The Hunt

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?”