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her tongue on the next thought: Well, they’re not happy now, and neither are we.
    “They’ve been under a lot of pressure lately,” Alice said. “Their landlord’s been trying to evict them and they’ve been fighting it.”
    “Lease?” Giometti’s pen hovered above the pad.
    “It expired, but they wanted to renew,” Alice explained. “Their apartment’s rent-stabilized, so they had the right to renew. Their landlord’s Metro Properties.” She watched as Giometti wrote it down, feeling some satisfaction at having informed the authorities of the offense. “I’m getting evicted too,” she blurted out, regretting it the instant Maggie’s eyes rolled to the ceiling.
    “Let’s not get off the point, darling,” Maggie said.
    “Do you live in the same building as Lauren?” Frannie asked Alice.
    “No, I live in a two-family house on President Street. Lauren lives in an eight-unit building on Union.”
    “It’s a coincidence,” Maggie clarified to the detectives, in case they hadn’t figured it out themselves. “One has nothing to do with the other. Lauren’s problem is institutional, so to speak, whereas Alice has the misfortune of occupying the space of someone who wishes to move into his own house.”
    Maggie’s commandeering of the issue grated. “The thing is” — Alice tried to clarify a thought that had barely congealed in her mind — “I’m six months pregnant and I got my Thirty Day Notice yesterday. Lauren was six months pregnant when she got her Thirty Day Notice almost three months ago. Doesn’t that have to mean something?”
    “Maybe,” Frannie said. “Or maybe not. It’s kind of stroller city around here. And we’ve been seeing a lot of forcible evictions. Mostly legal, by the way. No one’s ever happy about it.”
    “It’s called gentrification.” Maggie reached over to smooth a wrinkle out of Alice’s sleeve. “That’s really all I’ve been trying to say. It’s why Blue Shoes can exist. There is a price for everything, is there not?”
    Neither Alice nor the detectives tried to answer Maggie’s rhetorical question. Of course there was a price for everything. But what exactly was the commodity at issue? Shoes? Real estate? A woman’s life?
    “What’s Lauren’s due date?” Frannie changed the subject, to Alice’s relief.
    “September fifteenth,” Alice answered. “But Austin was a week early and she thought she might deliver early the second time too.”
    “Why?”
    “Just a hunch, I guess,” Alice said. “Bodies follow patterns — you know, habits — in childbirth just like everything else.”
    “Does she know if she’s having a boy or a girl?” Frannie asked.
    “No,” Maggie answered quickly.
    Alice was caught off guard by the lie. She leaned forwardto speak, but changed her mind and sat back. She didn’t want to bluntly contradict Maggie. But why, she wondered, had Maggie told them that?
    There were more questions and more answers until Lauren’s life had been outlined and colored in. At the end, Alice and Maggie were given business cards for both detectives.
    “Call us with anything you think of,” Frannie said.
    “Anything at all could be important,” Giometti added.
    “Don’t hesitate, okay?” Frannie reached out to squeeze Alice’s hand, then Maggie’s, offering both a supportive smile. Alice never would have imagined a police detective to be so friendly, but then she had never known one.
    “Thank you so much,” Alice said. “We’ll help in any way we can.” Alice kept her gaze from twitching toward Maggie, whose secretive withholding of Ivy was resonating through every word they spoke. She wondered if the detectives could feel it, smell it, somehow intuit the lie. It didn’t seem like it, though, by the gracious, un-freighted tone of their good-byes.
    “We’ll be in touch,” Frannie said. Giometti leaned forward to shake both their hands. They walked together across the store, this time not even glancing at the shoes.