“We didn't bring any bags.”
“Okay. The car's right outside.”
Chapter 16
The Mcdanielses walked behind Marco as Levon noted the driver's odd rolling gait in those cowboy boots and the man's accent, a trace of something – maybe New York or New Jersey.
They crossed the arrival lane to a traffic island where Levon saw a newspaper lying faceup on a bench.
In a heart-stopping double take, he realized that Kim was looking up at him from under the headline.
This was the Maui News, and the large black type spelled out, “Missing Beauty.”
Levon's thoughts scattered, taking him a few stunned moments to understand that during the eleven or so hours he and Barb had been in transit, Kim had officially gone missing.
She wasn't waiting at the hotel.
Like the caller said, she was gone.
Levon grabbed the paper with a trembling hand, his heart bucking as he looked into Kim's smiling eyes, took in the swimsuit she was wearing in this picture, probably taken just a couple of days ago.
Levon folded the newspaper lengthwise, caught up to Marco and Barbara at the car, asked Marco, “Will it take long to get to the hotel?”
“About a half hour, and there's no charge, Mr. McDaniels. The Wailea Princess is paying for as long as you need me.”
“Why are they doing that?”
Marco's voice turned soft. “Well, in light of the situation, sir.”
He opened the car doors, and Levon and Barbara climbed in, Barb's face crumpling when she took the paper, crying while she read the story as the sedan slipped into the traffic stream.
The car sped onto the highway, and Marco spoke to them, his eyes in the rearview mirror, gently asking if they were comfortable, if they wanted more air or music. Levon thought ahead to checking in at the hotel, then going straight to the police, the whole time feeling as though he'd suffered a battlefield amputation, that a part of him had been brutally severed and that he might not survive.
Eventually, the sedan crawled down what looked like a private road, both sides massed in purple flowering vines. They drove by an artificial waterfall, slowed to a stop in front of the grand porte cochere entryway of the Wailea Princess Hotel.
Levon saw tiled fountains on both sides of the car, bronze statues of Polynesian warriors rising out of the water with spears in their hands on one side, outriggers filled with orchids on the other.
Bellhops in white shirts and short red pants hurried toward the car. Marco opened his door, and as Levon walked around the sedan to help Barb he heard his name coming at him from all directions.
People were running toward the hotel entrance – reporters with cameras and microphones.
Racing toward them.
Chapter 17
Ten minutes later, Barb was dazed and jet-lagged as she entered a suite that on another day, and in different circumstances, she would have thought “magnificent.” If she had peeked at the rate card behind the door, she would have seen that the charge for the suite was over three thousand dollars a day.
She walked into the heart of the main room, as good as sleepwalking, seeing but not taking in the hand-knotted silk carpet, a pattern of orchids on a pale peach ground; the tapestry-upholstered furnishings; the huge flat-panel television.
She went to the window, looked out at the beauty without really seeing it, just looking for Kim.
There was a gorgeous swimming pool below, a complicated shape, like a square laid over a rectangle, with circular Jacuzzis at the shallow end. A fountain, like a champagne glass, in the middle spilled water over the children playing.
She scanned the rows of pure white cabanas around the pool, looking for a young woman in a chaise sipping a drink, Kim sitting at the poolside.
Barb saw several girls, some slimmer or heavier or older or shorter, but none of them Kim.
She looked out beyond the pool, saw a covered walk, wooden steps going down to the beach dotted with palm trees, fronted by the sapphire blue ocean, nothing but water between the edge of the beach and the coast of Japan.
Where was Kim?
Barb wanted to say to Levon, “I feel Kim's presence here,” but when she turned, Levon wasn't there.
She noticed an ornate basket of fruit on the table near the window and went to it, heard the toilet flush as she lifted out the note that was in fact a business card with a message written on the back.
Levon, her poor dear husband, his eyes unblinking and pained behind his glasses, came toward her, asking, “What's that, Barb?”
She read out loud, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels, please call me. We're here to help in any way we can.”
The card was signed, “Susan Gruber, SL,” and under her name was a room number.
Levon said, “Susan Gruber. She's the editor in chief. I'll call her now.”
Barb felt hope. Gruber was in charge. She'd know something.
Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later, the McDanielses' hotel room was full. Standing room only.
Chapter 18
Barb sat on one of the sofas, her hands clasped on her lap, waiting for Susan Gruber, this take-charge New York executive, with her bright white teeth and face as sharp as a blade, to tell them that Kim had had a fight with the photographer, or that she hadn't photographed well enough and so she'd been given the time off – or something, anything that would clear it all up, make it so that Kim was simply absent, not missing, not abducted, not in danger.
Gruber was wearing an aquamarine pantsuit and a lot of gold bracelets, and her fingers were cold when she reached out to shake hands with Barbara.
Del Swann, the art director, had dark skin, platinum hair, jewelry in one ear, and he was dressed in fashionably worn-out jeans and a tight black T-shirt. He looked like he was about to have a mental collapse, making Barbara think maybe he knew more than he was saying – or maybe he felt guilty because he was the last one to see Kim.
There were two other men. The senior one was forty-something, in a gray suit, had corporation written all over him. Barb had met men like this at Levon's Merrill Lynch conventions and business cocktail parties. She thought it was a pretty safe bet that he, and the junior clone standing to his right, were both New York lawyers who'd been overnighted to Maui like a FedEx package in order to cover the magazine's ass.
And Barb looked at Carol Sweeney, a big woman wearing an expensive, if shapeless, black dress. As the booker from the modeling agency who'd landed this job for Kim and had gone on the shoot as Kim's chaperone, Carol looked like she'd swallowed a dog, that's how choked up she was.
Barb couldn't stand to be in the same room with Carol.
The senior suit, Barb forgot his name as soon as she heard it, told Levon, “We have a security team working to find out where Kim may have gone.”
He didn't even look at Barb. Directed his attention to Levon. Pretty much, they all did. She knew she looked emotional, fragile. And who could say she didn't have good reason.
“What more can you tell us?” Barb asked the lawyer.
“There's no sign that anything happened to her. The police assume she's sightseeing.”
Barb thought, Levon, tell them, but Levon had said to her before the magazine people arrived, “We'll take information in. We'll listen. But we've got to keep in mind that we don't know these people.” Meaning, anyone attached to the magazine could have had something to do with Kim's disappearance.
Susan Gruber put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, said to Levon, “Kim was inside the hotel bar with Del, and Del went to the men's room, and when he returned, Kim was gone. No one took Kim. She left on her own.”