“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 around 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.
“There are shadowed lines here and here on the paper.”
“I asked Olga to make a copy of the reading list for me. I wonder if she did a little cutting and pasting of a longer list. Ellen’s friend Lucy Gray told me she had seen Ellen’s library record and it worried Lucy to know Ellen had been reading about child abuse.”
“Why would Mrs. Swenson wish to hide that from you?”
“The book in question was a self-help book. Look, it’s this one: Silent Knights. Olga must not have realized the nature of the book from its title, since the subtitle is not listed here. It has to do with having the courage to address one’s propensity for engaging in aberrant behavior. Although I had the impression from Ellen’s librarian friend that there was just a single book in question on this topic, maybe that was not the case. Perhaps Ellen had taken out another book along those lines and Olga did not wish for me to know it.”
“You mean it looked like Ellen was a child abuser? Ridiculous!” As if to wash away that foul notion, Nadia leapt up from her chaise lounge and strode into the sea.
It was nighttime before the two women addressed the topic of Ellen again. Lying on their backs in their beds, neither could settle down immediately. For Liz, it was a case of overexcitement at the unexpected visit to Fiji. Nadia seemed unsettled after making radio contact with her colleagues.
“It seems you do not wish to tell me about the specifics of your job, Nadia,” Liz said.
“It’s not a question of wishing to tell you or not. I cannot tell you.”
“Can you tell me, at least, if I’m correct in assuming that you are working in intelligence?”
“You are correct about that.”
“For whom are you working?
“I will tell you what I tell everyone who asks: I am an interpreter working on various United Nations projects.”
“Is the U.N. actually your employer?”
“Please, Liz. Understand I have told you all I can regarding my job.”
“Can you tell me something about Ellen, then? Was she also engaged in espionage?”
Nadia laughed. After a pause, she said, “I’m sorry to make light of your question. If you think our correspondence contained some sort of coded messages, you are mistaken. In fact, Ellen lost a briefcase full of old letters from me, and her purse, when we were in New York.”
“I was thinking more about the book she had in her possession—some sort of phrase book for intelligence officers.”
“Such books are not top secret and, while they are not sold in Barnes & Noble, they sometimes turn up in used-book shops. You might get in touch with the Brattle Book Shop in Boston and see if they have any record of selling it to her. I remember the shop name because I looked up the word brattle in my dictionary to see what it means. It wasn’t in the dictionary, so I assumed it’s the owner’s name. In one of her last letters, Ellen was most enthusiastic about a purchase she said she made in the Brattle, saying it would enrich our meeting. Since she never did give me a book when we met in New York, I now ask myself if it is possible that purchase was the phrase book that enabled her to greet me in Arabic.”
“I will check with the Brattle, of course. It does seem likely she was preparing to meet you. But then, I’m troubled, too, about her interaction with the cabdriver.”
“You mean he might have been an intelligence contact? You should know, Liz, that those kinds of machinations—a certain cab collecting a certain woman at a major train station—only happen in the movies, not in the life of actual espionage agents. It’s actually much more likely, unfortunately, that a certain woman would become the victim of a random psychopath encountered when she gets into the wrong cab.”
“What did she tell you about that cab ride?”
“Not a lot, Liz. We were so focused on meeting one another for the first time. She did tell me she surprised the driver by thanking him in his own language. When she did so, she said, the color drained from his face. That’s not an expression I’ve heard before, and it was very memorable. But it was even more memorable because Ellen seemed so—how do you say it?—shook by the encounter.”
“Could she have overheard anything significant in his radio conversation?”
“From what she said, it sounds to me like the driver was talking about her or another woman in sexual terms. You mentioned he used the word teena several times. As I told you, that is the word for fig, but it also refers to a woman as a sort of tasty dish.”
Suddenly, a sharp, shrill chirp pierced the air. Liz sat up and turned on the bedside light.
“Is there a bird in here?”
Nadia burst out laughing. “No, no! It’s just a lizard.”
“What do you mean ‘just a lizard’?” Liz said, hopping out of bed and shaking out her sheets.
“Take a look at the ceiling.”
Liz looked up and saw that part of the pattern painted there seemed to move. It was a lizard scurrying directly above her head. Then she saw another one, closer to the peak of the ceiling.
“Will they drop down on us?” Liz asked.
“I hope not. If they do, I believe they are harmless.”
“Startling, though,” Liz said, returning to her bed.
“Certainly. Think about it, Liz. A lizard in the night would make great fodder for a postcard message.”
“Let’s write one for Ellen.”
“If we post it, Erik will know we’ve been together.”
“That’s true. And, before we met, you told me you had something to say about him. I had the impression that the ‘something’ might have been a reason for Ellen to leave him.”
“She wrote that Erik had a problem with outflow at work. There was dirty business, money laundering. There was no doubt she loved her husband, but I thought she might separate herself from him to retain power over her own resources.”
“She wrote this? Did you discuss it further in New York?”
“Yes, she told me in a letter. And I asked her about it in New York. She said he’d found a way to recirculate the flow, so the outgo problem was not so serious. I felt she rather brushed off my concern, which, of course, was magnified once again when she went missing.”
“Oh Nadia! I think you’ve misunderstood. I’ve been to Erik’s workplace. He was working on designing an environmentally friendly washing machine. The costs of refining it were running high, largely due to his water bills, so he found a way to use recirculated runoff from his parking area to test the machine.”
“No wonder Ellen seemed unconcerned in New York! All these years I have prided myself on my English comprehension, but most certainly I read that letter all wrong!”
“You can’t blame yourself. The best linguists can get stumped on slang and jargon about machines.”
“But now you’ve come all this way, and my information is worth less than nothing.”
“Is that what you were writing about when you advised Ellen to be careful about leaving the family circle?”
Nadia seemed to weigh her reply.
“It’s little wonder you sought me out,” she finally said “Yes, I did advise Ellen to think carefully about shattering the family circle. I did not think it wa
s worth doing for financial reasons. And, as I mentioned, I worried that the hypnotist she considered consulting would lead her to think a family member was the figure in her flashbacks.”
“I, too, would have questioned her involving a hypnotist. But we’re still left with the fact that Ellen was overcome by the flashbacks. If she could not prevent them happening, she may have felt she was not in control of herself. And if she had an impulse to abuse, it would account for her leaving Veronica. By leaving her, she would be protecting her. The flashbacks you tell me about indicate a woman who felt out of control, overwhelmed.”
“Well, yes, the flashbacks seemed to overtake her. But when she spoke of them in New York, she was more worried than frantic. Even if they did make her feel as though she was losing control, it was not regarding handling herself with her child. She did not have it in her to abuse. I’m certain of it. No, Liz, I must say, it struck me that she wanted to face the flashbacks head-on and eliminate the source from which they sprang.”
“But didn’t you tell me she was reluctant to discover who the figure in the shadows was?”
Nadia did not reply. The two women stared up at the ceiling in silence. Liz wondered, could we have found a reasonable motive for suicide? Or, for the murder of the figure in the shadows?
“Ayeeeeeee!” Nadia shrieked, jumping from her bed and shaking a lizard from her sheets. Liz jumped up, too. Laughing, Nadia said, “Do you happen to have an extra postcard?”
“Eleven September 2001,” Nadia said aloud as she wrote the date on the postcard. “Someday, we hope, we will all sit down together and we will tell you how we came this far to find you,” she added and handed the card to Liz.
“The occasion for this postcard is easier to sum up,” Liz wrote. “Just call it ‘The Curious Incident of the Lizard in the Nighttime.’”
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