The Hunt (10 page)

“What is it?” I asked, expecting something with a lion theme, a variation of Leo.

“Petite Fleur.”

“Petite Fleur?”

“Petite Fleur.”

“Oh,” I said again, momentarily at a loss. Who knew my Lincoln Memorial keychain would find itself competing for the day’s most random prize so soon?

“It’s French for Little Flower,” added Laura.

“Can it mean anything else?” I’d taken a few years of French in high school, but it had been a long time since Madame Weber’s lessons had occupied any space in my head. Something had to be jettisoned to make room for Madonna lyrics, and French had really only been useful for ensuring I didn’t accidentally order tripe or something equally disturbing in fancy restaurants.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I even double-checked in a French-English dictionary. So that’s when I called you. Since you know Igor Behrenz personally, I thought you might know who this old-friend-turned-enemy could be and what the story is.”

Not only did she have no way of knowing just how strange something had to be for me to consider it strange, she had no way of knowing just how clueless I was when it came to Iggie. I couldn’t even locate him, let alone explain anything about his personal history. And my initial idea about the hacker being Leo now seemed misguided—for the bulky man in the picture with that shaggy mane of hair to call himself Petite Fleur would be an enormous stretch, even online, where people regularly give free rein to their alter egos. It would be like me calling myself Rambo.

Page 34

But I promised Laura I’d find out what I could and thanked her for the heads-up. It was important for Winslow, Brown to know what it was getting into. If Igobe’s technology was compromised, then so were its business prospects, which meant that underwriting its IPO could leave our firm financially vulnerable and even cause serious damage to its white-shoe reputation.

And it wasn’t just Winslow, Brown’s reputation I was worried about—my own reputation was on the line, as well. I was the one who’d urged the firm to go after the Igobe business, trading on my personal relationship with Iggie. If there were questions about Iggie, I’d be found guilty by association.

I felt a chill pass over me that had nothing to do with the climate. All the glory I’d hoped for could just as easily morph into something far less appealing should I unwittingly lead the firm into disaster.

11

I t took us a while to find parking, but eventually Peter squeezed the Prius into a spot on a side street, and we passed on foot through the pagoda-roofed arch marking the official entry to Chinatown. Stores catering to the tourist trade lined Grant Avenue’s sloping sidewalk, offering cheap porcelains and knock-off designer handbags, and there was no shortage of tourists shopping for souvenirs on this June evening. Personally, I’d had enough shopping for one day.

I filled Peter in on my conversation with Laura Taylor as he led me up the street and then down a small alley. “Petite Fleur?” he asked. “Are you making that up?”

“I’m not that creative.”

“Au contraire, mon chère. You are très creative.”

“You sound like Pepé Le Pew.”

“Who’s Pepé Le Pew?”

I froze in place, aghast. “You really don’t know?” I asked. It was one thing not to have watched Party of Five—Peter had never been in its targeted demographic—but classic cartoon characters were the building blocks of cultural literacy. “Didn’t they have Saturday-morning cartoons here when you were growing up?”

“I don’t know. We were always doing stuff on Saturday mornings.”

“Kids aren’t supposed to do stuff on Saturday mornings except watch cartoons and eat sugar cereals while their parents sleep late. What could you possibly have done instead?”

“We’d go hiking or sailing or biking. That sort of thing.”

“I didn’t realize you were abused as a child.”

He laughed and took my arm. “I liked it.”

“Did you at least get to eat Cap’n Crunch before you were dragged off to the wilderness? Or Fruit Loops? Please tell me you got to eat Fruit Loops.”

“Oh, look—we’re here.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“True. But we’re still here.”

Despite its Chinatown location, the restaurant was an intimate and relatively untouristed establishment the Forrests had been patronizing on a weekly basis for as long as Peter could remember. Based on how he described their usual weekend schedule, I guessed they were all too exhausted even to consider cooking by the time Sunday night rolled around. They probably would have had more stamina if they’d included more sugar and caffeine in their diet.

The elderly hostess greeted Peter as if he were her long-lost grandchild, scolding him for his prolonged absence and seemingly unsatisfied with his explanation that he now lived on the opposite coast. Then her gaze landed on me. “Who is this?”

“This is my fiancée,” Peter said. “May, this is Rachel. Rachel, this is May.”

“Hi,” I said.

She looked at me, and then at Peter, and then at me again. “Fiancée?” she asked, surprised. In fact, she sounded vaguely accusatory. Given that she’d been seeing Peter regularly for more than three decades, I guessed she had expected to be among the first to know when Peter got
Page 35

engaged, but anything else she had to say was cut short by Susan waving us over from where she and Charles were already seated.

We reached the table at the same time as a waiter with a chilled bottle of white wine, which he uncorked and poured as we discussed the menu. After some debate, we placed an order for enough food to feed a professional football team and its entourage and the waiter departed just as Peter’s phone rang. He showed me the caller ID—it was Alex Cutler—and excused himself to take the call outside. I watched as he crossed the restaurant, neatly sidestepping another waiter with a soda-laden tray. Even from a distance, the sight of the tall glasses of bubbling dark liquid nearly brought tears to my eyes. The wine felt smooth and refreshing on my tongue, but Chinese food, like bacon, tastes best with Diet Coke.

Plates of spring rolls and dumplings began arriving almost immediately, and Peter’s parents didn’t feel the need to wait for his return before digging in, which was fortunate because I was hungry and Peter had been waylaid by May on his return. She seemed to be talking his ear off, and from where we sat across the room it looked as if it would be a while before he’d be able to extricate himself.

“Did you have a good time catching up with your friends, dear?” Susan asked me as I took a big bite of scallion pancake. “Your college roommates seem very interesting. You must have been a colorful group when you were all at school.”

Since my mouth was full, I couldn’t do more than smile and nod, which was convenient, because I wasn’t sure how I would have responded otherwise. Colorful was not the word I had hoped Peter’s mother would use to describe either me or my friends. As adjectives went, it wasn’t quite as bad as idiosyncratic, but it was still closer to wacky or peculiar than I would have liked.

“And it must have been nice for you to meet Peter’s college friends, too,” Susan added. “I was worried it would be awkward to have Caro there, but Peter didn’t think it would be a problem.”

“Why would it have been awkward?” I asked, spearing a dumpling with my chopsticks and preparing to dip it in the dish of Hoisin sauce. Caro struck me as one of the least awkward people I’d ever met—she’d been all smiles and congeniality the previous evening. Good social skills were probably a prerequisite for a successful career in PR. Needless to say, I would have been hopeless in that line of work.

“Oh, I know she and Peter ended everything on a friendly note, but after all that time together, to then attend his engagement party—well, it just seemed like it could be awkward.”

“All that time?” I asked.

“All what time?” asked Peter, sliding into his seat.

“All that time you were seeing Caro, honey. I mean, you two started dating freshman year and then you were together off and on until last summer—why, that’s longer than a lot of marriages.

She was practically a member of the family. I was just telling Rachel how glad I was it wasn’t awkward for her to be at the party last night.”

The dumpling slipped from my chopsticks and splashed into the Hoisin sauce. Drops of liquid splattered the tablecloth, my sleeve, and, improbably, Charles’ glasses. Wordlessly, he removed them and wiped the lenses with his napkin before returning them to his face and picking up his own chopsticks again.

I might not have had Caro’s social skills, but I was pretty good at math. And by my calculations, Peter had dated someone else for nearly half his life. Which would have been fine.

If, that is, he had ever mentioned it to me before.

“Rachel, try one of the spring rolls,” urged Susan. “These are Caro’s favorite.”

The rest of the meal passed in a blur. I temporarily forgot about Hilary and Iggie, Leo, Biggie, memory sticks, security cameras, the Lincoln Memorial and Petite Fleur. All of the insecurities I thought I’d safely vanquished were back in residence, and apparently they’d used their hibernation period to multiply.

Peter had made the occasional oblique reference to an ex-girlfriend, but I’d never asked for
Page 36

specifics, much less statistics about the duration of his average relationship. I didn’t want concrete names or anecdotes to feed my neuroses, nor did I want to invite any questions about my own gory romantic past. Still, it seemed as if he could have told me he’d been all but married to someone, and that that someone had been Caro Vail.

Meanwhile, I’d been so proud of my normal relationship and of the progress I’d made in proving to Peter’s normal family what a normal daughter-in-law I would be. But now I knew I’d only been deluding myself. Charles was a man of exceedingly few words, but what words he did use were thoughtfully chosen—he hadn’t pulled idiosyncratic out of a hat. And I could now see Susan’s shopping expedition for what it was: a pathetically desperate attempt to make me over into the sort of woman she’d want as a daughter-in-law, one who had opinions about stemware, looked fetching in pink and couldn’t wait to have children she could take on nature-intensive Saturday-morning outings and deprive of sugar cereals.

And knowing that woman already existed, that for all intents and purposes she’d already been a member of Peter’s family, just made the obvious question all the more glaring: what was Peter doing with me? For fifteen years he’d made a choice to be with Caro—a woman who probably would name her own dog Spot, given the chance—and fifteen years couldn’t be written off as a mistake. Fifteen days or fifteen weeks, definitely. Even fifteen months. But fifteen years?

It was conceivable that after his decade and a half with Caro, Peter had needed a relationship vacation, an idyll of sorts with her polar opposite. And, if the ring on my finger was anything to go by, he’d managed to convince himself I was more than that. But now I had to wonder all over again whether I was anything more than a passing fancy, a temporary blip of insanity that he’d shake his head over once he came to his senses and returned to his normal life.

While these unsettling thoughts were racing through my head, Peter didn’t seem to have noticed anything was amiss. In fact, his behavior pretty much fit the dictionary definition of oblivious as we progressed from appetizers to entrées and then passed around the plate of fortune cookies that arrived with the check. I broke open my cookie, hoping for some sort of prophetic intervention, or at least something that could be interpreted as releasing me from my promise to forgo caffeine.

But the message was all too clearly meant for me: it was completely blank. I didn’t even have any lucky numbers. Just a clean strip of white paper.

I almost put my head down on the table and wept.

“What do you kids have on tap for tomorrow?” I heard Charles ask as we prepared to leave, but the words could barely penetrate my fog of miserable confusion.

“Rachel hasn’t spent much time in San Francisco,” said Peter. “And since we’re both taking a vacation day, I thought we could do some sightseeing.”

He really was oblivious. We didn’t have time for sightseeing. Had he completely forgotten about finding Hilary? But, I thought to myself, if he could forget to tell me about dating another woman for fifteen years, forgetting about our rescue mission would hardly be a challenge.

“Did you have anywhere special in mind?” asked Susan.

“Just the usual. You know, Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz, that sort of thing,” Peter said. “Maybe even take a ride on a cable car if Rachel doesn’t think it’s too much of a cliché.”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” said Susan. Of course, she hadn’t had the Rice-a-Roni jingle stuck in her head all day. She turned to me. “You might want to go to SF MoMA, too. I know that it can’t compare to MoMA in New York, dear, but they usually have some interesting exhibits.

And if the weather cooperates, you can take a picnic to the park across the street. You know, where the Martin Luther King memorial is.”

I perked up, and not just because picnics and soda were inextricably linked in my mind. I could sense Peter perking up in the same way next to me.

“The Martin Luther King memorial?” he asked.

“In the Yerba Buena Gardens. You know, right next to the Moscone Center. You must have
Page 37

been there before,” said Susan.

“As in the ‘I Have a Dream’ Martin Luther King?” I asked. “That Martin Luther King?”

“Actually, Martin Luther King, Jr.,” said Charles, pushing his chair back and helping Susan up from her seat.

“It would be a nice stop on your itinerary for tomorrow,” suggested Susan.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Peter asked me as his parents led the way out of the restaurant.

“I’m thinking a lot of things right now,” I told him, somehow managing to keep my tone even.

“But one of them is that we might want to start our sightseeing tonight.”

12

C harles and Susan were parked near us, so they walked us to our car. This meant I didn’t get a chance really to say anything to Peter until I was belted into the passenger seat, but once there the first item on my agenda was to call Luisa and tell her to grab Ben and meet us at the Martin Luther King memorial.