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little after eleven,” said Luisa. “She was outside, dancing with Page 16

    Iggie.”
    “So we have her in the tent with Iggie at eleven. What about you, Ben? When did you last see her?” I asked.
    “Huh?” he said, dragging his attention away from his soda label as I repeated the question. “Oh.
    At about the same time, I guess, dancing with Iggie. I went back inside, and then I looked for her around midnight, when the party was starting to wind down. I couldn’t find her anywhere, and she didn’t answer her cell. That’s when I gave up and assumed she’d left without me.”
    It seemed undiplomatic to comment on that. “Which means she probably left between eleven, when she was last seen, and midnight, when you couldn’t find her,” I said instead. Ben nodded.
    “When did you start thinking something might be wrong?” Peter asked him in a gentle tone.
    This had to be awkward for Ben—nobody could enjoy being ditched at a party by his significant other.
    He ripped off a long strip of the label. “This morning, when Luisa called.”
    “You mean, you couldn’t find her at the party, then she didn’t show up all night, and you didn’t think anything was wrong?” I asked. I tried to sound gentle, too, but withdrawal was wreaking havoc with my already limited interpersonal skills.
    He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We broke up. At the party. Around ten-thirty.”
    We all tried to look surprised, but only Peter really succeeded. Luisa and I were too familiar with Hilary’s history with the opposite sex to imagine much time would elapse before she acted on the feelings she’d expressed to us earlier in the evening. This breakup had been speedy even by Hilary’s standards, but it was hardly unexpected, and it certainly explained Ben’s passivity this morning.
    “So that’s why you didn’t get too concerned when you couldn’t find her,” Peter said.
    “Or when I didn’t see her here. I ended up hitting a bar after the party.” Ben gave a sheepish smile. “Drowning my sorrows, I guess. To be honest, I was pretty drunk when I got back, and I probably passed out more than went to sleep. And when I woke up and saw she still hadn’t shown up or even left a message, I was pretty pissed.”
    “But then I called,” prompted Luisa.
    “I was on my way out the door to head to the airport, but you were so worried that I figured I’d take a later flight and stick around to see how I could help. I know Hilary has the room booked for a few more days.”
    That was nice of him, I thought. If I were in his shoes, I would have been on the first plane back to the East Coast. “Do you know if she stopped by the room at all?” I asked. “Before you got back, or maybe while you were sleeping? Are her things still there?”
    “I took a look around after I spoke to Luisa, and her clothes and toiletries and stuff are where they were when we left for the party. But I did notice that her laptop was missing. And her notebook, too.”
    “Her laptop and her notebook are both gone?” said Luisa.
    “Uh-huh.”
    Luisa and I exchanged a glance, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. This new piece of information went a long way to clearing everything up, but I wished Ben had mentioned it sooner. It would have saved us a lot of worrying.
    “Iggie must have promised Hilary an interview,” I said, telling Ben and Peter about her comments the previous night. “We know she was hoping for an exclusive for her article. She probably talked him into it at the party, and then they would have left together and stopped here at the hotel to pick up her gear.”
    Putting this together was a relief for more reasons than one: if Hilary was with Iggie, then she was unlikely to be in any real danger, and if she’d taken her laptop and notebook with her, then her interest in him had remained professional rather than personal. The notion of a Hilary-Iggie hookup was a hard one to stomach, a billion dollars