“She arrived here in her husband’s car, not the one she wished to trade in. When I asked her about the other vehicle, she said it needed a repair and she didn’t want to put any more money into it. When the customer says that, we know the car is rather iffy, but, of course, our mechanics can fix most anything. It’s often a different story if the vehicle is not running. So I asked the lady, ‘Does it run?’”
“What did she tell you?”
“That’s when she surprised me. ‘Hamdu-lillah,’ she said.”
“What does that mean?”
“Thanks to God. For those words, I took another two thousand dollars off the price of her car,” he grinned. “That’s not all the story. It turned out the trade-in was truly on its last legs. That delightfully devious lady had it towed up the steep hill of Walnut Street and then drove it the last few blocks to my dealership, on the level road! I know, because she hired my cousin to do the deed!”
“You’re smiling! Didn’t that make you angry?”
“Not at all! I have respect for such a woman. And I made up my losses by the end of the same day by bargaining hard with some customers who could afford it. Of course, she was much less comfortable when it came time to pick up her new car. So amusing it was! She hurried off without picking up the title. That piece of paper proves you own it, of course. I phoned her more than once about it. And when she was never in, I decided to deliver it myself. My son and I tried to drop it off at her house, it turns out, on the very day she disappeared. By the way, you need a new vehicle, you let old man Maksoud know, OK?” the car dealer said, pressing his business card into Liz’s hand.
That eliminates one of the ‘foreign’ phone callers, Liz thought to herself as she returned to her car. The guy who called about “some title” was not a library patron, after all. It was the car dealer. Placing the business card on her dashboard, Liz noticed the pair of boldfaced Ms. Could the two Ms on Ellen’s blackboard have referred to Maksoud Motors rather than the colorful candies that “melt in your mouth, not in your hand?”
Still, positive news was a hard sell at the Banner. Back in the newsroom, Liz’s satisfaction in tying up some loose ends was short-lived under the city editor’s scrutiny.
“OK, five inches,” he told her. And play up the mailman’s reaction.”
It turned out that Dermott McCann made an excellent, if reluctant, decision. When Maksoud and son were taken in for questioning an hour after Liz left them, the World was onto the story—their only source an oil delivery man and Gulf War veteran who had seen men he took to be “Iraqi thugs.”
Liz did mention the mailman’s take on things in her story’s lead, but only to make him look as suspicious of airmail letters as he was of insects. Fortunately for the Banner, Dermott McCann had other fish to fry that night, so he didn’t edit Liz’s piece. He was occupied overseeing coverage of a basketball player who was hauled in and then released by police for attempted rape of a nightclub “date.” While the papers that came off the Banner’s press splashed the headline “BOUNCER BOUNCED,” the World’s front page broke the news, “Father & Son Car Dealers Implicated in Missing Mother Case.”
In the early hours of the morning, after the first copies of the World reached the Banner’s newsroom, night editor Esther O’Faolin saw to it that in late editions, Liz’s story got a front-page teaser headed: “TITLED GENTS: Do-Good Dealers Slammed Unjustly.”
New York City, December 16, 2000
Ellen waited at the elevator bay to ascend to the Windows on the World restaurant. Excitement about meeting Nadia was foremost in her mind, but it did not prevent her from noticing that the small crowd with whom she stood waiting for elevators was also a melting pot of peoples. While many were well dressed businessmen and women sporting corporate duds, they possessed complexions and facial characteristics from every corner of the world. Others in the crowd were an international mix, too, whether they wore the camera gear and belly packs marking them as tourists, casual dress and envelopes that identified them as couriers, the uniforms and clipboards that announced them as UPS or FEDEX delivery staff, or the garb of other workers, including telephone, copy machine, and computer repairmen. Ellen scanned every face she could see in case she and Nadia were already keeping company, but she did not recognize her pen pal among the elevator crowd.
The experience made her call to mind an arrival at a large international airport, where, after fetching baggage and going through customs, you step through double doors into a huge lobby to find yourself suddenly surrounded by a crowd of expectant faces. If you’re looking for someone from whom you’ve been long separated, you feel pressured to recognize the person first, so you scrutinize the crowd in earnest haste. But if you know no one is among the crowd to greet you, you nevertheless feel the full weight of the crowd’s attention and experience the urge to do something—a casual soft-shoe, perhaps, or quick juggling act—to merit it.
But Ellen was not the center of attention here. Except in the eyes of one Middle Easterner. And it was not Nadia.
Finally, the elevator doors opened. After some thirty people exited the single car, Ellen pushed forward to board it for its return trip. Then someone grabbed her shoulder firmly and spun her around.
“Ellen, Ellen!” Nadia cried out with delight. “I am giving thanks to Allah that it’s you. Only my pen friend could be wearing the scarf I sent to her twenty years ago.”
“You sent it to me for my fourteenth birthday, when you said I had become a woman. Oh Nadia, how wonderful to see you after all these years! And look, you are wearing the leather belt I tooled for you when I was thirteen!”
“Not, I am afraid, as easy to see as that scarf. I wonder, would you have recognized me if I hadn’t seen you first?”
Ellen paused. Then she said, “Ya sadiqati al habibah aa rifuki kull al- awqat.”
Nadia smiled and shook her head in pleased amazement, swinging her chicly bobbed brown hair from side to side. And then she pressed her cheek against Ellen’s and held it there for a good few seconds.
After opening their hearts to one another in letters for decades without laying eyes on anything but photographs of one another, the two women only had eyes for each other. Arm-in-arm, they joined the crowd entering an elevator.
Boston, Massachusetts, December 21, 2000
When Erik Johansson discovered the title to his wife’s car in his mailbox the following day, he shared the information with Ramona Hobart, host of the nationally broadcast morning television program, Wake Up USA. Erik had consented to an interview in order to spread the word about his missing wife to millions of American households.
Liz arrived in the newsroom to find a message from editor-in-chief James Conrad glowing in green letters on her ATEX terminal. “SEE ME ASAP,” it read.
Liz hardly knew what to expect when she arrived at the editor’s office. Certainly, it wasn’t the instruction, “Smile pretty and show your smarts.” But that was the advice Conrad gave her.
She’d seen similar happenings in the newsroom before but had never been the focus of them. Now, as Wake Up USA’s production team arrived and set up lights in the newsroom, she knew those lights would shine on her. The idea was to show the journalist at work amid the sea of desks. Since Liz’s workstation was not near the city desk and large Beantown Banner sign, she was seated for the occasion at political columnist Fred Constanzo’s desk. When Constanzo walked away muttering, no one could be sure if he was voicing complaint about being bumped from his desk or mouthing lines from his latest
