Finding Nouf (32 page)

"And she just rode away from the house, in plain sight?"

"No, she kept a motorcycle on the mainland beach. She'd jet-ski off the island, dock on the mainland, and use the motorcycle from there." He glanced nervously at Nayir. "She wanted that freedom of being out on the motorcycle—otherwise I would have given her a ride."

"How did you know when she was going to be at the zoo?"

Muhammad sighed deeply. "She would call me in the morning and tell me when to meet her. Usually she needed me to keep up her alibi. If she told her mother she was going shopping, then I had to show up at the zoo with some shopping bags full of stuff. She didn't care what it was. She wasn't materialistic. She wanted to ride her motorcycle more than she wanted new clothes."

Nayir nodded coolly. At least it explained why Nouf had taken the shoes to the zoo. "She was going to give you the pink shoes," he said. "You were going to exchange them for her."

Muhammad nodded glumly.

"So you saw her on the day she disappeared."

"No, I didn't!" Muhammad hissed, looking nervously at the men standing nearby. "She called me that morning and told me to meet her at the zoo, but when I got there, she wasn't there."

"What time was this?"

"I was supposed to meet her at eleven o'clock. I got there a little late, and there was no sign of her."

"If you didn't meet her, then why did I smell the zoo on your clothes?"

Muhammad shuddered. "Since she disappeared, I've gone to the zoo a few times to see if I could find anything that would help me understand what happened to her."

Nayir sat back and crossed his arms. "Did you find anything?"

"No." Hands folded in his lap, eyes cast down, Muhammad looked like a boy who'd been punished and shamed. "I didn't even find the shoe."

"It was on the access road behind the zoo, buried in the dirt."

"I looked there!" he whispered.

Nayir had to remind himself that Muhammad wasn't the father of Nouf's child. Yet he knew about Nouf's trips to the zoo; he had met her there secretly; he'd been lying to the family for months, perhaps years, and when Nouf disappeared, he hadn't told anyone the truth. He couldn't have been guiltier. At his apartment, Muhammad had given a subtle impression of righteousness; he felt he'd been keeping Nouf's secret in order to protect her. He couldn't possibly believe he was being virtuous, not knowing all of this. He must have been getting something out of it. The chance to share a secret with a beautiful woman. The chance to rebel against the Shrawis, whom he didn't like. Or perhaps it was more practical than that: if Nouf didn't need him, he didn't have to show up for work.

Nayir stared at the fountain, thinking. He realized suddenly why Nouf would have kept the shoes in her pockets. She'd been riding a jet-ski and a motorcycle. There was probably no storage compartment on the jet-ski, and it was safer to keep the shoes tucked away than to have a bag dangling from her wrist.

"What about the motorcycle?" Nayir asked. "Where did she keep it?"

Muhammad shook his head. "That was her secret. I went looking once or twice, but she changed the location." Wiping sweat from his chin, he fell into an uneasy silence.

"How did she get the motorcycle to the mainland in the first place?"

"Allah forgive me." He shut his eyes. "I have no idea. Look, I don't know where she kept it, I don't know how often she changed the location. The family owns a lot of beach property, and that's all I know. I asked her about it, but she wouldn't tell me. She just wouldn't. She said that only one other person knew about it—probably one of her brothers. I mean, how else would she get a key?"

"A key?"

"To a private beach."

"All right. Did she say who gave her the key?"

"No." Muhammad frowned. "I think it was Othman."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It's been bothering me. I've thought about it for weeks now, but it has to be Othman. He's the only brother she ever talked to."

Nayir rubbed his chin. "She wore a man's robe when she went out on the bike?"

"Yes. And a helmet, so no one saw her face. And gloves, to hide her hands."

"Didn't someone notice her leaving the estate dressed like a man?"

"No. She always left the house in her black cloak. It was only on the mainland that she changed into the robe. Look, we had conversations about this. I told her it was dangerous, but she said she would only do it once in a while, for fun. And anyway, she never listened to me."

"And you didn't tell her family."

Muhammad crossed his arms and pressed his lips into a line. Nayir already knew the answer—Muhammad would not have told the family about Nouf's business any more than he would have told the police. Yet his silence made Nayir angry. An escort's job was to guard a woman, not to spoil her. A favorite phrase of his uncle's came to mind:
If you cannot harden your heart, you cannot raise children.

"Why didn't you tell them?" Nayir asked coldly.

Muhammad wiped the sweat from his forehead. "When I got to the zoo that day, her motorcycle wasn't there. I waited at the service entrance for an hour, then I went into the zoo itself, but she wasn't there either. So I left. I thought she'd changed her mind, and I figured if she needed me, she'd call."

"Yes, but later, when you realized she was missing—you don't think the family might have wanted to know where she was supposed to be, even you didn't think she'd been there?"

Muhammad flushed. "Look, I checked the whole zoo—she wasn't there, and there was no sign that she'd been there. I didn't see how it would have help—" But his voice cracked, betraying his regret. "I honestly didn't think she'd even made it there that day."

Nayir bit back his frustration at Muhammad's selfishness and idiocy. "What made her go to the zoo in the first place?" he asked.

"She liked looking at the old exhibits. I told you she loved animals." His voice was shaky. "I swear I didn't see her there that day. I swear it in front of Allah."

Nayir barely suppressed a snort. People were inclined to swear a good many things in front of Allah, most of them sincere, but this felt dirty. Muhammad was the one person Nouf had trusted, yet he'd done nothing to find her. If he'd just told the family about her trips to the zoo, they might have been able to put the pieces together more quickly. There might have been a chance they could have found her alive.

"She trusted you," Nayir said. "She must have told you who she was meeting that day."

Muhammad's blush was slow but harsh; it burned a streak down his neck. "Eric, I thought." He tried to look cool, but his voice trembled with anger. The meaning of the anger struck Nayir like a punch. Muhammad wasn't just concerned for her safety; he was jealous, and he feared that she'd been sleeping with Eric.

"So perhaps she did meet with Eric when you couldn't keep her in your sights."

Muhammad looked furious. Nayir remembered his beautiful wife, their baby, the apparent domestic bliss. He couldn't imagine that Muhammad had slept with Nouf, but now he knew that Muhammad had loved her, or believed that he did. He certainly glorified her and let himself be swayed to assist her in all sorts of potentially dangerous acts: running away, riding a motorcycle, meeting strange men in remote places. It was no longer a shock that Muhammad would lie about Nouf's secrets; what amazed him was Muhammad's possessiveness. How could he expect honesty from Nouf when he was in some way lying to his wife?

Suddenly Nayir felt ashamed to have brought this kind of conversation into the masjid. He rose abruptly.

"I'm sorry," the escort said. "I should have told you everything before."

"I am not your judge." Nayir motioned for him to stand up. Muhammad rose and followed him out the door.

By the time they reached the street, Nayir's thoughts were so busy that he could hardly focus. He forced himself to turn to Muhammad. "Did your wife know about your feelings for Nouf?"

The escort's twitch of embarrassment answered the question.

"I see," Nayir said. "
Ma'salaama!
"

He was halfway down the block when he remembered one last thing. He turned back to find Muhammad still standing by the mosque, looking bereft.

"Why would Nouf want to buy a pair of glasses with no prescription?" Nayir asked.

Muhammad's look of shame turned to one of self-loathing. "For her costume," he muttered. "She had a small bag of clothes that she was going to wear when she got to New York. She was going to leave Qazi at the library, so she bought a suit that made her look like a librarian."

"What else was in the bag?"

"A wig, a brown suit, some high-heeled shoes. She was going to wear the glasses too."

Nayir gave him one last disgusted stare and went back to his Jeep.

Nayir left town and drove south toward the Shrawi estate. The sun was blistering the road, and to his right the ocean seemed to laze in the heat. Following the coastal highway, he drove past the bridge road until he came to a white, expansive beach that was popular with windsurfers. It was just south of the estate. On his boat, during summer excursions down the coast, he'd passed it many times, but the presence of so many small boats and surfers had always prevented him from getting a closer view.

He parked the Jeep at the edge of the beach near an outcropping of palms. The water was gentle; no one was surfing. To his left the sand extended as far as he could see, but to his right stood a strange, rocky region, beyond which lay a series of private enclaves, each sectioned off by high stone walls. The walls extended a good ten meters out to sea. Families came here seeking privacy so that their women could enjoy the water. There were no homes nearby; the beaches had thick iron gates and padlocks.

It seemed logical that if Nouf had jet-skied from the island, she would have come here. Not only would the currents have favored it, but this was the closest shore for a landing. The rest of the nearby coast was rocky. It also seemed unlikely that she would have hauled the jet-ski out of the water—much easier to leave it in a quiet spot, behind the confines of a stone wall on a private beach.

To access the restricted areas, Nayir had to cross the rocky part of the strand. It took him a good fifteen minutes of stumbling to navigate the field of jagged black stones. The stones were obviously imported, although for what purpose he couldn't imagine. Perhaps the wealthy beach-owners were hoping to thwart an attack of windsurfers. When he finally reached the first stone wall, he was winded, scraped in a dozen places, and nearly mad enough to abandon his Jeep altogether and swim back to his boat, never mind that he was wearing his coat.

The wall was in a state of mild disrepair. Large stones were missing in places, and a concoction of sand, dust, and guano quilted the upper half. First he walked up the shore and inspected the gate. It was locked and impenetrable, a sheer slab of iron. Then he went back down the length of the wall, searching for a hole large enough to squeeze through. Nothing was suitable, and besides, squeezing into anything had never been his forte. His would have to be a vertical assault.

Because of the wall's jagged design, heaving himself up proved easier than expected. When he reached the top, he stood up and looked around. A series of identical walls spread out before him, each neatly sectioning a ten-meter-wide portion of beach. Directly below him was a private enclave.

The enormity of his task quickly became apparent. It would take him a whole week to investigate every beach, climbing up each wall, down the other side, snooping around in search of ... what? A cabana? A small pier? Quite possibly each beach had one or the other. And even if he did have a whole week to waste, he doubted he could scale so many walls.

He climbed down the wall into the first enclave. The beach was empty, but he looked around anyway. Nouf might have chosen this enclave. It was at one end. To the north, the other end pressed up against the bridge road that led to the estate. She wouldn't have docked there; it was too close to home. She would have had to use the main road to reach the highway, and that would have been risky. Anyone driving into the estate could have seen her. She would have chosen this end of the beach. At least, this was where he would have come if he were Nouf.

Finding nothing in the enclave, he scaled the next wall and looked down. A small skiff, looking as if it had been untouched for decades, was tied to a metal hook in the wall. Propped beside the hook was an old cabana, timeworn and somehow friendly. He began to get excited. In his mind he could see Nouf's slender black form, waspish and intent, buzzing across the waves on a yellow jet-ski and docking at this beach. He climbed down the wall.

Inspecting the sand, he found a chaos of footprints, some of them small enough to have been made by a woman. He wrangled the good pink stiletto out of his pocket. A rudimentary comparison proved that at least three pairs of the footprints might have been Nouf's size. Many of the prints ended at the cabana.

The cabana's door was held firmly shut with a combination lock on a metal hasp. He walked around the shack looking for an alternate ingress, but there weren't even windows, so he went back to the door. The lock was stubborn, but when he yanked it, there was a crack of wood and the entire metal plate, hasp and all, fell into his hand, leaving the door swinging free.

Gently he opened it and peered inside. What he saw made him whistle with delight. In the center of the room sat a shiny black motorcycle propped elegantly on its kickstand.

Beside the door he found a camping lantern, which he used to prop the door wider. Sunlight flooded into the narrow space, which was spartan, dusty, and smelled vaguely of sunscreen. A basket hung from a nail in the wall, and in it he found a tube of lipstick, some powder, lotion, and a small box of cardamom-flavored Chiclets. Beside the basket a white robe hung from a hook, and a helmet hung beside it, with a pair of gloves tucked inside. On the
floor, half hidden beneath the robe's hem, was an old city map. He picked it up and read the scribbles in the margins. It was a graceful script, in a woman's hand.
Second left after stoplight
and
right on the first dirt road after that.
Someone had circled the zoo.