Finding Nouf

by Zoë Ferraris

  "I've been practicing," she said. "Please be careful—it's hot."

  He took the cup, sat down again, and found himself staring at the sleeve of her robe. All of a sudden his thoughts clicked into place. It wasn't the map—the map meant nothing. It was the robe that had obscured the map.

  A man's white robe had hung in the cabana.

  At the time it had seemed natural. Nouf wore the robe when she went out on the motorcycle; she had to dress like a man. But Muhammad had said that Nouf wore a black cloak when she left the island, then changed into the white robe when she got to the beach. She was wearing the white robe when she died, so where was her black cloak? And why was there another white robe in the cabana?

  Who else would wear a white robe and then leave it at the beach?

  Nayir was stunned by the discovery, empowered by it even as he marveled at his ignorance. He looked up at Abir, wondering suddenly why she'd come. Did she want information, or was she afraid he was going to say something to Othman?

  "I think I know what happened to your sister," he said calmly.

  Abir stood back and wrapped her arms protectively around her chest, but he saw a frown in her eyes.

  "And I think you might know too," he said.

  She bowed her head, a gesture he now recognized as a feint of modesty. "How would I know that?"

  "I found this." He set the black bag on the table.

  Abir looked at the bag with mock confusion, then tried to let recognition seep slowly into her eyes, but the result was a look of childish stagecraft. "Is that Nouf's jewelry bag?" she asked, her voice a hoarse whisper. Unfolding her hands, she quickly knelt by the table, lifted her burqa, and pried open the bag. Seeing its contents, she rolled her eyes and let out a moan that managed to approximate authentic grief. "Why would she leave it at the house?" she asked, clutching the bag to her chest.

  "How do you know she left it at the house?"

  She paled.

  "I think you can stop pretending now," he said. Abir's puzzlement held a touch of hostility. "She never took it out of the safe in the first place," he went on, energized by the sudden clicking into place of his thoughts. "You took it out. You had to make it look like she ran away, and you knew that if she disappeared, someone would check to see if her gold was gone. My only question is, why didn't you find a better place to hide it?"

  "You think I—?" she sputtered unconvincingly. Abir swallowed, blinked, and shook her head as if to chase away a fly. Her face wore a brief look of fear, but it resolved to the cold, well-mannered aspect that belonged in a Shrawi sitting room. "You're wrong about this," she said plainly. "I have no idea what happen—"

  "Stop." He raised his hand. "Lying will only make your sins grow greater. I know what you've done." He imagined she'd seen the flash of excitement in his eyes; she struggled to compose herself. Carefully setting the bag on the table, she tried to stand up but seemed unable. She was trembling.

  "You don't know what you're talking about," she said, but her eyes were fearful.

  "I hear you're getting married," he said, "to Nouf's fiancé."

  "He's not her fiancé." There was more vehemence in the comment than he expected.

  "He was going to marry her."

  "But he didn't love her," she spat. "And she didn't love him."

  Nayir saw the anger in her face and decided to take a risk. "She had everything, didn't she? Everything you wanted."

  "I don't know." She scowled.

  "You were jealous that she was going to marry Qazi. You wanted to marry him, but you couldn't. She was older, so she got first choice."

  "She didn't love him." She clutched herself and started to shake, her eyes welling with angry tears. "I knew what she was doing, sneaking around and having sex with Muhammad."

  "Did she tell you that?"

  "How else did she get pregnant? It's disgusting what she did! The only reason she wanted to marry Qazi was because he was going to be rich someday, and because he wouldn't care if she cheated on him."

  No doubt she was telling the truth as she knew it; her high emotion was like a furnace, and the tears burned honestly down her cheeks. But from here the rest of his theory was guesswork, based on insufficient clues and his imagination.

  "Why don't you tell me what happened?" he said. "The Quran says there is forgiveness for those who repent."

  She looked at the floor and, shutting her eyes, declined with a proud shake of the head.

  "All right," Nayir said. "Here's what I think. You planned it. It must have taken a while to figure everything out—how to get her to the desert, which truck to use, how to steal the camel, everything. It was a lot of work. But I think you knew that she was meeting someone at the zoo."

  She opened her eyes and regarded him with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

  "Did it sicken you?" he asked.

  "She was seeing Muhammad," Abir spat.

  "I have news for you," he said. "She wasn't seeing Muhammad. She was sleeping with someone else."

  "Who?"

  Nayir held back, enjoying the fact that he finally had some answers, even as he was unwilling to give up Othman. "Let me go back a little bit," he said. "You wanted to get rid of her so that you could have Qazi to yourself." Seeing her eyes flash, he raised his hand. "Or so that you could protect Qazi from her. And the only way to do that was to make it look as if she ran away. The best place to take her was the desert. No one would ever find her out there. But in order to make it look like she went to the desert, you had to steal a camel."

  She replied with a look of disgust that he found oddly encouraging.

  "It's difficult to steal a camel, especially in broad daylight, but you knew this camel—she was Nouf's favorite, and the camel probably trusted you. It wasn't actually too difficult getting her into the back of a pickup truck. What did you do—make her walk up a plank? The same plank you later used to roll Nouf's motorcycle onto the truck bed?" At the mention of the motorcycle, Abir's rigid countenance showed a mild crack of fear, but she kept her jaw firm.

  "Anyone could have stolen that camel," she said.

  "Yes, but it's a big feat for a girl your size. I was just wondering about the logistics. She's a pretty docile camel, but still." Seeing that she wouldn't offer up an explanation, he went on. "I think a plank would be the easiest way. There were planks in the courtyard. You brought the truck around from the front lot. Pretty easy to steal a truck—your brothers keep the keys in the cloakroom by the front door. So you stole a truck from the lot. You drove it around to the back courtyard and got the camel into the back. You also took a pipe from behind the stable door. And nobody noticed except the keeper's daughter, but you just hit her with the pipe. It probably knocked her right out."

  She seemed oddly pleased, but then she lowered her gaze—well trained, he imagined, not to show her pride. Her quiet self-satisfaction irritated him; he must have made a mistake.

  "No, of course..." he said reflectively. "You were smart enough to know the best time to steal the camel—when no one was around. The keeper's daughter caught you when you were hiding the gold?" Abir's eyes flashed with anger and he knew he was right. "Was it the same day you kidnapped Nouf?"

  She didn't reply.

  "No matter," he said. "You got the camel in the truck. You had a weapon—the pipe. You put the wooden plank in the truck bed. All you needed was Nouf, and you knew where to find her. She must have told you about her meetings at the zoo."

  "I found out about those myself," Abir said.

  "How?"

  "Just because I knew about her behavior," Abir said, "doesn't mean that I killed her."

  Nayir forced patience. "How did you find out?"

  "I followed her to the cabana one day and found her map to the zoo. When she came home, I went back to the beach and took the motorcycle and went to the zoo myself." Her chin jutted forward with an unmistakable look of righteousness. "I found condoms in the motorcycle."

  "But you still didn't know who she was seeing."
He looked for a reaction and saw only the facade of moral justice. "You got to the zoo before she did," he said, "and waited for her. Once she pulled up on her motorcycle, you knocked her out. How?"

  She was silent.

  "Now that I think of it," he said, "how could you be certain that she wouldn't be with her lover? I don't think you intended to kidnap both of them."

  "You see," she said, a wicked satisfaction showing in her eyes, "your story doesn't make sense."

  "You must have planned to get there either before her lover arrived or after he was gone. You knew already that Nouf went to the zoo by herself, those moments of freedom she cherished on her motorcycle..." Nayir watched her face carefully. "You knew that she met Muhammad there, and you probably also realized that he ran errands for her, to keep up her alibi at home."

  "He was stupid," she said.

  "Did she come home with shopping bags full of clothes she never wore?"

  "She came home smelling like an animal." The hostility in her voice gave him a brief, wicked thrill; it carried all the reckless anger that had driven her to kill her sister. Even if her composure didn't crack entirely, this small fracture was a satisfying marker of her guilt.

  "So you suspected that at some point Muhammad would leave to do the shopping," he went on, "and Nouf would be alone. You were lucky to arrive when she was alone, probably before Muhammad got there. But I'm still wondering, how did you knock her out? Her motorcycle would have been parked on the service road, and it would have taken no time at all for you to haul it into the back of the truck. Then what? Did you wait in the bushes and spring out at her? Or did you actually talk to her?" He studied her face for a clue but saw only reserve. "I can't imagine that you did. How would you have explained the fact that you were there, not to mention that you were driving a truck with a camel—and her motorcycle—in the back? No, you must have surprised her. You came at her from the bushes." He touched the spot on his temple that coincided with Nouf's head wound. "That's why she was hit on the side of the head. You certainly knocked her out—she didn't even wake up later when it started to rain. But I'm getting ahead of myself. You knocked her out. She fell. We found drag marks where you pulled her body to the truck."

  Abir looked as if she were tolerating the inane rantings of an elderly uncle.

  "It's funny," he said, "my footprint specialist confused your prints, so it looked as if Nouf had stood up again. But those were your prints we saw. Those were your prints at the beach too."

  "Your story is ridiculous," she said.

  "It's your story too." He saw the heat on her cheeks, and he plunged ahead. "Your next problem was getting to the desert," he said, "but you'd planned for that too. You'd stolen your brother's jacket with his desert maps and his GPS system, and you figured out how to use them. You had to find a place to take her where she wouldn't be found, so you thought you'd head out to the last campsite Othman had gone to, because the GPS would be able to lead you there and back, wouldn't it? It was already programmed, and although it's a pretty high-tech machine, it wasn't so hard that you couldn't use it. Once you were out there, you could head away from the camp and dump her body where no one would find her. That way she was stranded in the wilderness but you were not, because you could follow the wadi to the campsite and navigate your way back to the estate, thanks to the GPS. The campsite wasn't that hard to get to anyway, was it?"

  She gave him a cold look, and he imagined he'd insulted her. Her pride was showing through now; the only trace of modesty left was the tight way she clutched her torso, hands tucked into her armpits.

  "Once you got to the desert, you could drive the truck right up to the wadi's edge, and then it was only a matter of pushing Nouf out of the front seat into the wadi, maybe not realizing it was a wadi at all. It was just a convenient dip in the ground where people would be less likely to notice her."

  "I know what a wadi is," she snapped.

  "So you pushed her out of the truck, dropped her in the wadi. Then you drove—where? Maybe farther upstream? You had to find a place to dump the camel, far enough away from Nouf that she wouldn't be likely to find her."

  Abir maintained a stubborn silence.

  "Then you drove back toward the city, but you had to get rid of the truck. You obviously picked a clever enough location—it still hasn't been found. From there you climbed onto the motorcycle and drove back into the city. It was clever, I think, using her motorcycle. That's how you got home. Except you left behind some evidence. The motorcycle logo burned its brand into the camel's leg."

  Her face showed another quick tremor of fear. "So?"

  "I think it's obvious proof that the camel and the motorcycle were in a tight space together," he said. "Somewhere extremely hot." She looked as if she would speak, but she didn't indulge him. "The whole trip took only what—three hours? Half an hour to the zoo, an hour to the desert, half an hour dumping the body, and another hour back to the cabana. You were back before anyone noticed you were missing, and when you rode up on your jet-ski, I'm sure they thought you were just out skiing. When I think about it now, it's pretty amazing that you did all of that by yourself. You're just a young girl."

  "You don't know anything about girls," she spat.

  The comment struck him harder than he would have liked, but he pushed it aside and focused on her face. He saw there the hardness he expected in a murderer. Whether it came from the Shrawi upbringing or simply her personality he couldn't say, but it sickened him. She had barely protested against his reconstruction of events, and although her outburst had betrayed a motive of jealousy, it was her silence that disturbed him. It accepted his story. Judging by the remoteness in her eyes, she wasn't facing guilt; she was hardening herself, cloaking the truth behind the curtain of her femininity, the right to remain silent.

  "I congratulate you," he said, bitterness chopping his words. "It's amazing that you managed to pull it off and confound everyone."

  "People are stupid."

  He sat still, holding his anger in check. "If people are stupid, then that includes you. There were a lot of details you had to work through, but you forgot one thing."

  "Oh?"

  "Clothing. When you drove back to the cabana, you had to get rid of your white robe, the one you wore to disguise yourself as a man. So you hung it on the hook."

  The pride and defiance left her face.

  "If Nouf ran away," he said, "wouldn't her black robe still be hanging on that hook?"

  Abir quickly conjured her smugness again, draping it over her face like a veil. "That could be anyone's cloak."

  "I think it proves that someone was in the cabana after Nouf disappeared. That person stole her black cloak to hide the fact that she was there. But they left a white cloak that shouldn't have been there. Who would want to do that?"

  "I don't know."

  His temper was rising, and he sat forward, lurching close to her face. "You would. You left her in the desert to die. You might like to think it was an accident, but your blow to the head left her unconscious, and when the rain came she didn't stand a chance. She drowned. Do you tell yourself that it wasn't your fault? That it was her fault for not waking up in time to get out of the wadi? Let me tell you that even if she had gotten up and out of the wadi, the heat and the sunlight would have killed her anyway. You didn't leave her a camel or a truck or even a bottle of water. You left her out there to die."

  Abir wore a sneer that equaled his own, but she kept her mouth shut.

  "I am ashamed to say it," he said, "but I never considered that a woman could have done this. It was my ignorance, of course. I couldn't imagine it." He took a breath, trying to calm himself, but it didn't work. "And this was all about Qazi? I guess that means you didn't know that she was planning to abandon Qazi on their honeymoon."

  Abir made no effort to hide her shock.

  "Yes," he said, "she was making arrangements to live in New York. She'd even found someone to put her up for a while, until she could find her own place."r />
  "That's not true!"

  "It is." There was no satisfaction in seeing her horror; it only angered him more. "She didn't want to be with Qazi. She wanted someone else—and something else."

  Abir bit her lip so hard he thought she would puncture it. "She was only marrying Qazi for the money," she said, but without conviction. "She wouldn't have left him so easily."

  "Are you so sure?"

  Fear flashed across her face, but his anger roared through him and he couldn't find pity in his heart, only disgust. Had the sisters tormented each other enough to stoke this kind of hatred? He'd heard nothing about it until now. Katya would know better, but he guessed that Abir was just uncommonly self-serving. Averting his gaze, he sat back on the couch and stared at the coffee service.

  "I don't believe she was seeing someone else," she said. "You're just saying that to upset me."

  "There was someone else," Nayir said. "Someone she loved much more than Qazi. But I won't tell you who it was, because I think it would only cause more pain." And give you the chance to blame someone else, he thought.

  "But she was still using Qazi." Her voice was shrill now. "Still lying to him and sleeping with another man!"

  Nayir nodded once, a grudging agreement. "But I don't understand why that meant you had to kill her. I don't think there's any sense in it, when you could have stopped the marriage simply by telling Qazi about her behavior."

  She was sitting on her haunches, hands gripping her thighs, fingers pinching the fabric brutally. Something in the jerky dance of muscles on her face indicated that this was the most disturbing question of all. Nayir sat forward with new interest.

  "Or was it that he wouldn't have believed you?" he whispered.

  "Of course he would," she said lamely.

  "Maybe he loved Nouf so much that he might not have even cared."

  "That's not true!" she cried. "He wouldn't have believed me, but that's only because he doesn't think badly of people."

  "But you're not so sure," Nayir went on. "What if you told him and he said to himself, That Abir must be crazy!"