The Hunt

18

It was only a few minutes after seven when I opened my eyes, but I was alone when I did, which didn’t surprise me. I’d never been the sort of person who leaped out of bed in the morning. In fact, I was more the sort of person who swatted blindly at the snooze button with one hand while the rest of me slept on, relishing the happy warmth and comfort under the covers. Peter, on the other hand, woke before the alarm had a chance to go off, literally bounding out of bed and into his day. Caro probably did, too, I thought, grumpy.

I was feeling extra sluggish this morning, undoubtedly as a result of the combined effects of caffeine deprivation and whatever was the opposite of a runner’s high. I rolled over a few times, giving my body the opportunity to sink back into sleep, but nothing happened, so I slowly propelled myself into a sitting position and just as slowly into a standing one. Then I extended a foot in the direction of the bathroom.

At which point I fell over.

I lay on the floor like a defective Weeble, cursing Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda, and everybody else who could be blamed for making it seem as if fitness should be a goal for anyone but elite athletes. Peter had said yesterday’s run would be “fun,” but not only was it not fun, the muscles in my legs were now so tight they couldn’t do the flexing they needed to do to walk. I was descended from a long line of wise, if pale, people who fastidiously avoided breaking a sweat, along with eating any vegetable that didn’t come out of a can, and most of them had lived well past the average life expectancy. It seemed as if we could all benefit from emulating their habits. There might even be a best-selling lifestyle manual in it.

I spent a few more minutes on the floor, fantasizing about my new life as a best-selling author of lifestyle manuals while trying to knead the stiffness from my calves. Then I dragged myself up into a standing position again and attempted forward movement. The massage had helped a bit, and if I walked only on my toes, taking mincing baby steps, I was marginally mobile.

The Forrests weren’t the kind of family that expected everyone to be fully dressed at all times, so I minced down the stairs in my robe and pajamas, which were actually an ancient pair of Peter’s pajamas I’d snagged from one of his dresser drawers. There was something cozy about their well-worn oversizedness, and I made a mental note to snag the remaining pairs to take back with me to New York. For all I knew, this trip would be my last chance to raid his adolescent wardrobe and I should make the most of it.

Peter and his parents were sitting in the breakfast room, looking chipper and with plates of traditional breakfast-type food in front of them, just like in a television commercial. I hadn’t realized real people ever ate breakfasts like this on a weekday.

“Is everything okay?” asked Peter after I’d safely lowered my body onto a chair. “We heard a crash. I was about to go up and check on you.”

“I-I just dropped something.” That something was myself, but there was no need for them to know that.

“Rachel, dear, would you like a soda?” asked Susan, proud to have remembered my preferred morning beverage. She probably found mine such a strange choice that remembering it wasn’t much of a challenge.

I wanted a soda so desperately I could chew off my own arm, but I managed to smile and shake my head. “I’ll just have some herbal tea again, thank you.”

Not only did Peter’s family eat breakfast as if they were in a commercial, they made conversation in the morning as if they didn’t feel it was necessary to be fully caffeinated before diving into personal interactions. At least, Peter and Susan made conversation while Charles read the paper. Peter told her about our changed itinerary and the planned field trip to Silicon Valley, although he fibbed and said it was because he wanted to show me around Stanford.

“And we’re going to meet up with Caro and Alex Cutler for tennis,” he added, neglecting to mention that Alex Cutler was most probably a criminal. He was still operating in innocent-until-proven-guilty mode on that front, which only validated my theory that he was exceptionally skilled at deluding himself about his personal relationships. “They both work near Palo Alto and said they could get away for a lunchtime game.”

“That will be fun,” said Susan with enthusiasm, but experience was teaching me that anything a Forrest thought would be fun was likely to be painful and potentially dangerous. She turned to me. “Be careful, dear. Caro has a killer serve. And her backhand is deadly, too.”

“Good to know,” I said, hoping even more intensely we would be able to unmask Alex Cutler as an evildoer before Caro could kill me with either her serve or her backhand. Neither seemed a particularly appealing way to die.

“Is Alex a good player, Peter?” asked Susan.

“I think so. I’ve never played with him before, but he said he plays a lot.” He took a sip of coffee. “I have to admit, I’m hoping it will be good for Alex and Caro to spend some more time together. Maybe they’ll hit it off.”

“Hit it off? You mean romantically?” asked Susan.

Peter nodded. “Sure.”

“Hmm,” said Susan, taking a sip of her own coffee. “I don’t know if I see them together, honey. Do you see them together, Rachel?”

Yet again, she’d caught me with my mouth full. All I could do was give a noncommittal murmur, though that’s all I would have produced even if my mouth had been empty.

“I just don’t know if I see them together,” she repeated.

“It can’t hurt to try, can it?” asked Peter.

“Of course not,” she said, but she sounded doubtful.

I thought I knew why she sounded that way, and it wasn’t because she suspected Alex of abducting my friend. How could she possibly see Caro with Alex when she still hoped Caro would end up with her own normal son?

Peter and I managed to get ourselves washed and dressed and into a hybrid by half past eight. Fighting traffic across the city was almost as difficult as it had been to fight off Susan’s offers of juice, cereal, toast, English muffins, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, poached eggs and sausage, but it was less stressful because it wasn’t necessary to be polite to the traffic. Of course, Peter being Peter, he was polite anyway. Except he couldn’t stop humming.

“What are you humming?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Whatever my dad had on the stereo last night. I can’t get it out of my head.”

We made a pathetic pair: I still had “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat,” playing on in an endless mental loop and Peter was humming jazz. Caro probably loved jazz, I thought-all normal people did. To me it was the musical equivalent of Camilla Gergen’s voice but less pleasant. And neither Peter’s humming nor Rice-a-Roni were doing much for my mental state. My crankiness had not abated since yesterday; if anything, it was gathering force, and it didn’t help that to my various withdrawal and fitness-induced woes was added a fierce craving for pilaf.

It took more than half an hour to get from Pacific Heights to the hotel, a drive that had taken less than fifteen minutes when we’d made it in the opposite direction at one that morning. Gustav and Ray were gone, replaced by the day-shift staff, but Luisa and Abigail were waiting for us.

“Where’s Ben?” I asked as they slid into the backseat.

“Do I look like Ben’s keeper?” snapped Luisa, quickly putting to rest any hopes that her mood had improved overnight. At least I could be confident she was keeping up her end of the dare. This was the only reason I refrained from remarking on Abigail’s clothes, which were different than what she’d been wearing the previous night but also looked suspiciously like an outfit I’d recently seen on Luisa.

“Ben said he had a few things he wanted to follow up on here in the city,” supplied Abigail before embarking on a detailed discussion with Peter of which route to take. Apparently the 101 was more direct but the 280 more scenic.

My brain was still working too slowly to wonder what, exactly, Ben was following up on or if it was related in any way to what he’d been doing while Luisa and Abigail had been dining à deux the previous evening. Nor did I pay attention to the route Peter ultimately decided upon, as I never paid attention to directions when I wasn’t driving. Whichever highway we ended up on was choked with cars in both directions, including an astonishing number of hybrids. I’d seen a handful of them in Manhattan, and even a few hybrid taxis, but here we were surrounded.

As we meandered south in stop-and-go traffic, Peter and I filled in Luisa and Abigail on the text of the file he’d decrypted, showing them a printout of the e-mail, and together we discussed the ways in which the various dots might connect.

“Let me make sure I understand,” said Luisa in a way that really suggested she was having difficulty understanding how she’d found herself involved in this whole mess in the first place. “To start with, there’s Marxist Santa, who’s trying to throw a wrench into the Igobe IPO by leading all of the investment bankers who might handle the IPO on a scavenger hunt.”

“It’s not the most direct way to go about things, but I can’t figure out why else he’d be targeting the people he’s been targeting,” I said.

“And we’re sure that Marxist Santa has inside access to Igobe?” asked Abigail.

“How else would he know which bankers to target?” I said.

“And then there’s the hacker, Petite Fleur, who also wants to bring Igobe down by compromising its technology,” said Peter.

“So Petite Fleur is second. And then there’s the third person we know Hilary’s met with at least once, presumably about her Igobe article, and who also has a soft spot for Karl Marx,” Luisa said.

“Which suggests that the third person from Hilary’s e-mail could be the same as the first person, Marxist Santa,” I concluded. “And maybe Marxist Santa knows what Petite Fleur is up to, and that’s what he’s promising Hilary will be the ‘story of the century.’ Or maybe Marxist Santa and Petite Fleur are one and the same.”

“Obviously,” said Luisa dryly. I had to admit, I was pretty confused myself.

“Is it possible that this person-or persons-kidnapped Hilary?” asked Abigail.

I thought about that. “I guess it’s not impossible, but Hilary’s on his side. Or their side.”

“And which side is that?” asked Luisa.

“The side that’s standing in the way of the people who would benefit from an Igobe IPO. Namely, Iggie and Alex Cutler,” I said, trying to sound less confused than I felt.

“It would be good to know when and where ‘same time’ and ‘same place’ are supposed to be,” mused Abigail. “Did Hilary tell any of you where she’d been in the days leading up to the party?”

She might have, I thought guiltily, but I’d been so wrapped up in proving my normality I hadn’t paid much attention.

“I only remember her mentioning she’d been doing research,” said Luisa. “I don’t think she told me where, and I didn’t ask.”

“Ben might know,” suggested Peter.

Ben hadn’t seemed to know much of anything thus far, but maybe he’d come through on this. “We should call him. Do you know if he’s still at the hotel-” I started to ask.

But then I had another idea, and it was nothing short of brilliant. “I think I may be a genius.”

“Rachel, you are many things, but you are not a genius,” said Luisa.

I chalked this up to nicotine withdrawal and let it go. “Hilary left a pile of receipts in her room. Maybe one of the receipts is from where she met the person from the e-mail.”

“So we could put together where Hilary was and when she was there from the receipts?” asked Peter.

“Exactly. Then we can meet up at the same time and same place with the person who sent the e-mail, and he might be able to help us locate Hilary. And maybe we can also find out if he is, in fact, Marxist Santa and what he thinks the story of the century is.”

“That’s a great idea,” he said. Of course, Peter would be enthusiastic about anything that didn’t incriminate his old frat buddy, but even Abigail, who hadn’t spent the better part of a year convincing herself she was in love with me, agreed it was a great idea, and she chimed in to say so. To my credit, I did not turn around to say “so there” to Luisa in the backseat.

“Let’s call Ben right now,” I said. “Maybe he can start piecing together Hilary’s trail, and if we don’t have any luck with Iggie or Alex, we can pick up from there.”

“Fine,” said Luisa, “I’ll call Ben and run it by him.” This was as close as I was going to get to an admission from her that my idea was a good one. She reached Ben on his cell phone and spoke to him briefly, explaining about the e-mail and the receipts.

“Well?” I asked when she’d completed her call.

“He says he’ll get on it in a bit,” she replied.

“Did he think it was brilliant?” I asked. “I bet he thought it was brilliant.”

“Stop fishing for compliments.”

“How was that fishing for compliments?”

“Please.”

“I wasn’t fishing. I was simply asking what Ben said.”

She harrumphed in response.

“Did you just harrumph at me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m not being ridiculous. And you started it.”

“I did not start it. You started it.”

“What precisely did I start, Rachel?”

“You know what you started-”

“AARGHH!” This was from Peter, not Luisa. Horns blared as he cut across three lanes of traffic and pulled onto the highway’s shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” asked Luisa, alarmed.

“Are you okay?” I asked as he jammed the car into Park.

“I am fine,” he said between clenched teeth. “The two of you, however, are not. You’ve been at each other’s throats since we got in the car. In fact, you’ve been at each other’s throats since yesterday. Either stop the bickering now, or you’re going to get out and walk, and I won’t care if you go through a case of soda and a carton of cigarettes on the way.”

“We can’t do that,” I pointed out. “We were dared, and we don’t want to be wusses.”

“Then don’t be wusses. But the choice is the same. Which is it going to be? Ride and behave, or walk and bicker?”

“We weren’t bickering,” said Luisa. “Do you think we were bickering, Rachel?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But who knew that putting Peter behind the wheel would turn him into such a dad?”