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Peter covered the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand. “She’s not saying anything specific, but she wants the scoop.” He took his hand away from the phone and spoke into it. “Luisa was in a relationship for a long time, but they broke up in the fall.”
I enjoyed listening to Peter gossip like this—it was a side of him I didn’t see often—and it was somehow comforting to know that a woman who looked like Abigail still needed reassurances before embarking on a new relationship. And now I also knew why Luisa had been trying to reach me. She probably wanted the lowdown on Abigail.
My phone rang again, and I consulted the caller ID. Sure enough, it was Luisa. I pressed a button to answer the call.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me, young lady?” I asked with mock severity.
“It’s about time,” said Luisa, her tone harried. “I’ve been trying to reach you for ages. It’s important.”
“Is it?” I asked, still teasing. It was rare for Luisa to be anything but perfectly composed, and I was savoring this unusual role reversal.
But I definitely wasn’t expecting what she said next.
“It’s Hilary. She’s disappeared.”
4
I t took a moment for Luisa’s words to sink in, but once they did, my response came easily.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said, which was true. We’d initially been alarmed on those freshman-year mornings when we’d found Hilary’s top bunk empty, but we soon grew accustomed to her showing up a day or two later with a satisfied look on her face, and a few days after that there would be yet another guy whose calls she wouldn’t take.
“This is serious, Rachel.”
“We are talking about Hilary, right?”
“I spoke to Ben. He said she left the party without him, but she’s still not back, and he hasn’t heard from her. I’m worried.”
“Well, we know she was ready to break up with Ben. Maybe this was her way of doing it. Tact has never exactly been one of her strengths, and she and Iggie looked as if they were really hitting it off last night, bizarre as that might seem.” Hilary was usually disciplined enough to make sure she was completely finished with one guy before she took up with another, but maybe she was getting less scrupulous about these matters now that we were over thirty. And while I’d thought she had been spending time with Iggie solely for the purposes of her story, perhaps he finally won her over. Stranger things had happened. Hilary had never cared much about money, but a billion dollars could go a long way in making the previously unthinkable thinkable.
“I know that—it was hard to miss them on the dance floor last night. But I tried her mobile, too, and it went right into voice mail, and you know she never lets anything stop her from taking a call, no matter where she is. And there’s something else. Do you know if she tried to reach you?”
“I didn’t see any calls or messages from her. Why?”
“This is what started me worrying in the first place. I have a strange text on my phone. It was sent shortly after midnight from a number I don’t recognize, one with a San Francisco area code. I tried to call the number back, but it only rings and rings before going into an automated voice mail.”
“So?” I still wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about. “It was probably just somebody’s mistake.”
“I don’t think it was a mistake, Rachel. The message says SOS.”
“Oh,” I said, the smile fading from my lips.
There are couples who have signals they use to communicate privately with each other in public venues. Fiddling with an earring could mean “I’m ready to leave” while adjusting a shirt cuff could be a warning to stay away from the salmon puffs. My friends and I developed a similar set of signals when we were in college, but SOS was the one we used most frequently. It was easy to form the letters in sign language with one hand by making a fist for the first S, opening the fist into a circle for the O, and then closing it again for the second S. This could be done discreetly, with your hand at your side or even, with enough practice, while holding a drink.
I’d found it to be an especially useful tool at social events when cornered by an ex-boyfriend or someone I would never want to be my boyfriend, ex or otherwise. I would give the signal, and soon one of my friends would arrive at my side, claiming an urgent need to speak to me privately. It might not have been terribly mature, but it was effective. Of course, usually Hilary had been the one doing the rescuing rather than requiring rescue; given her lack of adherence to social norms, she’d never had trouble extricating herself from uncomfortable situations without assistance. For her to use this signal at all was remarkable, and in the context of her unexplained absence, it was definitely cause for alarm.
“Did you check with Jane and Emma?” I asked. “Could one of them have sent it?”
“It would have been three in the morning on the East Coast, but I checked with them anyhow,” said Luisa. “And they didn’t know anything. So it had to be Hilary. Did you get anything similar?”
“Let me take a closer look at my messages,” I told Luisa. I put the call on hold and started scrolling through the log again.
“What’s wrong?” Peter asked. He’d ended his own call with Abigail and had picked up on my change in tone.
“I’m not sure yet,” I told him, studying the BlackBerry screen. There were the several missed calls from Luisa beginning around nine-thirty. Under those, with a time stamp of twelve-nineteen, was a text message from an unfamiliar number with a San Francisco area code. I clicked it open.
“SO” it read.
That was it. Just the S and the O. As if its sender had been interrupted before she’d had a chance to finish what she wanted to say.
And when Hilary had something to say, she didn’t leave it unsaid. At least, not by choice.
I flipped back to Luisa. “We’ll be right there,” I told her.
On the one hand, there had been some talk about mountain biking, so I was glad to have a valid reason to avoid yet another exercise-based outing. On the other hand, normal people didn’t have friends who suddenly went missing, potentially in the company of velvet-clad Internet tycoons. If anything, those were the sort of friends with whom an idiosyncratic person would surround herself.
“It’s no problem,” Peter assured me. “We can go biking later. We’ll just tell my parents we need to track Hilary down first.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell them about Hilary.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t want them to worry unnecessarily,” I said, which he seemed to accept, but mostly I didn’t want to confide in him my concerns about not fitting in with his family. After all, normal people don’t worry about not being normal.
I insisted we live up to my promise to do the dishes, so we hurriedly loaded the dishwasher before going out on the deck, where we found Susan doing the crossword puzzle and Charles reading a book in the watery sunlight that passed for summer in San Francisco. Spot, curled by Susan’s feet, thumped his tail. Peter made our excuses about mountain biking, saying we were sore after the run—which was entirely true in my case—and had decided to catch up with friends instead.
“Is it all right to take the car?” he asked. The simple question made me feel as if we were teenagers up to something illicit, but his parents readily agreed without extracting any promises about not drinking and driving or reminders about curfews. There was some discussion of which hybrid to take, since the Forrests were a two-hybrid family, but that was easily resolved.
Susan turned to me. “Rachel, I think the Tiffany’s in Union Square is open this afternoon. It might be fun to swing by later and get started on registering you two. What do you think?”
I thought Peter’s family specifically and normal people more generally had peculiar ideas about what constituted fun. While I knew that brides-to-be were supposed to squeal with excitement over china patterns and place settings, I personally didn’t see the appeal, nor had I ever been much of a squealer. However, that didn’t seem to be the appropriate response. “Tiffany’s does sound like fun,” I said. Peter gave me yet another perplexed look, but I ignored him.
“How about three o’clock? Will that give you enough time with your friends?” Susan asked.
I certainly hoped so. If anyone was capable of getting herself into a deep fix, I was all too aware it was Hilary—she was uniquely skilled in this area. If we weren’t able to find her within a few hours, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of trouble she might have encountered.
“That should give us plenty of time,” I told Susan, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “We’ll see you then.”
“Are you sure?” asked Peter as he followed me out the door.
“About registering at Tiffany’s or about finding Hilary by three o’clock?”
“Either. Both.”
“As sure as I’ll ever be,” I said. Which turned out to be entirely true.
5
A s Peter steered the Prius up one hill and down another, I tried the number from the text message, letting it ring well after most phones go into voice mail or disconnect. Eventually an automated voice came on, inviting me without enthusiasm to leave a message. I explained I was looking for Hilary and left my own number. Then I replied to the text message for good measure, sending along the same information.
Traffic was light, and we even found parking on Market Street right across from the entrance to the Four Seasons hotel. We took one elevator up to the main lobby and then another elevator up to Luisa’s suite. She believed in traveling in style, and she had the wherewithal to support it, which worked out nicely for her. Ben and Hilary were staying in a more modest room at the same hotel, which would have been a stretch for a government employee and a journalist, but Hilary’s magazine assignment was covering her travel expenses.
Luisa greeted us at the door, and I remembered belatedly that she wasn’t even supposed to be here still. She’d mentioned the day before that her plane home was leaving at an “ungodly” hour, so she should have been gone long before she’d called to alert us to Hilary’s missing status. “Didn’t you have an early flight this morning?” I asked.
The question had barely left my mouth when something remarkable occurred: Luisa blushed.
I first met Luisa when we were seventeen, and in the years since, I’d seen her smile on occasion, look impassive often, raise one eyebrow frequently and cry just once. But I’d never seen her blush.
“Are you blushing?” I blurted out.
The flush tingeing her olive skin deepened. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous. You’re bright red. And you didn’t answer my question. Why are you still here?” With Hilary gone, I seemed to have stepped into her role as the blunt one. It might also have had something to do with the increasingly unmistakable onset of caffeine withdrawal.
“I overslept and missed my flight,” she said.
Not only did Luisa not blush, she didn’t oversleep. Moreover, she hated feeling rushed in airports, so she insisted on arriving no less than two hours before the designated departure time of any flight she took. But she ignored my expression of disbelief and led us into the living room where Ben was already waiting.
Luisa may or may not have overslept, but Ben looked as if he hadn’t slept at all, and based on the way he’d been hitting the Scotch at the party, he probably was hungover, too. He gratefully accepted a bottle of ginger ale from the mini-bar, and Peter took Luisa up on her offer of a juice. She passed me a Diet Coke without asking, and, exercising tremendous self-control, I passed it back. “No thanks,” I said, although my hand tingled where it had briefly touched the coolness of the can.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just not in the mood.”
“You’re never not in the mood.”
“Well, you never oversleep,” I snapped. Withdrawal was definitely setting in, and not only was it making me blunt, it was making me cranky to boot.
“I dared Rachel to go forty-eight hours without caffeine,” Peter explained to Luisa.
“Which hour is it now?” she asked.
“We’re in hour three,” Peter said. “Only forty-five more to go.”
“It’s going to be a long forty-five hours,” she said.
“I’m just beginning to appreciate that,” he said. They shared a hearty chuckle.
“Could everyone stop talking about me like I’m not here and could we instead talk about the reason we’re here, which is that Hilary’s not?” I said. It was unclear to me why they should find my pain so hilarious.
“A very long forty-five hours,” said Luisa to Peter. But she took a seat on the sofa next to Ben, and Peter and I sat down across from them.
We all turned to Ben. After all, not only was he Hilary’s boyfriend, however new and ill-fated that particular relationship might be, he was an FBI agent. We were fortunate to have a trained professional with us at a time like this—surely he would know exactly what to do. We could just sit back and follow his expert direction.
But Ben sat staring into space, absent-mindedly peeling the label from his bottle of ginger ale and apparently unaware of our eyes on him, much less our expectations. If we were waiting for expert direction from him, it looked as if we’d be in for quite a wait.
“So,” I said, since Ben didn’t, “when did everybody last see Hilary?” I wasn’t an FBI agent, but I did watch a lot of crime shows on TV, and this seemed like a reasonable place to start.
“You and I saw her at the buffet around ten with Iggie,” said Peter. “And then they sat down at a table with Caro and Alex. But I don’t remember running into her after that.”
“The last time I saw her was a little after eleven,” said Luisa. “She was outside, dancing with Iggie.”
“So we have her in the tent with Iggie at eleven. What about you, Ben? When did you last see her?” I asked.
“Huh?” he said, dragging his attention away from his soda label as I repeated the question. “Oh. At about the same time, I guess, dancing with Iggie. I went back inside, and then I looked for her around midnight, when the party was starting to wind down. I couldn’t find her anywhere, and she didn’t answer her cell. That’s when I gave up and assumed she’d left without me.”
It seemed undiplomatic to comment on that. “Which means she probably left between eleven, when she was last seen, and midnight, when you couldn’t find her,” I said instead. Ben nodded.
“When did you start thinking something might be wrong?” Peter asked him in a gentle tone. This had to be awkward for Ben—nobody could enjoy being ditched at a party by his significant other.
He ripped off a long strip of the label. “This morning, when Luisa called.”
“You mean, you couldn’t find her at the party, then she didn’t show up all night, and you didn’t think anything was wrong?” I asked. I tried to sound gentle, too, but withdrawal was wreaking havoc with my already limited interpersonal skills.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We broke up. At the party. Around ten-thirty.”
We all tried to look surprised, but only Peter really succeeded. Luisa and I were too familiar with Hilary’s history with the opposite sex to imagine much time would elapse before she acted on the feelings she’d expressed to us earlier in the evening. This breakup had been speedy even by Hilary’s standards, but it was hardly unexpected, and it certainly explained Ben’s passivity this morning.
“So that’s why you didn’t get too concerned when you couldn’t find her,” Peter said.
“Or when I didn’t see her here. I ended up hitting a bar after the party.” Ben gave a sheepish smile. “Drowning my sorrows, I guess. To be honest, I was pretty drunk when I got back, and I probably passed out more than went to sleep. And when I woke up and saw she still hadn’t shown up or even left a message, I was pretty pissed.”
“But then I called,” prompted Luisa.
“I was on my way out the door to head to the airport, but you were so worried that I figured I’d take a later flight and stick around to see how I could help. I know Hilary has the room booked for a few more days.”
That was nice of him, I thought. If I were in his shoes, I would have been on the first plane back to the East Coast. “Do you know if she stopped by the room at all?” I asked. “Before you got back, or maybe while you were sleeping? Are her things still there?”
“I took a look around after I spoke to Luisa, and her clothes and toiletries and stuff are where they were when we left for the party. But I did notice that her laptop was missing. And her notebook, too.”
“Her laptop and her notebook are both gone?” said Luisa.
“Uh-huh.”
Luisa and I exchanged a glance, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. This new piece of information went a long way to clearing everything up, but I wished Ben had mentioned it sooner. It would have saved us a lot of worrying.
“Iggie must have promised Hilary an interview,” I said, telling Ben and Peter about her comments the previous night. “We know she was hoping for an exclusive for her article. She probably talked him into it at the party, and then they would have left together and stopped here at the hotel to pick up her gear.”
Putting this together was a relief for more reasons than one: if Hilary was with Iggie, then she was unlikely to be in any real danger, and if she’d taken her laptop and notebook with her, then her interest in him had remained professional rather than personal. The notion of a Hilary-Iggie hookup was a hard one to stomach, a billion dollars notwithstanding.
“She likely went with Iggie of her own accord, but then perhaps he wouldn’t let her come back, and that’s when she texted us,” added Luisa. “She’s probably stranded at his house or wherever he took her. It wouldn’t be easy to overpower her physically, but he might have managed to lock her in somewhere.”
“Why wouldn’t Iggie have let her come back?” asked Peter. “Would he really do something like that?”
Luisa shrugged, something else I’d seen her do far more than I’d seen her blush. “When Iggie’s focused on a goal, he tends to forget about little things like whether or not his actions conform to generally accepted behavior. And remember, he has had a crush on Hilary for well over a decade. Maybe this is his way of acting on it?”
“Or it could be about her article,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t like whatever angle she was taking on Igobe, and he decided he would hang on to her until he could persuade her to change it. It seems extreme, but Iggie always did have a complicated relationship with reality.”
“At least if she’s with Iggie we don’t have much to worry about,” said Luisa. “I know Hilary wouldn’t have sent the SOS unless she needed our help, but I can’t picture Iggie doing anything particularly dangerous or evil. Can any of you?”
