LITMIR.BIZ

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“I can check with Rachel, but I’m pretty sure Luisa’s not dating anyone.”

      I shook my head to confirm this was true. “Not since she and Isobel broke up last fall. Did something happen?” I asked excitedly, trying to keep my voice low so Abigail couldn’t hear me. “With Abigail and Luisa?”

      Peter covered the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand. “She’s not saying anything specific, but she wants the scoop.” He took his hand away from the phone and spoke into it. “Luisa was in a relationship for a long time, but they broke up in the fall.”

      I enjoyed listening to Peter gossip like this—it was a side of him I didn’t see often—and it was somehow comforting to know that a woman who looked like Abigail still needed reassurances before embarking on a new relationship. And now I also knew why Luisa had been trying to reach me. She probably wanted the lowdown on Abigail.

      My phone rang again, and I consulted the caller ID. Sure enough, it was Luisa. I pressed a button to answer the call.

      “Is there something you’d like to tell me, young lady?” I asked with mock severity.

      “It’s about time,” said Luisa, her tone harried. “I’ve been trying to reach you for ages. It’s important.”

      “Is it?” I asked, still teasing. It was rare for Luisa to be anything but perfectly composed, and I was savoring this unusual role reversal.

      But I definitely wasn’t expecting what she said next.

      “It’s Hilary. She’s disappeared.”

      4

      I t took a moment for Luisa’s words to sink in, but once they did, my response came easily.

      “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said, which was true. We’d initially been alarmed on those freshman-year mornings when we’d found Hilary’s top bunk empty, but we soon grew accustomed to her showing up a day or two later with a satisfied look on her face, and a few days after that there would be yet another guy whose calls she wouldn’t take.

      “This is serious, Rachel.”

      “We are talking about Hilary, right?”

      “I spoke to Ben. He said she left the party without him, but she’s still not back, and he hasn’t heard from her. I’m worried.”

      “Well, we know she was ready to break up with Ben. Maybe this was her way of doing it. Tact has never exactly been one of her strengths, and she and Iggie looked as if they were really hitting it off last night, bizarre as that might seem.” Hilary was usually disciplined enough to make sure she was completely finished with one guy before she took up with another, but maybe she was getting less scrupulous about these matters now that we were over thirty. And while I’d thought she had been spending time with Iggie solely for the purposes of her story, perhaps he finally won her over. Stranger things had happened. Hilary had never cared much about money, but a billion dollars could go a long way in making the previously unthinkable thinkable.

      “I know that—it was hard to miss them on the dance floor last night. But I tried her mobile, too, and it went right into voice mail, and you know she never lets anything stop her from taking a call, no matter where she is. And there’s something else. Do you know if she tried to reach you?”

      “I didn’t see any calls or messages from her. Why?”

      “This is what started me worrying in the first place. I have a strange text on my phone. It was sent shortly after midnight from a number I don’t recognize, one with a San Francisco area code. I tried to call the number back, but it only rings and rings before going into an automated voice mail.”

      “So?” I still wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about. “It was probably just somebody’s mistake.”

      “I don’t think it was a mistake, Rachel. The message says SOS.”

      “Oh,” I said, the smile fading from my lips.

      There are couples who have signals they use to communicate privately with each other in public venues. Fiddling with an earring could mean “I’m ready to leave” while adjusting a shirt cuff could be a warning to stay away from the salmon puffs. My friends and I developed a similar set of signals when we were in college, but SOS was the one we used most frequently. It was easy to form the letters in sign language with one hand by making a fist for the first S, opening the fist into a circle for the O, and then closing it again for the second S. This could be done discreetly, with your hand at your side or even, with enough practice, while holding a drink.

      I’d found it to be an especially useful tool at social events when cornered by an ex-boyfriend or someone I would never want to be my boyfriend, ex or otherwise. I would give the signal, and soon one of my friends would arrive at my side, claiming an urgent need to speak to me privately. It might not have been terribly mature, but it was effective. Of course, usually Hilary had been the one doing the rescuing rather than requiring rescue; given her lack of adherence to social norms, she’d never had trouble extricating herself from uncomfortable situations without assistance. For her to use this signal at all was remarkable, and in the context of her unexplained absence, it was definitely cause for alarm.

      “Did you check with Jane and Emma?” I asked. “Could one of them have sent it?”

      “It would have been three in the morning on the East Coast, but I checked with them anyhow,” said Luisa. “And they didn’t know anything. So it had to be Hilary. Did you get anything similar?”

      “Let me take a closer look at my messages,” I told Luisa. I put the call on hold and started scrolling through the log again.

      “What’s wrong?” Peter asked. He’d ended his own call with Abigail and had picked up on my change in tone.

      “I’m not sure yet,” I told him, studying the BlackBerry screen. There were the several missed calls from Luisa beginning around nine-thirty. Under those, with a time stamp of twelve-nineteen, was a text message from an unfamiliar number with a San Francisco area code. I clicked it open.

      “SO” it read.

      That was it. Just the S and the O. As if its sender had been interrupted before she’d had a chance to finish what she wanted to say.

      And when Hilary had something to say, she didn’t leave it unsaid. At least, not by choice.

      I flipped back to Luisa. “We’ll be right there,” I told her.

      

      On the one hand, there had been some talk about mountain biking, so I was glad to have a valid reason to avoid yet another exercise-based outing. On the other hand, normal people didn’t have friends who suddenly went missing, potentially in the company of velvet-clad Internet tycoons. If anything, those were the sort of friends with whom an idiosyncratic person would surround herself.

      “It’s no problem,” Peter assured me. “We can go biking later. We’ll just tell my parents we need to track Hilary down first.”

      “Maybe we shouldn’t tell them about Hilary.”

      “Why not?”

      “I wouldn’t want them to worry unnecessarily,” I said, which he seemed to accept, but mostly I didn’t want to confide in him my concerns about not fitting in with his family. After all, normal people don’t worry about not being normal.

      I insisted we live up to my promise to do the dishes, so we hurriedly loaded the dishwasher before going out on the deck, where we found Susan doing the crossword puzzle and Charles reading a book in the watery sunlight that passed for summer in San Francisco. Spot, curled by Susan’s feet, thumped his tail. Peter made our excuses about mountain biking, saying we were sore after the run—which was entirely true in my case—and had decided to catch up with friends instead.

      “Is it all right to take the car?” he asked. The simple question made me feel as if we were teenagers up to something illicit, but his

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