Finding Nouf (37 page)

Nayir nodded, not certain what to believe but stirred by the sincerity of Othman's words. "So you were meeting her at the zoo."

"We met there, yes. It was private. She liked it."

"How often did you meet there?"

He hesitated. "Once a week."

"She went to the zoo on the day she disappeared," Nayir said.

Othman looked at him. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. We found her shoe—and her footprints—on a service road behind the zoo. We also found evidence on her body. The dirt in her head wound matched the dirt from the service road. There was also some manure on her wrist. But there's something I don't understand. She fought with you that morning, and she went to the zoo after that. Why would she concoct a lie about needing to exchange her wedding shoes and then go to the zoo instead, when you weren't going to be there?"

Nayir waited, but Othman sat rigidly staring at the fish. "I don't know," he whispered.

"Is it possible she went there to meet somebody else?" Nayir asked.

"No, that's ridiculous. She probably went to ... I don't know, maybe it reminded her of us." He moved his hand to his eyes and pressed them hard. "Maybe she went there to say goodbye."

"But who else would have known about the zoo?"

Othman sighed. "I don't know. Maybe she told Muhammad. She told him everything."

"What about someone in the family?"

"She didn't tell anyone in the house—it was too risky."

"Did she have any friends?"

He shook his head. "She did have friends, but she wasn't the kind of person who would confide something like this to anyone. She was more comfortable with the dogs."

"As far as we can tell, you're the only person who knew where she might have been going that day." Nayir tried to keep the judgment out of his voice, but his thoughts were spiraling in on themselves. It seemed obvious now. Not only was Othman the only one who knew about the zoo, he was the only one with a motive to follow her that day. They'd just had a fight; she'd stormed out of the house. He had probably gone after her to rectify things—or to stop her from going to New York.

"Where did you go after the fight?" Nayir asked.

Othman crossed his arms tightly over his chest. "I was too upset to stay here," he said. "I went for a drive. When I came back later that afternoon, she was gone."

"You were alone in the car?"

"Yes."

"I see."

"I know," Othman said. "I wish I could offer you some proof, but I can't. And your surprise about this mess—I have felt it myself, I still feel it. But I never actually looked at the
thing itself.
" He pinched his fingers together and poked the air with each word. Nayir saw the shame and anger in the gesture. "I never had the guts. She never let me in. I spent months trying to open her up, trying to make her happy, to make her
trust
me." He pressed his lips together. "After it happened, after I told her I loved her, she pushed me even further away. And dammit—" His voice cracked. "I still loved her." He turned away, angrily wiping tears from his cheeks.

Nayir looked back at the glass. A clown fish swam by, urgent and paranoid. Somewhere above them a generator switched off, and silence descended. Nayir, feeling uniquely inept at discussing matters of the heart, became absorbed in his thoughts. He waited for Othman to speak.

"I would never have hurt her," Othman finally said. "Disgusting though it may seem to you, I loved her, and she was carrying my child."

Nayir returned to his Jeep. He could feel helplessness sinking into him like sand in an hourglass, filling him, weighting him, and he wanted nothing more than to return to his boat and set out to sea, perhaps to a quiet spot down the coast. Drop anchor. Fish. Yes, he would fish, and lie in the sun, and watch the windsurfers and the gulls and the boats passing by. That was all he needed. Just a few fish and a quiet place to forget the one thing that was bothering him: Othman hadn't asked what else he'd discovered about the case. There were too many lingering questions. Why had they found her body so close to the old campsite? Why were the camel and the motorcycle together in the back of the truck? Could Nouf have done that by herself? Where was the truck? If Othman was genuinely perplexed by her kidnapping, wouldn't he want answers to these things as well?

Just as Nayir was climbing into his car, he caught a glimpse of
black and saw a woman emerge from a nearby Toyota. It was Katya. He was struck by her courage, coming to face Othman so soon. When she saw him, she flushed and averted her gaze.

"Hello," she said.

He greeted her, but she seemed at a loss for words, and an awkward silence deadened the space between them.

"Thank you," she said, "for everything last night."

"You're welcome." He felt the urge to say something—anything—but nothing seemed right. He felt unbearably self-conscious. Not knowing what else to do, he said goodbye and turned back to his car. She turned just as quickly and walked toward the house.

T
HE BOAT BOBBED QUIETLY
on the waves. Nayir sat on deck, fishing pole in hand, staring at the expanse of sea. From the left he heard a buzzing, a jet-ski no doubt, and sure enough, a moment later a woman came zipping over the water. She was wearing a bikini that looked like scraps from a tailor's floor, something that would rip if she sneezed. She was also pressing buttons on a cell phone, the other hand on the ski, steering recklessly. Defiantly, he didn't avert his gaze. He waited, watching. How long would it take her to realize he was staring? But she didn't notice. She was absorbed in her phone call. Her sleek brown thighs failed to arouse him. All he could think of was the fish she was scaring off.

Two days on the water had managed to put some distance between him and the events of the past few weeks. This morning he had finally been able to think about his conversation with Othman. It seemed absurdly false from a distance. Othman had hit Nouf on the head and dragged her out to the desert and left her there. So what if they hadn't found his prints on the service road at the zoo? They could have been obscured in the struggle. Even Mutlaq would admit to that.

But why had Othman done it? Had he needed to release his rage? Why not some other kind of release—a forgetting, moving on?
Those who believe, and suffer exile and strive with might and main in Allah's cause, with their goods and their persons, have the highest rank in the sight of Allah.
That was true jihad, the giving up of goods, hopes, desires, when life demands it, when not to give up would lead to wrong. But Othman hadn't given up, and he'd become a liar. His love for Nouf—was that a lie too?

The only question now was what to do about it. In theory, Nayir should take the whole thing to the police, to the judges or the mosque and the men in charge of law, but since the examiner's office had already closed the case—decided, in fact, that there was no case to close—then what hope did he have of stirring up justice from a system so easily corrupted by the rich? Even with the evidence that he and Katya had collected, there was not enough proof that Othman had actually kidnapped his sister or delivered that last blow, the one that had knocked her unconscious and allowed her to drown in the wadi. Nayir acknowledged that he could be wrong about Othman, and his mind circled relentlessly back to this hope.

It was possible, of course, to try Othman for
zina
—specifically, for sex out of wedlock. But the family would issue a punishment for that, which would probably be the same as no punishment at all—or perhaps a punishment for everyone. Nayir could imagine the look on Nusra's face if she ever found out that Othman had been intimate with Nouf. Personally, he hoped to spare her the knowledge. Othman could be tried for incest, but that didn't seem fair either. It wasn't really incest in a technical sense—he wasn't her blood—and even if a court established that he was her brother under law and
mehram
to her, Nayir didn't think it was humane to punish a man for being in love, or for thinking he was in love, if that's what it was.

There was nothing he could do but engage in his own timehonored practice of jihad: giving up his friendship with Othman, a silent but perhaps strongly felt protest against his friend's behavior.

Forgiveness is incumbent upon Allah,
it says in the Quran, but only when a man commits a sin in ignorance and immediately repents. Forgiveness is not incumbent for those who go on committing the same sins until death puts an end to them.

Yet the Quran also says that Allah forgives all sins and is oft merciful.

The jet-ski faded away, and he heard a ringing below. It was his cell phone. Annoyed, he took his time laying the pole aside, climbing down the ladder, and fishing through the junk on his desk to find the damned thing. It continued to ring until he flipped it open and heard a crackling.

"Nayir? It's Katya."

"Hi."

"I'm sorry to bother you, but I've been thinking about your question. You know, the one you asked me at the restaurant—whether I would deceive a husband like Nouf was going to do? That day I told you that I probably would, and I still think I would, if I were desperate enough, but I'm not. That's the thing—I don't think I'll ever be."

He wasn't sure what to say.

She sighed. "I'm sorry to call you like this. You must think I'm crazy. It's been bothering me. I think you would have to be desperate to deceive someone. Nouf was deceiving Othman. She didn't tell him anything about Eric or her plans to go to New York until the very last minute. And that's what angered him, that she'd been hiding it. But here's the thing—I think she was leaving
because
of him, because she was so ashamed of her feelings. She could have had that life here—everything she wanted. But Othman would be here, and no matter who she married, no matter what she did, she would always have to see him."

Nayir remembered a passage from the journal. Shuffling through the papers on the desk, he found the journal, opened it, and flipped through the pages. There it was, a short, simple passage that hadn't made much sense to him before:
I can't stay here anymore. I can't
bear it. It will always be here, this feeling. I'll never escape it, not here.

When he had first read it, he had thought she was referring to a general sense of oppression, but Katya was right. It was probably specifically about her feelings for Othman.

"What exactly are you saying?" Nayir asked.

"Nouf was desperate enough to run away to New York, but that was just an admission of the fact that she truly loved him. It scared the hell out of her."

"All right."

"She was desperate enough to run away, but I don't think Othman was desperate enough to kill her."

Nayir closed the book and sat down. He had an image of Katya sitting at a desk somewhere, just as he was sitting there now, both of them pondering a way to absolve Othman. He knew what she was thinking—hoping, demanding: that Othman loved her, that he didn't love Nouf. It was sad. He couldn't help feeling sorry for her—more than for himself, because at least he had managed to face the possibility of an awful truth.

She gave an empty laugh. "Othman wasn't enough of an animal. Does that make sense?"

He didn't reply.

"Believe me, he's not."

He realized that he hadn't told her about the journal yet. And he couldn't now. In the journal Othman wasn't an animal exactly, but Nouf's words painted a picture of a desperate man, someone who followed her around at sea, to the zoo. An uneasy silence hung between Nayir and Katya. He couldn't find a single word to break it.

"Nayir."

"Yes."

"Please tell me what you're thinking."

He hesitated. "There are things that can make men turn into animals," he said, "even if they're not normally animals."

Another pause seemed to last forever. "You think I'm just trying to excuse him," she said. "I'm not. Think back. He was the one who hired that private investigator. He sent you to the desert."

"But he was also the one who tried to stop you from analyzing the DNA."

"That's just it," she said. "He didn't want me to find out that he was the baby's father—it's obvious why. But he wanted to find out what happened to Nouf in the desert, because
he didn't know.
"

Nayir had to admit that it explained the inconsistency. "You may be right," he said, fighting a strange mixture of excitement and disappointment. Perhaps Othman wasn't guilty after all. "Then who killed her?" he asked.

"I don't know. Who was desperate enough?"

It felt as if he'd been over this too many times before. Who wanted to silence Nouf? Who had a reason? There was no evidence to direct his thoughts. Once again he was adrift in the sea of his own imagination, floating further and further from an understanding of things.

"I talked to Othman," she said, a hesitation in her voice. "He apologized. And I think he really meant it."

"I would imagine."

"But we decided to call off the wedding."

Nayir's stomach rose into his throat. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yes, well..." She gave a resigned sigh which was meant to convey strength but which managed only to convey how lost she truly felt. Or so it sounded to him.

The remainder of the conversation felt awkward. They talked briefly about fishing and the weather on the sea. He told her about finding the motorcycle at the cabana, and the inconsistent evidence of the footprints they'd found at the zoo. But as he fumbled along, he had the sense that they were supposed to be talking about Othman. Maybe he was failing to ask certain questions, to ride fearlessly into those territories of the heart that he didn't understand. But revealing that ignorance terrified him; he was glad she wanted to know about fish. Only after he hung up did it occur to him that perhaps she didn't want to talk about Othman at all and that their chatter about the weather had provided her with comfort enough. At least, that's what he hoped.

That night he lay on deck, bobbing gently on the sea. Thinking about Fatimah, he realized that the thing he most resented was her cloaking of truth, her failure to tell him that she was entertaining other men while she courted him. Othman's lies of omission were not quite as personal, but they stung in their own awful way, and Nayir wondered, was he doing it himself, lying to others? What
wasn't
he saying to those he cared for? His jihad against Othman now seemed cowardly. He stood adorned in a dishonorable silence, plumped and feathered with false piety. A passage from the Quran sprang to mind:
We have bestowed garments upon you to cover your shame as well as to adorn you, but the garment of righteousness is best.
It was said that Allah created man free of evil and shame but that once man was touched by sin, his thoughts and deeds became garments that covered and revealed him, showing him for what he was. Nayir knew that if he were an honest man, he would stop veiling himself to hide the shame of Othman's naked sin; he would have to confront him.