Swimsuit (5 page)

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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?”