“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
