Finding Nouf Read Online Free PDF Page A

railing gave him no comfort—in some places it had been ripped apart, exactly as if a car had blown through it. This was the only motor access to the estate. Over the years he'd crossed this bridge a hundred times, but it still made him uneasy.
    He drove forward slowly, eyes fixed on the road, taking one breath after another until he picked up a rhythm. He tried to suppress his usual image—blowing a tire, crashing through the fence, dropping into the murky sea—and soon the Shrawis' island grew larger. Glancing up, he could see the soft contours of the whitewashed palace set among the jagged rocks.
    Once on the island, he followed the gravel road that led to a small, seldom-used service entrance on the estate's west side. Two men were waiting there. They took Nouf's body out of his Jeep, thanked him curtly, and told him to drive around to the front. Watching the body disappear through the gate, Nayir felt a surprising sense of loss.
    He thought of calling Othman to let him know that the body had arrived, but he hesitated, wondering what the family already knew about the cause of her death. It occurred to him that he might be asked to explain what he'd learned at the coroner's office. The examiner had said that someone from the family had already identified the body and come to collect Nouf's belongings, but that could have been a servant or an escort, not someone who would press for sensitive information. Nayir wasn't sure what he would say to them. He might explain that Nouf had died in a flood, but he was wary of saying anything that implied she was murdered, in case they had been responsible for the cover-up, if that's what it was. Looking up at the house, he felt disoriented. He'd never really studied it from this perspective before; the outside walls were the same shiny white, but the windows were smaller, their screens a solid black, nothing like the elaborate wooden screens at the front of the house, through which it was possible to view certain things if one looked carefully.
This,
he thought,
must be the women's part of the house.
    He got into the Jeep and drove away from the service gate. It occurred to him that Nouf would have driven down this road. Othman said she had stolen an old Toyota pickup from the parking lot in front of the house, although Nayir had to imagine the rest himself. There were dozens of cars in the lot that the family owned but seldom used. It would have taken days for anyone to notice the absence of a single truck. All of the car keys hung in the cloakroom by the front door. They were meticulously labeled. Nayir often fetched them himself while preparing trucks for the men's desert trips. When no one was looking, Nouf could have stolen the keys from the cloakroom, sneaked outside, and taken the truck.
    From there she had to drive down the access road past the small service entrance to the rear gate, a large wooden door that was usually open. She would hardly have been noticed on the road. It was bordered by hedges and trees. The house itself sat so high above, and was surrounded by such steep cliffs, that most of the time it was difficult to see the road even from the terraces. The stables were just inside the rear gate. He imagined that she drove right up to the stable door, took the camel out of her stall, and encouraged—forced?—her into the back of the truck. How that happened was a mystery to him. Once it was done, she would have driven back along the service road and past the front parking lot, where she could have gotten onto the bridge with very little chance of being seen. It wasn't a foolproof plan for running away, but she'd left while most of the men were at work. The women seldom ventured outside and so probably hadn't noticed anything. Only the servants might have seen her, but Othman had already told him that no one had.
    Nayir pulled into the marble-topped parking lot near the estate's front entrance. A multitude of Town Cars, Cadillacs, and Rovers crowded the lot,