Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

“I don’t know anybody with a blue car,” Alice says.

“What is it?” Rosie asks.

“Is he still there? The guard. Luke Whoever.”

“Farraday. No, ma’am. I reached him at home.”

“Well, I… can you let me have his number, please?” She listens as Phoebe reads off Farraday’s number, writing it onto a pad on the counter. “Thank you,” she says. She puts the phone back on its cradle, hesitates for a single uncertain instant…

“What is it?” Rosie asks again.

…and is reaching for the phone again when it rings, startling her.

She picks up the receiver.

“Hello?” she says.

A woman’s voice says, “I have your children. Don’t call the police, or they’ll die.”

There is a click on the line.

Alice puts the receiver back on the cradle. Her hand is trembling. Her face has gone pale.

“What is it?” Rosie asks.

“Someone has the children.”

“Oh my God!”

“She told me not to call the police.”

“A woman?”

“A woman.”

“Call them anyway,” Rosie says.

“No, I can’t.”

“Then what…?”

“I don’t know.”

The house seems suddenly very still. Alice can hear the clock ticking in the living room. A big grandfather clock that used to belong to Eddie’s mother.

“A blue car,” she says. “A woman driving a blue car.”

“Call the police,” Rosie says.

“No. Do you know anyone who has a blue car?”

“No. Call the police.”

“I can’t do that! She’ll kill them!”

“Did she say that?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. Nothing. She just hung up. Oh my God, Rosie, she’s got the children!”

“What’d she sound like?”

“I… I don’t know. A woman. I…”

“White? Black?”

“I don’t know. How can anyone tell…?”

“ Everyone can tell. Was she white or black?”

“Black. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“How old?”

“In her thirties maybe.”

“Call the police. Tell them a black woman in her thirties has your kids. Do it now, Mrs. Glendenning. A bad situation can only get worse. Trust me on that.”

“I can’t take that chance, Rosie.”

“You can’t take any other chance.”

The women look at each other.

“Call them,” Rosie says.

“No,” Alice says.

“Then God have mercy on your soul,” Rosie says.

Alone in the house now, Rosie gone in a flutter of dire predictions, Alice first begins blaming herself. I should have bought Ashley the cell phone, she thinks, and remembers her daughter arguing like an attorney for the defense.

“But, Mom, all the girls in the fifth grade have cell phones!”

Oh, sure, the same way all the girls in the fifth grade are allowed to wear lipstick and all the girls in the fifth grade are allowed to date, and…

“No, Ashley, I’m sorry, we can’t afford a cell phone just now.”

“But, Mom…”

“Not just now, darling, I’m sorry.”

Thinking now, I should have bought her the phone, how much would it have cost, anyway? If Ashley had a cell phone, she’d have called me at the office before getting in a car with a strange woman — what on earth possessed her? How many times had Alice told them, her and Jamie both, never to accept anything from a stranger, never, not candy, not anything, never even to stop and talk with a stranger, certainly never to get in a car with a stranger, what was wrong with them?

No, she thinks, it isn’t their fault, it isn’t my fault, it’s this woman’s fault, whoever she is, this woman driving a blue car, do I know anyone who drives a blue car? She tries to remember. She’s sure she must know someone who drives a blue car, but who remembers the color of anyone’s car unless it’s yellow or pink? A blue car, she thinks, a blue car, come on, who drives a blue car, but she can’t think of a single soul, and her frustration leads once again to unreasoning anger. Anger against herself for not having bought the goddamn cell phone, anger at her children for getting into a car with a strange woman, but especially anger at this undoubtedly crazed person, whoever she is, this woman who probably has no children of her own, and who has now stolen from Alice the only precious things in her life, I’ll kill her, she thinks. If ever I get my hands on her—

The phone rings.

Alice picks up the receiver at once.

“Hello?” she says.

“Mrs. Glendenning?”

The same woman again.

“Yes,” Alice says. “Listen, Miss—”

“No, you listen,” the woman says. “Don’t interrupt, just listen. We want a quarter of a million dollars in cash. Hundred-dollar bills. Get the money together by noon tomorrow. We’ll call again then. Get the money. Or the kiddies die.”

And she hangs up.

Alice puts the receiver back on the wall hook, and stands silently at the kitchen counter for what is perhaps thirty seconds. Then she reaches for the phone again, and immediately calls Charlie Hobbs.

She does not think anyone is watching the house.

But she walks swiftly from the kitchen door to the car, and opens the door on the driver’s side and gets in behind the wheel, and starts the car, and then backs out of the driveway and into the street and is on her way in less than a minute and a half. Even in off-season traffic, it takes her ten minutes from her house to the Lewiston Point Bridge. From there, it takes her another fifteen minutes to Charlie’s house on the northern end of Tall Grass Key.

He is sitting on the front porch of his ramshackle house, waiting for her. Wearing white trousers and a baggy blue shirt, he is smoking a pipe, and he looks like the stereotype of any fisherman you might see on any calendar selling cod liver pills, except that he is not a fisherman, he is a painter of abstract-expressionist canvases, and a damn good one at that. His trousers and shirt are now stained with paint, and there are traces of paint under his fingernails as well, and even in the white beard that clings to his cheeks, his chin, and his upper lip, like leftover lather from a hasty shave. It is ten minutes past seven and still light, the sun hovering above the western horizon as if indecisive about its final descent.

The moment she pulls into his shell driveway, he rises from where he is sitting on the steps. She goes to him, and he holds her close. She is trembling in his arms. Until this moment, she has not realized how frightened she really is. Charlie smells of paint and turpentine and tobacco smoke. He is the only friend she now has in all Cape October, and she loves him to death.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

“I’m so scared,” she says.

“It’ll be okay. What happened to your foot?”

“I got run over.”

“What?”

“Yeah. The ankle’s broken.”

“Never rains,” he says.

She first met Charlie three months ago, when a developer represented by Lane Realty tried to buy the four acres of waterfront land Charlie had been living on since 1970. He’d come down to Cape October after the Vietnam War, having barely escaped death in the massive artillery barrage on Khe Sanh. He was nineteen years old in that March of 1968. He was fifty-six when Alice met him. Frank Lane sent her — new and inexperienced — to negotiate for Charlie’s now-precious land. He’d turned her down, of course. But they became fast friends, and Charlie later told her he’d have thrown anyone else off the property sight unseen.

She tells him about the children.

In the gathering dusk, she tells him everything that happened.