by Zoë Ferraris
He'd determined that she could have left the estate by jet-skiing around the island's west side. That way, she wouldn't have passed beneath the women's sitting room and the women wouldn't have heard the buzz of the jet-ski. She had docked on the mainland and changed her clothes, taking the shoes from the pockets of her black cloak and transferring them into the pockets of the white robe. Then she'd gone to the zoo on her motorcycle, her joyful burst of freedom.
Mutlaq's trip to the zoo had confused everything. He'd found Nouf's footprints on the service road, and there was evidence of a struggle, but the chaos in the dirt made it impossible to say if there'd been an attacker. It seemed as if Nouf had fallen near the bushes—that was probably when she lost her pink shoe. The drag marks didn't seem connected to Nouf, because at some point she had got back to her feet and gone to the truck. Had she suffered a fainting spell of some sort—perhaps from the pregnancy? More confusing still, Mutlaq had found motorcycle tracks on the service road just beside those of the truck, made by the same model of motorcycle as the one at the cabana.
Mutlaq had also found Othman's prints at the zoo, but they were not on the service road. They were outside the Matterhorn. There were another man's prints there as well, but Mutlaq didn't recognize them.
So Othman had been to the zoo, but Mutlaq had been unable to tell if he'd been there when Nouf had been kidnapped. The ground by the Matterhorn was dry and dusty, not as easy to read as the dirt on the service road. Maybe Othman knew about Nouf's trips to the zoo, and he'd gone to investigate. It wasn't something he was obliged to tell Nayir, although it might have been useful. Explaining why Nouf was at the zoo might have led to uncomfortable questions about her activities, and Othman would have wanted to protect her. It made sense, anyway.
But nothing else did. Judging by the tracks, Nouf had gone to the zoo on the motorcycle. But then she'd returned the bike to the cabana. From there she'd probably jet-skied back to the island. It looked ever more likely that she'd stolen the truck from the house herself. But then she'd gone to the zoo again. Mutlaq felt confident that the truck and motorcycle tracks had been made on the same day. Why would she have gone back to the zoo? Was she looking for her lost shoe? Nayir gathered from the journal that she went to the zoo frequently, by herself, to read the signs that described the animals. Perhaps she had gone there for privacy or comfort.
But it was also where she met her lover.
Taking his coffee to the table, he looked again at the map. He paused at the wadi and thought of all the things that were missing from the crime scene. Nouf's bag of librarian clothes—Muhammad still had them. Her glasses, which she hadn't yet picked up. The key to the apartment in New York. If she were running away, he ought to have found one of those items somewhere near the body. Instead he had found the pink stiletto, her alibi for leaving the house. She had left with the shoes in the morning—then she'd gone back to the house, stolen the truck and the camel, and driven back to the zoo, all the while toting around a single shoe. Why the shoe and not the other items?
Nayir went to the bathroom and rinsed his eyes. It felt as if someone had rubbed sand in them; they were red, and now his vision was blurry. Maybe, he thought, I should go back to that crazy eye doctor.
He sat down again and picked up the journal. The last third of it was mostly observations of her dogs' behavior—no mention of her plans to run away to America, no mention of names. Although the romantic passages had grown ever more painful, they were less confused. She seemed sick of her unrequited love. She had turned her attention to animals instead, finding comfort in their mysteries. Every so often she mentioned love again. I saw him today, and the way he looked at me sent me to the darkest realms of hell. I know I'll die if this goes on. If what goes on? Nayir wondered. This oppressive flirtation? With whom?
He turned to the very last page of writing. There were only two paragraphs. The handwriting was sloppier than before, almost frantic.
I'm not a girl anymore. I've done it, WE'VE done it, and the strangest thing of all is that I don't regret it. I feel so stupid when I think of all the fear I had. Allah, I almost committed the biggest sin, I almost killed myself! I realize all of the things I feared are only the beginning of something beautiful. I feel alive for the first time. And the crazy thing is that I didn't know it would happen. I thought that it was almost over between us. He was avoiding me, and when I'd see him, he wouldn't even look at me. I thought he'd given up. But when I got to the zoo, he was waiting near the mountain where they used to keep the goats. I was shocked! I asked him how he found me. I never tell anyone! He said he figured it out himself, but he didn't say how. I was nervous, too, but he hugged me. I almost fainted from surprise, and then he kissed me!! I tried to say no, but he said, "My heart tells me you don't mean it."
He told me that he wouldn't ever stop loving me, no matter where I went, no matter who I married. I started to cry, and he took me in his arms and brought me into the center of the mountain. It was cool and dark. He kept apologizing, because it was not expensive or romantic, but he knew that I love this place, and nothing would be better.
Slowly Nayir closed the book and set it on the table. He shut his sore eyes, and a deceptive tear streaked down his nose. Although she had died young, at least she'd learned one of the words for love.
A sudden shifting of the boat announced an arrival above. He blinked, wincing, and climbed out of the dinette to peer up the ladder. A black shape swooped around the hatch, and he knew before he saw her that it was Miss Hijazi.
"Nayir?" she called. Her voice sounded pinched.
He checked his clock; it was 9:30—not too late to make a social call but unusual nonetheless. He climbed up the ladder and caught sight of her eyes, red and tear-stained in the glow of the cabin's light. "What's wrong?" he asked. She stumbled, and he reached out to keep her from falling. "What happened?"
"Can we talk?"
"Yes, come in." He descended first and stood below her in case she stumbled again. To his surprise, his heart was thumping.
She stepped into the cabin and seemed to collapse. He managed to grab her around the shoulders and steer her toward the sofa, where she landed with an impact he wouldn't have expected from such a thin woman. Folding in pain, she put her face in her hands.
He chewed his lip and looked around. He was supposed to comfort her, but how? Going into the kitchen, he considered making more coffee but decided on tea. He set the kettle on the stove. Behind him, she had curled into a ball—knees up, arms wrapped around her legs, face buried in her cloak. She was sobbing quietly. When the tea was ready, he took her a cup and set it on the table.
"Drink something," he said, sitting on the sofa beside her.
She took a deep breath and raised her head. After a few moments she lowered her legs, straightened her cloak, and sat up. She lifted her burqa and took the teacup.
Nayir turned away so he wouldn't embarrass her.
"I found the baby's father," she said.
He couldn't help it—he looked. The expression on her face told him everything. Othman.
"He's not really her brother." She gave a dry laugh. "But I never thought—"
He was too stunned to speak.
"I also found his skin cells and blood beneath her fingernails. Remember those defensive wounds she had? It was someone else's blood."
"His?"
She nodded and broke into tears again. Nayir took her teacup and set it down. His own calm surprised him. Gently he put an arm around her shoulders, half expecting her to flinch or pull away, but she turned and curled against him like a child. "Othman was sleeping with his sister!" she wailed. He raised his other arm and enclosed her. It wasn't as awkward as he'd thought it would be. She sobbed unabashedly, and he waited, wondering if he smelled like garlic, if he should have said something different, wondering how it would end. He marveled at himself. He was unable to remember why he'd been so harsh to her before, which is what it seemed now: his own harshness, not hers. She was shaking, and
he rocked her back and forth, whispering Ism'allah, ism'allah in her ear. In that blinding instant when she'd burst into tears, all the barriers between them had ripped apart.
Finally she stopped crying and slowly, very slowly, pulled away. "I'm so sorry," she said.
"Don't be." He withdrew his arms and watched as she unwound the lower portion of her scarf and used it to wipe her nose.
"You know what my mother used to say?" she said. "'When you see a woman blowing her nose with her veil, divorce her.'"
He gave a crooked grin.
"You know what's funny? My father didn't want me to marry Othman." She wiped her nose and tucked her scarf back into her collar. "I guess he was right. I was saved just in time. If I had married him, he wouldn't have loved me. Maybe he'd have killed me too!"
"It doesn't mean he killed her."
"How do you explain his skin beneath her nails?"
"Maybe they fought before she was abducted."
"And someone else abducted her? Come on. He had motive—he had to cover up the pregnancy. He was jealous because she was marrying someone else. I'll bet he found out about Eric, about her plan to run away, and it drove him crazy. He knew enough about her to kidnap her and make it look like she ran away. And he knew enough about the desert to know where to take her, because he was too cowardly to kill her outright. He wanted the desert to kill her so he wouldn't feel the guilt."
Nayir had a hard time imagining Othman kidnapping Nouf, banging her on the head, driving her out to the desert. But Katya was right: he did have the motive and the opportunity. Yet if Othman had kidnapped her, why was he so eager to find her abductor?
"Have you spoken to him yet?" he asked.
"No." She sniffled. "I'll do it tomorrow, once I've calmed down." He nodded. "I'm sorry to come here and dump this on you," she said.
"I would have found out anyway." His mind went back to the journal and he understood why Nouf hadn't written the man's name—the people most likely to read the journal would have been scandalized if they had found out. In fact, most of the journal would have upset them, but Nouf had protected Othman's identity.
It made his skin crawl to think of it.
He glanced at the journal sitting on the table. He wanted to tell her what he'd read, but he didn't want her to read it. Not tonight, maybe not ever. Standing up, he gathered his maps and charts and slipped the journal between them. He took everything and set it on the captain's desk in the kitchen.
Katya lifted her feet onto the sofa and wrapped her arms around her legs. She seemed to be settling in for a while. He found a box of tissues in the bathroom and placed it on the table. He brought a pillow from the bedroom. She thanked him and clutched the pillow to her chest. He went into the kitchenette and took his time preparing more tea. When he brought the teapot, she forced a smile.
"Thank you, Nayir. I realize this must be awkward for you."
"No," he said. "It's not awkward at all." He sat down and poured the tea.
An hour later he climbed topside. Below, Katya slept soundly on the sofa. She'd fallen asleep, and he had decided it was best not to wake her. He'd brought a few old blankets from below, and now he laid them on the deck, making a pillow for himself from a ratty old life vest. The boat bobbed rhythmically, and except for the gentle splash of water on the hull, the world was incredibly quiet and calm. Everything slipped behind him now—Nouf, Othman, the unborn baby. All he could think about was Katya.
26
TEN MINUTES LATER Katya's driver came tromping down the pier, calling her name. Almost at once she clambered topside, clapping a hand to her mouth.
"I'm all right, Ahmad! I'm so sorry—I can explain!"
Nayir stood up and glanced at the neighbors' boats. No one was in sight, and he hated himself for feeling so relieved.
"Kati," Ahmad spat, barely able to contain his outrage, "I have been trying to call you!"
She climbed onto the pier. "I'm so sorry."
"You said you'd leave your cell phone on. Your father is terribly concerned. It's a good thing he hasn't called the police!"
"Wallahi" She whipped out her cell phone and called her father at once.
Nayir watched her speak into the phone and tried to ignore the driver's nasty stare. "Nothing happened," he said finally, "if that's what you think."
"I don't think," the driver snapped.
"I wouldn't do anything—"
The driver snorted and strode back down the pier.
Once Katya had gone, he realized it was going to be impossible to sleep, so he made coffee and sat at the dinette, uncomfortably alone with his thoughts. The image of Othman making love to Nouf racked him with disgust. He could imagine them meeting accidentally in the quiet recesses of the Shrawi estate, terrified, awkward, scurrying quickly away from each other as if the mighty force of their attraction had been reversed. He could see the capitulation to desire, the two of them meeting at the zoo, filthy with dirt and sweat and sex, a consummation. And then the final turn: Othman's discovery of her plans to flee, his own desperate plans to ruin hers—a hit on the head, abandonment in the desert. At the very least, he had lied and cheated. At the worst, he had killed her. And yet for all its horror, the fact brought Nayir an unpleasant relief. Katya certainly wouldn't marry him now.
Forgive me for these wicked thoughts! He shut his eyes and tried to envision this as an isolated event, not a deeper darkness in Othman but rather a single failing that could have happened to any man. Othman was in a difficult situation. When a man falls in love with a sister, he is locked into her life. He cannot avoid knowing her; he cannot so easily avert his gaze. It would require a measure of self-control that even Nayir would find daunting. He had known Katya for only a short time, but already he was having licentious thoughts about her. If he had to live with her, knowing that she was not a sister by blood, it was possible that he too would fall into sin.
Yet Othman had been such an archetype of decency, so modest despite his immodest wealth, that Nayir's disappointment was fierce. Was goodness only on the surface of a man—the part that you could see? Was the heart always wicked? Even the most decent men were always on the verge of losing control. And Katya—did he trust her only because he wanted to, because his body drove him to? If he couldn't trust a man like Othman, how could he trust a woman?
It struck him that she was gone, maybe for good. It would be awkward to contact her now. Just when she'd been liberated from Othman, she was less available than ever.
A sleepless night was followed by a vacuous day. He was too tired to go out, but at lunchtime he walked to the parking lot and bought a shawarma from the marina's vendor. He managed to avoid seeing Majid, but the quiet return to the boat and the stifling isolation that met him there only made the day stretch emptier than before. He had never felt quite so purposeless and dull, and it took him a while to realize that he was experiencing the vast, weighty, immobilizing dread of knowing that he had to talk to Othman but feeling he'd rather throw himself into the sea. Yet until he saw Othman, he would accomplish nothing else.
Later that afternoon he drove to the estate. A butler met him at the door and took him to the sitting room, where Tahsin was sitting in state with a nervous-looking Qazi. It was curious that Qazi was there. Was he close to the brothers? He had told Nayir that he had come to the estate only once during his courtship with Nouf. Othman never talked about him, in fact had never mentioned him until Nouf's disappearance.
Sitting across from Tahsin's bulk, Qazi looked like a reedy boy. He held a shaking teacup on his lap but was too nervous to drink, and his forehead glistened with sweat. When he saw Nayir, his face became eloquent with relief. Perhaps he had come to pay personal condolences to the family.
Tahsin greeted Nayir and invited him in. Nayir shook Qazi's hand and sat beside him, wondering at the cause of his distress.
"We were just discussing the future," Tahsin said.
Qazi smiled nervously, sloshing his tea. Nayir was inclined to believe what he'd sa
id about his reasons for loving Nouf—that she wasn't stiff or formal. In the sitting room, he seemed uniquely out of place.
"We can continue this later," Tahsin remarked.
Just then the door opened and Othman appeared with Fahad, the two of them escorting their father, Abu Tahsin.
Tahsin got up to clear the pillows from the floor. With steps as slow as a clock's minute hand, the three men shuffled into the room. Abu Tahsin's decrepitude was painful to see. In the course of a few weeks, this lissome and gregarious man had withered like a dried plum. His chest and arms were shrunken, and a host of new wrinkles netted his face. He could hardly stand on his own, and with each step his expression grew tauter. He didn't notice his guest until he was practically beside him.
"It's Nayir, Father," Tahsin said. "Nayir ash-Sharqi."
Abu Tahsin's voice climbed out of the depths of his throat. "Ahhmm."
Nayir was shocked. "Abu Tahsin, I'm at your service."
"Hahhhhmmm."
Nayir stood back to let him pass. He cherished a memory of Abu Tahsin standing above Wadi Jawwah near Abu Arish, aiming his rifle at a flock of white storks with a gleam in his eye. It was late afternoon, and the sun fell on him in a golden haze, deepening the sable color of his skin. Nayir remembered the sudden crack of the shot, the storks' unearthly skirl, the powder floating in the air like lines of white silk. Abu Tahsin had turned to him and said, his voice deep like a rumor, "The birds in the sky are not to be counted, and yet every one of them follows a pattern. Do you think this is a sign for prudent men?"