I could feel myself being sucked into the preliminary loops of a doom spiral. I really needed someone to talk to, but my usual confidantes were either long asleep on the East Coast, missing, or too gripped by nicotine withdrawal to be of any use. Luisa’s specific brand of calm rationality would have been particularly comforting, but she was too scary right now even to contemplate seeking her out for emotional support.

Since nobody appropriate was available to discuss my relationship with Peter, I decided I might as well use this time productively and ask Peter about another relationship. He might have been in denial about Caro and whether fifteen years together could be interpreted as serious, but perhaps I could figure out what was going on between him and the fourth member of our little tennis klatch. Assuming tennis had klatches.

“What’s with you and Alex Cutler?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you keep defending him? Is it because you’re brothers?”

“Brothers?”

“Frat brothers. Like Bluto and Otter.”

He laughed. “How many times have you seen Animal House, anyway? Trust me, Bluto and Otter wouldn’t have had anything to do with us. Even the Kevin Bacon character would have stayed away.”

“Then is it just because you’ve known Alex for such a long time?” We were stopped at a traffic signal, and red light spilled through the windshield. It was a good color for Peter, but it probably wasn’t the best look for me. The light turned green, and the car moved forward.

“No. I mean, we were friendly, and he always seemed like a nice enough guy, but he wasn’t one of my closest friends.”

“Then why did you invite him to the party?”

He glanced over at me. “Do you really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“It’s sort of silly. You promise you won’t laugh?”

“Why would I laugh?” If Peter laughed at every silly thing I did, he’d be in perpetual hysterics.

“Well,” he said, sounding unusually awkward, “I was hoping I could set him up with Caro.”

“Set him up with Caro?”

“I thought they might make a good couple. Do you think they’d make a good couple? That is, if he ends up not being the sort of guy who goes around abducting your friends?”

“That’s a pretty big if,” I said, and it was, but inwardly I was trying to figure out why Peter would want to play matchmaker in this particular situation.

What kind of man cares enough about the woman who broke up with him-after fifteen years, no less-to set her up with someone else? Either Peter really was too good to be true, or he was so in denial about what a perfect couple he and Caro made that he’d gotten himself completely turned around mentally and was trying to sidestep the obvious by fixing her up with Alex. The poor guy had definitely been spending too much time with me: it was exactly the sort of convoluted combination of suppressing certain emotions while misdirecting others into self-defeating action for which I was famous among my friends.

“Caro hasn’t really dated anyone since we-I mean, since she broke up with me. And she and Alex seem to have a lot in common,” Peter was saying. “They’ve known each other for a long time, but maybe it just hasn’t occurred to either of them to think of each other in a relationship sort of way. I thought that maybe if I gave them a little push, something might take.”

“Uh-huh,” I said noncommittally. Of course, if I had even half of a functioning brain, I should have been urging him on. Surely Caro would be less of a threat if she was safely involved with someone else, regardless of whether that someone else was potentially a kidnapper? But even if Alex was innocent, and even if he and Caro did get together, I knew it would only be a temporary fix.

One day, and probably sooner rather than later given the pace at which “adventures” seemed to pile up in my wake, Peter would remember how normal his life was with Caro and realize that was the sort of life he was meant to live.

By the time we let ourselves in through the Forrests’ front door it was after one. I was hoping Peter’s parents would be asleep rather than awake and wondering why their son’s idiosyncratic fiancée was dragging him around the city with her colorful friends until all hours, but my hopes were only half-met. Susan was in bed but Charles was still up, reading in the den as jazz played in the background and Spot dozed at his feet. However, neither Charles nor Spot appeared even mildly curious as to where we’d been since dinner. Charles glanced up only briefly enough to wish us a good night before returning to his book. Spot glanced up equally briefly, thumped his tail once and went back to sleep.

Upstairs, I handed Peter the pen with the memory stick we’d retrieved from the safe, and he booted up his laptop while I went into the bathroom to do my own bedtime routine. The bright light over the sink only emphasized my pallor and lack of muscle tone, reminding me that another reason it would be convenient for Alex Cutler to drive up in a Lamborghini tomorrow and confess was that I would then be able to skip the tennis game. I flexed my biceps in the mirror, but I saw nothing remotely resembling definition, so I finished brushing my teeth and returned to the bedroom.

Peter was seated at the desk with his laptop open before him, typing as rapidly as was possible using only his index fingers and occasionally a pinkie. For reasons I’d never understood, he’d always resisted learning how to type. His old textbooks and childhood mementos still filled the shelves above the desk, including a framed picture of his high-school cross-country team along with their female counterparts. I’d glanced at it quickly before, but now I didn’t want to know which of the coltlike girls, each bathed in the sort of rosy, endorphin-fueled glow that only a ten-mile romp across rugged terrain can deliver, was Ashley.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“I’m getting there,” he said distractedly. “Give me a few more minutes.”

“Okay,” I said, opening the closet door to put my jacket away. Then I recoiled in horror.

I’d managed to forget completely about the afternoon’s shopping expedition, and I hadn’t thought to prepare myself for the sight before me now. The pink dress was hanging in the closet, clashing with my other clothes almost as badly as it clashed with my hair, and the matching pink shoes were lined up neatly on the floor underneath.

Then I noticed something else. Maybe Susan had been confident I’d want to keep the dress forever, or maybe she’d already guessed at my plans for my new ensemble and wanted to nip them in the bud. Either way, she’d taken it upon herself to remove the tags. I stared at the dress, utterly foiled. What could I possibly do with it now? Auction it off on eBay? With my luck, Susan would bid on it for herself so we could have matching outfits.

“Here we go,” said Peter, just in time to stop me from descending a loop further down the spiral of doom.

“You got it?”

“Yep,” he said with satisfaction.

Well, at least something had gone right this evening. I let the dress swing back in line with the other hangers and crossed over to the desk, carefully averting my gaze from the cross-country team photo and bending to look at the screen.

In an open window was what appeared to be the text of an e-mail sent to Hilary. The date was from Friday, but the sender’s e-mail address was blank.

“It was encrypted with a fairly common program you can download free off the Internet,” Peter told me. “You need a password to run the decryption function, so I tried Dylan’s zip code again, and it worked.”

“You’re very talented,” I said.

“You’re easily impressed,” he said, pulling me down onto his lap for a better view of the screen. “I still couldn’t figure out how to unblock the sender’s address, and I don’t know if this tells us much otherwise. But what do you think?”