The Hunt

by Jennifer Sturman

  I was in a mean mood now, and this was a mean thought on my part, but it wasn’t the meanness that gave me pause. In fact, it was more than a pause-it was an epiphany. The realization washed over me with abrupt clarity, leaving me amazed at how long it had taken to arrive.

  Hilary could never have written that text.

  All of Hilary’s friends knew there was a long and varied list of things for which she had little patience, but the message Luisa and I had received included several items near the top of that list: an immoderate use of exclamation points for starters, not to mention gushing professions of love, and, most importantly, emoticons. Falling in love might have given her newfound patience when it came to gushing, and perhaps even about exclamation points, but nothing was powerful enough to overcome her passionate distaste for emoticons.

  But Luisa and I had both been so eager to get back to our own lives that we’d accepted the text as legitimate and dismissed Peter’s concerns without a second thought. I couldn’t help but groan.

  “Are you all right?” asked Caro.

  “What? Oh, I’m fine, thanks.” But perhaps some degree of osmosis had indeed occurred, because my mind was suddenly working with a speed and precision I hadn’t felt since my last Diet Coke, and it was pointing me in an entirely new direction. I knew with absolute certainty what had happened: Hilary’s kidnapper must have found the phone she’d used, seen the SOS texts she’d sent early Sunday morning and was now trying to counteract them via the same medium.

  Which meant Hilary was still missing.

  Which also meant we were back to Alex Cutler. Only, we couldn’t be back to Alex Cutler, because I also now knew he’d given Caro a ride home from the party, and not in a Lamborghini but in an SUV.

  Which meant we were back to square one, which meant Iggie. But Abigail was confident Iggie was telling the truth about having left Hilary at the Four Seasons, and something told me she was right. Being married to a person provided excellent training in lie detection. Or so I’d heard. The way things were going, it was unlikely I’d ever find out for myself.

  Which meant we were back to whatever came before square one.

  And that’s when I had another epiphany, and this one was also well overdue.

  We’d been overlooking the most obvious suspect.

  What if Hilary’s disappearance had nothing at all to do with Igobe or her magazine article? If that were the case, then we’d ignored the very first person we should have considered, the very first person it was customary to consider when something happened to a woman: namely, her husband, boyfriend or significant other.

  And in this case, that very first person was Ben.

  23

  I tried my best to hide my impatience as Peter and I said our goodbyes to Caro and Alex, enduring another painfully detailed discussion of sporting equipment with what would have been a fixed smile if my lip hadn’t been too swollen to make smiling possible. Once in the car, however, I wasted no time laying out my newest theory.

  “Think about it,” I told Peter. “Think about all of the things we’ve accepted as fact, when they’re really just what Ben told us. He could have made it all up: what he saw on the security camera tape, the registration for the phone Hilary used to send her SOS texts-everything. And he said he’d passed out when he got back to the hotel on Saturday night, but did you notice that the bed was still made Sunday, even though the Do Not Disturb sign was on the door of his room? It definitely didn’t look as if housekeeping had been there. And then there are the times he’s been off doing things on his own. Like last night, when Abigail and Luisa were having dinner, and then again today. Where is he? What hunch is he following up on? And if it’s such a good hunch, why didn’t he tell us about it in the first place?”

  While it had some holes we couldn’t completely fill, Peter liked my theory, possibly because it managed both to validate his own suspicions about Hilary’s most recent text and to direct my suspicions toward somebody other than his dream date for Caro. Who, it turned out, wasn’t exactly Caro’s dream date, but Caro didn’t realize that the man she thought was her dream date had been recently voted Most Likely to Be a Bad Guy. On the bright side, the renewal of Hilary’s MIA status meant I could once again postpone worrying about which relationships were and were not everyone’s respective destinies, and I knew enough to appreciate any silver linings that came my way.

  We’d called Luisa and Abigail as we were leaving, and they were waiting for us as we pulled up. Judging by the shopping bags they piled into the hatchback their outing had been successful.

  “Guess what?” I said, turning around to bring them up-to-date as they slid into the backseat.

  Abigail stifled a gasp, and Luisa recoiled. “Good God, Rachel! What happened to you?”

  I quickly explained about my little collision with a tennis ball. “But that’s not the important thing.”

  “Face forward, then. Do we have to look at you while you’re telling us what the important thing is?” said Luisa, as if my fat lip was some sort of purposeful assault on her refined sensibilities.

  “Do you need more nicotine gum?” I asked patiently. Given the circumstances, I considered my concern for her well-being extremely noble.

  “I have plenty of gum, thank you, but it’s going to take a lot more than gum to make you less scary.”

  “It’s not that bad,” said Peter.

  “See, Peter doesn’t think it’s that bad,” I told Luisa.

  “He’s either lying or he’s living proof that love is indeed blind,” she replied.

  “What’s the important thing you wanted to tell us, Rachel?” asked Abigail, who was growing skilled at moving discussion forward on those occasions when Luisa and I fell into a conversational rut.

  Peter turned the car toward the highway as we told them about my various epiphanies and Alex Cutler’s alibi.

  “You’re right,” said Luisa as I explained about the fake text, the realization washing over her just as it had washed over me, except without the self-recrimination. That was my personal area of expertise. “But do you really think Ben is behind everything?”

  “Who else could it be?” I said.

  “But then why did he wait so long to send the second text?” she asked. “Why didn’t he text us yesterday, so we wouldn’t have been concerned or looking for her at all? In fact, why didn’t he use her phone in the first place?”

  “There are a couple of pieces we can’t get to fit,” admitted Peter. “Maybe something was wrong with her phone, and then maybe he couldn’t find the phone she used to text us-maybe he dropped it wherever he stashed Hilary, and he went back to that place today and found it. It seems like he could have done that yesterday, but maybe he was worried we’d notice.” What he left unsaid was the assumption that Hilary had been “stashed,” rather than done away with on a more permanent basis. None of us was willing to entertain that thought, and the simple fact that Ben hadn’t left town seemed to indicate he was still attending to her in some way. At least, that’s what we hoped.

  “Then what about the second Lamborghini?” asked Abigail. “And the blonde who came out of the hotel and got into it? And its ACV vanity plate? Ben didn’t tell us about that-the doorman did.”

  “That’s the other piece we can’t figure out,” I said. “It could have been a coincidence, just like Iggie said. A driver he didn’t know, and then a different blonde altogether. Ben might have seen them when he watched the tape from the security cameras, which is how he also would have known about the other driver’s vanity plate. Then he could have improvised about the phone registration having the same letters.”

  This explanation was also a stretch, but if all went well, we’d be able to get the answer from the horse’s mouth soon enough, assuming Ben was the horse in this case and that we’d be able to corral him or lasso him or whatever the appropriate extension of the metaphor might be. We discussed calling the police, but it was still unlikely our reasons for worrying about Hilary would mak
e sense to an outsider. The texts Luisa and I had received that day would have reassured anyone who wasn’t aware of Hilary’s distaste for emoticons-they’d even temporarily reassured us. It seemed as if we would waste valuable time getting the attention of the authorities, and then telling our story could take hours. We agreed that our time would be better spent tracking Ben down on our own.

  Even so, we didn’t want to call him again-he probably wouldn’t pick up, and we didn’t trust ourselves not to sound too curious about his whereabouts, thus letting him know we were on to him. Instead, we sent him a text telling him we’d heard from Hilary and asking him to call us, hoping this would have the combined effect of letting him think we’d fallen for his ploy while leaving enough left unexplained that the natural thing for him to do if he was trying to act innocent would be to get in touch. In the meantime, we’d return to the hotel and attempt to retrace his steps from there.

  It was still early in the afternoon, and traffic was much lighter than it had been that morning. We zipped north at a steady pace, the road clear before us and the occasional glimpse of sun flashing on the waters of San Francisco Bay to our right. The drive would have been entirely pleasant if we weren’t worried anew about Hilary’s whereabouts, and if we weren’t now all humming the song Peter’s father had been playing the previous night. Even Luisa and Abigail had fallen under its sway, and a sing-along of our favorite numbers from Annie did nothing to clear our heads-moments after we finished the final bars of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” the unknown, insidiously tenacious tune was back, and soon we were all humming in unison.

  “How can we make this end?” demanded Luisa. “I don’t think I can take it anymore.” She was halfway through a third pack of Nicorette, but it no longer seemed to be working its magic.

  I wasn’t in the best of moods, either, between my own continued withdrawal, my recent facial disfigurement and my newest set of concerns about Peter, which persisted no matter how diligently I tried to shunt them aside. “There’s only one cure,” I said. “We need to hear the song all the way through.”

  “How can we hear it all the way through when we don’t know what the stupid thing is?” said Abigail. She wasn’t going through any sort of withdrawal, but the humming was apparently enough to make her cranky, too.

  “We have to find out,” said Peter, who also sounded unusually grumpy. “And I know exactly who to ask.” His cell phone rested in a cradle on the dashboard, and he reached over and pressed a couple of buttons that activated its small speaker phone and then speed-dialed a number.

  “Dr. Forrest’s office,” answered Charles’s receptionist.

  “Hi, Mitzie, it’s Peter.”

  “Peter!” she said warmly. “How are you, sweetie?”

  Sweetie was almost closer to forty than to thirty, but that was beside the point. “I’m fine, thanks. And you?” We all listened as Mitzie gave Peter the update on her husband, children, and, from what I could glean from the conversation, a pair of erratically behaved lovebirds named Joe and Judy.

  “Is my dad around?” asked Peter once Mitzie had finished discussing how Joe and Judy were flourishing now she’d changed their brand of birdseed.

  “Sure. He just finished up with a patient, and I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you. Hold on a sec.”

  A moment later, Charles’s voice boomed out of the tiny speaker. “Peter? Everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine, except I seem to have a song stuck in my head. What were you playing last night? When Rachel and I got home?”

  “Last night? That was Sidney Bechet. You must know Sidney Bechet-he was a contemporary of Louis Armstrong. Not as famous, but every bit as talented. Some would argue he was even more talented. One of the great jazz musicians of all time, and a real legend on the soprano sax.” This was practically more than Charles had said during the course of the entire weekend, and it was definitely the most I’d heard him say at once.

  “Do you know which song was playing? Right when we came in?” Peter asked.

  Charles didn’t remember, which meant Peter was reduced to humming it to him, but since Peter was nearly tone-deaf the rest of us ended up humming along, as well.

  Charles seemed oddly delighted to be on speaker phone with us all. He chuckled. “I can’t believe you don’t recognize it-I’ve played that record hundreds of times. It’s one of Bechet’s most famous works. Some would even call it his signature piece.” And then he began to sing, in a surprisingly melodic tenor he had neglected to pass along to his son. The words were in French, which meant they mostly mushed together, but one phrase stuck out.

  “Au jardin de mon coeur,” sang Charles, “une petite fleur.”

  “What was that?” I interrupted.

  “Au jardin de mon coeur,” he sang again, “une petite fleur.”

  “Petite fleur?” asked Peter.

  “It’s the name of the song. ‘Petite Fleur.’”

  With a rush, disjointed memories of the previous day came flooding back: first sitting in Union Square as the sounds of a distant saxophone wafted over us, and then the lone musician at the Martin Luther King memorial, playing the saxophone for the handful of people scattered across the grassy lawn.

  “That’s it,” I blurted out. “Now we know for sure. Marxist Santa and Petite Fleur are the same person.”

  “What did you say, Rachel?” asked Charles.

  “Oh. Uh, nothing.” I had no intention of giving him yet more reasons to think I was idiosyncratic.

  “Dad, thanks. This has been really helpful,” said Peter.

  “Yes, thank you,” the rest of us chorused.

  But as soon as Peter had disconnected the call, I explained. “Marxist Santa or Petite Fleur or whatever we want to call him-he was nearby, watching us, both when I received the keychain and then again when we found the iPod. But we didn’t notice him, because he was playing the saxophone. We thought he was just a regular street musician.”

  “So we’re looking for a jazz aficionado and saxophone player who’s also a hacker and a Marxist and is trying to screw up Igobe and its IPO?” summarized Peter.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “But we’re not looking for that person,” Luisa reminded Peter and me, her tone stern. “We’re looking for Ben, because we’re trying to find Hilary, and the two things have nothing to do with each other. You both need to focus.”

  “Right,” I said, trying to focus.

  “I know this isn’t about Ben,” said Abigail apologetically, “but I still keep thinking about Leo. It’s as if Petite Fleur is channeling him from beyond the grave.”

  Luisa did not remind Abigail to focus, which seemed like a blatant double-standard. “What makes you say that?” she asked instead.

  “Leo played several different instruments, including the saxophone, and he was a huge jazz fan. He even named his dog Scat,” said Abigail.

  I started to turn around in my seat, but Luisa made a threatening noise low in her throat, so I faced forward again. “What does naming a dog Scat have to do with jazz?” I asked.

  “Scat’s a type of jazz singing, isn’t it?” said Peter.

  “Yes,” said Abigail. “But instead of singing real words, you sing made-up syllables.”

  “Like bop and bap?” I asked.

  “Bop’s a real word,” said Luisa.

  “Not when people sing it that way. And bap isn’t a real word, either,” I said.

  “It might be, in some other language.”

  “But that doesn’t count, because if you’re singing in English and then you sing bap, it’s not supposed to mean anything.”

  “But it would count if you were singing in the other language,” she insisted.

  “But we’re talking about singing in English.”

  “Of course we are, since you don’t speak anything besides English. You really should consider broadening your cultural horizons.”

  “My horizons are broad,” I protested.

 
“How are your horizons broad? Give me one example of how your horizons are broad.”

  “I speak excellent pig latin.”

  “You two aren’t going to start up again, are you?” asked Peter through gritted teeth. “Because we still have a good ten or fifteen miles to go, and you really don’t want to be walking on the highway once it’s dark.”

  24

  We had to grovel a bit, but ultimately Peter didn’t make us walk the rest of the way, so half an hour later we were back in the lobby of the Four Seasons. Fortunately, Natasha was on duty at the front desk, and she remembered me from the previous day and still thought I was Hilary. She also must have been trained in not registering disgust at the appearance of hotel guests, although she did ask what had happened to my lip. I explained about the tennis ball, thinking as I did that I should come up with a more interesting excuse. If I was going to look like a special effect from a horror film, I should at least have a story that could better withstand repetition. One with more drama and even a hint of intrigue.

  We took the new keycard Natasha coded for me and headed up to the room Ben had been sharing with Hilary. We knocked, just to be safe, but there was no answer, and the Do Not Disturb sign no longer hung from the doorknob, so I used the keycard to open the door. Then I drew the security bolt on the inside so we wouldn’t have to worry about Ben walking in on us if he suddenly decided to return from whatever shady activities he’d been pursuing.

  Hilary’s belongings remained in the modified state of disorder in which we’d left them the previous day, and more importantly, Ben’s suitcase was still there. We took this as a positive sign, but the pile of receipts I’d left on the desk also looked as if they hadn’t been touched, which only reinforced our hypothesis that Ben wasn’t actually playing on our team. He had no need to recreate Hilary’s itinerary if he already knew where she was.