Chapter 9 rewrite

Edmond woke up. His stomach was growling. He hadn't eaten much lunch (somehow the sushi just hadn’t appealed to him), and it was now well past dinnertime. He considered trying to go out somewhere (but where?), and he thought about calling room service. He checked the charge on his wheelchair, and it was still kind of low. If he went out, he might get stranded somewhere. Normally, he would have preferred to just sit at home and heat something up, but he found himself wanting to go out somewhere; maybe he would just accidentally run into somebody who knew something about where Lena was. He certainly wasn't going to find anything out here in the room. At the same time, he wasn't sure he could learn anything if he did go out anyway. Everywhere he had gone, he had just hit dead ends. He called room service. It was hard for him to order dinner, because at this point, he was simply hungry; he had no real appetite. He didn’t particularly want to eat, he just realized that he needed to. It didn’t matter too much to him what he ate, as long as it filled his belly. Eventually he settled on one of the daily specials.He stopped to consider. He had met this guy, Jay. That seemed to be as close to Lena as he was going to get. Of course, he only had Jay's word that his name was even Jay. He didn't know of any reason why the guy might have lied about it, unless he were the kidnapper, and thought that Lena might have told Edmond enough that he could figure out that this was the guy he should be looking for. That didn't really make sense, though. Ed didn't know anything about any of Lena's friends, and if he had a name of the kidnapper... No, Jay was almost certainly telling the truth. He really had no reason to lie, even if he was the guilty party. When the food came, Edmond ate slowly, and thought some more. No matter how hard he thought, though, he couldn't reach any real conclusions. Something had happened to Lena, it appeared that she had been kidnapped, but he couldn't really be sure about that. If she had been kidnapped, he thought it was the guy that he thought of as Lena's boyfriend, even though he knew Lena didn't think of him that way. If that were the case, he didn't have a clue who the guy was or where he might have taken her. He was beginning to think that he should have stayed in Chicago, for all the good he was doing here. He knew he couldn't have stayed at home, though, even though he had never actually met Lena, she had come to mean a great deal to him; something of a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dreary life. He had to do something to help find her, even if he didn't know what else he could do. He had felt very frustrated in Chicago, because he realized that something needed to be done; now he was in Portland, and he was just as frustrated, because he didn’t know what he could do.By the time he finished eating, there was enough of a charge on the wheelchair that he felt confident that he could go out for a little while. He could plug the chair back in when he got back, and it would be fully charged in the morning. But where would he go? He should find someplace where young people hung out, like a Starbuck's. That might be just the thing. He wasn't sure that it would help, but he had to try something. This whole adventure was an exercise in desperation, anyway. The worst thing that could happen is that he spend too much money on some frou-frou latte or something...
He called the hotel concierge to ask about nearby coffee shops. He tried to come up with the best possible wording to try to find out where someone like Lena might choose to hang out, without giving away why he wanted to know, and without sounding like a pervert. “This is Edmond Randolph in 304. I’m a writer, here from Chicago, and I’m doing some research. Can you tell me where there would be a coffee shop close by that would be popular with people in their twenties?”
The concierge had several suggestions, but one in particular that he felt was close by and popular with IT professionals. Edmond asked him to make the appropriate transportation arrangements.