The Hunt

by Jennifer Sturman

  “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

  It 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.