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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