Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

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.

Garcia’s column is indeed in the coveted upper-right-hand position of the Sunday section’s first page. His photograph runs in a box at the top of the column. It shows him smiling at the camera.

The story that leads off “Dustin’s Dustbin” is titled:

The subhead reads:

The story reads:

A simple failure to communicate caused a dollop of confusion and measure for measure of consternation these past few frantic days. It all began when a blonde in a blue Impala drove into the parking lot of Pratt Elementary School at the end of the school day Wednesday and picked up James Glendenning, 8, and his sister Ashley, 10. When the children did not show up for school the next morning, and when the school’s calls to the home of Alice Glendenning, the children’s mother and a recent widow, went unanswered, school officials became alarmed.

“It was all a comedy of errors,” Mrs. Glendenning told the Dustbin last night. “It was my sister who picked up the children. She was down here from Atlanta, visiting with her own children, and we decided to take the kids to Disney World, which is where we’ve been for the past two days. I should have called Pratt, I guess, but it was a spur of the moment decision, and we didn’t think missing a few days of school would cause such a tempest.”

Carol Matthews, Mrs. Glendenning’s sister, is now back in Atlanta.

And the Glendenning children will return to school on Monday.

Which is as you’d like it.

There are some people out there who know that Garcia’s little story is a pack of goddamn lies.

Well, not Phoebe Mears.

She accepts unconditionally that Alice Glendenning took little Jamie and Ashley to Disney World and forgot to tell the school about it. But if she sent her own sister to pick up the kids after school Wednesday, then what was that phone call from her asking about did they miss the bus and all? Had she also forgotten her sister was picking up the kids?

Phoebe knows that Mrs. Glendenning has been through a lot lately, her husband drowning and all. In which case, she can be forgiven a lapse of memory every now and then. So she agrees that all’s well that ends well, and that everything was probably just much ado about nothing, after all. Which is just as she likes it, yes.

Luke Farraday can’t figure out why that newspaper reporter would give him fifty bucks to tell him about the blue Impala and the blonde driving it if he knew all along that it was Mrs. Glendenning’s sister picking up the kids. And also, what was that business about wanting to put an announcement about a party in the social calendar, when instead it turns out the kids went to Disney World with their mother? Or is the party next week sometime? Is it a birthday party? Is that why Mrs. Glendenning took the kids to Orlando? Was it a birthday present? Is it one of their birthdays coming up?

Sometimes, Luke gets confused.

Then again, it said in the paper that “A simple failure to communicate caused a dollop of confusion and measure for measure of consternation these past few frantic days,” so maybe everybody’s confused and consterned about whatever arrangement the sisters made between them.

One thing good about it, though.

He now knows why those kids would’ve got in the car with a stranger. It was their aunt all along.

Anyway, the hell with it.

He’s still fifty bucks ahead.

Jennifer and Rafe are in bed when they read the story in the Tribune. In fact, except for the five minutes it took Jennifer to put on a robe and go out to the mailbox for the paper, they have not budged from that bed since they climbed into it late Friday night. Rafe even called his wife from Jennifer’s bed yesterday afternoon.

Rafe knows an old joke that goes like this:

“Do you always tell your wife you love her after you have sex?”

“Oh yes. Wherever I am, I make a point of calling her.”

Rafe told Jennifer this joke after he’d spoken to Carol yesterday. It did not seem to trouble him that he had his head on Jennifer’s left breast while he spoke to his wife. It did not seem to trouble Jennifer, either. She laughed when he told her the joke.

They are not laughing now.

They have just finished reading Dustin Garcia’s little story.

“Total bullshit,” Rafe says.

“What makes you think so?” Jennifer asks.

“Think so?” Rafe says. “ Think? I know for a fact that there is not a word of truth in this article. To begin with, my wife is not a blonde. She has black hair. So does her sister. So it wasn’t my wife or her sister who picked up those kids after school. That’s the first thing. The second thing is my wife didn’t get down here to Florida till yesterday morning, so she couldn’t have been going to Disney World with her sister and the kids on Thursday, whenever the article says it was, that’s the second thing. And the third thing, I was in my sister-in-law’s house, the fucking place was crawling with cops, they know the kids’ve been kidnapped, so this whole story about Disney World is pure and total bullshit. Either it’s something Alice herself gave to the paper to protect herself because the paper was pestering her, or else the cops themselves planted it for some reason or other.”

“That’s what I think it is,” Jennifer says.

“The cops planted it?”

“Yes.”