And in this case, that very first person was Ben.

23

I tried my best to hide my impatience as Peter and I said our goodbyes to Caro and Alex, enduring another painfully detailed discussion of sporting equipment with what would have been a fixed smile if my lip hadn’t been too swollen to make smiling possible. Once in the car, however, I wasted no time laying out my newest theory.

“Think about it,” I told Peter. “Think about all of the things we’ve accepted as fact, when they’re really just what Ben told us. He could have made it all up: what he saw on the security camera tape, the registration for the phone Hilary used to send her SOS texts-everything. And he said he’d passed out when he got back to the hotel on Saturday night, but did you notice that the bed was still made Sunday, even though the Do Not Disturb sign was on the door of his room? It definitely didn’t look as if housekeeping had been there. And then there are the times he’s been off doing things on his own. Like last night, when Abigail and Luisa were having dinner, and then again today. Where is he? What hunch is he following up on? And if it’s such a good hunch, why didn’t he tell us about it in the first place?”

While it had some holes we couldn’t completely fill, Peter liked my theory, possibly because it managed both to validate his own suspicions about Hilary’s most recent text and to direct my suspicions toward somebody other than his dream date for Caro. Who, it turned out, wasn’t exactly Caro’s dream date, but Caro didn’t realize that the man she thought was her dream date had been recently voted Most Likely to Be a Bad Guy. On the bright side, the renewal of Hilary’s MIA status meant I could once again postpone worrying about which relationships were and were not everyone’s respective destinies, and I knew enough to appreciate any silver linings that came my way.

We’d called Luisa and Abigail as we were leaving, and they were waiting for us as we pulled up. Judging by the shopping bags they piled into the hatchback their outing had been successful.

“Guess what?” I said, turning around to bring them up-to-date as they slid into the backseat.

Abigail stifled a gasp, and Luisa recoiled. “Good God, Rachel! What happened to you?”

I quickly explained about my little collision with a tennis ball. “But that’s not the important thing.”

“Face forward, then. Do we have to look at you while you’re telling us what the important thing is?” said Luisa, as if my fat lip was some sort of purposeful assault on her refined sensibilities.

“Do you need more nicotine gum?” I asked patiently. Given the circumstances, I considered my concern for her well-being extremely noble.

“I have plenty of gum, thank you, but it’s going to take a lot more than gum to make you less scary.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Peter.

“See, Peter doesn’t think it’s that bad,” I told Luisa.

“He’s either lying or he’s living proof that love is indeed blind,” she replied.

“What’s the important thing you wanted to tell us, Rachel?” asked Abigail, who was growing skilled at moving discussion forward on those occasions when Luisa and I fell into a conversational rut.

Peter turned the car toward the highway as we told them about my various epiphanies and Alex Cutler’s alibi.

“You’re right,” said Luisa as I explained about the fake text, the realization washing over her just as it had washed over me, except without the self-recrimination. That was my personal area of expertise. “But do you really think Ben is behind everything?”

“Who else could it be?” I said.

“But then why did he wait so long to send the second text?” she asked. “Why didn’t he text us yesterday, so we wouldn’t have been concerned or looking for her at all? In fact, why didn’t he use her phone in the first place?”

“There are a couple of pieces we can’t get to fit,” admitted Peter. “Maybe something was wrong with her phone, and then maybe he couldn’t find the phone she used to text us-maybe he dropped it wherever he stashed Hilary, and he went back to that place today and found it. It seems like he could have done that yesterday, but maybe he was worried we’d notice.” What he left unsaid was the assumption that Hilary had been “stashed,” rather than done away with on a more permanent basis. None of us was willing to entertain that thought, and the simple fact that Ben hadn’t left town seemed to indicate he was still attending to her in some way. At least, that’s what we hoped.

“Then what about the second Lamborghini?” asked Abigail. “And the blonde who came out of the hotel and got into it? And its ACV vanity plate? Ben didn’t tell us about that-the doorman did.”

“That’s the other piece we can’t figure out,” I said. “It could have been a coincidence, just like Iggie said. A driver he didn’t know, and then a different blonde altogether. Ben might have seen them when he watched the tape from the security cameras, which is how he also would have known about the other driver’s vanity plate. Then he could have improvised about the phone registration having the same letters.”

This explanation was also a stretch, but if all went well, we’d be able to get the answer from the horse’s mouth soon enough, assuming Ben was the horse in this case and that we’d be able to corral him or lasso him or whatever the appropriate extension of the metaphor might be. We discussed calling the police, but it was still unlikely our reasons for worrying about Hilary would make sense to an outsider. The texts Luisa and I had received that day would have reassured anyone who wasn’t aware of Hilary’s distaste for emoticons-they’d even temporarily reassured us. It seemed as if we would waste valuable time getting the attention of the authorities, and then telling our story could take hours. We agreed that our time would be better spent tracking Ben down on our own.

Even so, we didn’t want to call him again-he probably wouldn’t pick up, and we didn’t trust ourselves not to sound too curious about his whereabouts, thus letting him know we were on to him. Instead, we sent him a text telling him we’d heard from Hilary and asking him to call us, hoping this would have the combined effect of letting him think we’d fallen for his ploy while leaving enough left unexplained that the natural thing for him to do if he was trying to act innocent would be to get in touch. In the meantime, we’d return to the hotel and attempt to retrace his steps from there.

It was still early in the afternoon, and traffic was much lighter than it had been that morning. We zipped north at a steady pace, the road clear before us and the occasional glimpse of sun flashing on the waters of San Francisco Bay to our right. The drive would have been entirely pleasant if we weren’t worried anew about Hilary’s whereabouts, and if we weren’t now all humming the song Peter’s father had been playing the previous night. Even Luisa and Abigail had fallen under its sway, and a sing-along of our favorite numbers from Annie did nothing to clear our heads-moments after we finished the final bars of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” the unknown, insidiously tenacious tune was back, and soon we were all humming in unison.

“How can we make this end?” demanded Luisa. “I don’t think I can take it anymore.” She was halfway through a third pack of Nicorette, but it no longer seemed to be working its magic.

I wasn’t in the best of moods, either, between my own continued withdrawal, my recent facial disfigurement and my newest set of concerns about Peter, which persisted no matter how diligently I tried to shunt them aside. “There’s only one cure,” I said. “We need to hear the song all the way through.”

“How can we hear it all the way through when we don’t know what the stupid thing is?” said Abigail. She wasn’t going through any sort of withdrawal, but the humming was apparently enough to make her cranky, too.