Smart, spirited, and happily pregnant, Kristine Kupka told friends she was going to check out an apartment with the father of her baby. That was ten weeks ago. She hasn't been seen since.

She was a romantic -- you could see it in her room: handmade muslin drapes looped through dogwood boughs, low tables bearing plants, vases, goblets. A shawl-draped dresser displaying a tin Barbie box, pictures of herself as a child in Wisconsin and of her sister Kathy's adorable 2-year-old son, named Marshall, after Thurgood Marshall. The books on her shelves (Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement, The Philosophy of Right and Wrong, Development and Dependency) advertised a feisty, cerebral idealism. And on the floor near a stack of CDs (Jamiroquai, Liz Phair, Jeff Buckley, the Fugees) were more books, including a dog-eared copy of Two of Us Make a World: The Single Mother's Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth and the First Year. She was five months pregnant; and though the baby was unplanned and she was adamantly pro-choice (after vegetarianism, reproductive freedom was the cause she fought for most fiercely), she never considered abortion. She was thrilled about having this child, and while her friends had no doubt she could handle single-motherhood ("Kristine is the most competent person I know," says Denise Lilien, her girlhood friend from Madison, Wisconsin), they had worried about her involvement with the baby's father. She had detailed to at least eight confidants every twist and turn in her strange, sporadic five-month relationship with her former Baruch College science instructor and had shared key parts of the story with several others. And so when, shortly after noon on Saturday, October 24, Kristine Kupka, 28, left this room (opposite) with little more than the clothes on her back and didn't return, her disappearance led those who knew her well to fear the worst.