Russell Andrews - Aphrodite

"For the longest time, she would talk about it only in vague generalities," said her best friend since childhood, Gay Chilcott. "I'd ask her who she was seeing and she'd get this beatific smile on her face and say things like, 'You'll meet him soon,' or 'It's going really well but I can't talk about it yet.' It didn't take a genius to figure out she was going out with a married man. From a few hints that she dropped, it was pretty obvious it was also an older married man. Then, about two weeks before she died…I mean, disappeared… she became a little more open. Started revealing a few details. She told me that he was fifty. And that he was a great lover. She also told me he was very important and she made it pretty clear he was with the government. One of the last times I talked to her on the phone she said that there was a decent chance she'd get to go to the White House and meet the president soon."

According to friends and family, Maura's affair had been going on for at least six months, probably closer to eight. Those who knew about the affair also knew that she expected her lover to leave his wife-and marry Maura.

"She was certain that she was going to be the winner in this relationship tug-of-war," Chilcott says. "I told her that men do sometimes leave their wives-but I sure as hell wouldn't count on it. But people believe what they want to believe in situations like that. And Maura believed that everything would end up happily ever after."

So far, things have ended up anything but happily. Whether that unhappiness is forever depends on two things. Will Maura Greer turn up alive? And what will happen to her married lover-our current secretary of Health and Human Services, Frank Manwaring?

Manwaring has denied any role in Maura's disappearance. For weeks he also denied that he and the young intern had been having an affair, but recently, as incontrovertible evidence of the affair was publicly released by the Greer family, the secretary made a televised confession and apology. Maura's parents do not believe the confession went far enough. And they most certainly do not accept the apology.

"He denied his relationship with Maura until we forced him to admit it," says Maura's father, Marcus. While Rachel is strong and definite in her belief that their daughter is the victim of foul play, Marcus can't speak about Maura without weeping, and he says he prays every day for her safe return. "Everything Frank Manwaring says has been a lie-until someone forces him to tell the truth."

Having an affair, of course, is a far cry from committing murder. And while it's not been proven that everything Secretary Manwaring has said about his relationship with Maura Greer has been false, many of his statements have been reticent and incomplete. Police feel he has been less than forthcoming. Maura's parents believe he has not only hindered the investigation, they are convinced that he should be at the center of it.

On Friday, February 24, Maura was supposed to visit her parents in East End Harbor, a small town on the outskirts of Long Island's chic Hamptons. It was Marcus's birthday on Saturday, and Maura was going to spend the weekend celebrating. Marcus had reserved an hour of tennis at a local indoor court on both Saturday and Sunday because Maura loved to play tennis and they had a friendly competition going back to Maura's teens. Rachel made a salon appointment for both mother and daughter on that Saturday afternoon. They were going to get facials, manicures, and pedicures. "She loved being pampered," Rachel says. "And I loved being able to pamper my daughter."

Marcus went to the train station to pick up Rachel. She was supposed to arrive on the 4 p.m. train. But when the train pulled away and the platform was cleared of people, there was no Maura. "At first I wasn't too concerned," Marcus says. "Maura was not always the most responsible person in the world, at least when it came to her parents. But when I called Rachel to see if Maura had called, she started talking about how she'd had a premonition. Rachel said that something bad had happened, that she'd felt it the day before but didn't say anything." So when he got home, Marcus called the Washington, D.C., police and said that Maura was missing. The D.C. police asked a few questions and, according to the Greers, basically dismissed their concern. "She hadn't been missing long enough to be 'missing,'" Rachel says, her voice tinged with anger. "We couldn't get them to do anything for forty-eight hours."

When the police finally did decide to act, they went to Maura's apartment. What they found was a spotless home with alphabetized CDs, a closet full of designer clothes, and nothing but two cans of Diet Coke and two cartons of unflavored yogurt in the fridge. Oh yes. They also found Maura's purse. In it were her driver's license and all of her credit cards.

"Why would she leave her purse?" Rachel asks. "We think it's because she was told to leave it behind. We believe that Secretary Man-waring didn't want her to meet him if she was carrying any identification. From the things that Maura said about the relationship, the man she was seeing was obsessed with secrecy. He had all sorts of rules for her to follow when she met him. We believe that this was one of those rules. It's why we believe she was on her way to meet him when she disappeared."

Manwaring did indeed try to keep the affair secret. Not only is he married with two college-age children, he is in a highly visible and sensitive cabinet position, appointed by a president whose popularity is partly based on his constant reaffirmation of his belief in and the country's need for faith and traditional family values. He is the tough, honest, anti-scandal leader. That is the image he ran on, it is the image that has kept his poll numbers higher than those of any president in recent memory, and it is the image he insists on maintaining for himself and his advisers. Manwaring's affair does not conform to that image. It is not just damaging to the president on a political level. According to several advisers, it offends the president's personal sensibility.

Although Manwaring at first denied that he was meeting Maura the day she disappeared, the Greers also forced him to admit the truth about that. Maura had a reservation at a local Marriott Hotel and was due to check in the afternoon of February 23. Manwaring admitted, nearly a month after Maura went missing, that he was supposed to meet her there and spend the afternoon and evening with her in the suite they regularly frequented.

Two weeks after Maura's disappearance, the D.C. police had uncovered no clues and had no leads in the case. They had not made a connection to Manwaring at this point. That came after the Greers got their phone bill. While scrutinizing it, Marcus Greer noticed that there were several long-distance calls made that month to a Washington number he was unfamiliar with. He realized that the dates of the calls coincided with the last weekend Maura had visited East End Harbor. He mentioned this to Rachel, who immediately went to the phone and dialed the number. It was a pager. Fifteen minutes later, the Greers' phone rang. The call to the pager was being returned. The person who returned it was Secretary Frank Manwaring.

The Greers asked Manwaring if he knew their daughter. He was nonplussed, they say, and evasive. He refused to speak to them. They immediately took their information to the Washington police. It took the police another four days before they contacted Manwaring. They went to his D.C. apartment, interviewed him for half an hour, then released a statement that the secretary knew Maura Greer, they were friends and nothing more, and that he had absolutely nothing to do with her disappearance. The police announced that he was not a suspect.

The media immediately jumped on the story. Two days after it was made public, a woman named Eva Grey called a press conference. Ms. Grey is a lap dancer at a Washington club called Privates. At the conference, she revealed that several years earlier she had had a four-month-long affair with Secretary Manwaring. The affair ended, she said, when she confronted him about his promise to leave his wife. According to Ms. Grey, the secretary got violent during the conversation. She alleges that he choked her until she almost passed out and told her that if she ever brought up the subject of his divorce again, he would make sure she disappeared. Secretary Manwaring immediately called a press conference to say that not only was Ms. Grey's story untrue, he had never met her or heard of her.