by Ed McBain
“Briggs, Randolph and Soames,” a woman’s voice says.
“Mr. Briggs, please,” she says.
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Alice Glendenning.”
“One moment, please.”
She waits.
“Hi, Alice,” a man’s voice says.
“Hello, Andy, how are you?”
“Good, thanks, and you?”
“Fine, Andy. Andy, I hate to keep bothering you about this…”
“It’s no bother at all,” Andy says. “I’m as annoyed as you are.”
“Have you heard anything from them?”
“They’re still stalling.”
“It’s been eight months now,” she says. “What proof do they need?”
“A certificate of death, they say. Which is absurd in this case. The man drowned at sea, his remains were never… forgive me, Alice,” he says.
“That’s all right.”
“But the facts…”
She knows the facts. Eddie took the sloop out for a moonlight sail. It was a small boat, the waters on the Gulf were very high that night. There was no one aboard when the tanker came across her the next morning, still under sail. Eddie had either fallen overboard or been washed overboard. Those were the facts.
“Garland has no right to withhold payment,” Andy says.
“But they are.”
“Yes, because there’s a lot of money involved here. And because they’re in trouble financially, this goddamn administration. With the double indemnity clause, the death benefit comes to two… by the way, no one at Garland is claiming that drowning at sea doesn’t qualify as an accident.”
“Well, they’d be foolish to do that.”
“They’re foolish to try wriggling out of this in the first place. Other insurance companies are paying the same sorts of claims, you know. It’s not as if nothing like this has ever happened before, Alice…”
“I know.”
“Some are taking more time than others, but they are honoring their obligations. Quite frankly, Garland’s position is contemptible.”
“So what do we do, Andy?”
“I’d like to give them till the end of the month. If they don’t settle by then, we’ll have to bring suit.”
“The end of the month,” Alice says.
“Yes. I’ll call them again on June first. Does that sound okay to you?”
“I suppose.”
“Alice?”
“Yes?”
“We’ll get the money, I promise you.”
“I hope so.”
“I promise.”
“Okay, Andy, thank you. We’ll talk soon.”
“I’ll let you know the moment I hear anything.”
“Thanks, Andy.”
“Talk to you later,” he says, and hangs up.
She holds the receiver in her hand for a moment, and then puts it back on the cradle, and suddenly she is weeping. She yanks a tissue from the box on her desk, blows her nose, and dries her eyes.
Well, she thinks, the first day of June is less than three weeks away, and I’ve certainly got enough in the bank to last me till then. But I don’t know what to do after June first, because by my calculation the account will be getting very low by that time. I suppose I can always get a job waitressing, she thinks, but that would mean having to pay Rosie even more than I’m paying her now. But at least I’ll have a steady salary and tips, and I wouldn’t have to count on commissions. So far, there has been what one might call a dearth of commissions. So far, the commissions have totaled zero, nada, zilch.
She picks up the phone again, dials her home number, and waits. Rosie Garrity picks up on the third ring.
“Glendenning residence,” she says.
“Rosie, hi, it’s me.”
“Hello, Mrs. Glendenning, how are you?”
“Fine, thanks. Everything okay there?”
“Yes, fine. What time is it, anyway?”
“A quarter to one.”
“Good. I want to bake a pie before the kids get home.”
Rosie comes in at noon every weekday, in time to clean the house and put it in order before the children get home at two-thirty, three o’clock, depending on traffic. By the time Alice gets home at five, Rosie has everything ready to put up for dinner. Rosie works full-time on Saturdays and Sundays, a broker’s busiest days.
“Did you see the chicken I left in the fridge?” Alice asks.
“Yes. Will you be wanting the spinach, too?”
“Please. And if you could get some potatoes ready for browning.”
“Sounds good. Can you stop for some ice cream on the way home? Go good with the pie.”
“What kind of pie?”
“Blueberry.” “Yum. I’ll pick some up.” “See you later.”
“Bye.”
It is almost one o’clock.
She decides to go to lunch.
Grosse Bec is a man-made island that serves as a luxurious stepping-stone between the mainland and Willard Key. If Cape October can claim a Gold Coast shopping area, the so-called Ring on Grosse Bec is it. The rest of the town is all malls. Alice’s office is on Mapes Avenue, just off the circle that serves as Grosse Bec’s center.
She is just crossing Founders Boulevard, familiarly called Flounders Boulevard by the natives, when she hears a horn blowing, and then the squeal of brakes, and then a woman’s voice shouting, “Oh God!” She whirls in time to see the red fender of a car not six inches from her left hip. She tries to spin away again, too late, and then thrusts both hands at the fender in desperation, as if trying to push it off her, away from her. Bracing herself for sudden impact, she feels the bone-jarring shock of metal against flesh, and is suddenly hurtling backward off her feet, landing some three feet away from the car’s right front wheel. She feels agonizing pain in her left leg, tries to twist away from the pain, and then does in fact twist away from the car itself, as if it were still a menace.
“Oh God, are you all right?”
The woman is crouched beside her now. Alice looks up into an elegant face, long blonde hair trailing on either side of it, blue eyes almost brimming with tears.
“Are you okay?” the woman asks.
“No,” Alice says.
The woman’s looming face vanishes. Alice hears a car door opening. Then some clicking and beeping sounds, and then the woman’s voice again.
“Hello,” she says, “there’s been an accident.”
She is talking into a cell phone.
“Can you send an ambulance, please?”
The ambulance gets there some five minutes later.
The police still haven’t arrived by the time the paramedics load Alice and drive off with her.
The emergency room doctor at October Memorial tells Alice she’s broken her left ankle. He tells her he will put her foot in a so-called cuff cast, which will look like an oversized white ski boot. He assures her she will still be able to drive because all she needs for the accelerator and brake pedals is her right foot. He tells her walking will be awkward and cumbersome, but he doesn’t think she’ll need crutches. He is smiling as he tells her all this. He seems to think she is very lucky.
It takes an hour and twenty minutes for them to clean the wound, and dress it, and put her foot and ankle in the cast. It is almost three o’clock when she limps out of the emergency room. Cumbersome and awkward is right.
The woman who knocked her down is waiting there for her.
“I’m Jennifer Redding,” she says, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
Alice guesses she is a good ten years younger than she herself, twenty-four or -five, in there, a willowy blonde wearing tight white bell-bottom pants with a thirteen-button flap like sailors used to wear, or maybe still did; Alice hasn’t dated a sailor since she was nineteen. The pants are riding low on Jennifer’s hips, a short pink cotton sweater riding high. In combination, they expose a good four inches of firm flesh and a tight little belly button as well.
“Why do you need that?”
“Well, there’s been an accident…”
“There must be a card in my wallet someplace.”
“Didn’t the cops ask you for it?”
“What cops?”
“At the scene.”
“There weren’t any cops.”
“Didn’t you call the police?”
“No. Was I supposed to?”
Alice suddenly realizes she is talking to a ditz.
“Didn’t anyone call the cops?”
“What for? The ambulance came, you were already gone.”
“I hate to break this to you,” Alice says, “but if you drive away from the scene of an accident, it becomes a hit-and-run. If I were you...”
“But I wasn’t running from anything. I drove straight here to the hospital. To see how you were.”
“The police may look at that differently. Get on your cell phone again, dial 911, and tell them—”
“Is it broken?” Jennifer asks, looking down at the cast.
“Yes, it’s broken.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t have come around that corner so fast. There’s a stop sign there. You should have at least slowed down.”
“I did. But you walked right into the car.”
“I what?”
“You seemed to be in some kind of a fog.”
“Is that what you’re going to tell the cops? That I was in some kind of a fog?”
“I’m not going to tell the cops anything.”
“Well, I am,” Alice says.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve had experience with insurance companies, thanks. And there are going to be hospital bills, and I want to go on record about what happened here. Especially if you’re going to claim I was in a fog and walked into your car.”
“I even blew my horn at you. You just kept walking.”
“Jennifer, it was nice of you to come here, really, but I am going to report this to the police. You’d be smart to call them first. Otherwise you might find yourself facing criminal charges.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” Jennifer says. “Have you got a ride home?”
“No, but I’ll call my office. My car’s—”
“I’d be happy to give you a ride.”
Alice looks at her.
“My car’s at the office,” she says. “On Mapes Avenue. If you can take me there…”
“Oh sure,” Jennifer says, and grins like a kid with a lollipop.
She doesn’t get back to her house on the mainland until almost four that afternoon. She has extracted from Jennifer the promise that she will call the police, but she is eager to call them herself as well. She knows all about claims. She has filed enough insurance claims since Eddie drowned.
North Oleander Street resembles a jungle through which a narrow asphalt road has been laid and left to deteriorate. A sign at the street’s opening reads DEAD END, appropriate in that North Oleander runs for two blocks before it becomes an oval that turns the street back upon itself in the opposite direction. Lining these two short blocks are twelve shingled houses with the sort of glass- louvered windows you could find all over Cape October in the good old days before it became a tourist destination for folks from the Middle West and Canada. The houses here are virtually hidden from view by a dense growth of dusty cabbage palm and palmetto, red bougainvillea, purple bougainvillea, white bougainvillea growing in dense profusion, sloppy pepper trees, pink oleander, golden allamanda, trailing lavender lantana, rust-colored shrimp plants, yellow hibiscus, pink hibiscus, red hibiscus, eponymous bottlebrush trees with long red flowers—and here and there, the one true floral splendor of Cape October, the bird-of-paradise with its spectacular orange and bluish-purple crest.
Rosie Garrity greets her at the front door.
Round-faced and stout, in her fifties, wearing a flowered house-dress and a white blouse, she glances down at Alice’s foot, shakes her head, and says, “What happened to you?”
“I got run over,” Alice says.
“Is it broken?”
“The ankle, yes. Where are the kids?”
“I thought maybe you’d picked them up.”
“What do you mean?”
“They weren’t on the bus.”
“Oh dear,” Alice says. “Was there a mix-up again?”
She limps into the kitchen, takes the phone from its wall bracket over the pass-through counter, and dials the school’s number by heart. Someone in the administrative office picks up on the third ring.
“Pratt Elementary,” she says.
Unless a kid is lucky enough to get into Cape October’s exclusive public elementary school “for the gifted,” officially called Pratt by the school board but snidely referred to as “Brat” by the parents of children who have not passed the stringent entrance exams; or unless a kid is rich enough to afford one of the area’s two private preparatory schools—St. Mark’s in Cape October itself, and the Headley Academy in nearby Manakawa—then the elementary school educational choices are limited to three schools, and the selection is further limited by that part of the city in which the student happens to live. Jamie has not spoken a word since his father drowned, but he and Ashley are bright as hell, and after the family moved down here both kids passed Pratt’s entrance exams with ease.
“Hi,” Alice says, “this is Mrs. Glendenning. Did my kids get on the wrong bus again?”
“Oh golly, I hope not. Which bus were they supposed to be on?”
“Harry Nelson’s.”
“Let me see if I can reach him.”
There is a silence on the line. Rosie raises an inquisitive eyebrow. Alice shrugs. She waits. The voice comes back on the line again.
“Mrs. Glendenning?”
“Yes?”
“Harry says they didn’t board his bus. He thought you might’ve picked them up.”
“No, I didn’t. Can you find out which bus they did board?”
“It might take some time to reach all of the other drivers. I got lucky with Harry.”
“Last time, they called me from Becky Feldman’s house. They got off there when they realized they were on the wrong bus. Would you know which route that might be?”
“I can check. Why don’t you call the Feldmans meanwhile? I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks,” Alice says, and puts the phone back on its hook, and then opens the Cape October directory and looks under the F’s for Feldman. She thinks Becky’s father’s name is Stephen, yes, there it is, Stephen Feldman on Adler Road. She dials the number, and waits while it rings once, twice, three times…
“Hello?”
“Susan?”
She can hear children’s voices in the background.
“Yes?”
“Hi, this is Alice Glendenning.”
“Oh, hi, how are you?”
“I don’t suppose my kids are there again, are they?”
“No, they’re not,” Susan says. “Did you misplace them again?”
“It would seem so. I don’t suppose I could talk to Becky, could I?”
“Just a second.”
She hears Susan calling her daughter to the phone, hears Becky approaching, hears her picking up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Becky, this is Ashley’s mom.”
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Glendenning.”
“Did you happen to see Ashley and Jamie after school today?”
“No, I din’t,” Becky says.
“Getting on one of the buses maybe?”
“No, I din’t.”
“Okay, thanks a lot.”
“Did you want to talk to my mom again?”
“No, that’s okay, thanks, Becky, just tell her bye.”
“Okay,” Becky says, and hangs up.
Alice replaces the phone on the wall hook. It rings almost instantly. She picks up.
&
nbsp; “Hello?”
“Mrs. Glendenning?”
“Yes?”
“This is Phoebe Mears at Pratt?”
“Yes, Phoebe.”
“I checked with the loading area guard. Man named Luke Farraday. He knows both your kids, says somebody picked them up after school.”
“What do you mean, somebody picked them up?”
“Around two-thirty, yes, ma’am.”
“Well… who? Who picked them up?”
“Woman driving a blue car, Luke said.”
“Picked up my kids?” Alice says.
“Woman in a blue car, yes, ma’am.”
“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?”