In our hotel room (where she also wasn’t) I went straight for the phone to call the police. She’d been taken from me, Miranda was missing and I needed help, but it was as I reached for the phone that I realized something.
The jewelry box, the one she had filled with new earrings and necklaces and other baubles just before we’d left – far too many for a few nights in Manhattan, I’d thought vaguely at the time – was gone. A quick peek into the drawer near my side of the bed proved that so was the envelope of emergency cash I’d hidden inside the Gideon bible.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Had a martini been in my hands, I would’ve spilled gin on the floor.
