The Hunt
Jennifer Sturman
Meeting the in-laws was the least of her problems…There's nothing like being the guest of honor at an engagement party to remind a person she has commitment issues, but Rachel Benjamin has finally put her neuroses behind her. A weekend with her fiance, Peter, and his parents will put her skills to the test, but she's confident they'll never guess how new she is to normal relationships. Then Rachel receives a cryptic message: her friend Hilary is missing. Hilary was last seen in the company of Igor "Iggie" Behrenz, a budding Internet tycoon with strange fashion sense and even stranger secrets–secrets Hilary had been threatening to expose. Someone is orchestrating an elaborate scavenger hunt across San Francisco, dangling Hilary as the prize. Now Rachel has to track down her friend, which would be enough of a challenge if she weren't already busy proving how normal she is to her future in-laws. And when Rachel stumbles upon secrets all Peter's own, she wonders if maybe she's declared victory over her neuroses too soon.
The Hunt
Jennifer Sturman
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to Rulonna Neilson.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of friends were extremely generous with their time and their knowledge of the Bay Area as I was writing this book. These kind people include Rita and Joe Brogley, Maria and Jan Leeman, Jasper Malcolmson, Stefanie Reich Offit, Elizabeth Porteous, Raj Seshadri and Rick Ostrander, and Marybeth Wittekind Sharpe and Amory Sharpe. Many thanks to Michele Jaffe, who again served as an early reader, and to Carrie Weber for her ace translation skills. And, as always, thanks to my agent, Laura Langlie, Margaret Marbury and the team at Red Dress Ink, and my family for their continued encouragement and support.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
1
“T hey’re so normal.
Luisa lit her cigarette and snapped the lighter shut. “And how is that a problem?”
“I didn’t say it was a problem. But they named their dog Spot.”
“The dog does have a spot, Rachel.”
It was true. The dog in question had a spot. And as dogs went, Spot was okay—not too yappy or slobbery. In fact, he was a completely normal dog, exactly right for his owners, Charles and Susan Forrest, my future in-laws and the source of all this rampant normalcy.
The phrase my future in-laws still felt unreal to me, even though Peter and I had been engaged for several months now and in spite of the very real engagement party we were currently attending at the Forrests’ San Francisco home. Or, to be more accurate, the engagement party from which Luisa and I were sneaking a break. She had wanted a cigarette, and the sight of my family mingling with Peter’s family, especially our grandmothers with their heads close together, undoubtedly hammering out just how many children we should have, was enough to make a little second-hand smoke seem nearly appealing.
We’d slipped out of the house through the side door and walked the short distance to the top of the Lyon Street steps, which led down from Pacific Heights to the Palace of Fine Arts and the Bay beyond. The steps were the local hot spot for underage drinkers on a Saturday night. Clumps of kids gathered on the landings, discreetly sipping from beer cans and plastic cups and apparently unconcerned that even in June the air was damp and chill.
I heard the staccato of high-heeled feet approaching, and one of the kids looked in our direction and whistled, a long, piercing wolf whistle. Since Luisa and I had already been there for several minutes, I knew the sound had nothing to do with us. I turned, and sure enough, Hilary was heading our way. Six-foot tall women with platinum hair and a proclivity for small clothing generate a disproportionate amount of whistling, especially in a city where most people’s wardrobes are comprised largely of fleece.
Fortunately, Hilary enjoyed the occasional objectification. She flashed the whistler a smile and pulled herself up to sit on the stone railing. “I thought I’d find you two out here.”
“Luisa needed a cigarette,” I explained.
“And you’re freaking out,” Hilary said.
“Not at all,” I said, which was almost the truth. There was nothing quite like being the guest of honor at an engagement party to remind a person she had commitment issues, not to mention several other relationship-related neuroses, but I was proud of the progress I’d made in developing emotional maturity. Between the party and the quality time Peter and I had planned with his parents over the next few days, my skills were definitely being put to the test, but I was confident the Forrests would never guess just how new I was to this whole normalcy thing.
“I don’t know how you people do it,” said Hilary.
“‘You people?’” asked Luisa, raising one dark, well-shaped eyebrow.
“Do what?” I asked, wishing I had Luisa’s one-eyebrow-raising skill.
“Long-term relationships,” said Hilary. “You and Peter. Jane and Sean. Emma and Matthew. You, too, Luisa. At least, until Isobel dumped you.” Luisa, Hilary and I had been roommates in college, which was starting to become longer ago than I cared to admit. Jane and Emma completed the group, but they were both on the East Coast this weekend: Jane home in Boston with her newborn son and Emma at the Southampton wedding of her boyfriend’s sister.
“Isobel did not dump me,” said Luisa evenly. She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “After careful consideration, we mutually decided our relationship had run its course.”
“And before Peter, my longest relationship only lasted three months,” I pointed out. Technically, it had been closer to two and a half months, but it seemed fair to round up for the purpose of this discussion.
“Ben and I haven’t been together anything like three months, but it’s felt stale ever since I got over the thrill of being with a guy who carries a gun. And that was during the second week,” said Hilary. Her boyfriend of the moment, Ben Lattimer, was an agent with the FBI’s financial fraud unit, and he did carry a gun, but it didn’t seem to be providing much in the way of defense against Hilary. Her blunt manner masked a deep affection and fierce loyalty where her friends were concerned, but her attention span could be short when it came to romance, and it sounded as if Ben was on his way out, whether he was aware of it or not.
“Have you considered giving a guy a chance for once?” I asked.
“I have given him a chance, and it was fine for a while, but now he’s getting all mushy on me. You know how I feel about that.”
We did know, having listened to more than a few discourses from her over the years on how love, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and a nonsurgical cure for cellulite, was a nice idea but equally lacking any basis in reality. “Are you sure? Ben’s sweet, and he seems mentally stable, and he’s really good-looking,” I said.
“He’s taller than you, too,” said Luisa. “How often does that happen?”
“And how often do all of those qualities come together in one man?” I added.
“How will I ever find out if I’m stuck with him for the rest of my life?” Hilary countered, swinging one long leg with impatience.
“Do you want me to talk to Ben?” I offered. It would be a good opportunity to exercise my emotional maturity. “I can help you work things out.”
Hilary made a noise that was somewhere between a snort, a laugh and a sigh.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said, disappointed.
“Speaking of good-looking,” said Luisa, “what’s the story on Peter’s colleague, Abigail?”
Abigail lived here in San Francisco, where she ran business development for the West Coast office of Peter’s company. She’d started working for him the previous fall, and it had been a bit unnerving at first to realize he was spending most of his waking hours with someone who was both brilliant and looked like a better version of Christie Turlington, but fortunately her tastes ran to women rather than men. “I think she’s single,” I told Luisa. “Peter says she’s sort of guarded about her personal life. Not shy so much as cautious.”
“I wonder why that is,” said Luisa. “You’d think somebody that beautiful wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
I brightened. Hilary might not want my help on the romantic front, but maybe Luisa would. “You know, Peter and I could set you—”
“Thank you, but I can handle my own personal life,” Luisa said.
“Because we’d be happy to—”
She interrupted me again. “Rachel, that’s very thoughtful but not necessary.”
“Since when are you so eager to get involved in other people’s love lives, Rach?” asked Hilary. “First offering couples therapy to Ben and me and then trying to hook Luisa up with Abigail?”
“I need something to do. My own love life is so normal. Isn’t it better to take an interest in other people’s relationships than look for reasons to mess up my own?”
“Have you considered simply enjoying the normality of your own life while simultaneously staying out of the lives of others?” asked Luisa.
“I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, but I have all of this free emotional energy that I used to expend on maintaining my neuroses, and now I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Rach, don’t take this the wrong way, but you haven’t exactly perfected normal yet.”
Hilary was hardly in a position to be evaluating who was and who wasn’t normal. “It took a while, but I’m totally normal at relationships now,” I told her, trying not to sound defensive.
“Of course you are,” said Luisa, but her own voice held a note of skepticism.
“While we’re talking about normal, I still wouldn’t describe him as such, but our old friend Iggie looks a lot better than when he lived across the hall from us sophomore year,” said Hilary. “He’s almost attractive, in a revenge-of-the-nerds type of way.”
“Huge piles of money will do that for a guy,” I said, glad of the change in topic from my relative normality to somebody else’s.
“Will he really be worth that much, Rachel?” asked Luisa.
“That’s how things are shaping up.” Winslow, Brown, the investment bank where I worked, was competing with several other firms to handle the initial public offering—IPO—of Igobe, an Internet company founded by our former classmate, Igor “Iggie” Behrenz. Iggie had been the quintessential computer geek in college, except instead of being shy and dorky he’d been arrogant and dorky, so confident in his future success that he was frequently unbearable. He hadn’t changed much since then, but I was still repairing the damage from a minor misunderstanding in which I’d ended up as the lead suspect in my boss’s murder. Winning his IPO business offered a chance to shore up my position at the office, however unbearable Iggie might be. Our pitch was conveniently scheduled for Tuesday morning at Igobe’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, and I’d invited him to the party tonight hoping it would improve our odds. “Iggie’s stake will be close to a billion dollars when his company goes public,” I told my friends.
Hilary whistled. Her admirer below turned to look, wondering if she was belatedly returning his show of appreciation, but her thoughts were somewhere else entirely. “A billion? As in a one with nine zeros after it?”
“That’s obscene,” said Luisa. Her family practically owned a small South American country, but even their fortune seemed modest in comparison.
I worked in an industry where the net worth of the top performers regularly topped the hundred-million mark, but I had to agree: a billion did seem excessive. “Everyone’s looking for the next MySpace or YouTube, and a lot of people think Iggie’s got it,” I said. “This IPO should be the hottest deal of the year.”
“You know the article I’m working on about the newest generation of Internet start-ups?” Hilary asked us. We nodded as if we did, but while I had a vague recollection of her mentioning a San Francisco-based assignment that dovetailed nicely with the party, I tended to lose track of what she was working on at any given moment. A freelance journalist, she jumped from topic to topic much as she jumped from man to man. “I’ve decided to make Iggie’s company the focus. It shouldn’t be hard to score an exclusive interview with Iggie, and I’ve been digging up some interesting material on Igobe.”
“What does the company do?” asked Luisa.
“It develops technology that masks people’s identities online,” I explained. “Once you download its software to your computer, your privacy is protected when you’re surfing the Web.”
“Which means you can visit all the porn sites you want and nobody will ever know,” translated Hilary.
“Isn’t that a relief,” said Luisa dryly.
“A lot of people seem to think so,” I said. “And they’re going to make Iggie a very rich man.”
“I only remember him as the geek who was handy to have around whenever that evil bomb icon popped up on my Mac,” said Luisa.
“Well, he’s still a geek, but he’s a billion times handier now,” said Hilary, her smile mischievous. “And he might just come in handy tonight.”
“Why do I have a feeling I don’t want to know what you’re plotting?” I asked.
“Plotting?” she asked with mock innocence. “Moi? ”
“You’re incorrigible,” said Luisa, something she’d said to Hilary on more occasions than any of us could remember.
“And that’s why you love me,” she replied easily.
“Oh, is that why?” asked Luisa, but she was laughing.
“I knew there had to be a reason,” I said, but I was laughing, too.
A gust of frosty air rose up from the Bay just then, and we all shivered in our lightweight summer dresses. “We should get back to the party,” I said. “It’s freezing out here, and Peter’s probably wondering where I am.”
“And Ben’s probably wondering where you are, Hilary,” said Luisa pointedly.
“Probably,” said Hilary, but the mischievous smile was still there. “More importantly, I promised Iggie a dance.”
2
T he Forrests’ house was a three-story Victorian, painted pale yellow with glossy white gingerbread trim. It looked a lot like the house in Party of Five, which was rumored to be nearby—not that Peter or his parents had any idea what I was talking about when I asked. Still, I’d found myself half-expecting to run into Bailey or Charlie ever since we’d arrived the previous day, and Hilary and I debated the relative merits of the Salinger men on the walk back to the party. “Don’t forget Griffin,” she said. “Not a Salinger, but still hot.”
“As if I could forget Griffin,” I said.
“Who could forget Griffin?” said Luisa, but she was teasing us—she’d never seen even a single Party of Five episode. Except for college and law school, she’d lived most of her life on another continent, privy only to a sadly limited selection of high-quality American television. This didn’t bother her—I guessed it was hard to miss something unless you knew what you were missing, and sometimes I thought being culturally illiterate might have its advantages. I worried about the amount of space TV characters and plotlines occupied in my brain, not to mention the lyrics from eighties pop songs, especially when I was unable to remember other very basic things, like pretty much everything I learned in high school.
The party was in full swing when we slipped back in through the side door, with people chatting and mingling as they balanced drinks and plates of food from the buffet in the dining room. Peter and I hadn’t yet set a date for the wedding, but his parents had insisted on throwing us an engagement party in his hometown, particularly since we would likely get married in Ohio, where I grew up, or in New York, where we lived. Their idea of a “little” party was turning out to be good practice for a big wedding—they had a wide circle of friends, and over a hundred of them were here tonight. This didn’t even include the friends Peter and I had invited or the members of my family the Forrests had urged to make the trip west.
Fortunately, nobody seemed to have noticed our brief absence. Peter’s grandmother and my grandmother were exactly where they’d been fifteen minutes ago, seated together in the den and poring over old photo albums, each probably calculating whose family had more dominant genes, and Peter’s parents were busily introducing my parents to their friends. No mediation on my part seemed necessary, but there was too much fodder for embarrassment lurking in my childhood for me to be entirely comfortable with extended interfamily mingling.
We made our way to the rear of the house, where French doors opened out onto the deck and yard. A tent and a temporary dance floor had been spread over the grass and a band played a mix of songs from both the elder Forrests’ generation and our own. Either way, most of the “younger set,” as Susan Forrest put it, seemed to have gravitated toward the music. That might also have had something to do with the fact that the line at the bar was shorter here.
I paused at the top of the stairs leading down from the deck, scanning the crowd before locating Peter’s sandy head on the far side of the dance floor. Even after nearly a year together, my heart still did a little flip whenever I saw him across a room. Luisa and Hilary volunteered to bring me a drink, and I went to join him where he stood talking with a man and woman I didn’t know.
“Hey,” he said, leaning down to kiss me. “I’ve been looking for you. There are a couple of old friends from college I want you to meet. Rachel, this is Caroline Vail.”
The woman, an athletic-looking blonde with a kittenish face, clasped my hand in hers. “Call me Caro—everyone does. I’ve heard so much about you, I feel as if I know you already.” I was surprised she’d heard so much about me since I’d never heard a thing about her, but I smiled and said hello.
“And this is Alex Cutler.”
Alex was West Coast preppie, dressed in khakis, a navy blazer, and a button-down shirt open at the collar. His brown hair was cut short, and his blue eyes were friendly behind round, wire-rimmed glasses. “So you’re the woman who convinced Peter to cross over to the dark side,” he said.
“He means New York,” Peter said. “People out here have a hard time understanding why anyone would live anywhere else.”
Hilary appeared at my side with a wineglass in one hand and a martini glass in the other. She passed me the wine as Peter introduced her to Caro and Alex.
“You know, Hil, these two might be able to help with the article you were telling me about,” he told her. “Caro runs a public-relations agency that works with start-ups in the Bay area, and Alex is a venture capitalist in Palo Alto.”
“I’m working on a magazine piece about the newest wave of Internet companies and whether they’re for real or if it’s all just another bubble,” Hilary explained. “Some of these start-ups seem like nothing but hype.”
Caro laughed. “Well, I’m in the business of generating hype, but I like to think there’s substance behind some of it.”
“There’d better be, since I’m in the business of funding it,” said Alex.
“These two know everyone,” Peter assured Hilary. “We were all at Stanford together, and a lot of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their financial backers are Stanford alumni.”
“Peter and I were even frat brothers,” said Alex.
This was also the first I’d heard about Peter being in a fraternity, and it was a hard mental picture to draw—I’d never thought of him as the beer-pong type. “Were there beanies and paddling?” I asked. “Or just making pledges drink until they puked?”
“No, nothing like that,” said Peter, smiling and shaking his head. “It was just a bunch of guys hanging out. Not exactly Animal House. ”
Maybe the band caught his words, because a moment later they launched into the Isley Brothers’ version of “Shout.” The dance floor, sparsely occupied before, started to fill. And that’s when Iggie made his move.
“Hey there, homeys,” said his reedy voice from behind me. I’d greeted him earlier, but he’d arrived at the same time as a number of other guests, and I hadn’t been able to do more than say hello and hastily introduce him to Peter. Now I had the opportunity to better take in his attire, and it was interesting, to say the least. The Google guys, despite their multiple billions, had adopted a spare sartorial uniform that depended heavily on black T-shirts. Iggie, however, was staking out a more fashion-forward look, one that owed more to Versace than Banana Republic and involved a lot of purple velvet. I’d always thought velvet was a no-no in June, but maybe Iggie knew something I didn’t. And even if Iggie hadn’t been an old friend, he was still a potential client, which went a long way toward helping me overlook any questionable fashion statements.
“Hi, Iggie,” I said. “Having a good time?”
“The Igster always has a good time,” he said.
I was glad I wasn’t taking a sip of my drink, because white wine spurting out of my nose wasn’t the image I wanted Peter’s friends to take away from the evening. Peter made a choking noise that I knew was his way of trying not to laugh.
“Iggie, have you met Caroline Vail and Alex Cutler?” I asked.
“Sure. We’re like this.” He held up two fingers to indicate just how close they all were, and Caro and Alex smiled and nodded in agreement, but Iggie clearly wasn’t interested in talking to them or to Peter and me—he had a very different agenda. “Ready for that dance, Hilarita?”
When we were in college, Iggie had hit on Hilary with a single-minded perseverance that was staggering when you considered most of the time she didn’t pay him enough attention to notice he was hitting on her. But even without the imminent certainty of a billion-dollar bank account, Iggie had been sufficiently self-confident to keep trying. Now he appeared to be picking up where he’d left off, and tonight Hilary had an agenda of her own.
She drained the rest of her martini and handed me the empty glass. “Let’s do it,” she said, allowing Iggie to lead her onto the dance floor.
“‘The Igster’?” Peter said as soon as they were out of earshot. This time I was taking a sip of my drink, but I managed to swallow without incident. “Who does he think he is? Elmo?”
“That’s new since college,” I said. “He never used to refer to himself in the third-person, and definitely not as ‘the Igster.’”
“He’s famous for it out here,” said Alex, an expression of bemused tolerance on his face. “Or maybe notorious would be a better way to put it.”
“I handle public relations for Igobe,” said Caro, her own expression equally bemused. “And I’ve tried to give Iggie some tips on things like wardrobe and assigning nicknames to himself and others, but he likes to do things his way.”
“And except for the wardrobe and the nicknames, his way is usually right,” said Alex. “Which is why I put money into his company. My firm is Igobe’s biggest outside shareholder. I even helped him with his business plan back when he was just getting started.”
“So that’s how you two know him?” I asked. “Alex, you invested in his company, and Caro, you do his company’s PR?”
They nodded in unison, and I wondered if they were a couple. It was hard to tell from their body language, and there’d been nothing in Peter’s introduction to indicate one way or the other, but they shared a similar outdoorsy look, as if they spent a lot of time doing healthy things, like eating trail mix and training for triathlons.
Caro glanced toward the dance floor. “Oh,” she said, wincing. “I’ve tried to give Iggie some tips on dancing, too, but that doesn’t seem to have helped much, either.”
We all turned to look. The band had reached the slowed-down, writhing-on-the-floor part of “Shout,” but only Iggie felt it necessary to actually writhe on the floor. Hilary stood watching, her head cocked to one side and her expression unreadable, a rarity for her.
“The Igster seems to have a thing for Hilary,” said Peter. “Is it requited?”
“I hope not, especially since she’s supposed to be dating someone else right now,” I said. “I think she’s just trying to hit him up for an interview for her story. She said she was thinking of making Iggie and Igobe the focus. Although, it could be useful to have a friend who was married to a billionaire.”
“I wonder what ever happened to Iggie’s first wife,” said Alex. “She must be kicking herself for bailing before the payoff.”
“Iggie was married?” I asked in disbelief.
Caro smiled at my reaction, revealing perfect white teeth. “There’s a lid for every pot.”
“Who was his lid? Or pot?” My contact with Iggie had been limited since college, picking up only recently with the discussions about my firm potentially handling his company’s IPO, but I was still surprised to have missed an entire marriage, and it was hard to imagine anybody willing to put up with Iggie long enough to marry him.
“Believe it or not, her name was Biggie,” said Alex.
“Did she call herself the Bigster?” asked Peter.
Alex chuckled, but Caro shook her head. “It was a nickname—probably left over from not being able to say Elizabeth, or something like that, when she was little.”
“Or maybe Iggie made it up. Either way, it fit,” said Alex.
Caro leaned forward and lowered her voice as if she were imparting classified information. “Unfortunately, Biggie was a little on the heavy side.” She smoothed the pink silk sheath she was wearing over her own trim hips.
“A little?” repeated Alex. “A little on the obese side is more like it.” He held his arms out and puffed up his cheeks to indicate that Biggie was a sizable woman. I was still having a hard time adjusting to the idea of Peter in a fraternity, but picturing Alex engaged in raucous male-bonding hijinks was a lot easier.
“She really had a very pretty face underneath all that hair,” said Caro. “And she was supposed to be very bright. But the marriage didn’t last. I think they met when they were in graduate school at Berkeley, and then they worked together at Iggie’s first start-up, the one before Igobe.”
“The one that never really got off the ground,” said Alex.
“Whatever did happen to Biggie?” Caro mused. “I haven’t seen her since the divorce, and that must have been over a year ago. It’s as if she fell right off the planet—just disappeared.”
“Nothing that big could just disappear,” said Alex with another chuckle.
Caro changed the subject then, asking about our plans while we were in town, and I was happy to end the discussion of Iggie’s ex-wife before Alex could make any more cracks about the poor woman’s weight. As far as I was concerned, anyone who’d had the misfortune to be married to Iggie deserved our full sympathy. We chatted a while longer, but guests of honor were supposed to circulate, so Peter and I eventually excused ourselves and circulated, working our way methodically through the crowd of people outside. Then we headed inside, where he abruptly pulled me down a short passageway and into the small laundry room.
“Hi,” he said, wrapping his hands around my waist.
“Hi back,” I said, resting my hands on his shoulders.
“You look really pretty.”
“Thank you. You look really pretty, too.”
“Pretty wasn’t what I was going for, but I’ll take it. Want to make out?”
“Here?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Now?” I asked.
He nodded again.
“Okay.”
We emerged from the laundry room a few minutes later, but not before I’d made Peter promise me I didn’t look as if I’d just been making out with him in the laundry room. “I want to make a good impression,” I said.
“What are you talking about? Everybody already loves you.”
“Even your father?” Charles Forrest had a reserved air about him, and it made me nervous. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.
“Especially my father. He was singing your praises just this afternoon.”
“Seriously? What did he say?” I could always use an ego boost, regardless of my advanced level of emotional maturity.
“He said—what did he say?” Peter ran a hand through his hair, trying to remember the words, and I reached out to smooth the pieces of hair left standing straight up in the wake of his fingers. “I know. He said you were ‘idiosyncractic.’”
My hand dropped to my side. “‘Idiosyncractic?’”
“Sure.”
“‘Idiosyncratic’?” I repeated.
“Uh-huh. Ready to go?”
Idiosyncratic was not normal. In fact, idiosyncratic was pretty much the opposite of normal. It was a blood relative of eccentric, which was practically a euphemism for crazy.
It looked as if I still had a distance to go in convincing the Forrests I could blend gracefully into their normal family.
Back at the party, we ran directly into Ben Lattimer at the bar that had been set up in the living room. He’d exchanged his customary Levi’s for a suit in deference to the occasion, but while he looked as handsome as ever, he seemed somehow deflated. “Have either of you seen Hilary?” he asked.
“Um, I think she might be out back,” I said, wondering why I felt guilty when it was Hilary who was spending most of her evening with someone who wasn’t her boyfriend.
“Thanks. I’ll try to track her down.”
Peter and I watched Ben walk away. Even his broad shoulders seemed to slump. “I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my best friends,” I said, “but Hilary can be a menace. She comes on so strong, but then she leaves men hanging. And Ben’s a nice guy.”
“Ben is a nice guy, but he’s also a grown-up. If things with Hil don’t work out, he’ll get over it. And I know I shouldn’t say this about one of your best friends—and I like her, too—but with her track record, he’d probably be better off without her.”
Ben was a grown-up, and if he and Hilary were, in fact, headed for the rocks, Peter was right—he would get over it and likely be better off. She didn’t seem cut out for long-term relationships, and the longer Ben stayed with her, the more he’d get hurt. But I couldn’t help keeping an eye out for him for the rest of the evening. He was clearly in a vulnerable state, gun notwithstanding.
We caught up to him again an hour later, standing on the deck looking out at the tented dance floor. Hilary and Iggie were still dancing—at least, Hilary was dancing, and Iggie was moving with such frenzied energy that he even managed to hit the beat every so often. Ben stared at them as he sipped from a glass that looked and smelled like straight whisky.
“We were going to get some food,” Peter told him. “Are you hungry?”
“Come join us,” I urged.
“Thanks, but I’m not really in the mood,” Ben said, his eyes not moving from the dance floor.
The band wrapped up a spirited interpretation of “Love Shack” then announced that they would be taking a short break, and Hilary and Iggie left the dance floor and started in our direction. His arm was draped over her shoulders, which couldn’t have been comfortable given their difference in height, but he kept it there anyway.
“Excuse me,” said Ben. I thought he would go to intercept Hilary, but instead he headed back into the house.
“That’s not good,” said Peter.
“I wonder if I should say something to Hil,” I said, watching as she and Iggie made their way through the crowd.
“Have you ever said anything to her that influenced her behavior?”
“No, it’s always been a complete waste of time. But maybe if Luisa and I ganged up on her?”
“Has ganging up worked before?”
“It’s Hilary. Nothing’s worked before. Where is Luisa, anyhow?” I asked. “I haven’t seen her in a while.”
Hilary and Iggie reached us where we were standing at the top of the steps. “Hey, Raquel, hey, Pedrolino,” said Iggie. “We were going to check out the buffet. All of that dancing really builds up an appetite.” He patted his velvet shirt where it strained across the beginnings of a pot belly.
“Have you two eaten?” asked Hilary.
“Not yet. We were just trying to find Luisa,” I said.
“She’s over there,” said Hilary, gesturing to the far corner of the tent. Her height gave her an advantage when it came to locating people in crowds. “And it looks like she was right about not needing your help, Rach,” she added.
Beyond the dance floor, Luisa was deep in animated conversation with Abigail. And while Abigail bore a significant resemblance to a gazellelike supermodel, if somebody were to make a movie of Luisa’s life, the lead role would be played by Salma Hayek. Together, the two were a formidable sight. I made a mental note not to stand next to them in any photographs.
“Whoa,” said Iggie, his arm slipping from Hilary’s shoulder. “Who’s that with LuLu?” Luisa was even less of a LuLu than I was a Raquel or Peter a Pedrolino, but it seemed best to let it pass.
“A coworker of mine,” said Peter. “And a friend. Her name is Abigail.”
“Abigail,” said Iggie thoughtfully. “Babealicious, isn’t she?”
Fortunately, he was still gazing at Abigail and Luisa, so he didn’t notice Hilary glance over at me and mouth “babealicious” or Peter again making a choking noise as he struggled not to laugh.
I reminded myself of the fees Winslow, Brown would generate if Iggie chose the firm to handle the Igobe IPO and the much-needed momentum those fees would generate on my own path to a Winslow, Brown partnership.
“She certainly is,” I said.
3
T he next morning Peter made me go running.
“That’s what we always do on Sundays in San Francisco,” he said. “A long run along the water and then a big brunch.”
“Sounds wonderful,” I lied, except about the brunch part. “There’s nothing I would rather do this morning. If only I’d remembered to bring my workout clothes. Darn. What a shame.”
“I packed your stuff for you.”
“You did?”
He smiled in a way that would have been smug if he had been anyone else. “I had a feeling you might forget.”
Peter exercised because he enjoyed it. I exercised because I enjoyed fitting into my clothes. “Even my sneakers?” I asked.
“Even your sneakers,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Come on, it will be fun.”
“How are you defining fun? ”
Ten minutes later, we descended the stairs dressed in shorts, T-shirts and running shoes and found Peter’s parents in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Judging by their attire and healthy glow, they’d already been for their own run. I thanked them again for the party, which hadn’t wound down until after midnight.
“It was such a treat to finally meet your family, Rachel. I wish they could have stayed longer,” Susan said.
The various Benjamins had been among the last to leave the previous evening, and they had gotten along beautifully with the Forrests and their friends, but by my calculations they were now well on their way to the airport, and I considered this excellent timing. While I loved my family, between the joint family dinner on Friday night, a joint family outing yesterday to the Asian Art Museum, and then the party, there had been more than enough opportunities for somebody to dredge up a mortifying tidbit from my past. And since my past was rife with mortifying tidbits, I was amazed to have made it through all of these events safely—prolonging the interaction further would have been courting disaster. But I didn’t mention any of that. “They really liked meeting you, too,” I said instead.
“Are you two going for a run?” Susan asked.
“Yep,” said Peter, reaching into the refrigerator and taking out a couple of bottles of water. He held one out to me, but I shook my head, and he exchanged it for a Diet Coke. I opened the can with pleased anticipation. There was nothing quite like the day’s first hit.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have some coffee, dear? Or orange juice?” Susan asked me.
“Oh, um, thank you, but I like soda in the morning.” In fact, morning was my favorite time to drink soda, although I also enjoyed it in the afternoon and evening.
“Peter, honey, don’t you think Rachel might want a glass? Rachel, dear, don’t you want a glass?”
“Rachel prefers it out of the can, Mom,” said Peter. I did prefer it out of the can. There was something about the way the carbonation and aluminum interacted that made it especially tasty.
“Are you sure, dear?” The perplexed look on Susan’s face reminded me that my habits might seem a little strange to the uninitiated.
“You know, I will have a glass. Thanks,” I said.
Peter stared at me, the perplexed look on his face an exact replica of his mother’s, but he reached into a cupboard and handed me a glass. I poured out the soda and drank it down.
“We’ll be back in an hour or so,” Peter told his parents.
“An hour?” I said under my breath.
“Have fun,” Susan said. “We’ll have brunch ready when you get back.” Charles raised his coffee cup in our direction without glancing up from the paper.
Peter ushered me out the front door. “Ready?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, but he took my hand anyway and began pulling me along the street.
“Is this pace okay?” he called over his shoulder.
“Uh-huh,” I said, and it was for a bit, since the first part was all downhill. Peter even trusted me to keep moving once he let go of my hand. The next part along the water was flat and picturesque with the light glinting off the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, and for a few minutes I felt an inspiring camaraderie with the other runners on the path. But that quickly dissipated.
“Look,” said Peter, slowing his pace to accommodate my own, which had started to lag. He pointed to some slippery animals sitting on rocks in the water. They were seals or sea lions, or maybe even walruses, but I was too winded to ask, much less care, nor did he seem to notice I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation as he pointed out other landmarks. By the time we finally turned back I’d been evaluating alternative modes of revenge for a good ten minutes, and when we found ourselves at the bottom of the Lyon Street steps, I had no choice but to draw the line. In truth, there was no conscious decision. My feet simply stopped.
“No,” I wheezed.
“No what?” Peter asked, still jogging in place as I rested my hands on my knees and struggled to feed air into my burning lungs.
“No, I’m not running up those.”
“We’re almost home. You’ll feel great afterward.” I scowled at his chipper tone.
Two women with legs the size of tree trunks sprinted by us and charged up the steps. “Marathons weren’t enough of a challenge, so I started training for an iron man,” one was saying to the other.
“My first iron man was a total rush,” the other replied.
“I’ll meet you at the top,” I said to Peter.
He ran up and down the steps several times as I made my way up them just once. “That’s obnoxious,” I told him as he pranced by me yet again, but he pretended not to hear. He was stretching when I eventually crested the final flight.
“Is this your passive-aggressive way of trying to get me to break up with you?” I asked as we walked the remaining distance to his parents’ house. Or, to be more accurate, as Peter walked and I limped.
“You loved every second.”
“If that was love, you should have some serious misgivings when I say I love you.”
“You know, you’d probably feel better if you hydrated before you ran.”
“I did hydrate.”
“Rachel. Diet Coke is not hydration.”
“You say tomato.”
“Maybe you should admit it. You have a problem.”
“I don’t have a problem. What’s my problem?” I asked.
“You’re addicted to Diet Coke.”
“Yes, but it’s not a problem.” We’d reached the house, and I contemplated the steps leading up to the front door. They seemed steeper than they had the day before. A bald man passed by walking a Great Dane, and Spot appeared at the bay window and started to bark, but the Great Dane trotted on, oblivious.
“You couldn’t last two days without Diet Coke,” said Peter.
“Why would I want to?”
“What if I dared you?”
I looked up at him and was alarmed to see he wasn’t joking. “That’s not fair,” I said. Peter knew how I felt about dares—specifically, that you didn’t turn them down unless you were comfortable being branded a wuss.
“You mean, you’re turning down a dare?”
I considered my options. I didn’t really have any, given that I didn’t want anyone to think I was a wuss, at least not about something like this. “No,” I said reluctantly, “I’m not turning down a dare.”
“Forty-eight hours, then. No Diet Coke. In fact, how about no caffeine?”
I gasped. “No caffeine?”
“No caffeine. You wouldn’t want to do this halfway, would you?”
“Yes, I would. I absolutely would.”
“No caffeine,” he repeated firmly.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked, forlorn.
“Because I want you to live a long and healthy life.” He consulted his watch. “It’s ten o’clock. You only need to last until ten on Tuesday. It will be fun.”
It was the second time that day Peter had declared something terrible would be fun, and it wasn’t even noon.
Little did I know just how much less fun the day would get.
At least Peter had been telling the truth about brunch. I believe strongly in eating frequently and in large quantities, but the Forrests made me feel positively ascetic. There were scrambled eggs and crisp bacon on china platters, warm scones and croissants in a basket, sliced melon and berries in a glass bowl, and a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice.
Of course, nothing goes with bacon quite as well as Diet Coke, but I tried not to think about that. I’d read somewhere that it took smokers three days for their physical addiction to nicotine to pass. Caffeine couldn’t be nearly as addictive as smoking. I was starting to feel a little shaky and had the beginning of a headache, but I assured myself the cravings would last only a few hours at the most. When Susan offered me a soda, I politely demurred and asked for herbal tea instead, feeling superlatively normal. But even with a generous dollop of honey, the tea lacked the stimulating kick of Diet Coke. I glanced up at the clock. Only forty-seven hours to go.
We ate in the cozy breakfast room, chatting about the party as we passed around sections of the paper. We were discussing potential outings for the day when I heard my cell phone ringing from up in Peter’s bedroom. Years of Winslow, Brown partners phoning at odd hours had instilled a Pavlovian response to that sound, and I jerked up automatically. But, as my mother frequently reminded me, it wasn’t polite to take calls during a meal. That never dissuaded me in the presence of my own family, but while it was one thing to be impolite to my mother, it was another thing entirely to be impolite to somebody else’s, particularly Peter’s. I sat back down.
“Don’t you want to get that?” Peter asked.
“It can wait,” I said.
“What if it’s work?” he asked.
“It can still wait,” I said again. Officially, I was on vacation, having taken off the Friday and Monday surrounding the weekend, and I’d put in a superhuman effort before I left to make sure I was fully caught up on the deals and projects I had underway. Nobody from Winslow, Brown should be calling, but that didn’t guarantee anything. People in my line of work adhered closely to the saying that time-is-money, and the partners tended to view my time as their money. Not a single one of my vacations had gone uninterrupted since I’d started at the firm.
“Are you sure, dear?” asked Susan.
“I’m sure,” I said, resolute.
The ringing finally stopped, but a moment later Peter’s own cell phone trilled from upstairs. He twitched. “Do you want to get that, honey?” his mother asked.
“If Rachel can wait, I can wait,” he said stolidly.
Peter’s phone had barely stopped ringing when mine started ringing again. Then his started ringing again, too.
“Somebody must really want to get a hold of you kids,” commented Charles. We were all silent as we listened to the alternating rings from two floors above. I gripped the seat of my chair with both hands to keep myself at the table.
But no sooner had our cell phones stopped than the Forrests’ home phone began to ring. “I’ll get that,” said Susan, just as both Peter’s phone and my phone started up again. She reached for the extension on the wall with one hand and started clearing plates from the table with the other, and Charles rose to help her.
I took this as a cue the meal was over and rushed up the stairs to answer my phone, calling over my shoulder for them to leave the dishes to me. Normal future daughters-in-law probably delighted in post-meal cleanup.
I grabbed my BlackBerry a second after it stopped ringing. Peter was more successful, reaching his own phone just in time. He would undoubtedly attribute his success to hydration, even though I’d beaten him up the stairs.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Abigail,” he said. “It’s Abigail,” he mouthed to me, as if I couldn’t figure that out from his greeting. Perhaps he thought caffeine withdrawal was impeding my mental processes. Based on how I was starting to feel, this wasn’t entirely out of the question.
I began scrolling through my message log. There were several missed calls, some of which must have come through while we were out on Peter’s little adventure in sadism. The most recent were from Luisa.
“Really?” Peter said into his phone. The way he said it, with a combination of curiosity, invitation, and amusement, made me look up. It was the gossipy tone of a morning-after debrief. “I can check with Rachel, but I’m pretty sure Luisa’s not dating anyone.”
I shook my head to confirm this was true. “Not since she and Isobel broke up last fall. Did something happen?” I asked excitedly, trying to keep my voice low so Abigail couldn’t hear me. “With Abigail and Luisa?”
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?”
We couldn’t, but although being reasonably confident of Iggie’s relative harmlessness tempered the urgency we’d initially felt, neither Luisa nor I would be able to completely relax until we’d located Hilary and made sure she was all right.
“Why don’t we just give Iggie a call?” Peter asked. “Or drop by his house?”
“I wish it were that easy,” I said. “But Iggie’s obsessed with privacy. I asked him for his home address when I wanted to send him the invitation for the engagement party, and instead I got a lecture about how he keeps his personal information personal. He wouldn’t even give me a phone number or e-mail address. According to him, a guy with as much money as he has—even if most of it’s only on paper at this point—has to worry about being a kidnapping target, not to mention the people hoping to hit him up for handouts. The only way I know how to reach him is through his office, but it will be closed for the weekend.”
“What about the police?” asked Peter. “Can’t they help us?”
Again, we all looked to Ben, and this time he seemed to be paying attention. He shook his head. “We can report Hilary missing, but I don’t think it will do much good without proof her disappearance was coerced. She’s an adult, and secret codes between old friends aren’t likely to be cause for concern to anyone except us.”
“And Hilary does have a tendency to strike out on her own without letting anybody know. It would be difficult to convince anyone that this time is different,” said Luisa.
“I think we’re stuck with trying to find them ourselves. Maybe we can retrace their steps from the party,” I said.
“Well, if that’s what we need to do, I can call the valet service my parents used last night,” said Peter. “If Iggie and Hilary left together, somebody must have seen them—her dress was pretty memorable.”
“What there was of it,” said Luisa. She gestured to her own laptop resting on a side table. “Meanwhile, I’ll log into our online alumni directory. Iggie wasn’t the most popular person on campus, but he must have at least one friend left over from our class who would know how to reach him.” Luisa cochaired the alumni giving campaign and had proven skilled at persuading our former classmates to cough up donations. I attributed her success, particularly with males, to the lasting impact of her freshman facebook photo combined with her phone voice, which was husky and still bore traces of an exotic accent.
“And while you’re doing that, I’ll go through Hil’s things,” I said. I turned to Ben. “We know she was doing research on Iggie and Igobe. She might have left something behind that will give us more information.”
The rest of us springing into action seemed to finally energize Ben. “I can make a few calls to some colleagues. Somebody might be able to tap into a database and find out where Iggie lives—there has to be a record of it somewhere. And we could check the hotel’s security cameras, too. They would have caught Hilary coming and going last night, and they might also confirm who was with her.”
“So we have a plan,” I said with satisfaction. I liked plans, and I hoped keeping busy would distract me from my cravings, which were growing more intense with every passing minute. “When should we get back together?”
“It’s close to one now,” said Luisa. “Three o’clock? But I’ll call you if I find somebody who knows how to reach Iggie before then.”
“Three sounds good,” I started to say before remembering I had a previous engagement. “Actually, could we say four-thirty instead? In Union Square?”
“We can call my mother and postpone,” Peter offered.
I considered this for a moment, tempted, but then I decided against it. Susan had seemed sufficiently excited about our planned outing that I wouldn’t want to disappoint her, and I doubted ninety minutes one way or another would make much of a difference as far as Hilary was concerned. She was merely being inconvenienced rather than in any real peril—at least, that’s what we thought then.
“Postpone what?” Luisa asked.
“We’re supposed to meet my mother at Tiffany’s to choose things for the wedding registry,” Peter told her.
Luisa looked at me, amused. It was yet another expression I’d seen more often than a blush and one that appeared especially frequently when I was the topic of discussion. “You’re going to register?” she asked. “You? The woman whose Realtor had to talk her out of buying an apartment without a kitchen? The woman who uses her oven to store her shoes? The woman who can order ‘the usual’ from every take-out place in Manhattan? The woman who—”
“Yes, me,” I interrupted, only a little bit huffy.
“Well,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.”
6
L uisa was already online and searching our alumni directory as the rest of us left the suite and took the elevator down to the room where Ben and Hilary were staying. Ben looked up at the paneled ceiling of the elevator and at the mirror on its back wall as we moved between floors. “There’s probably a camera hidden in here somewhere,” he said, “maybe behind the mirror. The tape from last night should have captured anyone who got off on our floor.”
I would never have thought of that on my own, and although I knew there were security cameras in a lot of public facilities, it was creepy to consider just how pervasive they were. I recognized they could be useful in combating crime and thwarting terrorism, and I was all for combating and thwarting such nefarious activities, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many times I’d embarrassed myself on camera without realizing someone was watching. It was a reminder of why Iggie’s company was so successful—even if you weren’t doing anything wrong, there was something comforting in knowing nobody else knew what you were up to.
Ben had left the Do Not Disturb sign dangling from the doorknob. He inserted his keycard into the lock, but he paused before opening the door. “I should warn you. It’s sort of chaotic in here.”
“I know what to expect,” I assured him, “and I know it’s not your fault.” Hilary never did anything halfway, and that included making a mess. In college, this had been a convenient way for her to ensure she would be awarded the first available single bedroom in any of our living quarters, and apparently she’d seen no reason to change her habits since then. It looked as if her suitcase had exploded over the room’s otherwise sleek interior. A neat roller-bag standing in the corner was Ben’s, but every other surface was strewn with Hilary’s belongings.
Peter’s expression upon entering the room combined horror and awe. “Are you sure nobody’s ransacked the place?”
“Nope, this is standard. In fact,” I said, “it’s pretty tame. She clearly hasn’t been here long enough to settle in.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he said, “so maybe I’ll just leave you to it.”
“Coward,” I said.
“Yep,” he agreed good-naturedly, picking his way across the cluttered floor. He leaned against the window, took out his cell phone and dialed.
“Can you get reception in here?” asked Ben. “I couldn’t.”
“It seems to be going through,” Peter told him.
“Must be my carrier,” said Ben, taking a seat on the bed and picking up the phone on the nightstand. A moment later, Peter was asking his mother about the valet service from the party and Ben was asking to speak to hotel security.
I began sorting through Hilary’s things. Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this was to pick each item up and put it away in a more orderly fashion so I could catalog what was there and what wasn’t. I examined each piece of clothing before draping it over the back of the desk chair, seeing nothing but the usual assortment of jeans and tops along with a few more formal outfits and finding nothing in her pockets except a jumble of gum wrappers, coins and receipts. There were a couple of books on the desk—an account of the late Nineties’ dot-com boom and bust, which was probably background for her article, and a history of jazz which I guessed was Hilary’s somewhat disturbing idea of pleasure reading—but, as Ben had said, no laptop and no notebook.
Of course, the dresser drawers were completely empty, as it would never have occurred to Hilary to actually use them for storage when the floor worked so well for her. I opened the closet door, but there I found only a folded luggage rack leaning against one wall, dangling hangers, the plush terry robes provided by the hotel and extra pillows on a high shelf. The only other items in the closet were an iron and an ironing board, but I was confident Hilary wouldn’t have thought to even touch either of those—her domestic skills were nearly as limited as my own, and her taste in clothes ran to fabrics of the clinging but nonwrinkling variety.
I moved on to the bathroom. Hilary wore her hair short and limited her cosmetics regimen to the liberal application of brilliant red lipstick, but she was always experimenting with different skin lotions and creams. I lined up the bottles and tubes on the vanity, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary, although I did sample an absurdly expensive eye cream I’d seen advertised in a magazine. The ad guaranteed an immediate and dramatic reduction in dark under-eye circles, so I patted in the recommended pea-sized dollop below each eye and then stared at my face in the magnifying mirror, waiting for the reduction to begin. After thirty seconds, nothing had happened, and seeing my pores blown up several times their actual size was too troubling to watch any longer. Then I sampled Hilary’s lipstick, to see if the bright color would distract from my under-eye circles, but that didn’t seem to help, either, and the red clashed miserably with my own red hair.
Sighing, I used a tissue to wipe my lips clean and turned to head back into the bedroom. If there were useful clues to Hilary’s whereabouts anywhere to be found, the anywhere didn’t seem to be in the hotel room.
But then I spotted Hilary’s jewelry pouch, partially buried under a hand towel. It was a flat-bottomed drawstring bag made of patterned silk, gaping open to reveal a tangle of earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. “Aha,” I said, to myself, since I could still hear both Peter and Ben talking on their respective phones in the other room.
I had a jewelry pouch that was nearly identical except for the pattern of the silk—Hilary had bought several of them in Thailand years ago and given them to her friends as gifts. The silk was pretty, and the pouches were useful, but she was mostly excited by a special feature each had: a fake bottom that could be pried out to reveal a small secret compartment below. Of course, with the exception of the occasional murder, my life was too dull to have much call for secret compartments, but perhaps Hilary had made use of hers.
I spilled the jewelry out onto the marble counter and tried to work a fingernail into the inner seam where the silk-covered cardboard at the bottom met the edge of the bag. Unfortunately, this was a job for a long tapered fingernail rather than the sort of fingernails I had. I rummaged through the items on the vanity but found nothing suitable until I saw the small sewing kit supplied by the hotel. I would never have used any of its contents to actually sew—such matters were better left in the hands of those less accident-prone than myself—but the kit included a needle that worked perfectly to pry open the false bottom. It lifted out easily to reveal the compartment below, and nestled within was a piece of folded ivory paper. “Aha,” I said again, pleased with my success.
“What have you got?” asked a voice behind me.
I nearly screamed but managed to strangle the noise to a muted yelp. I’d been so absorbed in the task and so busy congratulating myself on my cleverness that I hadn’t heard Ben come in or even glimpsed his image reflected next to mine in the mirror. “I didn’t realize you were here,” I said, recovering with an embarrassed laugh. “You scared me.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No problem,” I said, although my heart was still racing. I showed him the jewelry pouch and its false bottom before withdrawing and unfolding the piece of paper.
It was a receipt, on Four Seasons letterhead, dated two days earlier and made out to Hilary for an item she’d left in the hotel safe.
The obvious next step was to retrieve whatever it was Hilary had considered sufficiently important to require such high-security treatment. However, it was unclear whether the hotel would release the safe’s contents only to Hilary. I could try to impersonate her, but that wouldn’t work if I was asked for identification. Even if we did have her driver’s license, and even if a short blond wig and green contact lenses had been readily available, Hilary was more than a half-foot taller than me, and there wasn’t any practical way for me to impersonate that.
We discussed calling downstairs to ask about the procedure for redeeming an item from the safe so we could plan accordingly, but we quickly discarded that idea. It would only make the staff think twice when someone actually showed up a few minutes later to redeem something from the safe. Nor, for similar reasons, did we call to ask if the same staff members were on duty as on Friday. Instead we decided to brazen it out and headed for the lobby. If I was asked for ID, we would try to talk our way through any challenge with Ben’s identification since he was registered to the same hotel room.
Peter hung back as Ben and I approached the woman behind the front desk. Her hair was pulled into an elegant knot at the nape of her neck, and a tag on her suit jacket lapel told us her name was Natasha. I resisted the urge to make any Rocky and Bullwinkle jokes and rested the hand holding Ben’s room key and the receipt on the counter with what I hoped was a proprietary air. “Hi,” I said. “We need to pick up something we left in the safe.”
“Of course,” Natasha said smoothly. “You have the receipt?”
“Of course,” I answered, equally smoothly. I handed her the piece of paper and prepared myself to lie about not having any identification with me. But the good news was Natasha didn’t ask for it. Instead, she led us to a discreet side door and used a pass to buzz us into an interior room.
At which point we encountered the bad news. Instead of a big vault of the sort you see in movies about bank heists, there were several rows of small safes mounted on a wall. Each of the safes had a digital keypad for a password the guest could set his or herself. And Hilary hadn’t bothered to write down her chosen password and leave it with the receipt in the secret compartment, which I considered a serious lapse in planning for the possibility that her friends might need to rescue her from a billionaire with personal-boundary issues.
“Here you are,” Natasha said, checking a number on the receipt and indicating one of the safes about halfway down the row second from the top.
“Could we have a moment alone?” I asked her. In the movies, they always left people alone with their safe deposit boxes when they went to retrieve their Nazi artifacts, incriminating documents or unmarked bills from Swiss banks.
Natasha didn’t seem to expect that—I guessed most people just entered their passwords, collected their things and left—but she agreed readily enough. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
We looked around the room. The hotel’s management had posted a notice outlining its policy for items left in the safes on the wall to one side. They’d also posted instructions for setting passwords for the safes, advising users to choose a code consisting of between four and six numerals.
“Do you have any idea what her password could be?” I asked Ben.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t even know she locked anything up in the first place. Why would I know her password?”
Because you’re her boyfriend, I started to say, but I managed to catch myself before the words left my head and came out of my mouth.
I turned and contemplated the keypad on the safe Natasha had indicated, wracking my brain for memories of Hilary at the ATM, Hilary at the computer, or Hilary doing anything else that would have required her to enter a personal code, but nothing came immediately to mind. I ran through the usual sorts of considerations that guide people’s password choices, but Hilary hadn’t lived in the same place for more than a few months at a time since we’d graduated, she didn’t have any pets, and she had never cared much about birthdays—in fact, she’d been twenty-nine for several years now. Her twin passions were work and men, and these two interests tended to occupy the majority of her waking hours.
While this line of thinking didn’t offer any brilliant insights, thinking about Hilary’s passions and her interest in men, specifically, did remind me of last night’s conversation about Party of Five. Which gave me an idea.
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Here goes.”
I punched in five numbers and pressed the pound key. There was a pause, and I waited for an alarm to blare out and for Natasha to come running, armed with a stun gun or something like that. Instead, a small light flashed green and the word “OPEN ” appeared on the screen above the keypad.
I breathed out with surprise and relief. I really hadn’t expected that to work.
“What was the password?” Ben asked.
“It’s 9-0-2-1-0,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Dylan’s zip code.” Ben looked confused, but this was no time to explain Hilary’s long-standing crush on Luke Perry in his career-defining role—he probably wouldn’t appreciate that the only guy ever to hold her interest on a sustained basis was a figment of Darren Star’s imagination. I twisted the latch and opened the door to the safe.
Inside, zipped into a clear plastic bag, were two items: a pen and a photograph.
“Everything all right in here?” asked Natasha, poking her head through the door.
“Everything’s great,” I said. I withdrew the bag and slipped it into my purse, and we followed her out of the room.
Peter, Ben, and I huddled on one of the sofas in the lobby, studying the photograph. It was of three people in their mid-to-late twenties, two men and a woman, standing on steps that led up to the columned portico of a stone building. The man in the center we all recognized easily—it was Iggie, back in the days when he still wore thick glasses, cut his own hair, and dressed without the assistance of an overly adventurous stylist. The Lasik and the professional haircut were definitely an improvement, but I was less sanguine about his updated wardrobe.
“That’s probably Biggie on the left,” I said, then explained to Ben about Iggie’s ex-wife and Caro’s and Alex’s comments the previous night. The image in the photo matched their description perfectly: a heavyset woman with big brown eyes and masses of brown hair shielding much of her face.
“The building behind them looks sort of familiar, too,” said Peter. “I can’t quite place it, but I think I’ve seen it before.”
But none of us recognized the person standing to the right of Iggie, a bulky but relatively nondescript guy with nearly as much hair as Biggie, and there were no helpful names or dates written on the back of the picture to indicate who he might be.
“So what does this mean?” asked Ben.
For an FBI agent—essentially a professional investigator—sometimes he seemed a little slow to connect the dots, I thought. But then I admonished myself. My withdrawal was making me uncharitable, as well as blunt and cranky, and Ben was not only hungover, he had just gotten dumped. I reminded myself again that a lesser person would have washed his hands of the matter and hightailed it home.
“That Hilary put an old picture of Iggie and his ex-wife in a safe?” I said. “Probably that she thought there was a juicy story about them. And maybe it involved the other guy in the picture, too. And maybe she started asking Iggie about whatever she thought the story was, and he was happier letting sleeping dogs lie. At least, that’s my theory.” I slipped the photo back into the plastic bag for safekeeping and started to return the bag to my purse.
“Wait,” said Peter. “What about the pen?”
“What about it? It’s just a pen.” It was a metallic color and a bit thicker than usual, but without a brand name or any other markings. While it was a step up from a disposable ballpoint, it was hardly a Mont Blanc, or even a Sharpie. I’d removed the cap and even checked that it wrote with ink and not some sort of magic clue-revealing substance, but as far as I could tell that was the extent of its usefulness.
“Then why would Hilary put it in the safe, Columbo?” he asked, reaching over and taking it out of the bag.
“Did you really just call me Columbo?”
But Peter didn’t respond. He weighed the pen’s heft in one hand and examined each end. Then he smiled. “I think it’s more than a pen,” he said. He pulled at its non-writing end, and it came off in his hand, revealing a short metal prong. “Voilà.”
“What is it?” I asked. “A weapon? Does it shoot darts or squirt poison or something?”
“No, but sometimes it scares me to think about how your mind works. This is even better than a poison-squirting pen. It’s a memory stick,” he said.
“How is that better?” I asked, disappointed.
“There could be anything on it,” Peter said. He pointed to the prong. “See, this is where it plugs into a USB port. Hilary could have copied the entire hard drive of her laptop onto here, practically. Documents, pictures, videos—anything. And whatever’s on here, Hilary clearly felt it was important enough to make sure she kept it locked up.”
“Oh,” I said, considering the possibilities with growing enthusiasm. “Could we attach it to Luisa’s computer and see what’s on it?”
“That should work,” said Peter.
“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s go back upstairs.”
“Um, it’s already two-thirty,” said Ben.
“So?” I said.
“So?” echoed Peter.
And then I remembered. “So we’re supposed to meet your mother in half an hour,” I said, glancing at my watch. My heart sank. Finding out what was on the memory stick sounded a lot more interesting than shopping for place settings, not that that was such a high bar. Just about anything had to be more interesting than shopping for place settings.
“Are you sure you don’t want to reschedule?” Peter asked me again. “My mom will understand.”
“She’s not going to have to,” I said. Even if I’d been willing to tell Susan about Hilary’s disappearance, it didn’t seem justified. After all, we still didn’t have any reason to think she wasn’t with Iggie, or that Iggie could pose a serious threat. The interruption wouldn’t take that long, and now that I was normal, I had to make the normal choice, which was to meet my future mother-in-law, as promised, at Tiffany’s.
With admirable restraint, I took the pen-memory stick from Peter and handed it to Ben. “Will you give this to Luisa to check out on her computer?”
“Okay,” he said. “And I’ll see if I can take a look at the tape from the surveillance cameras, too. I told the security guys I’d stop by their control center.”
“Thanks,” I said, although I almost wished he hadn’t mentioned the tape, because it only reminded me of something else that would be far more interesting than shopping for place settings. “We’ll meet you at four-thirty.”
I took Peter’s arm and steered him toward the elevator before my willpower could run out.
7
U nion Square was close enough that we walked the few short blocks, leaving the Prius on Market Street. In fact, we arrived at Tiffany’s early, which only added to my frustration. We probably would have had plenty of time to check out whatever was on the memory stick ourselves instead of leaving it to Ben and Luisa.
At least I had the opportunity to impress Susan with my punctuality, as she was early, too. We found her in the crystal department with a saleswoman named Marge who introduced herself as our “registry consultant.” They were deep in discussion of the relative merits of different stemware brands and designs. I’d never actually used the word stemware before, nor had it occurred to me to have opinions about it, but looking at the array of goblets and tumblers mostly just made me think how much nicer they’d look if they were filled with Diet Coke.
“Rachel, dear, how would you describe your taste?” asked Susan.
“Traditional?” asked Marge. “Contemporary?
Usually I just trusted the bartender to choose the glass he or she thought most appropriate for whatever drink I ordered—I never specified traditional or contemporary. “Um, well, uh, gee,” I said, searching for words. I turned to Peter, who was the person who actually cooked and poured beverages on those isolated occasions when cooking and pouring beverages occurred in our apartment. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “Whatever you want is fine by me.” Then his phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket and checked the screen. “It’s the valet service calling me back—I should take this.” He wandered off with the phone, leaving me alone with his mother, Marge and several-hundred stemware options, which seemed horribly unfair, at best.
It quickly became clear I wasn’t ready to make firm decisions about stemware just yet, nor was I ready to make firm decisions about casual china, fine china, flatware or even table linens. However, I did learn that my tastes defied conventional description. I was pretty sure I overheard Marge describing them as “all over the map” to one of her colleagues, and it didn’t sound as if she meant it as a compliment. Apparently most brides-to-be came into the store better prepared than I, having already studied these matters extensively.
Susan seemed to take my indecision in stride. In fact, she seemed to misinterpret it as my savoring the process. “You’re right, dear,” she said. “This is too much fun to rush through on our first trip.” There was something ominous about hearing this outing described as if it were merely the beginning of a long series of similar outings, but I tried not to think about that. We left the store loaded down with catalogs, Peter trailing behind us, still on his phone.
I was relieved to note that not choosing anything for the registry hadn’t taken very long—it was barely four o’clock. Peter and I would be well ahead of schedule to meet up with Luisa and Ben. I was opening my mouth to thank Susan for her help when she opened her own mouth. “Saks is right here,” she said. “What do you think, Rachel? Do you want to take a quick spin inside and see what they have? I could use a few fresh things for summer.”
Given that summer in San Francisco seemed to call for the sort of clothing most people wore on Arctic expeditions, I had difficulty seeing how Saks would be the best place to find what she needed, but she was eager to continue shopping. I looked to Peter for help, but he didn’t even notice, intent on his ongoing cell-phone conversation. “Sure,” I said, summoning up a smile that I hoped appeared as eager as Susan’s.
She linked her arm through mine. “This is such fun. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I had a daughter to do girlie stuff with.” Peter had two older brothers, and they were both married, but one lived in London and one lived in Hong Kong—I guessed their wives didn’t afford Susan much in the way of regular daughterly companionship. Nor did I have the heart to warn her just how unfulfilling I was likely to be on the girlie front. I might not be able to describe my tastes in stemware, but I was fairly confident my tastes in apparel did not run to the girlie.
When Susan had said she could use a few fresh things for summer, she apparently had meant I could use a few fresh things for summer. Fifteen minutes later I was in a dressing room with an assortment of items she believed would look adorable on me. One would expect that someone like her, a respected attorney with a thriving local practice, would favor the tailored and professional, but everything she’d picked was either pastel or flowered, and several of her choices were both. I personally preferred black—it went with everything, which meant I never had to worry about my outfit clashing with the scenery, much less my hair, but I hadn’t wanted to rain on Susan’s shopping parade.
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