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She always referred to him as her hero, her ‘Rock of Gibraltar.’ She was a—how do you say it?—‘father’s girl.’”

“‘Daddy’s girl.’ I suppose reminders of his death stirred her up emotionally, leaving her more vulnerable to those flashbacks.”

“That is how she saw it. I imagine she never read that book to Veronica. That’s why she returned it the next day.”

“Seems sensible. Look at this,” Liz said, handing to Nadia the library record.

“There are shadowed lines here and here on the paper.”

“I asked Olga to make a copy of the reading list for me. I wonder if she did a little cutting and pasting of a longer list. Ellen’s friend Lucy Gray told me she had seen Ellen’s library record and it worried Lucy to know Ellen had been reading about child abuse.”

“Why would Mrs. Swenson wish to hide that from you?”

“The book in question was a self-help book. Look, it’s this one: Silent Knights. Olga must not have realized the nature of the book from its title, since the subtitle is not listed here. It has to do with having the courage to address one’s propensity for engaging in aberrant behavior. Although I had the impression from Ellen’s librarian friend that there was just a single book in question on this topic, maybe that was not the case. Perhaps Ellen had taken out another book along those lines and Olga did not wish for me to know it.”

“You mean it looked like Ellen was a child abuser? Ridiculous!” As if to wash away that foul notion, Nadia leapt up from her chaise lounge and strode into the sea.

It was nighttime before the two women addressed the topic of Ellen again. Lying on their backs in their beds, neither could settle down immediately. For Liz, it was a case of overexcitement at the unexpected visit to Fiji. Nadia seemed unsettled after making radio contact with her colleagues.

“It seems you do not wish to tell me about the specifics of your job, Nadia,” Liz said.

“It’s not a question of wishing to tell you or not. I cannot tell you.”

“Can you tell me, at least, if I’m correct in assuming that you are working in intelligence?”

“You are correct about that.”

“For whom are you working?

“I will tell you what I tell everyone who asks: I am an interpreter working on various United Nations projects.”

“Is the U.N. actually your employer?”

“Please, Liz. Understand I have told you all I can regarding my job.”

“Can you tell me something about Ellen, then? Was she also engaged in espionage?”

Nadia laughed. After a pause, she said, “I’m sorry to make light of your question. If you think our correspondence contained some sort of coded messages, you are mistaken. In fact, Ellen lost a briefcase full of old letters from me, and her purse, when we were in New York.”

“I was thinking more about the book she had in her possession—some sort of phrase book for intelligence officers.”

“Such books are not top secret and, while they are not sold in Barnes & Noble, they sometimes turn up in used-book shops. You might get in touch with the Brattle Book Shop in Boston and see if they have any record of selling it to her. I remember the shop name because I looked up the word brattle in my dictionary to see what it means. It wasn’t in the dictionary, so I assumed it’s the owner’s name. In one of her last letters, Ellen was most enthusiastic about a purchase she said she made in the Brattle, saying it would enrich our meeting. Since she never did give me a book when we met in New York, I now ask myself if it is possible that purchase was the phrase book that enabled her to greet me in Arabic.”

“I will check with the Brattle, of course. It does seem likely she was preparing to meet you. But then, I’m troubled, too, about her interaction with the cabdriver.”

“You mean he might have been an intelligence contact? You should know, Liz, that those kinds of machinations—a certain cab collecting a certain woman at a major train station—only happen in the movies, not in the life of actual espionage agents. It’s actually much more likely, unfortunately, that a certain woman would become the victim of a random psychopath encountered when she gets into the wrong cab.”

“What did she tell you about that cab ride?”

“Not a lot, Liz. We were so focused on meeting one another for the first time. She did tell me she surprised the driver by thanking him in his own language. When she did so, she said, the color drained from his face. That’s not an expression I’ve heard before, and it was very memorable. But it was even more memorable because Ellen seemed so—how do you say it?—shook by the encounter.”

“Could she have overheard anything significant in his radio conversation?”

“From what she said, it sounds to me like the driver was talking about her or another woman in sexual terms. You mentioned he used the word teena several times. As I told you, that is the word for fig, but it also refers to a woman as a sort of tasty dish.”

Suddenly, a sharp, shrill chirp pierced the air. Liz sat up and turned on the bedside light.

“Is there a bird in here?”

Nadia burst out laughing. “No, no! It’s just a lizard.”

“What do you mean ‘just a lizard’?” Liz said, hopping out of bed and shaking out her sheets.

“Take a look at the ceiling.”

Liz looked up and saw that part of the pattern painted there seemed to move. It was a lizard scurrying directly above her head. Then she saw another one, closer to the peak of the ceiling.

“Will they drop down on us?” Liz asked.

“I hope not. If they do, I believe they are harmless.”

“Startling, though,” Liz said, returning to her bed.

“Certainly. Think about it, Liz. A lizard in the night would make great fodder for a postcard message.”

“Let’s write one for Ellen.”

“If we post it, Erik will know we’ve been together.”

“That’s true. And, before we met, you told me you had something to say about him. I had the impression that the ‘something’ might have been a reason for Ellen to leave him.”

“She wrote that Erik had a problem with outflow at work. There was dirty business, money laundering. There was no doubt she loved her husband, but I thought she might separate herself from him to retain power over her own resources.”

“She wrote this? Did you discuss it further in New York?”

“Yes, she told me in a letter. And I asked her about it in New York. She said he’d found a way to recirculate the flow, so the outgo problem was not so serious. I felt she rather brushed off my concern, which, of course, was magnified once again when she went missing.”

“Oh Nadia! I think you’ve misunderstood. I’ve been to Erik’s workplace. He was working on designing an environmentally friendly washing machine. The costs of refining it were running high, largely due to his water bills, so he found a way to use recirculated runoff from his parking area to test the machine.”

“No wonder Ellen seemed unconcerned in New York! All these years I have prided myself on my English comprehension, but most certainly I read that letter all wrong!”

“You can’t blame yourself. The best linguists can get stumped on slang and jargon about machines.”

“But now you’ve come all this way, and my information is worth less than nothing.”

“Is that what you were writing about when you advised Ellen to be careful about leaving the family circle?”

Nadia seemed to weigh her reply.

“It’s little wonder you sought me out,” she finally said “Yes, I did advise Ellen to think carefully about shattering the family circle. I did not think it was worth doing for financial reasons. And, as I mentioned, I worried that the hypnotist she considered consulting would lead her to think a family member was the figure in her flashbacks.”

“I, too, would have questioned her involving a hypnotist. But we’re still left with the fact that Ellen was overcome by the flashbacks. If she could not prevent them happening, she may have felt she was not in control of herself. And if she had an impulse to abuse, it would account for her leaving Veronica. By leaving her, she would be protecting her. The flashbacks you tell me about indicate a woman who felt out of control, overwhelmed.”