The Hunt

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.

With a collective sense of déjà vu, we began searching the room yet again, but this time we concentrated on Ben’s belongings rather than Hilary’s. His neatness seemed compulsive when contrasted with Hilary’s mess, which was compulsive only in its need for chaos. It was a miracle their relationship had lasted as long as it did.

Peter hoisted the suitcase up onto the carefully made bed and unzipped it, and we all began rifling through its contents. This felt vaguely unethical, and it was probably illegal, as well, but if desperate times did, in fact, call for desperate measures, then we were well justified. But that didn’t mean we found anything but dirty clothes stuffed into a plastic laundry bag and clean clothes folded alongside. A search of the bag’s inner and outer pockets proved equally fruitless, as did an examination of the lining for any hidden compartments. There were no papers, no maps with a convenient X marking a spot, or even a handy Palm Pilot or calendar.

Luisa began repacking the bag as Peter and Abigail started on the dresser and closet. Since I’d been so successful the first time I’d searched it, I went into the bathroom, where Ben’s toothbrush stood in a glass by the sink next to his Dopp kit. Going through this felt even more invasive than going through his suitcase; there was something more personal about a man’s deodorant and dental floss than his spare socks. But I unzipped it anyhow and began removing the items one by one. As far as I could tell, it was the usual assortment of toiletries and grooming items, but I kept digging, hoping I would come up with something revealing rather than anything disturbing. And, depending on one’s point of view on these matters, what I did come up with could have been either.

I reached into the very deepest corner of the canvas case, and my fingers landed on something small and hard but covered in soft fabric. Its very shape and texture aroused my apprehension, and my yelp of shocked discovery brought everyone running.

“Are you all right?” asked Peter, who arrived first.

“Is that what I think it is?” asked Luisa, her eyes landing on the box cupped gingerly in my palm. It was covered in dark velvet and had a tightly hinged lid.

“I haven’t looked inside yet.” I gave the box a gentle shake, but nothing rattled. It could contain cuff links of the nonrattling variety, but as much as I wanted to believe this, Ben didn’t seem like a French cuffs sort of guy.

“Do you plan on opening it?” asked Luisa. “Or are we all just going to stand around and stare at it?”

But opening the box only confirmed our darkest fears. Inside, nestled into a satin pillow, was what was unmistakably intended as an engagement ring. The modest stone was an emerald, not a diamond, but its deep green would have matched Hilary’s eyes perfectly.

“What was he thinking?” asked Luisa, incredulous. “Engagement rings aren’t Hilary’s style.”

“Neither are engagements,” I said. “Or marriage, for that matter.”

“I had no idea he was so serious about her,” said Peter.

“I don’t think she had any idea, either,” said Luisa.

“It must have made it even worse for him when she ended things,” said Abigail.

We weren’t sure what to do with the ring, so for lack of any better ideas we restored it to its original hiding place and returned to the other room, where we resumed searching the various drawers and shelves.

Luisa was the next person to find something of interest: a sheet of hotel stationery on the bedside table, covered with a handwritten list of phone numbers. “Are any of these familiar?” she asked, passing the piece of paper around so we could all take a look.

Each number had a local area code, but otherwise none was immediately recognizable. “Well,” she said, “it shouldn’t be too hard to find out what they’re for.” She sat down on the bed, managed to retrieve her phone from the depths of her purse without incident and began dialing as the rest of us continued with the task at hand.

The desk was the only unsearched area somebody else wasn’t already searching, so I began sorting through the items on its surface and in its drawers, listening to Luisa’s repeated inquiries as to whom she had called. I found nothing I hadn’t already seen the previous day, and most of it had been provided by the hotel-the room-service menu, a sheath of writing paper and postcards and directions on how to access the broadband network-so I took a moment to leaf through the receipts. Regardless of Luisa’s lecture about focus, I couldn’t help but be curious as to where and when Hilary was supposed to meet Petite Fleur. At least now I understood why she’d been reading a book on jazz and didn’t have to worry about staging an intervention.

There were several little slips of paper documenting taxi rides to and from local addresses, but the receipts were the kind the cabdriver fills out by hand rather than prints from a meter, and even the ones that included a date lacked time stamps, so they were only moderately useful. I also learned that Hilary had been a frequent customer of a Seven-Eleven on Market Street during her stay in the city. There were a couple of credit-card slips for more expensive lunches and dinners, and I set those aside, thinking I would examine them more closely later. Then I came to the last receipt.

“That’s more like it,” I said as a puzzle piece clicked into place. It wasn’t part of the puzzle we were trying to solve, but it was still satisfying.

“What’s more like it?” asked Luisa, glancing up from the list of numbers.

At nine-sixteen on Friday night, Hilary had paid six dollars and forty-two cents for a Glenlivet.

This in itself was unremarkable. Hilary had always appreciated single-malt Scotch, preferably served neat, although it didn’t mention that on the receipt.

What was remarkable was the name of the establishment: Chez Bechet. An hour ago the name would have meant nothing to me, but now I knew better. It sounded exactly like the sort of place a guy who called himself Petite Fleur would hang out.

Of course, at this point figuring out where Hilary had planned to meet Petite Fleur was a purely intellectual exercise, and Luisa was quick to point that out. “The more pressing question to answer is what Ben was doing with a list of phone numbers for marinas and boat clubs.”

“Is that what the numbers are?” asked Peter, turning from his inspection of dresser drawers.

“Every single one I’ve reached so far,” she confirmed. “But I don’t know why he was calling them. What was he trying to accomplish?”

“I can answer that,” I said. “He wanted to go sailing. Caro said he asked her about places he could rent a boat when she talked to him at the party.” And then another puzzle piece clicked into place, one that fit nicely with the contents of the little velvet box. “Unbelievable. He really should have known better.”

“What’s wrong with sailing?” asked Peter.

“Nothing’s wrong with sailing. But Ben must have been planning a romantic outing with Hilary so he could pop the question.” I sighed. “What a sap.”

“How does that make him a sap?” he asked.

“Because he should have known better than to think Hilary would find sailing romantic. Hilary’s the least romantic person on earth,” explained Luisa. I almost felt bad for Ben. How was it possible for him to have dated Hilary for even the brief period he did and still be so utterly clueless about her?

Then I had another thought, and this one was chilling. Maybe Ben hadn’t been planning a romantic outing at all, but rather an outing of an altogether different sort. “Do you think he called the marinas from the hotel phone?” I asked Luisa. Yesterday he’d said his cell-phone reception in the room had been lousy.

“How should I know and why should we care?” asked Luisa, but I was already using the phone on the desk to dial the hotel operator.

“Hi,” I said when the operator picked up. “I was wondering, could you tell me if I made any calls from my room Saturday, yesterday or today?”

Just as Natasha had been trained not to show shock when a guest showed up looking like the victim of an overzealous round of collagen injections, the operator had been trained not to let on whether he found a question stupid. If I’d been on his end of the phone, I would be wondering why I couldn’t remember my own calls. “If you’ll hold on for a moment, I’ll pull up the records,” he offered instead. There was a brief, mercifully Muzak-free pause, and then he came back on the line. “Nothing Saturday, and nothing yesterday except a call to hotel security, but you placed several calls today. In fact, just a couple of hours ago. All to local numbers.”

“A couple of hours ago?” That wasn’t good.

“Yes, ma’am. A couple of hours ago.”

“Could you give me the numbers and the exact time of each call?”

“Sure,” he agreed, without commenting on what could only be interpreted as either amnesia or a propensity for blackouts on my part. As he read them off, I motioned for Luisa to hand me the slip of paper. Each number he gave me was on the list, and he read them in the exact same order as Ben had written them. The final number was one toward the end of the list. It had been dialed only an hour and thirty-six minutes earlier, and on closer inspection I could make out a faint check mark alongside. “That’s it,” said the operator, even though there were still a few numbers left on the piece of paper we’d found.

I thanked him profusely, wondering as I did if he was going to use me as an example the next time somebody asked him about guests’ strange requests, and hung up the phone.

“What does that mean?” asked Luisa after I shared what the operator had told me.

“It means he wasn’t planning a romantic outing to pop the question,” I said. “At least, not anymore. He made these calls well after Hilary broke up with him and went missing.”

“But then why would he still want to rent a boat?” she asked.

“Because now he might have something far less romantic in mind,” said Peter. “That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“I think you’re right to be worried,” said Abigail. She’d pulled a chair over to the closet while we were talking, apparently to reach something she’d seen on the uppermost shelf. Now she stepped down lightly from the chair, and I saw she was holding another box, but this one was covered in leather, not velvet, and it was considerably larger than the one I’d found. “If this is what I think it is, and if it’s as empty as it feels, then he definitely had something less romantic in mind,” she said.

She set the box on the desk and lifted the top. If we’d been hoping to discover another piece of jewelry, perhaps a necklace to match the ring, we were out of luck. The box was empty, but the molded indentations of the inner padding clearly indicated what it usually housed, and its very emptiness was cause for alarm.

It looked as if Ben had decided to take his gun with him on his little maritime jaunt.