Swimsuit Page 4

  “No modeling after this,” Levon said now.

  “She’s twenty-one, Levon.”

  “She’s going to be a doctor. Barb, there’s no good reason for her to be modeling anymore. This is the end of it. I’ll make her understand.”

  The flight attendant announced that the plane would be landing momentarily.

  Barb raised the shade and Levon looked out at the clouds flowing under the window, the peaks of them looking like they’d been hit with pink spotlights.

  As the tiny houses and roads of Maui came into view, Levon turned to his wife, his best pal, his sweetheart.

  “How’re you doin’, hon? Okay?”

  “Never better,” Barb chirped, attempting a joke. “And you?”

  Levon smiled, brought Barb close, and pressed his cheek to hers, smelled the stuff she put in her hair. What Barb smelled like. He kissed her, squeezed her hand.

  “Hang on,” Levon said, as the airplane began its steep, sickening descent. And he sent out a thought to Kim. We’re coming for you, honey. Mom and Dad are coming.

  Chapter 15

  THE McDANIELSES STEPPED from the plane’s exit door to a wobbly staircase and from there down to the tarmac, the heat suffocating after the chilled air on the plane.

  Levon looked around at the volcanic landscape, an astounding difference from Michigan in the black of night, with the snow falling down the back of his shirt collar as he’d hugged his sons good-bye.

  He took off his jacket, patted the inside pocket to make sure that their return plane tickets were safe — including the ticket he’d bought for Kim.

  The terminal was full of people, the waiting room in the same open-air section as the baggage claim. He and Barb turned cards over to an official in blue, swearing they were not bringing in any fruit, and then they looked for taxi signs.

  Levon was walking fast, feeling a heightened need to get to the hotel and not watching his feet when he sidestepped a luggage trolley and just about stumbled over a young girl with yellow braids. She was clutching a fuzzy toy, standing in the middle of everything, just taking it all in. The child looked so self-assured that she reminded Levon again of Kim, and a wave of panic rose in him, making him feel dizzy and sick to his stomach.

  Levon swept blindly forward, asking himself if Kim had used up her quota of miracles. Was her borrowed time up? Had the whole family made a tremendous mistake buying into a headline written by a reporter in Chicago, giving all of them a belief that Kim was so miraculous that nothing could ever hurt her?

  Levon silently begged God again to please let Kim be safe at the hotel, make her be glad to see her parents, have her say, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you worry.

  With his arm around Barb, the two headed out of the terminal, but before they reached the taxi rank, they saw a man approaching — a driver holding up a sign with their name.

  The driver was taller than Levon. He had dark hair streaked with gray, a mustache, and he wore a chauffeur’s cap and livery jacket and alligator cowboy boots with three-inch heels.

  He said, “Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels? I’m Marco. The hotel hired me to be your driver. Do you have claim tickets for your luggage?”

  “We didn’t bring any bags.”

  “Okay. The car’s right outside.”

  Chapter 16

  THE McDANIELSES WALKED behind Marco as Levon noted the driver’s odd rolling gait in those cowboy boots and the man’s accent, a trace of something — maybe New York or New Jersey.

  They crossed the arrival lane to a traffic island where Levon saw a newspaper lying faceup on a bench.

  In a heart-stopping double take, he realized that Kim was looking up at him from under the headline.

  This was the Maui News, and the large black type spelled out, “Missing Beauty.”

  Levon’s thoughts scattered, taking him a few stunned moments to understand that during the eleven or so hours he and Barb had been in transit, Kim had officially gone missing.

  She wasn’t waiting at the hotel.

  Like the caller said, she was gone.

  Levon grabbed the paper with a trembling hand, his heart bucking as he looked into Kim’s smiling eyes, took in the swimsuit she was wearing in this picture, probably taken just a couple of days ago.

  Levon folded the newspaper lengthwise, caught up to Marco and Barbara at the car, asked Marco, “Will it take long to get to the hotel?”

  “About a half hour, and there’s no charge, Mr. McDaniels. The Wailea Princess is paying for as long as you need me.”

  “Why are they doing that?”

  Marco’s voice turned soft. “Well, in light of the situation, sir.”

  He opened the car doors, and Levon and Barbara climbed in, Barb’s face crumpling when she took the paper, crying while she read the story as the sedan slipped into the traffic stream.

  The car sped onto the highway, and Marco spoke to them, his eyes in the rearview mirror, gently asking if they were comfortable, if they wanted more air or music. Levon thought ahead to checking in at the hotel, then going straight to the police, the whole time feeling as though he’d suffered a battlefield amputation, that a part of him had been brutally severed and that he might not survive.

  Eventually, the sedan crawled down what looked like a private road, both sides massed in purple flowering vines. They drove by an artificial waterfall, slowed to a stop in front of the grand porte cochere entryway of the Wailea Princess Hotel.

  Levon saw tiled fountains on both sides of the car, bronze statues of Polynesian warriors rising out of the water with spears in their hands on one side, outriggers filled with orchids on the other.

  Bellhops in white shirts and short red pants hurried toward the car. Marco opened his door, and as Levon walked around the sedan to help Barb he heard his name coming at him from all directions.

  People were running toward the hotel entrance — reporters with cameras and microphones.

  Racing toward them.

  Chapter 17

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Barb was dazed and jet-lagged as she entered a suite that on another day, and in different circumstances, she would have thought “magnificent.” If she had peeked at the rate card behind the door, she would have seen that the charge for the suite was over three thousand dollars a day.

  She walked into the heart of the main room, as good as sleepwalking, seeing but not taking in the hand-knotted silk carpet, a pattern of orchids on a pale peach ground; the tapestry-upholstered furnishings; the huge flat-panel television.

  She went to the window, looked out at the beauty without really seeing it, just looking for Kim.

  There was a gorgeous swimming pool below, a complicated shape, like a square laid over a rectangle, with circular Jacuzzis at the shallow end. A fountain, like a champagne glass, in the middle spilled 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 leaned forward, said to Levon, “Kim was inside the hotel bar with Del, and Del went to the men’s room, and when he returned, Kim was gone. No one took Kim. She left on her own.”

  “So that’s the story?” Levon asked. “Kim left the hotel bar on her own, and no one’s heard from her, and she’s been gone for a day and a half, and that means to you that Kim ditched the shoot and went sightseeing? Am I getting that right?”

  “She’s an adult, Mr. McDaniels,” Gruber said. “It wouldn’t be the first time a girl dumped a job. I remember this girl, Gretchen, took off in Cannes last year, showed up in Monte Carlo six days later.”

  Gruber was talking like this was her office, and she was patiently explaining her job to Levon. “We’ve got eight girls on this shoot.” She went on to say how many people she had to supervise and all the things she had to cover, and how she had to be on the set every minute or looking at the day’s shots…

  Barbara felt the pressure building inside her head. All that gold on Susan Gruber, but no wedding ring. Did she have a child? Did she even know one? Susan Gruber didn’t get it.

  “We love Kim,” Carol Sweeney blurted to Barb. “I… I felt that Kim was safe here. I was having dinner with one of the other models. I mean, Kim is such a good girl and so responsible, I never thought we had reason to worry.”

  “I only turned my back for a minute,” said Del Swann. And then he started to cry.

  It all became clear to Barb, why Gruber had brought her people to see them. Barbara had been raised to be nice, but now that she’d stopped denying the obvious, she had to say it.

  “You’re not responsible? Is that why you’re all here? To tell us that you’re not responsible for Kim?”

  No one met her gaze.

  “We’ve told the police everything we know,” said Gruber.

  Levon stood up, put his hand on Barb’s shoulder, and said to the magazine people, “Please call if you learn anything. Right now, we’d like to be alone. Thanks.”

  Gruber stood, slung the strap of her handbag across her narrow chest, said, “Kim will be back. Don’t worry.”

  “You mean, you hope and pray with every miserable breath you take,” said Barbara.

  Chapter 19

  A MAN STOOD in the thick of the media gaggle outside the Wailea Princess main entrance, waiting for the press conference to start.

  He blended in well, appeared to be a guy living out of a duffel bag, maybe sleeping on the beach. He had on sports sunglasses wrapped around his face like a windshield, even though the sun was going down. Dodgers cap over his rusty brown hair, vintage Adidas, rumpled cargo pants, and hanging down in front of his cheap Hawaiian shirt was a perfect replica of a press pass identifying him as a photographer, Charles Rollins of Talk Weekly, a publication that didn’t exist.

  His video camera was expensive, though, a state-of-the-art Panasonic, HD-compatible with a stereo microphone boom and a Leica lens, costing over six thousand bucks.

  He pointed the lens at the grand front entrance of the Wailea Princess, where the McDanielses were taking up their positions behind a lectern.

  As Levon adjusted the mic, Rollins whistled a few notes through his teeth. He was enjoying himself now, thinking that even Kim wouldn’t recognize him if she were alive. He lifted his vid cam over his head and recorded Levon greeting the press, thinking he’d like the McDanielses if he got to know them. Well, fuck it anyway, he already liked them. What was not to like about the McDanielses?

  Look at them.

  Sweet, feisty Barbara. Levon, with the heart of a five-star general. Both of them, salt of the fucking earth.

  They were grief-wracked and terrified, but still comporting themselves with dignity, answering insensitive questions, even the de rigueur “What would you say to Kim if she’s listening to you now?”

  “I’d say, ‘We love you, darling. Please be strong,’ ” Barbara said with a quavering voice. “And to everyone hearing us, please, we’re offering twenty-five thousand dollars for information leading to the return of our daughter. If we had a million, we’d offer that…”

  And then Barbara’s air seemed to run out. She turned, and Rollins saw her take a hit off an inhaler. And still, questions were fired at the supermodel’s parents: Levon, Levon! Have you gotten a ransom demand? What was the last thing Kim said to you?

  Levon leaned toward the microphones, answered the questions very patiently, finally saying, “The hotel management has set up a hotline number,” and he read it to the crowd.

  Rollins watched the journalists jumping up like flying fish, calling out more questions even as the McDanielses were stepping down, moving toward the embrace of the hotel lobby.

  Rollins looked through his lens, zoomed in on the back of the McDanielses’ heads, saw someone coming through the crowd, a semicelebrity he’d seen on C-Span hawking his books.

  The subject of Rollins’s interest was a good-looking guy of about forty, a journalist and best-selling detective novelist, dressed in Dockers and a pink button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up. Kind of reminded him of Brian Williams reporting from Baghdad. Maybe a little more rough-and-ready.

  As Rollins watched, the writer reached out and touched Barbara McDaniels’s arm, and Barbara stopped to speak with him.

 
Charlie Rollins saw an interview with the legitimate press in the making. He thought, No kidding. The Peepers will love this. Kim McDaniels is going big-time. This is turning into a very big event, indeed.

  Chapter 20

  THE JOURNALIST in the Dockers and pink shirt?

  That was me.

  I saw an opening as Levon and Barbara McDaniels stepped away from the lectern, the crowd closing in, circling them like a twister.

  I lunged forward, touched Barbara McDaniels’s arm, catching her attention before she disappeared into the lobby.

  I wanted the interview, but no matter how many times you see parents of lost or abducted children begging for their son or daughter’s safe return, you cannot fail to be moved.

  Barbara and Levon McDaniels had gotten to me as soon as I saw their faces. It killed me to see them in such pain.

  Now I had my hand gently on Barbara McDaniels’s arm. She turned, and I introduced myself, handed her my card, and lucky for me, she knew my name. “Are you the Ben Hawkins who wrote Red?

  “Put It All on Red, yes, that’s mine.”

  She said she liked the book, her mouth smiling, although her face was rigid with anguish. Right then, hotel security made a cordon with their arms, a path through the crowd, and I walked into the lobby with Barbara, who introduced me to Levon.

  “Ben’s a best-selling author, Levon. You remember, we read him for our book club last fall.”

  “I’m covering Kim’s story for the L.A. Times,” I told Mr. McDaniels.

  Levon said, “If you want an interview, I’m sorry. We’re out of steam, and it’s probably best that we don’t talk further until we meet with the police.”

  “You haven’t spoken with them yet?”

  Levon sighed, shook his head. “Ever talk to an answering machine?”