Front Page Teaser lhm-1

by Rosemary Herbert

  Certain the Banner would not pay for a speculative jaunt to Singapore, Liz went straight to the newsroom, looked up the Singapore Tourism Board on the Internet, and discovered there was a celebrated orchid garden in that city. If the Banner saw her as a garden writer, it might be to her advantage. Collaring the travel editor, Susan Damon, she pitched a story about the orchids and great ethnic shopping, while reminding Susan she had vacation time available to spend on the enterprise. Susan composed a letter to the tourism board, which Liz faxed immediately. A half-hour later, she followed up with a phone call.

  “Certainly, we’d love to host you at the Fullerton hotel. It’s just been renovated and the management is looking for coverage,” the public relations manager said. “As long as it is midweek, we can make the arrangements.”

  The airfare was another story. It cost the earth. But Liz decided to go for it. She smiled to think a garden- and travel-writing assignment might provide her ticket to the front page again. Even more important, it might help her keep her promise to Veronica.

  Chapter 23

  Singapore, September 9, 2001

  While she tried to recline in the cramped economy-class seat of a Singapore Airlines jet, Liz experienced the longest sleepless night of her life, as she traveled westward over the international dateline, and into the next day in the process. In Singapore, a city that savvy travelers dubbed “Asia Lite,” Liz was whizzed from the airport to her hotel in air-conditioned ease. After leaving a message for Nadia announcing her arrival, she fell into a deep sleep.

  Seven hours later, a room service meal she had not ordered was delivered to her door, along with a ticket for the cable-car ride that overlooked the city and its harbor. A small vase of orchids on the tray bore a card that read, “Let me show you Singapore! Let’s meet at the cable-car station at 4:00 p.m.—Nadia”

  Liz ate a leisurely meal of tropical fruits, an egg-white omelet, and coffee, then showered and dressed for tropical heat and humidity. After riding the elevator downstairs to the hotel’s expansive, marble-floored lobby, she took a taxi to the cable-car station. With a picture of Nadia and Ellen in hand, Liz had no trouble recognizing Nadia. Before much could be said, the two were seated in their own cable car, which lifted off on a trip across Singapore Harbor to Sentosa Island.

  Distracted by the vista of the huge Merlion statue—a half-mermaid, half-lion mythological beast that is said to guard the port of Singapore—Liz nonetheless managed to fill Nadia in on her efforts to find Ellen, and she made sure to let on that she had paid for this trip out of her own funds. “Beyond that, I’m not certain how to convince you that I care about her well-being,” Liz added. “I know it appears she left of her own volition, but if that is so, I would like to know why. Yes, solving this case would be a boon to my career. But more important is my promise to Veronica. I told her I would find her mother.”

  “Your traveling this far is proof enough that you care, Liz. Ah, here we are on the landing station. You’ve come so far. Let me make your trip memorable.”

  Although Liz was itching to learn more about Nadia’s insights into Ellen, it was clear the Palestinian woman would not talk about this in public. So Liz dutifully—and with increasing pleasure—accompanied Nadia through the interactive Singapore History Museum, then climbed the Merlion statue to get a view from the observation window that was also its mouth, and strolled through the tropical gardens on the island. As she answered many questions from her companion, Liz realized Nadia was trying to learn as much as she could about the reporter. Liz was glad to cooperate in hopes of winning the woman’s trust. In return, however, the Palestinian woman revealed little about herself.

  Back in the cable car, Liz mentioned how she had tried without success to reach Nadia through the United Nations and said she guessed Nadia was an international consultant with a mission other than translation.

  Nadia looked her straight in the eyes and said, “Let’s just say my translation skills are necessary to my work and leave it at that. There is much static these days that must be sorted out, for the good of us all.”

  “You mean international misunderstanding?”

  “Worse than that.” Nadia turned her attention to the panoramic view until the cable car reached its station. “Now, let me take you along to the Raffles Hotel. The bar there is quite famous, you know.” Nadia waved a cab away and signaled for a rickshaw instead. “I always promised Ellen I’d take her on a rickshaw ride here when Veronica is grown up and Ellen has the time to travel.”

  The British-built, white colonial edifice that was the Raffles Hotel screamed “Raj,” and there was no denying it was elegant. Fronted by a circular drive lined with traveler’s palms—so-named, Nadia explained, because they held water cupped in the base of their fan-like display of leaves—the hotel looked like an imperialist’s dream come true. At sunset, the long bar was mostly populated by Japanese tourists, the men in white suits and Panama hats and the women well coiffed and dressed in long, sleeveless frocks.

  Nadia steered Liz to a pair of plush-cushioned rattan chairs with high backs that curved over their heads. Then she ordered two Singapore Slings, sweet alcoholic drinks that arrived in martini glasses. Only after the waiter stepped away did Nadia lean forward and say, “I have debated at length about this, and I hope I am making the right decision. I do not break confidences easily and I hope you won’t break mine without serious cause, either.”

  “Are you saying I cannot report what you tell me?”

  “Yes, Liz, I am saying that. Unless it will help to save Ellen’s life.”

  “You have my word.”

  “Good. Then I will tell you. While we were in New York, Ellen confided that she had been experiencing some frightening flashbacks to an incident from her girlhood.”

  “When a boy exposed himself to her? Yes, I know about that.”

  “It was not a boy.”

  “Perhaps it was a different incident then.”

  “Perhaps. She said the flashbacks began after she received a phone call, a year ago just before Christmas, and the speaker hummed some unknown but oddly familiar gibberish to her. ‘A tuneless hum,’ she called it. The caller never phoned again until just before she met me in Manhattan, but the flashbacks kept coming nevertheless. They always began the same way, with the tuneless hum and a visual image of a topiary garden she loved, a place with trees pruned into marvelous shapes. But although she loved that place, the hum made her extremely uneasy. She told me that when she remembered it, she said she broke out into a cold sweat.

  “The flashbacks seemed to have something to do with tea, she said, because after Veronica broke a teacup, she started to experience them more frequently and at greater length. Each time they overtook her, more was revealed.

  “First there was the hum and the sculpted trees and the uneasiness. Then the hum and the trees and the uneasiness and a kind of umbrella of pine needles. Then, she said, there was the humming and the sculpted trees and a shadowed figure under an umbrella of pine needles. Then there was all of this and the dark figure was revealed to be a man. Then there was the humming and the shaped trees and the needles and the man in the shadows stroking himself. He was forming a word, Ellen said, the ‘f-word.’”

  “‘Fuck.’”

  “These flashbacks were disturbing enough in themselves, but what worried Ellen most was a certainty that the identity of the man would inevitably be revealed to her. She did not want to know who it was. And yet she did. To protect her daughter. After she received the phone call, she felt the man was targeting her home. She was afraid for Veronica. You see now why I must consider that Ellen might have had good reason to flee from her home? She was protecting her child by drawing the perverted man’s attention to herself.”

  “Why didn’t she tell her husband about this?”

  “She planned to do that. Just as soon as the man’s face was revealed to her. Until then, she thought it sounded mad, crazy.”

  “The tuneless hum, did she repeat it for y
ou?”

  “No, but she told me that something in her cab ride in New York City called it to mind. The driver was an Arab, as you discovered. He made her uneasy, she said, talking on his short-wave radio in salacious tones about a girl named Tina. I told her, in Arabic teena is a word for fig, as well as a rather improper euphemism for a female. Ellen had good instincts. She knew the driver was talking about her in, let us say, over-familiar terms.”

  “Then it makes sense that he followed her home? She walked straight into the path of a classic stalker.”

  “That seems likely, but then what about the phone call she received a year ago and then again before she met me in New York, before she met the taxi driver? Doesn’t it seem extremely unlikely that two men were stalking our friend?”

  “Yes, but it’s slightly more believable than the notion that the taxi driver and the man who called are one and the same. How could a taxi driver plant himself in the position to pick up a particular woman at Penn Station? It’s just too impossible to engineer. But the caller could well have been Ali, the tongue-tied boy from her past who, I learned, exposed himself to her in the incident she is calling to mind in her flashbacks. Olga told me someone mumbling a tuneless hum phoned her at the same time every year until last year. She feared he’d turned his attentions to Ellen instead. I discovered where Ali lives and works, but he went missing two days after Ellen did. Now there’s a coincidence I know is real.”

  “The fact that both men are Arabs is suggestive. I wonder if a common expression, or simply words spoken in the flowing Arabic language, might have been used by both.”

  “The tuneless hum! That might be it!” Thinking about tones of voices led Liz to ask, “Did you, by any chance, phone the Johansson house on December 18, the day after you parted with Ellen?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. But I only left a message. I felt terrible about losing a roll of film I’d taken of us in New York.”

  “Do you recall saying, ‘It’s all my fault’?”

  “I might have said something like that. I knew she’d be disappointed because it was a standing joke between us about how dreadful a photographer she was. We both used our cameras while we were in Manhattan, and she was sure my photos would be far better than hers.”

  “In your letter to Ellen, you advised her not to open a Pandora’s box. What did you mean by that?”

  Nadia’s expression changed to one of shock.

  “I’m sorry, Nadia,” Liz said. “I must admit, I read your last letter to Ellen. It was given to me by a workman who had access to her house.”

  Nadia was quiet for some minutes.

  “Ellen told me she was going to find a hypnotist to help her unveil the figure in her flashbacks,” she said at last. “It made me terribly uneasy for her. It’s one thing for a repressed memory to reveal itself, don’t you think? It might be monstrous, but at least it’s pure. It seems to me a hypnotist might manipulate things, twist the truth. Then you never know the actual truth of the matter.”

  While Nadia engaged in “urgent work” in unidentified offices in Singapore, Liz toured the extensive orchid gardens there, marveling at their quantity and variety. She also located and interviewed the horticulturist for her travel article and arranged for photographs to be sent to her at the Banner newsroom. Later, Liz shopped in Chinatown and Little India, ethnic enclaves where beautifully crafted items were plentiful and cheap, and browsed without buying anything in the opulent Japanese department store on Orchard Road, a thoroughfare known as the “Fifth Avenue of Singapore.”

  In the evening, the two met at a hot pot restaurant decorated with Mao Zedong and Chinese Communist memorabilia. After ordering their fare from waiters dressed in classic comrades’ garb, they collected tofu, pieces of raw fish, several varieties of mushrooms, and a half-dozen varieties of Asian greens and took them back to their table. In the center of it, a waiter installed a steaming pot of broth, which was kept bubbling on an electric burner. Using chopsticks to drop in the food they had collected, they watched it cook and then ladled the soup into bowls. As the two dined, Liz enthused about the orchids she’d seen.

  “Then you must come along with me to Fiji,” Nadia said. “There’s a marvelous orchid garden there established by the actor Raymond Burr.”

  “It sounds wonderful, but I’ve already broken my bank by paying for my airfare to get here.”

  “Use some of my frequent-flyer miles. I have more than I can ever spend. And you can join me in my lodgings. I travel alone so much it will be a pleasure to have your company during this little holiday. I shan’t be working in Fiji, so I will have more time to converse with you. We will have more opportunity to put our heads together about Ellen, too.”

  On the morning of September 10, the two made their way to Fiji’s main island and installed themselves in the aptly named Shangri-La’s Fijian Resort. After freshening up, they toured Raymond Burr’s Garden of the Sleeping Giant orchid plantation, so-named for the long mountain, shaped like a reclining titan, which stretches out above and beyond the garden. Liz took photographs and copious notes for another travel article. And then she and Nadia returned to the resort, in time to attend a fire-walking demonstration and outdoor banquet.

  “I had thought fire walkers would skitter quickly across the stones,” Liz said. “But they seemed to linger on them.”

  “Like you with your work and me with mine.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s true. Here we are, behaving as tourists and making little progress at all.”

  “If you think so, you are mistaken. The more I get to know you, the more I feel I can say about Ellen. You see, she has been my friend for two decades. I have known you only for a matter of days.”

  “You haven’t, however, spent much time with Ellen, have you?”

  “Not in person. In fact, I have now spent more time in your physical company than I have in hers. But that doesn’t matter. Since we were girls, we have shared our lives through writing. I can say, without hesitation, that Ellen was one of my dearest . . .”

  Liz met Nadia’s eyes. “You feel she is gone, don’t you?” Liz asked.

  “My mind tells me there are questions enough about her circumstances to suggest she chose to leave, but my tongue betrays me.” Nadia paused. “Yes, I already think of her in the past tense.”

  Liz placed her hand over Nadia’s. “We will find the truth, Nadia. That’s all we can do now,” she said.

  Chapter 24

  The following day, the pair took a Piper Cub to one of Fiji’s three hundred islands, where Nadia had a reservation at a rustic-style resort.

  “This makes me think of the film Cast Away,” Liz remarked, as the two installed themselves in a grass hut with a thatched roof just steps away from the water. The beach hut, or burrah, would have been charming enough from the outside, but it was even more delightful inside. Brightly colored batik spreads covered two beds, and intricate, hand-painted patterns in black and cream adorned the deeply peaked ceiling above them.

  Obviously designed for barefoot visitors, the hut’s concrete slab entryway was fitted with a hand-woven straw mat. A dishpan of fresh water sat in front of a small bench there, so visitors might remove sand from their feet with ease before entering the hut.

  “Do you see that island there?” Nadia said, pointing to a small mound or rock across the blue water.

  “Um hm.”

  “That is where the movie you mentioned was filmed. I gather the bar and restaurant at this resort were favored by cast and crew during the filming.”

  After changing into bikinis, the pair stepped out of their hut and settled in the shade of a palm tree. Nadia, who knew the resort well, seemed set on reading. Liz, however, took out her book and only laid it on her lap. She found it hard to settle her eyes on a book when she could gaze instead at the expanse of aquamarine water, dotted with distant islands, that was laid out before her. But her book caught Nadia’s eye, nonetheless.

  “You carried a library book halfway arou
nd the world!” Nadia exclaimed, noticing the call numbers pasted on the book’s spine.

  “It’s one Ellen was reading before she disappeared,” Liz said, and explained to Nadia how she gained access to Ellen’s library record.

  “You and Mrs. Swenson have missed your callings,” Nadia chuckled. “You should have taken up my line of work. But that’s a children’s book, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I suppose Ellen might have been reading it to Veronica.”

  “May I take a look?”

  “Of course.”

  Nadia read aloud the blurb on the back of the paperback. “‘Margaret’s father died in a mysterious drowning accident when she was eight years old.’” She stopped and looked hard at Liz. “When did Ellen take out this book? Do you know?”

  “Sometime last November, I think. I’ve got my folder about the case in my suitcase. I could check on it.” Liz retrieved the folder from the grass hut and returned to the chaise lounge under the palms. “Here’s Ellen’s borrowing record.” She spread it out on her knees. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found was borrowed November 16 and returned the next day.”

  “Then that may well be the book she wrote to me about. She never mentioned the title, but in a letter she wrote in mid-November, Ellen said little things, even picking up a children’s book, were stimulating flashbacks. This book perhaps reminded her of her father. He died in a drowning accident when she was eight years old, you know. She always referred to him as her hero, her ‘Rock of Gibraltar.’ She was a—how do you say it?—‘father’s girl.’”

  “‘Daddy’s girl.’ I suppose reminders of his death stirred her up emotionally, leaving her more vulnerable to those flashbacks.”

  “That is how she saw it. I imagine she never read that book to Veronica. That’s why she returned it the next day.”

  “Seems sensible. Look at this,” Liz said, handing to Nadia the library record.