The Travel Writer Read Free Page B

with the private investigation
. Signed by the manager, Jorge”—he pronounced it
George
—“Barrientos. Can’t call off this dog so easy. I told Hilary’s boss at Folgers to get tough, and when that didn’t work, I called our senator.”
    “The new one,” Mrs. Pearson said.
    “That man knows how to get the job done. Or maybe it’s all his assistants. His minions! I don’t care. But we called him all right. A few days later some woman, Pealer something, gets on the horn and gives us the old Spanish sweet talk.” He twisted his voice into a preposterous imitation of Pilar’s voice, adding for good measure a Mexican accent she didn’t have. “
We o-pol-o-gize for de misunderstanding
. I tell her, we want answers. We want to do some of our own investigating! So she sends us plane tickets. Didn’t even meet us at the airport. Sent a shit-box car—a subcompact. The windows don’t shut. Dashboard held together by twist ties. Put us up for a night in La Paz and the next morning shoved us in a minivan with four Germans to go to the hotel. They showed us her room. They showed us her suitcase. They even showed us her goddamn tampons! What were we supposed to do with her tampons?”
    He aimed this question at his wife, but she only sighed and kicked her pumps.
    “Did you meet anyone from the hotel before you went down there? Anyone named Gonzales?”
    “Before? Not a chance,” he said. “It’s all lies down there. The hotel. The newspapers. Even the papers up here. You talk to a reporter and he turns around and screws it all up. Well,
you
better not! Listen to me.” And then Mr. Pearson, with help from his wife, recounted, in tedious lurches, like a truck in the mud, the whole story of their Bolivian sojourn. (Fortunately he dispensed with the accent when quoting the locals.) Apparently their one day in La Paz, where they and a young Bolivian cop tacked up missing-person flyers, impressed them far more than anything in the Hotel Matamoros. They described for me, in blunt, deploring phrases, the city streets of unpainted cement, the unclean odor of street food, the minibuses crowded like circus cars, where the conductor was a boy who leaned out the window and shouted for passengers. As for the Matamoros itself, they emphasized the discomfort of the journey there—it was three hours from La Paz—the indigestibility of its cooking, and the mendacity of the hotel’s employees and the barbarity of their English. The woolen blankets (handwoven, I had heard) were scratchy, the alpacas and vicuñas that roamed the back gardens were smelly and ill-tempered, the television got only a half dozen English-language stations, there was no
USA Today
. This world-renowned First Wonder of the Third World was to them not just a den of iniquity but a shabby circus of curiosities and discomforts. Had they visited under the best of circumstances, with their daughter as chaperone, they still would have hated it. I wondered why Hilary hadn’t run as a child. Perhaps she had, and later returned, defeated but defiant, to sulk away her time until high school graduation. That Hilary had survived the emotional oppression of this house with the worldly good cheer she had always shown me, if only through email, was astonishing. Such a triumph shouldn’t be wasted. I was more determined than ever to find her.
    The worst part of the trip, the Pearsons agreed, was the press conference held in the Matamoros’s atrium. Every reporter, cop, government official, and hotel employee who spoke left the Pearsons more convinced that the entire country was conspiring to protect the secret behind their daughter’s disappearance.
    * * *
    After they finished deploring and I finished commiserating, I asked for a picture. Mrs. Pearson fetched a shoe box from another room and presented it to me. It was full of jumbled copies of a single photo. Hilary was perched on the guardrail of a hotel balcony at twilight, her head tossed to one side so that her