It wasn’t that small. After all, Iggie and his ex-wife had gone to graduate school at Berkeley, as well. But at least we now could put part of a name to the unidentified face, and it shouldn’t prove too hard to find out the rest of the name, or, I hoped, to track down its owner and ask him why he thought Hilary had felt it necessary to stash the picture in such a top-secret locale. He might even know where we could find Iggie. All we had to do was check with the university and ask them about former graduate students named Leo who had worked in tech support and helped visiting law-school instructors. With a name like Leo, it would be easy, I thought, pleased.

My pleasure was almost enough to blot out any concerns about just where Peter’s mother thought I’d be wearing my pink dress and matching shoes.

8

We said goodbye to Susan outside Saks after agreeing to meet for an early dinner in Chinatown. She offered to take the shopping bags home, which was nice of her, but it also meant I wouldn’t have the opportunity to accidentally allow my new outfit to be crushed under a passing cable car.

“Thank you for standing idly by while your mother dressed me up like Bridesmaid Barbie,” I said to Peter as we waited to cross Post Street.

“I thought you looked cute,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “The pink is amazing with your hair.”

I found his utter cluelessness about such matters to be part of his charm, so I didn’t bother to debate this with him. “What were all those phone calls?” I asked.

“The valet service tracked down the guys who parked cars at the party last night and had them get in touch with me. There were three in total-high-school kids who work for the service on weekends.”

“Did any of them remember Hilary?”

“Did I mention they were in high school? They all remembered Hilary. She’s the living incarnation of adolescent male fantasy.”

“I’m sure there were posters of women just like her decorating the walls at your frat house,” I said.

“It wasn’t that sort of fraternity,” he protested. “In fact, we were pretty nerdy. And why are you so surprised I was in a fraternity?” The light finally changed, and we hurried across the street.

Because fraternities are so normal, I thought but didn’t say, nor did I say I shouldn’t be surprised given how normal everything else was about him and his family. “Was there a matching sorority?” I asked instead. “Where people wore a lot of pink?”

“Caro’s sorority was sort of like a sister sorority. And Caro likes to wear pink. So, yes, I guess there was a matching sorority where people wore a lot of pink.”

A mental picture of a sorority house filled with pastel-clad triathletes flashed before my eyes. I gave silent thanks that I’d lacked the spirit of adventure applying to a college in California would have required before returning to the matter at hand. “So what did the male adolescents have to say?”

“Ben and Luisa are right over there,” Peter said, pointing them out in line at a coffee cart. “Why don’t I wait and tell you all at the same time?”

The four of us purchased beverages and found a table on the plaza. It was a pleasant spot, especially during those fleeting moments when the sun managed to break through the clouds, and a breeze carried the faint notes of a saxophone accompanied by the occasional clang of a cable car’s bell or a barking dog. My seat faced directly onto the statue at the plaza’s center, a woman doing an arabesque atop a Corinthian column. She looked energetic and healthful, as if she hadn’t been deprived of vital carbonated and artificially sweetened cola refreshment. I, on the other hand, had the Rice-a-Roni theme song running through my head, courtesy of the cable cars, and was trying to make do with seltzer, which was doing nothing to relieve my withdrawal symptoms.

“This is a useless drink,” I said, jabbing at the ice in my plastic cup with a straw.

“Only forty-one hours left,” said Peter, his tone encouraging.

“You forfeited your right to comment when you let your mother trick me out like a prom queen,” I said to him.

“I thought it was Bridesmaid Barbie,” he said.

“The two are hardly mutually exclusive,” I said.

Luisa giggled.

I looked up, startled. Giggling was as unprecedented as blushing. “Did you just giggle?” I asked her.

“What can I say? It’s funny.” She pulled her cigarette case and lighter out of her handbag.

“I’m glad you’re taking such pleasure in my suffering,” I said.

“Who wants to debrief first?” asked Peter, wisely steering the conversation onto a more productive path. “Luisa, how about you? Did you find a way to reach Iggie?”

She shook her head. “I had no idea he was such a man of mystery. First I left messages at Igobe, and I even tried to send a couple of e-mails to obvious addresses like [email protected] and [email protected], but they bounced right back. Then I must have made calls to two dozen of our classmates, including everyone who lived on our hallway sophomore year, but even his old roommates didn’t know how to find him. They haven’t heard from him since college, and one of them is still harboring quite the grudge-I got an earful about how Iggie borrowed his autographed picture of Bill Gates and never returned it.”

“Bill Gates? As in the guy who founded Microsoft? That Bill Gates?” asked Ben, who had been silently sipping his latte up until now.

I nodded. “Iggie always used to wonder if he should bother sticking around until graduation. He said he already knew more than most of the professors and Bill Gates dropped out of college and did just fine without a degree. If you haven’t gathered as much by now, Iggie was never the sort to be paralyzed by self-doubt.”

“He was absolutely confident that he would eventually be as successful-if not more so-as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or any of the other technology moguls,” added Luisa. “And this was even before the Google guys or any of the other more recent Internet billionaires.”

“So was that it?” Peter asked her. “Nobody knows where he is or how to reach him, but his old roommate wants his Bill Gates picture back?”

“I do have one potential lead,” Luisa said, taking a cigarette out of her engraved case and tapping its end on the table. “Somebody mentioned she may know a way to get in touch with him. I’m going to follow up with her later.”

“Who’s that?” I asked. “Someone from college?”

“No, just a friend.” She busied herself with her silver lighter.

“Which friend?” I asked. I’d seen Luisa light cigarettes on countless occasions, and it had never required such concentration.

“Just a friend,” she repeated, finally releasing a lick of flame from the lighter and touching it to the tip of the cigarette.

It was unlike her to be evasive, but perhaps being evasive went with the blushing and giggling. And my withdrawal hadn’t completely compromised my powers of deductive reasoning. Putting together the blushing and giggling with the phone call Peter had fielded that morning indicated with abundant clarity that the “friend” in question was almost certainly Abigail-not that I had any idea as to why Abigail thought she could locate Iggie when nobody else could. It was also abundantly clear that Luisa hadn’t “overslept” on her own.

I was about to ask her who she thought she was fooling with her coy references when her phone rang. She dug hastily into her bag to retrieve it and checked the caller ID. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, jumping up. “Hi,” she said into the phone, her voice practically giddy. She walked toward the far side of the statue, but even at a distance I could see her cheeks redden.

I didn’t know what to think of anybody anymore. Fearsome, fearless Hilary was sending out distress signals and cynical, self-contained Luisa was behaving like a love-struck teenager. And I was supposed to make sense of it all without caffeine. It didn’t seem fair, but it did prove to me how far I’d come. I was definitely normal compared to the two of them.