a sporty new red Ford Taurus.

There have been a lot of bank holdups in the state of Florida during the past year or so, and a big sign at the entrance to Southwest Federal cautions all customers to remove hats, sunglasses, or kerchiefs before approaching any of the tellers’ windows. Christine takes off her own sunglasses the moment she steps into the lobby. A uniformed guard at the door gives her the once-over, but she surmises he’s scrutinizing her boobs rather than her potential as a bank robber.

She chooses a black teller, a woman like herself. HENRIETTA LEWIS, her little name plaque announces in white letters on black. Sometimes choosing a sister backfires. You get a black with attitude, she’ll give another black more grief than any white person in the whole wide world. But this one greets Christine with a cheery smile.

Christine is carrying $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills, five of them in the bill compartment of her wallet. The cab driver who drove her to the Hertz place accepted one of those bills with a pained expression not half an hour ago, when he nonetheless made change for her. For his trouble, she gave him a big tip and a leg show as she got out of the taxi. She now removes three more of those bills from the wallet, slides them onto the marble counter, and says, “May I have these in tens and twenties, please.”

Henrietta smiles, and picks up one of the bills.

She notices at once that this is not one of the new hundreds with the oversized picture of Benjamin Franklin on it. There are still many of these old hundreds in circulation; it will in fact take years before they’re all replaced by the Federal Reserve. Henrietta checks these older bills more carefully than she does the Big Bens because she knows there are a lot of fakes out there. The American hundred-dollar bill is the most widely used piece of currency in the world, and hence the most counterfeited.

She holds it to the light to check the security strip along its edge, sees the repeated USA100USA100USA100USA100, picks up the second bill to perform the same check and then something catches her eye in the sequence of serial numbers, and she frowns slightly — which Christine catches even though it lasts for less than maybe five seconds.

“Excuse me one minute, miss, okay?” Henrietta says, and leaves the teller’s window, and goes to where a bald-headed white man wearing a blue seersucker suit is sitting behind a desk near the vault. Christine sees her handing one of the bills across the desk to him. She wonders if she should run. The white man looks over to where she’s standing. Henrietta is handing him the second bill now. Let’s get out of here, Christine thinks. Just walk slowly to the door, smile at the uniformed guard there, go out to where she’s parked the red Taurus, and split, sister!

The bald-headed manager, or whatever he is, gets up from his desk, smiles at Christine where she is still standing at the teller’s window, and goes to a paneled walnut door. He disappears from sight behind it. Henrietta walks back to the teller’s cage.

“Sorry, miss,” she says, “but Mr. Parkins has to run those bills through the machine.”

“What machine?” Christine asks.

“To verify them.”

“Oh dear,” Christine says. “Did someone pass me some fake money?”

“It happens,” Henrietta says, and smiles. “These supers are hard to recognize with the naked eye. But the machine will tell us.”

“Supers?”

“Super-bills. They’re made in Iran on intaglio presses the U.S. sold to the old shah. They print the bills on German stock. They’re really very good.”

“I see,” Christine says.

Her eyes are on that closed walnut door.

“But the Fed installed these machines in all our branches. Just like the ones they’ve got in D.C. I guess after 9/11, they’re more worried about people using fake money to do mischief.”

“I’ll bet,” Christine says.

“Did you read about all those bank accounts the terrorists had? Right here in Florida! Opened them with fake social security cards, can you imagine? You can buy all sorts of fake ID nowadays, no wonder there’s so much trouble in the world. Ah, here he comes now.”

Run, Christine thinks.

But something keeps her rooted to the spot.

The bald-headed man is smiling behind the bars of the teller’s cage.

“Miss,” he says, “I’m sorry, but these bills are counterfeit. We’ll have to confiscate them.”

“What does that mean?” Christine asks.

“By law, we’re required to send them to the Federal Reserve in Washington. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, but what do you mean, confiscate? Will I be out three hundred dollars?”

“I’m afraid so, miss. The bills are counterfeit.”

“I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine,” Christine says, and pulls a face.

“I’m sorry, miss.”

“I just don’t see why I have to suffer for somebody else passing phony bills.”

“I’m sorry, that’s the law. We can’t allow counterfeit currency to stay in circulation. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s fair,” Christine says.

Her heart is pounding in her chest.

She turns away from the teller’s cage, walks past the guard at the front door and the sign asking patrons to please not wear hats, kerchiefs, or sunglasses, puts on her sunglasses, and walks out to where she parked the Taurus.

What Henrietta and Mr. Parkins neglected to do this morning was check the Cape October police list of marked bills that was circulated to every bank and merchant in the state of Florida.

On that list were the hundred-dollar bills Christine just now tried to cash.

Luke Farraday is beginning to wonder why so many people are so suddenly interested in who picked up the Glendenning kids on Wednesday afternoon. The one here now is from the Cape October paper, on Luke’s day off, no less, and he’s given Luke some cock-and-bull story about one of the kids, he doesn’t know which one, having a party, he doesn’t know what kind of party, and wanting to put an announcement about it in the social calendar, but he needs to have a cute little story to go with it. He thinks the story about them getting picked up after school and their mother thinking they missed the bus might be just the sort of human interest thing that would tickle his paper’s readers. Then again, Garcia looks like a Cuban to Luke, and maybe Cubans have different senses of humor than Americans have.

“What kind of car was it, would you remember?” Garcia asks.

It suddenly occurs to Luke that maybe there’s a bit of change to be made here.

The job he holds at Pratt Elementary is what the Cape October Department of Education officially calls a School Loading Area Director, a Level-4 position that pays $8.50 an hour, not a hell of a lot more than he could earn at the local Mickey D’s, if they were hiring anything but teenyboppers these days. Way Luke looks at it, the entire state of Florida is run by teenagers, if not the entire United States of America. So if there’s a few extra bucks to be picked up here for providing information to a journalist, well, why not take advantage of the situation? There were women who’d been raped by Martians who sold their stories to the tabloids for thousands of dollars.

“Why’s this of such importance to you?” he asks, and Garcia immediately recognizes that he’s about to be hit up.

“Give the story some interest,” he says.

“Get your facts right, you mean.”

“Kind of car, all that.”

“How much would your newspaper pay,” Luke asks straight out, “to give the story some interest? Get the facts right?”

“Let’s say that depends on the facts.”

“How much do you usually pay for facts of this sort?”

“Twenty bucks? Thirty?”

“How about fifty?” Luke says.

“Fifty’s cool.”

“The kids were picked up by a blue Impala driven by a blonde woman,” Luke says. “Avis sticker on the right rear bumper.”

“Thanks,” Garcia says.

In Cape October, because the police force is so small, the Radio Motor Patrol officers ride one to a car. The single officer in the car usually hangs his hat on the back rest of the passenger seat, so that it looks as if there are two cops patrolling instead of just one. Everybody in town knows there’s just that one cop in the car, however, so the effect is somewhat diminished.

The RMP officer patrolling Charlie Sector of the Pecan Street Division hung his hat beside him when he started his tour of duty at 7:45 A.M. this morning, and it is still there at 9:15. Like Tom Hanks talking to the volleyball in Cast Away, Officer Searles has begun talking to his own hat of late, a good argument perhaps for putting a second officer in the cars. Searles considers this good police work, however. Talking things out loud, so to speak, checking out the scene with someone else, even if the someone else is only your own hat.

“Narrow it down to blue cars,” he tells his hat. “No sense checking the tag on a red car, for example.”

He is slowly cruising the parking lot of the Pecan Street Mall. The mall opened at nine, and there are already plenty of parked cars in the lot.

“Weekend shoppers,” he tells his hat.

He is coming around the northern end of the long mall building, making a turn past the new Barnes & Noble that just came in last week, when he spots a pale blue four-door sedan parked some four ranks back from the front doors of the store.

“Hey!” he tells his hat. “A blue one! But is it a Chevy?”

The car is a Chevy.

It is, in fact, a four-door full-size sedan that Searles identifies at once as an Impala. On the right rear bumper there is a sticker that reads WE TRY HARDER. Searles takes out his pad, studies the notes he took this morning at roll call.

“We may have just won the lottery,” he tells his hat.

He pulls up alongside the blue Impala, engages the parking brake of his own vehicle, leaves the engine idling, and gets out of the car. He bends over, takes a look through the left rear window of the Impala. Empty. He drapes a handkerchief over his right hand, tries the back door. Locked. He tries the front door on the driver’s side. It opens to his touch. He leans into the car.

There is a red baseball cap on the backseat.

Christine is afraid to go tell him what happened.

Phony bills! Super-bills! What the hell is this, some kind of science fiction? Bills printed in Iran? He’ll never believe her. He’ll think she’s trying to pull a fast one, he can be so damn suspicious sometimes.

She has stopped for breakfast in a diner on U.S. 41, not far from the bank where she tried to cash the counterfeit bills. Can you imagine them just taking the money from her like that?

We’ll have to confiscate them.

What does that mean?

By law, we’re required to send them to the Federal Reserve in Washington. I’m sorry.

Yes, but what do you mean, confiscate? Will I be out three hundred dollars?

I’m afraid so, miss. The bills are counterfeit.

I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine.

She guesses she should’ve.

Fuckin thieves.

Worse than a stickup in a dark alley.

But what was she going to tell him?

Never mind being out three hundred dollars. If the bills are phony — well, they have to be phony, the bank has a damn machine! So, yes, let’s say the bills are very definitely phony. Which means they are out not three hundred dollars but two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which further means the whole damn scheme has gone up the chimney. Unless he can come up with another idea, he’s never been short of ideas, it was his idea to do this thing in the first place.

She is afraid to go tell him.

“More coffee, miss?”

The waitress.

“No, thanks,” she says. “Just a check, please.”

What do we do now? she wonders.

Here we are with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in perfectly fine-looking fake money we can wipe our asses with, and we’ve got two kids on our hands we won’t know what to do with now that—

“Here you go, miss.”

“Thank you,” she says, and takes the check, studies it. Six dollars and twenty cents for an orange juice, a cup of coffee, and a toasted English. At least on the Cape, they didn’t get you by the food. All they did was get you by the bills.

Smiling in spite of herself, she leaves a dollar tip on the table, and then walks to the cash register. She has a ten-dollar bill in her wallet, and she can just as easily pay for her breakfast with that. But suddenly…

I guess I should’ve cashed them someplace that doesn’t have a machine.

…the thought comes to her.

She opens her wallet and takes out another of the hundred-dollar bills.

“I’m sorry,” she tells the cashier. “I don’t have anything smaller.”

The cashier looks at the bill, snaps it sharply between both hands, the bill making a crisp little cracking sound, holds it up to the light to check the security strip, and then rings open her register and begins counting out change…

“Twenty-five, fifty, seven dollars,” she says, placing the coins on the countertop. And then three singles, “Eight, nine, ten.”

Watching her counting out more bills now.

“Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred. Thank you, miss, have a nice day.”

Christine picks up the cash.

“You, too,” she says, and walks out of the restaurant and across the parking lot to where she left the red Taurus.

“Are you okay?” Charlie asks.

Alice looks at him across the breakfast table. It occurs to her that she has not sat at this table with anyone but her kids since Eddie’s death.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m okay, Charlie.”

“We’ll get them back, don’t worry,” he says.

There is something confident and comforting about his manner. It reminds her of Eddie’s self-assurance when first they met. But Eddie was very young then, and Charlie, of course, is fifty-six, though there is about him the vigor of a much younger man. She finds this strength reassuring, and realizes all at once that if she were facing a dozen hungry lions, she would rather have Charlie at her side than a hundred Wilbur Sloates.

“Something?” he says, and smiles.

“No,” she says, and returns the smile. “Nothing, Charlie.”

He hears a sound outside, and turns toward the living room windows. A car is pulling into the driveway. Alice has begun dreading the appearance of anyone here at the house. Every new appearance seems to bring her children closer to greater peril. A car door slams. A moment later, the front doorbell rings.

“Want me to get it?” Charlie asks.

But she is already on her way. She looks through the peephole, and then immediately unlocks the door and throws her arms open wide. The sisters embrace. Carol looks up into her face.

“Hey, honey,” she says.

“Hey,” Alice says.

She leads Carol in, locks the door behind them. Charlie is standing now, a napkin in one hand.

“Charlie,” she says, “this is my sister, Carol.”

“Never would’ve guessed,” Charlie says, and extends his free hand. “Damn if you don’t look like twins.”

“I’m a year older,” Carol says.

“Have you had breakfast, hon?”

“Could eat a bear.”

Alice goes to the stove, pours a cup of coffee for her sister, carries it to the table. She realizes she is smiling. For the first time since Wednesday afternoon, she is smiling. She cuts a few slices of rye bread, pops them into the microwave. Charlie is asking Carol how the trip down was. She’s telling him there was a lot of traffic, but it was moving fast. Alice carries the bread, a slab of butter, and a jar of raspberry jam to the table. Carol digs in.

“So what’s happening here?” she asks.

Alice suddenly hugs her close.

“Hey, what?” Carol asks. “What?”

Christine figures one of the malls is the best place to go. No need to go driving all over town, all the shops are in one location here. In a Barnes & Noble, she buys the two latest Nora Roberts novels, and pays for them with one of the hundred-dollar bills. The man behind the counter doesn’t even bother to check the bill’s security strip. He makes change for her, smiles, and looks up at the next customer in line.

At a Victoria’s Secret, she buys two Balconette push-up bras at $19.99 each, one in the black hydrangea, the other in the cheetah print, and a pair of low-rise thongs, both in the leopard print at $5.99 each, and a black lace garter belt at $7.99, for a total of $59.95 before tax. She hands the salesperson a hundred-dollar bill and then wanders over to look at the sleepwear collection, choosing a red sequin-lace baby-doll nightgown and carrying it back to the cash register.

“Can you add this to the bill?” she asks, and the salesperson smiles and says, “Of course, miss,” adding $29 to the earlier total, for a grand total of $88.95, plus tax, and then counts out the change without a whimper.

Christine wonders if it’s time to press her luck.

Dustin Garcia is not a crime reporter as such, and he is not familiar with any of the cops downtown at the Public Safety Building. When he stops at the reception desk in the main lobby, he merely asks for the detective who’s handling the Glendenning kidnapping, and waits while the uniformed officer behind the desk plugs into one of the extensions.

“Anyone up there handling a kidnapping?” the officer asks into the phone. He listens, looks across the desk at Garcia. “Who’d you say?” he asks.

“Glendenning. Alice Glendenning.”

“I mean you,” the officer says. “Who’re you?”

“Dustin Garcia, Cape October Trib.”

“Dustin Garcia,” the officer says into the phone. “October Trib.” He listens again. “Third floor,” he says, “Detective Sloate.”

Just as Christine steps off the escalator on the second floor of the mall, she finds an electronics store selling Sony, Hitachi, Samsung, and Philips television sets. She does not know how far she should go here, how much she should risk to test her theory. The salesman is a guy in his sixties, she guesses, another one of the bored retirees down here. He tries at first to sell her a Philips 34-inch digital wide-screen, which, at $2,800, happens to be the most expensive set in the store. She is reluctant to go that high, not because she doesn’t have that kind of money — she is still carrying almost five thou in hundreds in her bag — but only because she doesn’t want any eyebrows raised.

The salesman figures she’s a deadbeat, maybe because she’s black, maybe because she’s relatively young, who the hell knows or cares? He immediately switches to pitching the cheapest set he has in the store, a Samsung 27-inch that goes for $300.

“If you don’t need top-shelf features like a flat screen or picturein-picture,” he says, “this little beauty’ll give you good picture quality. And it has an excellent remote control, and V-chip parental control, do you have any children?”

Two, she almost says. Temporarily.

“I had something a bit more upscale in mind,” she says.

“Then how about this?” he asks, brightening, and shows her a 32-inch Sony Trinitron Wega that he says is on sale for a mere $1,800.

“This model earned more votes than any other HD-ready model,” he tells her. “It can auto-switch to enhanced mode when it detects wide-screen sources, and the pull-down circuitry improves the picture quality of film-based material.”

“I’ll take it,” Christine says.

“It also comes in a thirty-six-inch version, on sale for $2,300,” the salesman says.

“No, I’ll take the thirty-two-inch,” Christine says.

She digs into her handbag.

She guesses he thinks she’s searching for a checkbook or a credit card. Instead, she comes up with a wad of hundred-dollar bills, and begins counting out $1,900.

“Will that be enough to cover the tax?” she asks.

“Florida sales tax is six percent,” he says. “That comes to a hundred and eight dollars. I’d need another eight dollars from you.”

She fishes a five and three singles from her wallet.

“I’ll write this up and be back in a minute,” he says, and walks to a door on the far wall, and enters what she assumes is someone’s office, possibly a manager’s. She waits with her heart in her throat. Are they checking the bills on a machine similar to the one the bank had? Will they discover the bills are counterfeit? Are they on the phone to the police this very moment?

She waits.

At last, the door opens, and the salesman comes out smiling.

“Here’s your receipt,” he says. “Someone’s bringing a fresh set down now. Will you need help carrying it out to your car?”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Garcia?” Sloate asks.

They are in his third-floor office.

A red baseball cap sits on his desktop.

“Are you the man handling the kidnapping?” Garcia asks.

“What kidnapping is that?” Sloate asks.

Garcia knows at once that he is lying. Anglos lie to him a lot. That’s because he looks like a Cuban. He has a dark complexion and straight black hair and the rednecks down here think of him as a Cuban-American even though he was born in this country, in this state, in fact. Which in his view makes him an American, right? An American who votes here, by the way, but not for Mr. Bush, thank you, and fuck little Elian Gonzalez, too. It’s Garcia’s parents who are so-called Cuban-Americans, which means they immigrated here from Cuba and became American citizens who also voted, but their votes for Bush outnumbered his vote for Gore by two to one, and besides the Supreme Court had the final say.

Sloate is lying to him, he knows that.

“The Glendenning children,” he says. “The little boy and girl who were snatched from school on Wednesday.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that case,” Sloate says.

“Then why’d you tell downstairs to send me up?”

“Courtesy to the press,” Sloate says, and shrugs.

“Why are you stonewalling this?” Garcia asks.

“Mr. Garcia, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t heard of any kidnapping here on the Cape for the past three years. If you think you have information…”

“The Glendenning kids have been out of school for the past two days.”

“Maybe they’re home sick.”

“No, I went there, they’re not home sick. The mother refused to let me in. If they were there, she’d’ve let me talk to them. They’ve been kidnapped, Detective Sloate. You know damn well they’ve been kidnapped.”

“Sorry,” Sloate says.

“Here’s what the Trib’s gonna do,” Garcia says. “We’re gonna run a big picture of Mrs. Rose Garrity on our front page tomorrow morning. She’s the woman who called in to say the Glendenning kids are missing and nobody’s doing anything about it. We’re gonna run her picture big as life, and we’re gonna tell her story. And when we turn inside to page three, we’re gonna see a big picture of the school guard who witnessed those two kids getting into a blue Impala driven by a blonde woman who definitely ain’t Mrs. Edward Glendenning, who isn’t blonde and who doesn’t drive a blue Impala. We’re gonna tell his story, too, his name is Luke Farraday, and we’re gonna tell the people that the police in this town aren’t doing a damn thing to get those two kids back! How does that sound to you, Detective Sloate?”

“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.

But along came Eddie, so what was a girl to do?

His own plan was to earn his master’s in business that June (which he did) and then get a job with a Wall Street brokerage firm (which he also did that August, to start in September) and then sit back and watch the big bucks roll in (which he never did manage to do, but he was still young, and that was the plan). He didn’t reveal the rest of his plan to her until Halloween night of that magical autumn thirteen years ago.

She was dressed as Cinderella.

Eddie was dressed as Dracula.

An odd couple, to be sure, but the pairing was granted some measure of legitimacy by the fact the Eddie was carrying one midnight blue satin slipper in the pocket of the frock coat under his long black cape, and Alice was limping along on one shod foot, the other clad in a skimpy Ped.

“The limp adds vulnerability to your undeniable beauty,” Eddie told her.

She was, in fact, feeling quite beautiful that night, all dolled up in a sapphire blue gown she’d rented for a mere pittance at a costume shop on Greenwich Avenue, masses of pitch black hair piled on top of her head, faux diamond earrings (they came with the gown) dangling from her ears, a faux diamond necklace (also courtesy of Village Costumes, Inc.) around her neck, a lacey low-cut bodice to surpass that of the heroine on the cover of any Silhouette romance — but hey, she was Cinderella, the romance heroine of all time!

And Eddie was as sinister a vampire count as anyone might have conjured in his wildest nightmares. Alice had never seen a Dracula with a mustache and a pointed little beard, but Eddie was wearing those tonight, together with greenish makeup around his startling blue eyes, creating a sort of hungry look — hell, a famished look — that promised an imminent bite on the neck from those prosthetic fangs he was also wearing.

“Are you supposed to be Lucy?” their host asked them. “Or was that her name?”

“Beats me,” Alice said. “I’m Cinderella.”

“What’s Cinderella doing with Dracula?”

“We’re in love,” Eddie said.

“Ah,” their host said.

“See? I have her slipper,” he explained.

“Ah,” their host said again.

His name was Don Something-or-Other, and he was an NYU student taking classes in Method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute on East Fifteenth Street. Don himself lived on Horatio Street near Eighth Avenue, in a loft that was probably costing his parents a bundle, and which tonight was filled with a variety of Trekkies, monsters, clowns, superheroes, hookers, ghosts, witches and warlocks, pirates both male (with mustaches and eye patches) and female (in ragged shorts and soft boots), angels, devils and demons, and one girl dressed as a dominatrix (but this was, after all, Greenwich Village). Since this was thirteen years ago, and the first President Bush had recently sent ground forces to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the first of the Bush Dynasty’s Persian Gulf Wars, there were also two men wearing Bush masks.

The dominatrix, who said her name was Mistress Veronique, made a pass at Eddie, and Alice whispered in his ear, “I’ll break your head!” which seemed to dampen any interest he might have had in whips or leather face masks. He asked Alice what she wanted to drink, and then he made his way to the bar, where a girl who identified herself as a Barbie doll made yet another pass at him. (Apparently there were many would-be vampire victims on the loose tonight, longing for the count to draw first blood.) Eddie made his way back to Alice, cradling a pair of dark-looking drinks in his hands. He made a toast to “All Hallows Eve and beyond” (significant pause), and then led her through the crowd to a pair of French doors opening onto a small balcony overlooking a postage-stamp garden below.

The night was mild for the end of October.

Back in Peekskill, she’d be shivering. But here in New York, on a balcony well-suited to a scullery maid soon to become a princess, or at least already a princess until the horses turned back to mice at midnight, Alice stood looking out over this dazzling city, her one unshod foot somewhat chilled, but otherwise toasty warm in the cape Count Dracula wrapped around her, the better to bite you on the jugular, m’proud beauty!

Eddie took the midnight blue slipper from the pocket of his frock coat.

He knelt before her.

“May I?” he asked.

And tried the slipper on her shoeless right foot.

And, of course, it fit.

“Will you marry me?” he whispered.

The words took her quite by surprise.

They’d been living together since September, when Eddie started work at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich. This was, after all, thirteen years ago, and the entire civilized world east of the Mississippi had already been sexually liberated. But marriage had never come up as a viable option. Not before now, anyway. How could a married woman go trotting off to Brazil lugging cameras and running out for coffee while some would-be eminent director filmed piranhas in the Amazon?

She was speechless.

Eddie was still kneeling.

His hand was still resting on her now-slippered foot.

His wonderful blue eyes were asking, “Well?”

“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.

They were married shortly before Christmas.

She didn’t want to get pregnant, either.

That wasn’t part of her revised plan.

She had already begun implementing this modified plan by getting a part-time job editing film for an indie who was making a movie titled The Changing Face of the Lower East Side. Her idea was to find a series of similar temporary jobs in various aspects of film-related work until she could find full-time employment as a production assistant in a New York — based company.

What she wanted to do, you see, was produce films. She wasn’t interested in cinematography or screenwriting or directing or, God forbid, acting. What she wanted to do was create, for all these other people, an environment in which they might make good movies. Movies that won all the prizes. She felt this was an ambition compatible with a good marriage. Eddie was beginning to find his way downtown on Wall Street; she was beginning to find her way in the film industry. Pregnancy was not part of the scheme.

Encouraged by her sister, Carol, who’d been married for two years already and had been successful in avoiding any unwanted pregnancies, Alice consulted her gynecologist about acquiring the same sort of diaphragm Carol had been using so effectively. She was told by Dr. Havram — a woman whose first name was Shirley — that the diaphragm was a flexible rubber cap that a woman filled with a spermicide prior to intercourse and before inserting it.

This, Alice already knew, duh.

She learned, however, that there were some slight, ahem, disadvantages.

To begin with, using it increased the chances of bladder infections. Whee, just what Alice needed, a bladder infection! Next, the cream or jelly spermicide might have an unpleasant taste, not very appealing to Count Dracula, eh, kiddo? Moreover, it might “interrupt the effortless flow of foreplay,” as Dr. Havram put it, and added, “Although you can teach your husband to insert it as part of the foreplay.”

Not to mention the fact that it was less effective than the condom either as a birth-control device or as protection against STDs. Although Alice knew what an STD was, Dr. Havram informed her anyway that the letters were an acronym for “sexually transmitted diseases” such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydial infection, or herpes, none of which Alice had ever had or ever wished to have.

“Also,” Dr. Havram said, “as a contraceptive, the failure rate of the diaphragm is about eighteen percent annually. In fact, it’s most effective with older married women who experience intercourse less than three times a week.”

(“That’s nonsense,” Carol later told her on the phone. “Whenever Rafe’s home, we go at it hot and heavy almost every night of the week, and you don’t see any little creatures running around here yet, do you?”)

So Alice had herself fitted for a diaphragm.

Dr. Havram confirmed that there was no pelvic infection. Alice emptied her bowel and bladder prior to the fitting. Dr. Havram checked to see that the anterior rim of the diaphragm was just under the symphysis pubis, the posterior rim lying at the vaginal formix, the diaphragm touching both lateral walls and covering the cervix and the upper vagina. She made sure that she could feel the cervix through the diaphragm. She asked Alice if she was aware of anything inside the vagina, and was pleased when Alice answered in the negative.

The diaphragm worked in spite of the Glendennings’ heavy sexual activity, which seemed to negate Dr. Havram’s dire statistical warnings.

But then one night in April…

Eighteen months after she’d inserted for the first time the rubber cap filled with spermicidal jelly…

In fact the very night Braveheart took the Academy Award for best picture …

In the privacy of her own midnight bathroom…

Alice tore open the sealed Instastrip Onestep HCG Pregnancy Test kit and removed from it the test strip. With the arrow end pointing downward into a cup of her urine, and being careful not to dip the strip past the MAX line, she left it immersed for the required three seconds, and then removed it from the urine and placed it flat on the countertop. Scarcely daring to breathe, she watched the strip as avidly as she’d watched Mira Sorvino making her poised and articulate acceptance speech for best supporting actress. If only one band appeared in the control region, and no apparent band appeared in the test region of the strip, then no pregnancy would have been detected.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

In less than a minute, colored bands began to appear in the test region. This meant that a developing placenta was secreting the glycoprotein hormone known as human chorionic gonadotropin, or HCG. Which meant that Alice was pregnant.

She could not believe it.

She had religiously inserted the diaphragm two to twelve hours prior to intercourse each and every time. She had made certain it remained in place for at least six hours after sex. She had never left it in place for longer than twenty-four hours. She had washed it carefully with warm soapy water and stored it in a clean dry place. And now this?

Pregnant?

She absolutely could not believe it.

Ashley was born nine months later.

The Okeh Diner is in a row of stores in a strip mall on the west side of the Trail. The mall itself attempts to emulate Old Florida, and almost succeeds in doing that. Turreted and balconied, shuttered and terraced, the pink-stuccoed and orange-tiled shops partially re-create an aura of graciousness, reminiscent of what Cape October must have been like in the 1920s. Flanking the diner’s entrance, a potted umbrella tree stands opposite a dragon tree and a corn plant, all arranged around a sidewalk flower cart massed with purple, white, and pink gloxinias, mums in yellow and lavender, spinning wheels with bright yellow centers and white petals. There are two cars parked in front of the diner. One of them is a white Caddy. Alice wonders why she thinks it belongs to Rudy Angelet.

He is sitting in a booth at the rear of the place, facing the entrance door. He rises the moment he sees her come in. She considers this an ominous sign: he knows what she looks like. Which means he’s been watching her. She walks toward the booth.

“Mrs. Glendenning?” he asks.

The same nicotine-ravaged voice she heard on the telephone.

“Mr. Angelet?” she says.

“Please,” he says, and opens his hand, using the palm to invite her into the booth beside him. Another man is sitting on the other side of the booth. He is a black man with a sceloid scar running the length of his jawline on the left side of his face.

“My partner,” Angelet says. “David Holmes.”

“No relation to Sherlock,” Holmes says, and shows white teeth and pink gums in a wide grin. “Sit down, Mrs. Glendenning.” It is more a command than an invitation. She sits alongside Angelet and opposite Holmes.

“What happened to your foot?” Angelet asks.

“I hurt myself.”

“How?”

“I got run over.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Is it broken?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a shame,” he says. “Cup of coffee? Something to eat?”

“Just coffee,” she says. “Thanks.”

Angelet signals to a waitress wearing a pink uniform.

“Another cup of coffee, honey,” he tells her.

The waitress smiles and goes off again. She is back with Alice’s coffee not three minutes later. She smiles again at Angelet. It occurs to Alice that she is flirting with him. He is not a bad-looking man. In his late thirties, early forties, Alice supposes, with dark brown eyes and a pale complexion for a Floridian — if indeed he’s from Florida. His voice on the phone sounded more like Brooklyn than Cape October. Alice suddenly wonders if he knew Eddie while they were still living in New York. On the phone, he said, “I’m an old friend of your late husband.” How old? she now wonders.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Angelet says.

“This is a serious matter here,” Holmes says. “Your husband owed us two hundred thousand dollars when he met with his unfortunate accident. He still owes us that money.”

“Which is a lot of money,” Angelet says.

“A whole fucking lot of money,” Holmes says.

“I can’t imagine my husband owing—”

“Imagine it, lady,” Holmes says.

“How… how could he possibly…?”

“The puppies, lady,” Holmes says.

“The what?”

“The hounds.”

“I don’t know what—”

“The dog races. Your husband liked to bet.”

“He liked to bet big.”

“Too big.”

“Losers shouldn’t bet so big.”

“He was into us for two hundred large when he drowned,” Holmes says.

“Drowned too soon,” Angelet says.

“Too fucking soon,” Holmes says, and both men laugh.

Alice gets up to leave.

“Sit!” Holmes says, as if he is talking to a disobedient dog. “And don’t get up again.”

Alice sits. She looks across the table at him.

“I don’t believe a word you’re saying,” she says. “I don’t believe you knew my husband, I don’t believe he owes you money, I don’t believe—”

“Want to see his markers?” Holmes asks.

“Markers?”

“Show her the markers, Rudy.”

“What…?”

“His betting slips,” Holmes says.

Angelet reaches into the inside pocket of his sports coat. When his hand emerges again, it is holding a sheaf of three-by-four white papers, some two inches thick.

“They’re all dated,” he says. “They go back a year and a half. That’s when he started betting with us. We were carrying him a long, long time.”

“We since found out he stiffed half a dozen other bankers in town.”

“We shoulda been more careful,” Angelet says.

“You’ll probably be getting a few more calls,” Holmes says.

“Once word gets around there was insurance.”

“What do you mean? How do you know…?”

“A check went out from Garland last week. Seems your lawyer threatened them with a lawsuit…”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s true, ain’t it?”

“How do you—?”

“I’ll tell you how we know,” Angelet says. “One of the people who bets with us happens to work for Garland, and he also happens to owe us a little money. So when we mentioned to him one day that this fucking deadbeat Eddie Glen—”

“Don’t you dare—!”

“Stay put, lady, I warned you!” Holmes says, and pulls her down into the booth again.

“When we mentioned to this man, whose name is Joseph Ontano, if you’d care to check, that your husband owed us two hundred large, but he was already dead and we weren’t about to let some little pissant like Mr. Ontano stiff us for a mere five, he said the name rang a bell, and he looked up the file when he got back to the office, and sure enough a check went out.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“Lady…”

“I haven’t received any check.”

“You will.”

“I hope so. I can use it just now.”

“So can we. When that check arrives, we want two hundred of it.” “Before the other sharks start circling.”

“We’ll call you tomorrow,” Angelet says. “And we’ll keep calling you every day until that insurance check is in your hands. Then we—”

“I don’t know when a check is coming. I don’t even—”

“Whenever it—”

“I don’t even know if one is coming. I haven’t heard they’re paying. Your Mr. Ontano must be mistaken. When did he say this check went out?”

“Lady,” Holmes says, “whenever that fucking check gets to you, we want our piece of it. Or we’ll break your other foot, you know whut I’m saying?”

“You don’t frighten me,” she says.

“How about your kids? Do they frighten you?” Angelet asks.

“Are you in this with the others?” she asks.

Their faces go blank.

“What others?” Holmes asks.

“To each his own,” Angelet says, thinking he understands.

“Let them collect their own fuckin markers,” Holmes says, picking up on it.

They have no idea what she’s talking about. With an enormous sense of relief, she realizes they have nothing whatever to do with the kidnapping, Eddie’s gambling was not responsible for—

“We’ll call you this afternoon,” Angelet says. “After the mail comes.”

“Keep an eye on the mailbox,” Holmes says.

Both men rise in the same moment, as if by prearranged signal. Alice sits alone in the booth, watching them as they go. The waitress in the pink uniform walks over.

“Who’s getting this check?” she asks.

Outside, Alice hears an automobile starting. She looks through the blinds on the diner window. The white Caddy is moving out of the parking lot.

Too late, she thinks of writing down the license plate number.

The car is gone.

She calls her lawyer at home from the cell phone in her car.

“Andy,” she says, “hi. It’s Alice Glendenning, can you hear me?”

“Hello, Alice, how are you?” he asks.

“I’m fine. If we get cut off, I’ll call you back. I’m in the car.”

“What’s up?”

“Have you heard anything more from Garland?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Because some people seem to think a check to me has already been cut.”

“Really?”

“So they say.”

“What people?”

“Some people who knew Eddie.”

“I haven’t heard anything to that effect. You’d be the first to know, Alice.”

“I know that. But they seemed so positive…”

“I can call Garland again, if you like.”

“Could you, Andy? It’d be nice to know if a check is really on the way.”

“I’ll do that right now. Are you on the way home?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’ll call you there. Say half an hour or so?”

“Thanks, Andy.”

When she hangs up, she realizes she’s forgotten to give him Joseph Ontano’s name.

She tries to call him back, but she can’t get a signal.

I’m in a dead zone, she thinks.

Again, she thinks.

Ashley was five months old when the call came from Alice’s best friend in film school. Denise Schwartz had set up a low-budget production deal with an independent producer named Backyard Films, who were ready to finance a script Denise herself had written and planned to direct — and would Alice care to come in as her partner?

What?

What!

Her heart stopped.

Denise elaborated. The budget was only $850,000, which meant they would both have to wear many hats. Denise would be director and executive producer. Alice would work the camera and serve as line producer…

“You were so good with the camera, Alice, please say yes.”

“Well, I…”

She could barely speak.

“Where will you be shooting?” she asked.

“Toronto,” Denise said. “For New York.”

“How long is the shooting schedule?”

“I haven’t worked it out yet, but I’m assuming six, seven weeks — seven weeks tops. Neither of us will be drawing salaries, Alice, but we’ll share in the profits, if there are any. And if we bring this one in on budget, and win a few prizes…”

“Oh sure, prizes.”

Her heart was racing.

“Why not?” Denise said. “What I’m saying is it’s a start, there’ll be other ones in the future. Alice. Please.”

“I’ll have to talk to Eddie,” she said. “I’ll get back to you.”

Eddie didn’t think it was such a good idea.

Things weren’t going too well at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich; he wasn’t becoming a millionaire quickly enough. In fact, he wasn’t making anywhere near the kind of commissions he thought he should be making by this time.

“So how can we afford your being away for two, three months, whatever it is…?”

“Seven weeks tops,” Alice said.

“Seven weeks, okay, even so. We’d have to get a nanny for Ashley, where are we supposed to get the money for a nanny? Line producer and cinematographer are very nice titles, Alice, but you said yourself there wouldn’t be any salary while you’re…”

“If the film shows a profit…”

“Oh sure, how many of these indie films make any money?”

“It’s what I trained for, Eddie!”

“I know. I’m not saying don’t put your training and your expertise to use, Alice, I’m only saying don’t do it right this minute. Do it sometime in the future. This just isn’t the appropriate time for you to be running off to Canada.”

“But the opportunity is here now, Eddie. Not sometime in the future. And why isn’t this an appropriate…?”

“Because I’m thinking of leaving the firm.”

“What? Why would you want to do that?”

“Because the bonanza boat at Lowell-Hastings has already sailed, Alice. Which doesn’t mean I can’t make it somewhere else in the world of high finance. I was thinking…”

“Somewhere else? Where, Eddie, New York is our…”

“Why can’t we move to a small town on the West Coast? Or maybe somewhere in the Southwest? Or even the South? Maybe Beaufort, South Caro…”

“Beau…”

“…which I hear is a lovely place to live. Plenty of opportunities elsewhere, Alice. Maybe Florida. Why not Florida? Nice and warm in Florida. But I don’t think you should go to Canada just now, honey. Not at this juncture of my career.”

Your career? Alice thought.

What about my career?

What about the juncture of my career that was put on hold when Ashley was born five months ago, what about that little career, Count Dracula?

That night, she called Denise and told her she was really sorry, but she couldn’t go in with her at this time.

“Thanks, Denise,” she said. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“That’s okay,” Denise said. “Another time. “I love you, hon.”

“I love you, too. Good luck with it.”

“I’m gonna need it,” Denise said.

The pill Alice’s new gynecologist prescribed was “The Pill,” a combination of the synthetic female hormones progestin and estrogen, as differentiated from “The Mini-Pill,” which contained only the one hormone, progestin. Dr. Abigail Franks recommended the combination pill because it was supposed to be 99 percent effective as opposed to the 97 percent effectiveness of the progestin-only pill. This meant that if a hundred women took the so-called combination-pill every day of the year, only one of them would become pregnant.

Alice took the pill every day at the same time, right after she brushed her teeth and just before she went to bed, because it was easier to remember taking it that way. She gained a little weight at first, and she experienced some spotting, but these side effects went away after her first three or four menstrual cycles, and after that the daily routine became as fixed as bathing Ashley in the morning or kissing Eddie goodbye before he went off to work.

And then one day, she missed her period again.

She didn’t think this was possible. She hadn’t skipped a day of taking the pill, so how was this possible? Besides, ever since she’d started taking the pill her periods were always very light, sometimes nothing more than a brown smudge on a tampon or in her panties. So she knew that if she hadn’t missed any pills — which she was certain she hadn’t — then even these light periods counted as menstruation. That was because the hormone doses in the pills were so very low that not much uterus lining built up, and very little blood needed to come out each month.

But this particular month, there was no blood at all.

Nada, zero, zilch.

So Alice went to the nearest CVS pharmacy and bought herself a trusty old reliable Instastrip Onestep HCG Pregnancy Test. And guess what? All the colors of the goddamn rainbow showed up after she dipped the test strip in a little cup of her pee.

Just her luck, Alice turned out to be the one woman in a hundred who got pregnant taking the pill that year!

Jamie was born in the month of October, a year and five months after his sister came into the world. That same month, Denise’s film Summer of Joy won the $100,000 Leone dell’Anno Prize at the Venice Film Festival. When she called Alice to ask if she would join her on her new venture, Alice regretfully had to decline again, she was so very sorry.

“That’s okay,” Denise said. “Another time. I love you, hon.”

Just before Thanksgiving that year, the family moved to Cape October, where Eddie began his new job with the investment firm of Baxter and Meuhl.

At the time of his drowning last year, Eddie still hadn’t made his first million dollars. In fact, they were still paying off a $150,000 mortgage on the house, and making monthly payments on the Jamash, and the two cars, and what suddenly seemed like far too many other things.

Long before then, Alice had given up her girlish dream of making movies that would win all the prizes.

When she gets back to the house, a faded maroon Buick is parked in the driveway behind her sister’s black Explorer. The police, she thinks. A maroon Buick. Gee, fellas, what took you so long?

“I had to let them in,” her sister explains. “They have badges.”

“Sorry to bother you again,” Sloate says.

He is here with Marcia Di Luca, who has already made herself at home behind the monitoring equipment, sipping a cup of coffee Alice assumes her sister prepared.

“Long time no see,” Alice says.

She cannot quite hide the enmity she feels for these people.

“Let me fill you in,” he says. “To begin with—”

“To begin with,” Alice says, “they know you followed them.”

“How do you—?”

“The woman called me,” Alice says. “They know a maroon Buick followed them. Is that the car outside?”

Sloate makes a sort of helpless gesture.

“Even so,” he says, “the bills are marked. We feel certain someone will spot the serial numbers and call us.”

He now explains that genuine hundred-dollar bills are printed in so-called families, with serial numbers starting with different letters of the alphabet, but that the super-bills supplied for the ransom drop are all A-series bills, and they all bear the identical serial number, which happens to be A-358127756.

“Once the perps try to cash any of those bills,” he says, “someone will spot that number.”

“How is anyone going to…?”

“We sent out a list to every merchant and bank in the state,” Sloate explains, almost apologetically.

“Nobody looks at serial numbers.”

“We’re hoping they will.”

Alice shakes her head. She is at the mercy of nitwits. She is in the hands of total incompetents.

“What else did she say?” Sloate asks. “When she called?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Please, Mrs. Glendenning.”

“She said they had to check the money.”

“And?”

“She said the kids were okay. She said they just needed a little time.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t inadvertently say anything about where they might be holding the children, did she?”

“Nothing,” Alice says again.

“Well,” Sloate says, and sighs heavily, which Alice finds somewhat less than reassuring. “Let’s get ready for her next call.”

This time, a so-called plan is in place.

This time, Alice knows exactly what she is to say to the black woman when she calls. If she calls. Alice is not at all sure she will call. How long does it take to “check” $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills? Whatever that’s supposed to mean, “check” them. Count them?

Well, you can count twenty-five hundred bills, that’s what they came to, in ten, fifteen minutes, can’t you? Half an hour? An hour tops? So what’s taking them so long? Have they discovered the bills are fake? Will they kill the children because the bills are fake? If anything happens to the children…

“Nothing will happen to them,” Sloate assures her. “Please, Mrs. Glendenning, don’t worry.”

But Alice can’t stop worrying. She still believes these people are more interested in catching whoever’s holding Jamie and…

Well, that isn’t quite true.

Certainly, they want to get the kids back safe and sound. But in addition to a rescue operation — and she has to think of it as that — they also want to capture the “perps,” as Sloate keeps calling them, and this is the farthest wish from Alice’s mind. She does not give a damn who has the children, does not give a damn if they’re ever caught. She wants her kids back. Period.

Apparently, they have located the blue Impala.

“Our techs are going over the car right this minute,” Sloate tells her. “If we get some good latents, we’re halfway home.” He hesitates and then says, “There was a red cap on the backseat of the car.”

He shows her the cap now. It is in a sealed plastic bag with an evidence tag on it. It is indisputably the cap Jamie left at home Wednesday morning, the one she took to him later. His lucky hat. Which means he was in that blue Impala sometime during the past three days.

“What we can’t understand,” Sloate says, “is why the kids would’ve got in a car with a strange woman.”

Alice is thinking there are a lot of things Sloate can’t understand. She looks at the clock. It is now a quarter to one, and still no call. If they abandoned the car, have they abandoned the children as well? Are Jamie and Ashley now sitting alone in some apartment or some house waiting for…?

Or…

God forbid…

No!

She won’t even think that.

The telephone rings.

Her heart leaps into her throat.

“Pick it up,” Sloate says. “Remember what we said.”

Marcia Di Luca is putting on her earphones.

Alice lifts the receiver.

“Hello?” she says.

“Alice?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Rafe. How’s it going there?”

“Where are you?”

“On the road. Just thought I’d—”

“Carol’s here, did you know that?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m calling.”

“Hold on. Carol?” she says. “It’s Rafe.”

“Rafe?” Carol says, surprised, and takes the receiver from her sister. “Hi, honey,” she says into the phone. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, fine. I’m just calling to see how you are. I called home last night, found out you were heading down.”

“I figured Alice could use a hand.”

“Bet she can,” Rafe says. “Fact, I was thinking of stopping by there again myself. You think that’s a good idea?”

Carol covers the mouthpiece.

“He wants to come by,” she tells Alice.

“Where is he?”

“Where are you, hon?”

“Just over the state line. In Alabama.”

“Alabama,” Carol tells her sister.

“Who’s that?” Sloate asks.

“My husband.”

“Tell him to save it for another time,” Sloate says. “We’re busy here.”

“Rafe, it’s not a good time just now,” Carol says.

“Whatever you say. Give her a hug for me, okay? Tell her I hope this all works out.” He hesitates a moment. “Has she heard anything more from them?”

“No, not yet. Rafe, I have to get off the phone. We’re hoping—”

“Wish you’da told me you were coming down to Florida.”

“Wish I’da known where to reach you,” Carol says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No, Carol, what’s it supposed to mean?”

“Rafe, I have to go now,” she says.

“We’ll talk about this when we get home.”

“Yes, good-bye, Rafe,” she says, and hangs up.

“Everything all right?” Alice asks.

“Yes, fine,” Carol says.

But Alice knows it isn’t.

The clock bongs one o’clock.

And they still haven’t called.

She doesn’t want to hear her sister’s troubles.

She wants the phone to ring, that’s all.

But they are in the kitchen now, brewing a fresh pot of coffee, and Carol takes this opportunity to unburden herself. The door is closed; all those law enforcement geniuses out there can’t hear what they’re saying.

“I think Rafe’s running around on me,” Carol says, flat out.

Alice remembers Rafe’s comment about Jennifer Redding after she drove off in her red convertible. She says nothing.

“I’ve had the feeling for a long time now.”

Alice still says nothing.

“He’s gone so much of the time, you know,” Carol says.

“Well, that doesn’t means he’s—”

“Oh, I know, I know. It’s his job, after all…”

“It is, Carol.”

“But he never calls when he’s on the road.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, either.”

“This is unusual, his calling now.”

“Well, if you think… why don’t you just ask him about it?”

“No, I…”

“Ask him flat out. ‘Rafe, are you cheating on me?’”

“I don’t think I could do that.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t think I could.”

Alice looks at her sister.

Carol turns away.

“What is it?” Alice says.

“There are the kids,” Carol says, and suddenly she’s weeping. She puts her head on Alice’s shoulder. Alice holds her close. The kitchen is silent except for Carol’s soft sobbing. In the other room, Alice can hear the law enforcement people talking among themselves. This is a nightmare, she thinks. At last, her sister nods, moves away from her. Drying her eyes on a tissue, she says, “I’m all right, it’s okay.”

“Leave him,” Alice says. “Kids or not.”

“Would you? If Eddie was still alive, and you found out he was…?”

“In a minute,” Alice says.

“Did he ever?”

“Never.”

And the telephone rings.

She snatches the receiver from the phone on the wall. She doesn’t give a damn if anybody out there in the living room is trying to trace the call or not. They haven’t succeeded so far, and she has no reason to believe they ever will.

“Hello?” she says.

“Alice, it’s Andy Briggs.”

“Hi, Andy. What’d you find out?”

“Well, Garland is closed today, but I spoke to a man named Farris, at home, asked him if he knew anything further about a settlement on Eddie’s policy. I told him word had it that a check had already been sent out. He said as far as he knew the matter was still pending.”

Alice nods silently.

“Alice?”

“Yes, Andy.”

“I still think we should wait till the beginning of June. If nothing happens before then, we’ll start an action.”

“It’s just that these people…”

“Yes, what’s that all about, Alice? I mentioned to Farris that some people seemed to have inside information, but he said he didn’t know how such information could have come from Garland since ‘the matter is still pending,’ his favorite expression. Who are these people? And where’d they get their information?”

“Well, they may be wrong,” Alice says.

“Apparently so. Be patient, okay? We’ll resolve this, I know we will.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” she says. “Thanks, Andy.”

“Any time,” he says, and hangs up.

She puts the receiver back on the wall. Outside, she hears the sound of a car pulling up. She looks out through the kitchen window. It is the mail truck.

The mailman greets her as she comes out the back door and walks up the path to the mailbox. He comments on the hot weather they’ve been having, and she agrees it’s been awful, and then he gets back into his truck. Next door, Mrs. Callahan waves to her as she comes out to her own mailbox.

“Morning, Mrs. Glendenning!”

“Morning,” Alice says.

Everything as normal.

Except that her children are gone.

She leafs through the envelopes. Nothing from Garland. Inside the house again, she goes through the mail more thoroughly. A bill from Florida Power and Light…

“Anything from the perps?” Sloate asks.

The perps.…another from Verizon. A third from Burdines. Two pieces of junk mail, both soliciting subscriptions to magazines she’s never heard of. But nothing from Garland. And nothing from the perps, either, no.

“Nothing,” she tells Sloate, and the phone rings again. Sloate grabs for the earphones.

Alice glances at the grandfather clock.

One twenty-five.

She picks up the receiver.

“Mrs. Glendenning?” he says.

She recognizes the voice at once.

“Yes?”

“Has the mail come yet?”

“Yes, it has.”

“Is the check there?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure it’s on the way,” he says. “I’ll call again Monday.”

“Mr. Angelet…”

“I’ll call again Monday,” he repeats, and hangs up.

“Who was that?” Sloate asks.

“A friend of Eddie’s.”

“What check was he asking about?” Sloate wants to know.

“A check he says he mailed.”

“A check for what?”

“He owed my husband some money.”

Sloate looks at her.

She senses that he knows she’s lying.

But she doesn’t care.

10

Christine is almost afraid to break the news to him.

There is something very frightening about this man.

He’s never hit her or anything like that, he’s not a violent man, although you never can tell with the ones who look as delicate as he does. Once, back when she was still living in North Carolina, she used to date this Latino who looked like a stork, he was that slender and dainty. Actually, he was dealing dope, but that was another matter. The point is, the minute she started living with him, he began batting her around. “What’re you gonna do?” Vicente used to ask her, that was his name, Vicente. “Call the cops?” No, she didn’t call no cops. She just left. Fuck you, Vicente.

The situation is very different here. Christine knows she could never end this relationship, even if he ever did hit her, which he better not try, but she’s not afraid of that, really. He’s never hit her yet, and they’ve been together — what? It must be almost three years since they met, and a year since he cooked up this scheme of his, she can still remember the day he told her about it, she thought he was crazy. That intense look in his eyes, that’s the word for him, she guesses, intense. Everything about him is so fucking intense, man. You can almost feel him vibrating sometimes.

She thinks maybe the reason she’s afraid to tell him what she’s discovered is that this whole idea was his to begin with, and now he may think she’s trying to muscle in on it, come up with an idea of her own, you know? That was one of the things used to get Vicente in a rage all the time, her coming up with ideas of her own. It’s like these delicate guys have to prove they’re not as feminine as they look, so they put you down whenever you try to express yourself. And if dissing you doesn’t work, there’s always the fists, right? They can always give you a black eye or a bloody lip. That hasn’t been the case here yet, but she’s a little gun-shy, she has to admit, of somebody who so perfectly fits the Vicente profile of profound passion in a slight body.

He hasn’t yet asked her why she’s back so late.

All she was supposed to do this morning was ditch the Impala and rent a new car, which she did without any trouble. But going to the bank to break down the hundreds into smaller bills was her idea, not because she suspected any of the bills were counterfeit but only because cashing a big bill in a shitty little town like Cape October could become a hassle.

He’s watching television when she comes in.

The kids are locked in the forward stateroom of the boat. She doesn’t ask him how the kids are. Truth be known, she doesn’t give a shit about the kids. Now that they’ve got the money, all she wants to do is turn the kids loose and get the hell out of here. A quarter of a million dollars can take them anywhere. Stop playing hide-and-seek with the locals here. Go to Hawaii or Europe or the Far East, wherever. Go someplace where a black woman and a white man with blond hair won’t attract the kind of attention they do here in Crackerland.

But she still has to tell him about those three queer bills, and her idea about the rest of the money.

“Where’ve you been?” he asks.

“Here and there,” she says, and goes to him and kisses him on the cheek.

“Did you get the car?”

“A red Taurus.”

“Can’t wait to see it,” he says, and gets up to give her a hug, flicking his long blond hair as he rises. His hair was short when they met three years ago, made him look more butch. She doesn’t dare tell him he looks a bit faggoty with the longer hair, which he didn’t start growing till after all this started, even though they moved out of town where nobody could possibly recognize him.

“I missed you,” he says. “What took you so long?”

“I bought some things,” she says.

“Uh-oh,” he says, but he’s smiling.

“Want to see them?”

She puts the Victoria’s Secret shopping bag on the kitchen table. He’s already recognized it, his eyes are already dancing. He may look like a pansy, but man, the opposite is true when it comes to reaction and performance, you know what I’m saying? She removes the boxes from the bag one by one, stacks them on the table. She shows him the push-up bras in the black hydrangea and the cheetah print. She shows him the leopard-print low-rise thongs. He rubs the fabric between his forefinger and thumb, as if he’s testing one of the hundred-dollar bills. She shows him the red sequin-lace baby-doll nightgown. He especially likes the black lace garter belt.

“I’ll wear it for you tonight,” she says.

“How about now?” he asks.

“We have to talk,” she says.

“What about?”

“I also bought a television set. It’s in the car.”

“A television set? What for?”

“Cost me nineteen hundred bucks.”

“What? Why’d you spend…?”

“To test the bills.”

He looks at her.

“Three of the bills were counterfeit,” she tells him.

“How do you know?”

“I tried to cash them at a bank. They’ve got a machine. The bills are what they call super-bills…”

“Hold it, hold it…”

“Honey, please listen to me.”

There is that familiar intense look in his eyes. He is afraid she’s going to tell him that all their careful planning was for nothing. She has already told him three of the bills—

“Honey, please,” she says. “It’s not bad, really. Just listen.”

“I’m listening,” he says.

“The bank refused to cash them. In fact, they—”

“Why’d you go to a bank?”

“To get some smaller bills. Honey, please, for Christ’s sake, listen!”

She sees him tense the way Vicente used to, sees the muscles in his jaw tightening, is fearful that in the next minute he is going to punch her or slap her or shove her…

“I’m listening,” he says again.

“They call them super-bills. They make them on some kind of presses the U.S. sold to Iran when the shah was still in power. They use German paper to print the bills. You can’t tell them from the real thing, honey, except with these machines the Fed has, and now all the Southwest Federal branches. Which is how they flagged the bills, they ran them through their machine. But a diner where I had breakfast accepted one of the—”

“Slow down,” he says.

“A diner cashed one of the hundreds. So did Victoria’s Secret. Which is why I bought the television set. I paid for it with nineteen hundred in cash, and nobody batted an eyelash. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying the rest of the money is real. You’re saying we don’t have to worry…”

“No, honey. I’m saying it don’t matter if they’re real or fake or whatever. We cash them where there are no machines, and we’re home free.”

He looks at her.

He is nodding now.

And now he is smiling.

“Let’s go celebrate tonight,” he says.

The features editor of the Cape October Tribune is a man named Lionel Maxwell, who has been in the newspaper business for forty years now, and who doesn’t need a twerp like Dustin Garcia telling him about placement. Garcia is saying he wants his weekly column to run on the first page of tomorrow’s Sunday section.

“That is patently absurd,” Maxwell says.

This is a small newspaper, circulation only 75,000 in a town of 143,000, which tells you something, doesn’t it? In addition to being a star reporter in his own mind, Garcia writes this column he calls “Dustin’s Dustbin,” and it usually runs on page five of the Sunday section. But now Garcia is insisting it should run on the first page instead.

“Give me one good reason,” Maxwell says.

He knows the good reason. Garcia wants greater exposure. His picture runs at the top of the column — “Dustin’s Dustbin,” for Christ’s sake! — but that isn’t good enough for him. He wants his picture and his precious words to run on the section’s first page, where anyone too lazy to turn to page five will see it at once.

“I think it’s an exceptionally good column this week,” Garcia says.

He can’t tell Maxwell that running it on the first page of the section is Detective Wilbur Sloate’s idea. Detective Sloate is looking for higher visibility. He wants to make sure that the people who have those kids will see the piece without having to go digging through the paper for it. But Garcia can’t explain that to his boss.

Nor can he tell him that the story he’s written is a complete fabrication. He’s afraid that Maxwell won’t run it at all if he knows not a word of it is true. Well, the kids being picked up at school is true, but the rest is all a crock. Garcia feels he’s performing a public service here, helping to get those kids back. He doesn’t want to run into bureaucratic red tape from an old-timer like Maxwell who doesn’t know what new-wave journalism is all about. He doesn’t want to hear him sounding off about libel suits, the way he did that time Garcia wrote a column about municipal garbage pickups regularly and routinely being ignored in the predominately Cuban Twin Oaks area, which actually did happen one Friday, the garbage not being picked up, and which even Garcia had to admit was not exactly an epidemic of neglect, but the city hadn’t sued anyway, so what was all the fuss?

“Also,” Maxwell says, “I’m not sure I like all these Shakespearean references.”

“That’s what makes the column special,” Garcia says.

“Half the rednecks down here never even heard of Shakespeare.”

“Come on, Lionel, everybody knows Shakespeare.”

“Wanna bet?”

But he is softening.

Garcia is thinking if his column helps crack a kidnapping case, he’ll get the Pulitzer.

“Please, Lionel?” he says. “Give me a break, okay? Front page of the section, upper right hand corner. Please?”

“I must be out of my mind,” Maxwell says.

They pick up I-75 ten miles east of the Cape, and then drive the Taurus north toward Sarasota. He tells Christine he’s afraid they might be spotted if they try any of the local restaurants, most of which aren’t any good, anyway. In Sarasota, there’s a wider selection.

They both must realize that Alice is sitting by the phone, waiting for a call from them, but they aren’t talking about her, or the kids locked in the forward stateroom of the boat. As long as they catch the last ferry back at ten-thirty, the kids will be okay. Instead, they talk about where they should go now that they have all this money.

The Unicorn is a restaurant all the way out on Siesta Key, secluded and quiet in the off-season. A month ago, it would have been thronged with Midwesterners. Tonight, they are virtually alone in the place. He orders a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. They toast to their success, and then order from the truly magnificent menu.

He sips at his champagne, gives the glass an admiring glance, eyebrows raised. He is dressed casually, tan slacks and a brown cotton sweater that perfectly complement the long blond hair. Christine is wearing an off-the-shoulder yellow dress, strappy yellow sandals, dangling yellow earrings. In Florida, especially during the off-season, no one dresses up for dining out.

She wants to talk about where they should go, now that they have all this money. She wants to talk about leaving Cape October forever, now that everything’s worked out the way they hoped it would, now that they’re finally rid of his wife.

“She’s not a bad person,” he says.

“I thought—”

“It’s not her fault that we happened to meet.”

“You and her, you mean?”

“No, you and me. It’s not her fault that I met you and fell in love with you.”

“Nice save,” Christine says, and hesitates a moment, and then asks, “Are you glad you met me?”

“Of course,” he says.

“And fell in love with me?”

“I am very glad I fell in love with you.”

She remembers the way they met.

Thinking back on it now, it seems to her they fell in love that very first instant. This will always be a source of amazement to her. That they met at all. People tend to forget that Florida is the South. In fact, it is the Deep South. And he is white and she is black. But they met. And fell in love.

He looked almost like a teenager. Three years ago, he was wearing his blond hair in a crew cut well suited to the summers on Cape October. Down here — and she was only just learning this because she’d recently moved down from Asheville — the summer months were horrendous. In Asheville, she’d worked serving burgers at a Mickey D’s. Down here (big improvement!) she was scooping ice cream at a place called The Dairy Boat. That’s where they met. At the Boat.

“Which are the no-fat flavors?” he asked.

Crew-cut blond hair. T-shirt and shorts, Reeboks. This was a Saturday, he’d probably been out running, high sheen of sweat on his face and his bare arms.

“Up there on the chart,” she said.

“I can’t read,” he said, and grinned.

That grin. Jesus!

“Chocolate-vanilla swirl,” she said. “Strawberry. Coffee crunch.”

“What’s the coffee crunch?” he asked.

“It’s got like these little chunks of chocolate in it.”

“Is it good?”

“I like it.”

“What else do you like?”

Little bit of double intender there?

She looked at him.

“Lots of things,” she said.

“You like walking hatless in spring rain?”

She looked at him again.

“You flirting with me?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said.

“You too young to be flirting with a grown woman,” she said.

“Thirty-three last month,” he said.

“You look younger.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Nice age difference,” he said.

“You think?”

“Don’t you?”

“How about that other little difference?” she asked.

“The Great Racial Divide, you mean?”

“No, I mean the gold band I spy on your left hand.”

“Oh,” he said. “That.”

“Yeah, that.”

“Yep,” he said.

“So whut’s a married man like you doing flirting with a nice colored girl like me?”

“Gee, I really don’t know,” he said. “What time do you get out of here?”

“Six o’clock.”

“Want to come for a ride with me?”

“A ride where?”

“To the moon,” he said.

That was the start of it.

“You still love me?” she asks now.

“Adore you,” he says.

“Even after what we had to do?”

“Well,” he says, “desperate people do desperate things.”

“Desperate, huh?”

“Is what we were,” he says. “We had to do what we did. There was no other way.”

“Here’s to all that money,” she says, and raises her glass in a toast. They clink glasses. Her eyes flash with sudden awareness.

“Why’s that waiter staring at you?” she whispers.

He turns to look.

“The bald guy over near the serving station.”

“He’s not staring at me.”

“He was a minute ago.”

They drink.

“Good,” he says.

“Yummy,” she says. But she is still looking toward the serving station.

“I wonder why they gave us fake money,” he says.

“If it’s all fake. We don’t really know.”

Still looking across the room.

“It must be, don’t you think?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Good as gold either way.”

He pours more champagne for both of them. They sip silently for several moments.

“So where do you think we should go?” she asks. “After we turn the kids loose?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“Bali.”

“Okay.”

“You serious?”

“Sure. Why not Bali?”

“Oh, wow, I’d love that.”

“Fake money, fake passports, why not?”

“Can we get them? The passports?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Do you know somebody?”

“Same guy who made the other stuff.”

“Then let’s do it.”

“We will.”

“Let’s get out of Florida tonight,” she says, really excited now. “Let’s give her a call…”

“Well, not yet.”

“…tell her the kids are all right…”

“Well…”

“…drop them off someplace, and get the hell out of here.”

“Well,” he says, and takes another sip of champagne. “The kids may be—”

“Excuse me, sir,” a voice says.

He turns.

The man standing at his elbow is the waiter who Christine says was staring at him a few minutes ago. Fifty years old or thereabouts, tall and lean, with a balding pate and clear blue eyes, an apologetic smile on his face now.

“I don’t want to interrupt your meal,” the man says. “Just wanted to say it’s nice seeing you here again.”

“I… uh… I’m sorry, but this is the first time I’ve been here.”

“Ah? From some other restaurant then? I used to work at Serafina’s out on Longboat…”

“Never been there.”

“Or The Flying Dutchman downtown?”

“Don’t know either of them. Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry to’ve bothered you. I thought sure… well, excuse me, I’m sorry.”

He nods, smiles, backs away from the table.

“Do you know him?” Christine whispers.

“Never saw him in my life,” Eddie says.

Faking his death was the easy part.

It had to look like a sudden whim.

Take the sloop out for a moonlight sail when it’s too late to get a sitter on such short notice. Gee, Alice, I’d like to take the Jamash out tonight, would you mind? Sudden inspiration, you know? But in preparation for this seemingly impetuous idea, he’s been watching the daily forecasts, waiting for a night when the seas will be high and the wind will be blowing out of the east.

They keep the boat at a ramshackle landing pier called Marina Jackson. It doesn’t have any hoists or storage racks, which they don’t need anyway because they never take her out of the water except to have the bottom scraped periodically, and they have that done at a true marina out on Willard. The guy running Marina Jackson is named Matt Jackson, and he’s surprised to see Eddie driving in at eight o’clock that night, fixing to take the boat out when the Coast Guard has issued small craft warnings. Eddie tells him he’ll be staying on the Intercoastal, which isn’t his plan at all, but Jackson frowns at him, anyway, and tells him to be careful out there tonight.

The sloop is a thirty-foot seaworthy Pearson that can sleep four, perfect for the Glendenning family, with a V-berth that can accommodate two up forward, and a port settee in the main salon that converts to a double berth. Eddie does indeed start out under motor on the Intercoastal, but the minute he rounds the tip of the key, he hoists sail and grabs the first wind that takes him westward, into the pass and out into the Gulf.

Man, it is not fun out here.

Expert sailor though he is, he knows this is goddamn dangerous, knows he can really drown out here tonight, if he doesn’t get off this boat fast, before it gets too far from shore. He inflates the rubber dinghy, carries it back to the stern platform and lowers it into the water. Clinging to the line that holds it to the Jamash, he climbs down into the dinghy, and starts its fifteen-horsepower Yamaha engine. He lets the line fall free of the sloop’s cleat. Still under sail, the Jamash seems to fly away westward into the night, disappearing from sight almost at once.

He is still fearful that he might really drown.

Waves crash in over the sides of the rubber dinghy, drenching him, threatening to capsize the small boat. He keeps its furiously bobbing nose pointed consistently eastward, constantly checking a handheld compass, squinting into the squall, his heart beating wildly in his chest.

At last he sees the light marking the entrance to the pass and the Intercoastal. He shifts course slightly, adjusting for the wind that threatens to blow him and the dinghy farther out into the Gulf. When he comes to within a hundred yards or so from the white sand beach that marks the tip of Willard Key, he removes a bait-cutting knife from its sheath and rips two gaping slashes in the dinghy’s orange rubber hide. He is over the side and swimming for shore as the deflating dinghy, weighed down by the engine, sinks out of sight.

He lies on his back on the sand, breathing harshly.

The night rages everywhere around him.

But Eddie Glendenning is dead.

Isn’t he?

Christine is silent all the way back to the ferry landing. She is still wondering about that waiter in The Unicorn. They park the car, lock it, and board the ferry at ten-thirty. Ten minutes later, they are approaching the marina.

Years ago, when Ashley first saw the place, she began applauding. Jamie, who was then four, began clapping his hands, too, in imitation, and not knowing what he was cheering. Both children kept clapping as Eddie brought the Jamash in. The only approach to Marina Blue was by water. You either came on your own boat, or you took the rickety ferry over from the end of Lewiston Point Road.

Then, as now, the docks were painted the palest tint of azure, streaking the wood like a thin wash of watercolor. Before the site was turned into an eccentric boating hideaway, the grounds had served as an artists’ retreat called The Cloister. Here, in the dim distant past, as many as a dozen writers, painters, and composers at a time could be housed and fed for periods as long as two months, while they worked on projects proposed to and accepted by The Cloister’s board of directors.

Isolated on this secluded stretch of land a thousand yards off the northern tip of Lewiston Point, a wide assortment of creative men and women lived and worked in wooden residences affording views of tranquil Crescent Inlet to the east, and the sometimes turbulent Gulf of Mexico to the west. The largest of the dwellings served as a community meeting place, where the transient citizens of the retreat gathered nightly to discuss and sometimes vociferously evaluate each other’s work in progress.

It was rumored that back in 1949, when Marina Blue was still The Cloister, John D. MacDonald wrote his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, while living on a houseboat here. It was further rumored that this earlier experience afloat served as inspiration for Travis McGee’s Busted Flush. Adding credence to the hearsay was the large framed photo of the writer now hanging in the marina dining room, which had once been the community meeting hall. None of the other wooden buildings remained, although there were now tennis courts and a swimming pool on the grounds as well, luxuries not thought essential to the creative process back then in the bad old days.

The long weekend the Glendennings spent at Marina Blue provided the fondest of memories for the entire family. Eddie guessed he was still in love with Alice at the time. He had not yet begun gambling heavily. He had not yet met Christine. He later supposed he started gambling only when he realized he could not make his for tune as a stockbroker. In his view, betting on the dogs was a lot like buying and selling stocks, bonds, and commodities. It never occurred to him that one was a job and the other was an addiction.

He later also supposed that he’d started up with Christine only because he was no longer in love with Alice. It never occurred to him that he might have fallen out of love with Alice only because he’d already started up with Christine.

The way Eddie looks at it now, he chose Marina Blue as a hideaway only because he thought it would be a safe, familiar, and therefore comforting place to hold the kids until all this was over and done with.

It never occurs to him that he might have been trying to re-create for himself one of the happiest times of his life — before it got too late.

It never once occurs to him that it might already be too late.

Eddie doesn’t think of himself as a criminal. He met criminals while he was working at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich, thanks, men who engaged in insider trading and were later caught and sent to prison. He was never one of those. Which was perhaps why he’d never made a killing in the market, he was never a goddamn criminal. And he is not a criminal now.

There are men all over these United States, perhaps all over this world, righteous men who take their children away from negligent or promiscuous mothers, men who rescue their children, in effect, from households that are hopeless — though he can’t claim to have done that, no. That would be lying to himself. And Eddie has never in his life lied to himself.

He knows that in the eyes of the law, he has kidnapped his children, which is a crime, but he is not a criminal. In the eyes of the law, he has taken his own children away from their mother, a woman perceived to be a widow. Which, by the way, and for all intents and purposes, is patently true. Since he is legally dead, or at least presumed to be dead, who is to say that someone declared dead isn’t actually dead? Who is to say that Alice is not truly a widow if, in her own perception, she is in fact a widow? Who indeed?

And who is to say that Edward Fulton Glendenning did not cease to exist on that night of September 21 last year, which was when Edward Fulton Glendenning disappeared? And is it a crime to vanish from the face of the earth? Does this make him a criminal?

He was certainly not a criminal when he first began seeing Christine on the sly, began cheating on Alice, so to speak, his wife of so many good years; that did not make him a criminal. Florida is supposed to have state laws going all the way back to 1868, and these laws govern adultery, unmarried people living together, and oral sex — but they are never enforced. When he first started seeing Christine on a regular if clandestine basis, Eddie got curious about these laws so he went into the legal department of Baxter and Meuhl, where he was then working, and checked out the Florida statutes in their brown leather covers embossed in red and gold, but he couldn’t find any of those laws anywhere in any of the books. So if they weren’t in the statutes, were they even laws at all, or just myths? So he convinced himself that he was not doing anything criminal by seeing a sexy little black girl once, and then twice, and then three or four times each and every week, he was certainly not a criminal.

But Chapter 61.052 of those same Florida statutes informed him that if he and Alice ever got divorced because the marriage was “irretrievably broken,” then according to Chapter 61.08, titled “Alimony,” the court could consider “the adultery of a spouse… ”

Uh-oh.

“…and the circumstances thereof in determining whether alimony would be awarded.”

Which was not such good news.

By the time he met Christine, Eddie was into Angelet and Holmes for thirty grand. When he finally decided he had to do something to get out of this desperate situation, he owed them two hundred thou. With this huge debt hanging over his head, getting a divorce and paying alimony besides was entirely out of the question.

In Eddie’s mind, the two “problems” (he called them) became inextricably linked. If he could not get rid of Alice, he could not be with Christine full-time, and he would have to keep sneaking around corners and taking her to cheap roadside motels for quick afternoon fucks, which was not fair to either one of them. And if he could not get rid of his debt to Angelet and Holmes, then he could not get a divorce with its attendant alimony “penalties” (he called them).

So what to do?

Well, he could always kill Alice.

This was not a joke. Although he was not a criminal, killing Alice seemed to him a perfectly viable solution to at least one of the problems. Kill Alice, and he wouldn’t have to divorce her. He would be free to marry Christine and be with her night and day, you are the one.

Unfortunately, this still left the other little problem, which was a debt of two hundred thousand dollars, payable on demand or he would either be killed or hurt very badly, these people did not fool around.

What to do, oh what to do?

Well, desperate people do desperate things.

When he first told Christine about the insurance policy on his life, she thought this was very interesting but did not see how it applied to their current situation.

“If I die in an accident, the death benefit is doubled,” he told her.

“So?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“So?”

“So if I die in an accident, Alice gets two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And we get to start a new life together.”

“One,” Christine said, “how do we start a new life together if you’re dead?”

“I’m not dead. I’m presumed dead.”

“And two, if Alice is the one who gets this insurance money, how do we get to start this new life together?”

“We kidnap my kids and hold them for ransom,” Eddie said.

After he faked the drowning, they moved out of the state entirely. It might have been safe to settle on the East Coast of Florida someplace, but from Fort Myers to Palm Beach was just a short hop across the state on U.S. 80, and farther south you could jump onto Alligator Alley at Naples and be in Fort Lauderdale in what, two, three hours? They couldn’t take that chance. Eddie Glendenning was dead. They didn’t want any travelers from Cape October to run into his ghost in a bar someplace.

They chose New Orleans.

Easier to get lost in a big city.

Fun town besides. The Big Easy, they called it. And nobody looked cockeyed at a black-white relationship there. Plenty of those there already; Eddie and Christine didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow.

He knew you could buy a fake ID on the Internet, but he was reluctant to do that because he felt it would leave some kind of paper trail that might come back to bite him on the ass later on. He was also leery of contacting anyone… well, criminal… who might be able to help him establish a new identity. By faking his own death, Eddie had already committed insurance fraud, and he was about to commit the crime of kidnapping, but he still did not think of himself as a criminal. He had not given up gambling — just because a person is dead doesn’t mean he has to stop gambling — but gambling wasn’t a crime. Gambling was an addiction, even though Eddie wasn’t quite ready to admit he was an addict, either.

However, some addictions are related, and so there were gamblers in New Orleans who also used narcotics, and the sale or possession of controlled substances was a crime in Louisiana, the same as it was in any other state of the union. And these gamblers who were also using drugs knew the people who were selling these drugs, of course, and these people were criminals, even Eddie had to admit that. And these drug-dealer criminals knew people who were involved in yet other types of criminal activity, and one of those activities happened to be the manufacture and creation of false documents like passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and even diplomas from Harvard University.

So by asking around — cautiously, to be sure — Eddie finally got a line on a man named Charles Franklin (“No relation to Ben,” he told Eddie with a grin) who was able to provide a false driver’s license issued to one Edward Graham residing at 336 East 120th Street in the city of New York, State of New York, with Eddie’s new signature on it and everything.

And he was able to provide first a false American Express card under the cloned name of Michael Anderson, which he said would take Eddie through the month of October when the company would bill the real Michael Anderson, who would begin squawking about charges he’d never made. Franklin then created a cloned Visa card (true owner a man named Nelson Waterbury) that would take Eddie through November, and then a cloned Master Card for December and a cloned Discover card for January. By then, Eddie had found a job selling computer equipment and established a bank account of his own. When he applied for a bona fide credit card under his new name — Edward Graham, no middle initial — it was granted at once. He had no trouble passing a Louisiana driving test, either, and acquiring a legitimate driver’s license as well.

By then, he had also married Christine Welles, who became Christine Graham, thereby adding the crime of bigamy to Eddie’s already growing list of denied crimes.

Then again, it wasn’t Eddie Glendenning who married her.

Eddie Glendenning was hardly a memory by then.

Always mindful of leaving a trail that can somehow be picked up, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Graham fly not to Fort Myers — the closest airport to Cape October — but instead to Tampa, where they rent a car and drive to a marina he knows in St. Pete. Using his new name and his new legitimate credit card and driver’s license, Eddie rents a forty-foot Sundancer, a Sea Ray power cruiser that, with its pair of twin Volvo 430-horsepower engines, is capable of high performance in open water — although he plans only to take her down the Intercoastal to Cape October. In effect, he needs the boat more as a floating hotel than as a means of transportation.

Once on the inland waterway, he motors leisurely southward past the towering Sunshine Skyway to Anna Maria and Longboat, into Sarasota Bay, and past Venice and Englewood, and finally rounding Cape Haze and coming past Boca Grande. On the first day of April, he exits the Intercoastal at October Bay, where he finds the marina he and the family stayed at aboard the Jamash several years ago. Here on the northern end of Crescent Island, a thousand yards from where Lewiston Point Road dead-ends into Crescent Inlet, the azure docks of Marina Blue beckon in brilliant sunlight as he parks the Sundancer and cuts the engines.

He reminds Christine that this is April Fool’s Day.

An appropriate time to be setting their plan in motion.

Eddie Glendenning drowned in the Gulf of Mexico on the night of September 21 last year. Surely the insurance company has paid the death benefit by now. Even so, they do not plan to take the children till the middle of May, after they’ve gone over the ground a hundred times, walked it through again and again to make sure there will be no mistakes.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is riding on this little venture.

Their entire future together is riding on this little venture.

He does not dare wander very far from the boat, for fear someone will spot him, and recognize him, and blow the whole scheme.

It is Christine who purchases the hinged hasp that Eddie himself fastens to the door and jamb of the forward stateroom. In the same hardware store on the Trail, she buys a padlock that fits into the hasp, to keep the children secure until it is time to release them.

It is Christine as well who takes the ferry over to Lewiston Point, and phones for a taxi to carry her to the Fort Myers airport. They dare not choose any of the rental car companies that line U.S.41. It is their reasoning that if she rents at a smaller site, she might be recognized later on. There is a lot of traffic at an airport the size of the one in Fort Myers. No one will remember her. Or so is their reasoning.

The flat rate for the ride from the Lewiston Point ferry landing to the airport is seventy-five dollars. She goes directly to the Avis counter and presents her Clara Washington credit card and her Clara Washington driver’s license with her Clara Washington photograph and signature on it, and within fifteen minutes she is driving a blue Chevrolet Impala out of the airport.

She picks up Route 78 West, and drives directly to the Cape.

At the Shell station on Lewiston Point Road, she crosses U.S. 41 and drives out over the bridge to Tall Grass. At the end of the road, she parks the car and again boards the ferry to Crescent Island.

It has taken her exactly thirty-two minutes from the gas station to Marina Blue.

She is still worried about that guy in the restaurant.

It is now almost midnight, and they are lying in each other’s arms on the converted double berth in the middle stateroom, several feet from where the children are asleep in the locked master stateroom. It is Christine’s expectation that tomorrow they will turn the children loose and leave Cape October behind forever — but she can’t stop wondering why that guy in the restaurant thought he knew Eddie.

“Are you sure you never saw him before?” she whispers.

“Positive,” he says.

She nods. The boat bobs gently on the water. Her eyes are wide open in the dappled dark.

“Suppose he recognized you?” she asks. “Suppose he knew you were Eddie Glendenning sitting there in that restaurant?”

“I don’t think that’s likely.”

“But suppose.”

“Who cares? We’ll be out of here tomorrow night. Bali, remember? And we’ll never come back. So who cares what some old fart in a restaurant—?”

“Why don’t we leave tonight?”

“No,” he says. “There are still some things I have to figure out.”

“What things?”

“Well… the kids, for one.”

“What’s there to figure out? We drop them off someplace, and we’re on our way.”

“I’m not sure we can do that, Christine.”

“Do what?”

“Just drop them off like that.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Eddie. Why can’t we…?”

“It’s not as simple as that, Christine! I have to figure it out!”

His voice is a sharp cutting whisper.

She catches her breath.

Then, very slowly, she asks again, “What is there to figure out, Eddie?”

“We kidnapped them,” he says. “We held them for ransom,” he says. “That’s what there is to figure out.”

They are both silent for several moments.

“Why don’t you take this off?” he whispers, and lifts the hem of the baby-doll nightgown she bought at Victoria’s Secret.

On the other side of the locked master stateroom door, the children are wide awake, listening to every whispered word.