Alice in Jeopardy

by Ed McBain

  “What’s my husband got to do with this woman?” Carol asks.

  “He called Calusa Springs to ask about her maybe renting there.”

  “That’s not likely,” Carol says, shaking her head. “Rafe’s on the road to Atlanta. In fact, he’s probably home by now.”

  “Maybe so,” Sally says, and turns to Sloate. She is all efficiency now, not a wasted motion, not a wasted word. “You and Marcia might want to go back to your office, too, Wilbur.”

  “What for?” Sloate asks.

  “Help us find that number Clara Washington called from in the middle of March. From someplace in New Orleans to Barker Realty in Calusa Springs. Knowing how cooperative…”

  She lands heavily on the word, almost sneering, almost spitting it out.

  “…the phone company can be…”

  Stressing that word, too.

  “…maybe we should all try our luck.”

  “What’s happening?” Alice asks. “Can you please tell me?”

  “Will you be okay here alone?” Sally asks.

  “She won’t be alone,” Carol says pointedly.

  “Here’s where you can reach me if you need me,” Sally says, and hands Alice a card with the FBI seal on it. Not two minutes later, she is out the door.

  “I need a road map,” Carol says, and goes out to the Explorer.

  “Where’s Calusa Springs?” she asks Alice.

  The map is open on the kitchen table.

  “About a half hour south of here,” Alice says. “On U.S. 41.”

  “Why would Rafe be phoning a town south of here, if he was heading north to Atlanta?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice says.

  She is wondering what Sally Ballew plans to do with a New Orleans phone number, if ever the phone company gives her one. She is wondering how a New Orleans phone number will help them locate Clara Washington—if that’s her name—and the blonde woman who together have stolen her children.

  “Why would he call a real estate agent at all?” Carol wonders out loud. “And what did she mean about him using the name Ralph Masters?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice says, and suddenly remembers what Clara Washington said to her on the phone Thursday night.

  If you don’t come to that gas station alone, your children will die. If you don’t have the money with you, your children will die. If anyone tries to detain me, your children will die. If I’m not back where I’m supposed to be in half an hour, your children will die.

  “I don’t like that woman, do you?” Carol says.

  “I think she knows her job,” Alice says.

  If anyone tries to detain me, your children will die.

  “She’s very bossy, I think,” Carol says.

  If I’m not back where I’m supposed to be in half an hour, your children will die.

  Half an hour, Alice thinks.

  They’re half an hour from the Shell station on Lewiston and 41!

  “Let me see that map,” she says, and grabs it from her sister, and locates the scale of miles, and then roughly measures thirty miles north, east, south, and west from the gas station.

  Port Lawrence to the north.

  The wildlife refuge to the east.

  Compton Acres to the southeast on route 884.

  Calusa Springs due south.

  “What are you doing?” Carol asks. “What is it?”

  And to the west, the keys and the Gulf of—

  “They’re on a boat!” Alice says.

  She finds the card Sally Ballew left, goes to the phone at once, and dials the number.

  “FBI,” a male voice says.

  “Sally Ballew, please.”

  “Moment, please.”

  She waits. She can hear ringing on the other end.

  “Special Agent Warren Davis,” another man says.

  “Sally Ballew, please.”

  “Sorry, she’s not here just now,” he says. “Anything I can help you with?”

  “Yes, can you please give her a message when she comes in? Tell her Alice Glendenning called…”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “…with something I don’t think she’s considered yet.”

  “Yes, ma’am, and what’s that?”

  “I think my children may be on a boat. We’ve been checking land accommodations, but they may be on a boat someplace. Miss Ballew may want to alert the Coast Guard, or—”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell her.”

  “Thank you,” Alice says.

  There is a click on the line. She has the feeling she’s just been brushed off. She replaces the receiver on its cradle, and is staring at the phone in anger and disbelief when suddenly it rings.

  She picks up the receiver at once.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Mrs. Glendenning?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Rosie Garrity. Please don’t hang up, ma’am.”

  “What is it, Rosie?”

  “My husband, you know? George?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a waiter out on Siesta Key? In Sarasota? A restaurant called The Unicorn?”

  “Yes, Rosie, what about him?”

  “He was working last night when this man came in for dinner. A white man with a black woman.”

  “Yes?”

  “George thought he recognized him, so he went over to the table and introduced himself—”

  “Rosie, what is it you’re—?”

  “Do you remember that Saturday my car broke down and George had to drive me to work? And he met Mr. Glendenning going out to the mailbox for the newspaper?”

  Alice is suddenly listening very hard.

  “Well, George thought this man last night was your husband. Was Mr. Glendenning.”

  “Why… why would he think that, Rosie?”

  “Well, this man was the same height and build, and he had blue eyes, and blond hair.”

  “Even so, Rosie…”

  “Though now he’s wearing it much longer. To his shoulders, actually.”

  “What are you saying, Rosie?”

  The line goes silent.

  “Rosie? You said he’s wearing it much longer. What are you trying to tell me? Who’s wearing it much longer?”

  “God forgive me, your husband!” Rosie says. “Mr. Glendenning.”

  “Rosie, that’s imposs—”

  “I know, I know. Your husband drowned last year, how can I believe it was him sitting there in that restaurant?”

  Mom, I can’t believe it!

  The words her daughter shrieked into the phone.

  “But this man paid the bill with a credit card, and the last name on the card was Graham, but his first name was Edward…”

  Oh Jesus, Alice thinks.

  “…so I can’t help believing…”

  “Oh Jesus!” she says aloud.

  “Mrs. Glendenning?” Rosie says. “Please don’t fire me. I just had to tell you what I was thinking.”

  “You’re not fired, Rosie. Thank you. I have to go now.”

  “Mrs. Glendenning? Do you think it really was—?”

  Alice puts the receiver down on the cradle.

  Her heart is pounding.

  “What?” her sister asks.

  “Eddie’s alive,” she says.

  “What!”

  “He’s alive. He was out last night with that black woman, he’s alive!”

  “That can’t be.”

  “It is.”

  She goes into the bedroom and takes the .32-caliber pistol from her top dresser drawer.

  “Come on,” she tells her sister.

  13

  “He’s the one who has the kids,” Alice says. “Him and this black woman… whoever she is.”

  They are driving out to Lewiston Point. Alice is thinking that she doesn’t know who the woman is, and she doesn’t know who Edward Graham is, either. Edward Fulton Glendenning no longer exists. These people are both strangers to her.

  “He knows boats,” she
says. “He’d be comfortable on a boat. And they’d be less obvious on a boat than in a hotel or a motel. Besides, we took the kids there four years ago. They loved it. They’d feel safe and protected there.”

  “Where, Alice? Where are we going?”

  “Marina Blue. That’s what Ashley was trying to tell me on the phone. Not Maria, not Marie, but Marina Blue. Out on Crescent Island. Half an hour from the Shell station.”

  The women are silent for several moments.

  The Mercedes truck bounces along Lewiston Point Road, which in the past few minutes has gone from potholed asphalt to rutted dirt. Either side of the road is lined with thick mangroves. Beyond, they can hear the gentle lap of water. The sun is beginning to set. Nightfall comes quickly here on the Cape, especially near the water, where the sky turns from red to violet, to blue, and then black with a suddenness that can stop the heart.

  “That’s why the kids got in that car,” Carol says, nodding. “It wasn’t a stranger, it was their father.”

  Was, Alice thinks.

  Was their father.

  Who knows what he has become now?

  Eddie has paid the marina bill, refueled the boat, and brought it back to their dockside mooring. Christine knows that his plan is to get under way as soon as it’s dark. She knows nothing beyond that. When she comes topside, he is sitting at the helm, alone and silent, smoking a cigarette. He raises the flip-up bolster, making room for her on the upholstered companion seat. She sits beside him and takes his left hand. It is a warm evening, but his hand is cold to the touch.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  “Yes, fine. What are the kids doing?”

  “Watching television.”

  He nods.

  “When do we call Alice again?” she asks.

  “Well, there’s no hurry,” he says.

  “Because we should tell her where we’re leaving the kids, you know.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and nods, and takes a long drag on the cigarette.

  They are silent for several moments.

  Out on the water, a fish jumps.

  Then all is still again.

  “Are we going to just leave them here on the dock?”

  “No, that wasn’t my plan,” he says.

  “Because I thought we were getting under way…”

  “That’s right.”

  “…soon as it got dark.”

  “Right.”

  “Which is pretty soon, Eddie.”

  “I know it is.”

  “So where are we going to leave the kids?”

  “You see…” he says, and then stops, and shakes his head.

  She looks at him.

  “They saw me,” he says.

  He draws on the cigarette.

  “They know I’m alive,” he says.

  She is still looking at him.

  “We can’t turn them loose,” he says.

  “We can’t take them with us, either, Eddie. The police’ll be looking for them everywhere we—”

  “I know that.”

  “We have to let them go, Eddie.”

  “But we can’t,” he says.

  “Then what…?”

  He draws on the cigarette again.

  “We’ll move out in about five minutes,” he says, and looks at the luminous dial of his watch. “We’ll head straight out to the Gulf.”

  “I don’t understand. What about…?”

  He does not answer.

  He turns away from her penetrating gaze and tosses the cigarette overboard. Its glow arcs against the sudden blackness of the night and hits the water with a brief dying hiss.

  They get to the ferry landing just as the boat is about to leave. Alice pulls the truck into a parking space alongside a red Taurus. Carol jumps out and first begins waving and shouting at the lone dockhand who is already tossing lines aboard, and next at the pilothouse to let the captain know they’re here. Alice slams the door shut on the driver’s side. They both run for the dock.

  “Take it easy, you’ve got time,” the dockhand says.

  The ferry carries passengers only, no cars. There are perhaps half a dozen people aboard when the captain gives a final warning toot on his horn and begins backing away from the dock. He makes a wide circle, coming around, and then points the boat’s prow toward Crescent Island, some thousand yards across the inlet.

  Ten minutes later, the boat is docking on the island side.

  The night is balmy and still.

  Eddie has already started the engines.

  The Sundancer is idling at the dock.

  The two women come striding out of the darkness beyond, moving rapidly toward where he is crouched over the forward line. He does not recognize them until the dockside stanchion lights pick them up, and then he sees that it is Alice and her sister, Carol. He shakes his head and smiles because Alice looks so utterly ridiculous and helpless, her left foot in a cast, limping across the dock like a cripple. And then he sees the pistol in her hand, and the smile drops from his face. He loosens the line from its cleat and tosses it aboard. In the next instant, he leaps aboard himself, and reaches into a locker alongside the wheel.

  “Where are the kids?” Alice shouts.

  He is already behind the wheel.

  Alice does not raise the pistol in her own hand until she sees that what he’s taken from the locker is a gun.

  “Put it down!” he yells.

  The thirty-two is shaking violently in her fist.

  “Give me the children and leave,” Alice says. “You’re Edward Graham now, you can forget all this.”

  “But will you?” he says, and smiles thinly. “Will your sister? Will the kids?”

  The gun in his fist is a nine-millimeter Glock. It looks very large and very menacing, and it is pointed at her head.

  “You know the penalty for kidnapping in the state of Florida?” he asks.

  His tone is almost conversational. He could be giving a little talk on the wisdom of investing in growth stocks.

  “You can leave Florida,” she says. “Take your girlfriend and—”

  “My wife,” he corrects.

  “Your… ?”

  “Kidnapping is a life felony, Alice. If they ever catch up with us...”

  “No one will even try, Eddie. Just let the kids go!”

  “Well, no,” he says, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  And throws the engines into reverse.

  She hears a click in the dark.

  Is there a safety on the gun?

  Has he just thrown off a safety?

  She hears two simultaneous voices.

  “Don’t, Eddie!”

  “No, Daddy!”

  The first voice is the voice Alice has heard so many times before on the telephone, the voice of the woman she came face-to-face with outside the Shell station’s ladies’ room, the woman she now sees again, rushing up from below, holding out her hand beseechingly to Eddie. His wife, Alice thinks. His wife.

  The second voice is a voice Alice has not heard since the morning they learned that Eddie drowned out on the Gulf.

  The second voice belongs to her dear son, Jamie.

  “Don’t hurt Mommy!”

  His son’s voice has no effect on him. He still has the Glock in his right hand, pointed at Alice’s head. His left hand is still steady on the stainless steel wheel as he starts to maneuver the Sundancer away from the dock.

  This is the man who once matched her foot to a midnight blue slipper.

  This is the man she once loved with all her heart.

  She squeezes her eyes shut.

  Opens them again at once, and fires.

  Fires another time.

  And yet another.

  Blood spurts on his yellow windbreaker. She sees him crumpling over the wheel. The boat swerves back and bangs violently against the dock. She throws down the gun, and leaps onto the boat, and rushes to her son where he stands trembling just outside the slatted wooden doors leading below. The black woman whos
e name she still does not know says nothing. Her eyes are darting, calculating.

  “Mom?”

  Ashley comes from below, her eyes wide.

  She glances once at her father where he lies slumped and still over the stainless steel wheel smeared now with his blood. Then she, too, rushes into Alice’s arms.

  The black woman hesitates a moment longer, and then suddenly leaps ashore.

  “Gee, no,” Carol says, and points the pistol at her head.

  They have called all the real estate agents and condo rental offices they could find in the Yellow Pages, and have even visited one personally, but have not come up with any information on a blonde and a black woman having rented any kind of dwelling at any time during the past two months. Or at any time at all, for that matter.

  So there is nothing to do now but make love again.

  Rafe reflects afterward, as they both lie spent and damp on rumpled sheets in Jennifer’s bedroom, that there’s a certain time of day in Florida when a hush seems to come over the entire land. The traffic seems to come to a halt, the streets are all at once deserted, even the insects and the birds seem to fall suddenly still. Overhead, the ceiling fan rotates lazily, scattering dust motes climbing shafts of silvery moonlight. Lying on his back beside her, Rafe thinks that maybe it’s this way everywhere in the world after you’ve just made love to a beautiful passionate woman, maybe there’s just this, well, this sort of serenity that comes over you. A stillness that causes you to believe your heart has stopped, causes you to believe that maybe you’re even dead. And causes you to think.

  He knows he’s going to be leaving here soon.

  He knows he’s going to get out of this bed, and shower in this lady’s bedroom, put on his Jockey shorts and his jeans and his denim shirt, and his socks and loafers, and then either take a taxi or ask her to drive him to the truck stop where he’s parked the rig, knows he is going to walk out of this bedroom, and out of this house, and never see this woman again. Because no matter what Eminem has to say about opportunity knocking just once or whatever the words were, seize the moment, seize the music, he knows that maybe such dreams are okay for a talented kid on 8-Mile Road, but they’re just not there for people like Rafe who don’t know how to rhyme.

  Opportunity may have come knocking when he learned about all those phony bills out there someplace, and maybe it kept knocking and knocking when he found this beautiful passionate woman willing to chase the dream with him, but man, there is no way on earth he is going to find those two chicks sitting on that fake bread, no way in the world at all. He has tried to seize the moment and the music, but his hands have closed on nothing but thin air.