Front Page Teaser lhm-1

by Rosemary Herbert

  Every time he considered warning her of the danger she was in, the thought was paired with panic about the practical aftermath of such an action. His own life would then be threatened, too. How would the two of them—together or singly—elude Fa’ud for any length of time? Perhaps the only course was to kill her.

  A gust of wind whipped icy crystals into his face. Samir Hasan squared his shoulders and picked up his pace.

  With the cookie-making ingredients set out in the kitchen, Ellen decided to make herself a cup of tea. Taking out the china she had bought in New York City to replace the cup Veronica had broken recently, she realized she now owned an extra saucer, since the shop would sell her only the cup-and-saucer set. Turning the saucer over, she looked again at the name of the china pattern: Forget Me Not.

  And then it happened again. A strangely unsettling feeling washed over her like a wave breaking on the side of her head, spilling down her arms and torso, producing a cold sweat. Gripping the saucer in one hand and the kitchen counter with the other, she saw again the marvelous shapes of topiary trees. And then, like a relentless lens trained on a reluctant subject targeted by paparazzi, her mind’s eye zoomed in on a sort of umbrella of pine needles. And, yes, there was the tuneless hum again. And more sounds came to her too. The moan of a man, the man seated stroking himself under the tree. After he moaned, he formed a word, a word starting with the sound of the letter F, and this time he finished the word. With horror, Ellen heard two all-too-familiar syllables, Flicka.

  Swedish for “Pretty Girl.” Her father’s pet name for her.

  “Forget me not!” Ellen cried out, shocked into a state of mind that was no longer dreamlike in the least. Keenly aware of the saucer in one hand, of the counter edge she gripped with the other, of the shriek of the teakettle, Ellen recalled, with a kind of exhilaration, the sound of a zipper in the shadows, her father standing up, emerging from the shadows, taking her in his arms. Then he pointed, thrusting out his finger as if to stab the air, and he bellowed, in an unfamiliar, throaty voice, “Forget me not, young man! I will not let you get away with this.”

  Loosening her grip on the countertop, Ellen picked up a piece of chalk and wrote the words “FORGET ME NOT” on her blackboard. Her hand was shaky, but the writing seemed to settle her. She turned off the teakettle, and without washing the new cup, prepared herself a cup of tea in it.

  Marveling at her mastery of these ordinary things, she carried the cup of tea into the living room, sat down in her chair, and then realized she had carried the extra saucer along without realizing it. She set the teacup with its own saucer on the side table and picked up her Arabic phrase book. Still holding the orphaned saucer in her left hand, she found herself tapping it on her thigh as, all at once, the flow of words, words in any language, seemed marvelous to her. So did the sound of her own voice. She sat and tapped the saucer against her thigh and read phrase after Arabic phrase with a facility that had heretofore always eluded her.

  Meanwhile, Hasan had made his way to the Johanssons’ front steps. Hearing Ellen through the door, he found himself astonished again at this woman’s ability to surprise him. Perhaps her conversational Arabic was rather good, as he’d originally thought, even though she seemed perplexingly unfamiliar with the word for coffee and the names of some fruits. How could he be certain about the shaqra’s failure or success at understanding the code words? It was all too much for him. Utterly unmanned by the consternation he felt, Hasan did the only thing left to him.

  He whispered a fervent prayer for guidance.

  Only then did he reach out and ring the doorbell.

  Startled, Ellen stood up, and set down her book. She was not expecting anyone. Still holding the saucer, she crossed the room and opened the door.

  Hasan could take no chances. Even as he greeted her politely, he strode past her directly into the house, knocking her arm and causing the saucer she was holding to crash to the floor.

  Allah be praised! This gave Hasan an excuse to bend down and assist in the cleanup, hiding his face while he continued to deliver the complicated greeting that he hoped would buy him entrée into the home.

  “Dear lady,” he said, “I have news of vital importance, which I beg of you to hear.”

  “Please, I’ll take care of that,” Ellen said, glancing at the shattered saucer. But she remained standing, afraid to squat near this intruder. “I must ask you to leave.”

  “Please, it is for your good that I have come to say . . .”

  “I will call the police!”

  Hasan clenched the shard, cutting himself. “Ayah!” He cried out, dropping his backpack and the china and standing up suddenly, clutching his bleeding hand.

  Alarm overcame Ellen’s instinct to help but Hasan cut short her effort to shove him toward the front door. Holding his uninjured hand over her mouth, he pushed her toward the back of the house, through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  “Please, lady!” he urged, as Ellen squirmed free and rushed toward a block of wood holding a set of knives. To prevent her grasping a knife, he grabbed her hands with both of his, including his injured hand, dripping blood. Ellen slipped her left hand from his slippery grip. Disgusted, she shook her bloodied hand over the countertop.

  “You!” she cried recognizing him fully now. “What are you doing here? What do you want with me?”

  “Hamdu-lillah! I only want to—”

  Ellen opened her mouth to scream.

  Lunging, Hasan clamped his hand over Ellen’s mouth. But her panic gave her cleverness he did not expect. She relaxed all of her muscles, dropping in a quick movement toward the floor.

  Just then, a gunshot rang out.

  And Ellen finished her journey to the floor—arriving dead at the cabdriver’s feet.

  Chapter 25

  September 16, 2001

  Unable to fly via Singapore, thanks to impossible flight delays in that hub of international travel, Liz decided to travel eastward from Fiji to Los Angeles. Entailing daylong waits in Fiji’s airport and then again in Los Angeles, the journey was a fruitful one for Banner articles on passenger frustration and airport security.

  Liz finally arrived in Boston’s Logan Airport late in the afternoon of September 17. Taking a cab directly to Banner Square, she filed her stories and collected her messages before she returned to Gravesend Street. Pausing only to greet and feed a jubilant Prudence, she fell into bed and slept for twelve hours straight.

  Only when Tom arrived at daybreak to feed Prudence did Liz awake. She began to apologize for her failure to phone and save him the trouble of feeding the cat, but then she broke off in the middle of the effort and said, “Oh Tom! I’m not sorry you’ve come. I’m so glad to see you!” And she threw herself into his outstretched arms. Exhausted from her trip and weary of holding herself together for days without emotional release, she simply sobbed.

  After awhile, Tom left to pick up some groceries for Liz while she showered and made herself some coffee. Only then did she look over the telephone messages she had noted in the newsroom the day before. There was one from Doug Mayhew, the would-be rock star of Cape Cod, announcing he had written a “cool new ballad” in response to the terrorist attacks. There were two more from book publicists pushing authors of books about the Middle East as experts to be quoted in the Banner. And there was a call from a man with a Middle Eastern–accented voice, too

  “Hello, M-Ms. Higgins. This is Al Hazard. Mr. V-V-V-Vee said I should c-c-c-call.” He left a phone number Liz recognized as that of the Van Wormer workshop. “Mr. Vee” must be Jan Van Wormer.

  When Liz dialed, the man picked up. Thanks to the stuttering and another more general hesitancy that was evident even over the phone, Liz realized it would be best to talk with Al in person. She arranged to meet him at the workshop within the hour. After cursorily drying her hair and leaving a note for Tom, she set out immediately for South Boston.

  Along the way, she was startled to find American flags had materialized everywher
e, especially as stickers in car windows, on bumpers, and even on car bodies. Flags waved from car antennae, too, and she saw Old Glory plastered on fences, porch railings, and automobile overpasses. At Van Wormer’s South Boston address, the flag was in evidence, too, hanging stripes downward, like a curtain, from the little archway leading to the workshop entrance.

  “I put it there for Al’s sake,” the elderly piano builder said as he opened the door for Liz. “Personally, I don’t see how hanging the flag will achieve much, but it might make Al look like a patriot—and in a time like this, that’s not a bad thing.”

  “When did he return, Mr. Van Wormer?”

  “September the thirteenth. He said he was kicked out of his rented room because he is an Arab. Sadly, that may be true. In any case, I’m sure he feels safer here. He’s ready to talk with you, too.”

  “That surprises me somewhat, grateful as I am for it. Why—if he’s nervous about having the spotlight on him—is he ready to talk with the press now?”

  “He’s still not very comfortable about this, but he knows another man of Middle Eastern background is implicated in Mrs. Johansson’s disappearance. Al says he fled from my house when he heard on the news that a Middle Easterner might have had something to do with her troubles. Now that that man has been identified, he’s willing to tell you what he knows.”

  As Jan Van Wormer finished speaking, a timid figure slunk into the room. Lingering in the shadows near a grand piano, he spoke up.

  “That’s r-right,” he said. “Mr. V-V-Vee? Would you p-p-please stay with me?”

  “Sure, Al,” the piano man said, motioning for Al to be seated on a worn settee while he and Liz took chairs facing him. Saving Al the struggle of spitting out his entire story, Jan Van Wormer told Liz, “Al here has told me he was falsely accused of some lewd behavior regarding Ellen Johansson, back when he was a student at the Wharton School out in Wellesley. Of course, Mrs. Johansson was just a girl then.” Looking at Al, he said, gently, “That right, Al?”

  “Y-yes, Mr. Vee,” Al managed to say, while he brought his knees up to his chest and visibly struggled not to hug them to himself.

  “It’s all right, Al,” Liz said encouragingly. “I’m here to tell the truth, not to get you in trouble for something you didn’t do. I already know Dr. Mayhew doubted you had done anything wrong.”

  Al unfolded his knees and set his feet on the floor again. “He d-d-did? Hamdu-lillah!”

  “Yes, Al. Mr. Buxton, your music teacher, told me he thought you were scared because Mr. Swenson was so angry. Dr. Mayhew said the board members at the Wharton School wouldn’t give you a chance to tell the whole story. Now you can tell us everything, Al.”

  “I d-d-d-didn’t do it,” Al said.

  “But you saw something that shocked you, is that right? Something that made you say ‘Rah, rah. Shock-rah, shock-rah.’”

  “How do you know that?” Al managed to spit out.

  “Dr. Mayhew remembered you said that.”

  “I was d-disgusted.”

  “Not shocked? Then why did you keep saying ‘Shock rah’?”

  “Shaqra,” he said. “It means ‘yellow hair’.”

  “Blonde? The word ‘shaqra’ means ‘blonde’?”

  Al nodded. “I was d-d-disgusted, and sad, too. I was sorry for the shaqra. I was sorry for what Ellen maybe saw.”

  “What did Ellen see, Al?”

  “It is d-d-difficult for me to tell this to a lady,” he said, drawing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them this time.

  “You saw a man behaving badly, didn’t you, Al?” Jan Van Wormer said in a low tone. “The man was masturbating, wasn’t he, Al? It’s all right to tell the truth,” he said, reaching across and placing his gnarled hand on Al’s wrist.

  “Allah help me, it is the truth. M-M-Mister Swenson. He was d-d-doing this thing.”

  “Did Ellen see what he was doing, Al?”

  Al nodded and then shook his head in a contradictory motion. He seemed unable to speak.

  “Al told me he was not sure how much Ellen saw,” Jan Van Wormer said. “She ran to her father and then fled towards the house where she lived. Then Mr. Swenson began to shout at Al.”

  “F-F-F . . . ,” Al began.

  “Al told me Mr. Swenson was mumbling the word ‘flicka.’ I think it’s a Swedish endearment. But that was earlier, while the man was masturbating.”

  Tongue-tied, Al nodded exaggeratedly, then he moved his hand in a rolling motion as if performing a charade to indicate moving ahead.

  “When he became angry, Ali,” Liz pressed, using his boyhood name, “did he say ‘fuck’ then?”

  Al shook his head violently. ‘F-F-F-FORGET ME NOT!’” he bellowed, and then fled from the room.

  Liz had every intention of confronting Olga Swenson with her knowledge as she drove out to Wellesley from South Boston. Fatigue, hunger, and finally traffic gave her pause, however. Unwilling to face Olga on an empty stomach, she stopped at a lunch place in Newton Lower Falls and purchased a take-out container of clam chowder, a tuna sandwich, and potato chips. The September skies, whose beauty was so remarkable on the day of the terrorist attacks, remained as blue as any on a picture postcard. And, as Liz took her sandwich outdoors to a picnic table overlooking a fast-flowing stream that she knew was the Charles River, nearby trees with leaves just beginning to change color looked like harbingers of autumn.

  It was nine months since Ellen had gone missing. Observing water splashing over a dam as brightly as if Ellen’s disappearance or the pain of terrorists’ victims had never occurred, Liz felt keenly alone with her thoughts. What did this new piece of the puzzle augur? Could one assume Ellen had called to mind her father’s words at last—perhaps reminded by the name of the broken teacup’s china pattern? If so, would that have given her relief from her flashbacks, or only endowed her with more pain?

  If the shakily written words “FORGET ME NOT” on the blackboard were any indication, she was certainly agitated. But surely, Liz hoped, Ellen must have realized she now had the upper hand over the flashbacks. Even if it was painful to know her father had behaved appallingly, a woman like Ellen, a woman who knew how to turn to books for information about her worries, must have known she could get help overcoming this painful knowledge. She must have experienced some sense of relief as she wrote those words on her blackboard.

  Why then, did she go missing? Tilting her head to look up at the gloriously blue sky, Liz thought again about Nadia’s account of Ellen’s strange cab ride and the events at the World Trade Center. The night before the attacks, Nadia, who was herself an intelligence operative, had not seen anything significant in the cabdriver’s radio talk. The terrorist attacks put everything in a different light. What would Nadia think now? Had Ellen overheard something she shouldn’t in the two-way radio conversation?

  Finishing her sandwich, Liz returned to her car and phoned Faisal al-Turkait. He sounded far more reserved than he had been during their earlier encounter. But he consented to meet her later that day in his shop. Unsure what she wanted to say to Olga at this stage, Ellen nearly turned her car eastward towards Boston. What point was there in dredging up the ugly fact of her husband’s behavior, except to see if Olga was aware of it? But, even so, on impulse she turned west and drove to the Swenson house.

  If Olga was perplexed to see Liz, she hardly showed it. Instead, she seemed relieved to have company and to share her thoughts about the terrorist attacks.

  “It personalizes things, doesn’t it, when you have a loved one who has been on the scene where a tragedy later occurs? Only months earlier, Ellen was having such a memorable meeting with her pen pal on the top floor of one of those towers,” Olga said as she poured hot water into a china teapot.

  “Yes,” Liz said. “It makes the unimaginable all too imaginable, unfortunately.”

  “Shall we take the tea outside and enjoy the weather?”

  “Good idea. Let me help.”

  Liz welcomed the chance
to be occupied with the tea things, since she remained uncertain about sharing Ali’s revelation. The walk through the house, down the stairs, and through the mudroom bought her a few minutes to think. In the mudroom, Liz noticed Olga’s aluminum vases were filled with fresh-cut flowers, and an incomplete flower arrangement stood on the potting table.

  “Did I interrupt you in your arranging?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Just as I felt strange taking up old hobbies although my daughter remains missing, I now find myself feeling odd about arranging flowers while the world is in such a state. It feels rather like fiddling while Rome burns.” Olga seemed to shake herself as she stood poised to exit the mudroom.

  Meanwhile, Liz took a scarf from her purse. “I seem to have picked this up accidentally during an earlier visit. Shall I hang it here?” she asked.

  Olga nodded. As Liz tried to drape the scarf on an overloaded coat hook, she knocked a coat to the floor. Picking it up, she tucked the scarf into its pocket and hung the coat on the hook again by the little chain sewn to its collar.

  Burdened with the tea tray, Olga signaled Liz to make haste into the fresh air. “That is one of Ellen’s favorite old scarves,” she said, her eyes brightening with tears. Thrusting the door open with her shoulder, she added, “It’s stuffy in here, don’t you think?”

  “I’d call it ‘close,’ thanks to the mixed fragrances of the flowers.”

  Liz contented herself with making small talk, until she realized it was time to head for her appointment with Faisal al-Turkait in Cambridge.

  “Was there a particular reason for your visit, Liz?” Olga asked.

  “I thought I’d let you know, ‘shaqra’ means ‘blonde’ in Arabic.”

  “‘Shock-rah!’ Then that Al Leigh was not so tongue-tied!” Olga said, her eyes widening. “It’s dreadful, don’t you think, the assumptions we make about foreigners? No wonder they hate us! What will become of us, Liz?”