“Why do you do it? Taking clients out, when it’s your own business?”
“Actually I run the company for an Omani friend, but I hate paperwork—there’s a lot of bureaucracy and schmoozing required to keep government departments happy—and I prefer the open road, so if I get the chance to fill in for a driver, I take it.”
“You must like it here, to have stayed so long?”
“Love it. I mean, this is a tough landscape; it doesn’t forgive you much, and you have to keep your wits about you—whether it’s flash floods or hiking over escarpments—but with the right client, I can take off into the desert and—”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see the desert again!”
Closing one eye to shut out the glare reflecting off the water, he said, “Again? I thought you’d never been here before?”
“This isn’t the only place that has deserts.”
“Ah, Iraq.”
“Yes.” Her gaze drifted off with her thoughts.
Gabriel cleared his throat. “Wahiba Sands tonight, I suppose?”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t see much desert on the tourist hop, you know.”
“Well, it isn’t my itinerary. I’m the official travelling companion. All I have to do is get in and out of the jeep at appointed spots and swim. Wonderful.”
“It must have been lovely,” he said, “meeting Kim again.”
She flicked water about with her fingers. “Oh, it was . . . fantastic. I mean, I’d been getting these mysterious postcards from Muscat for months and hadn’t a clue—”
“Postcards?”
Thea wrinkled her nose. “Long story.”
“Good. Long and mysterious stories go down well in these parts. From the top, please.”
“Wherever that is.” She turned her face up again, begging the sun to hit on her. “A few months ago, I came downstairs one day and saw the white-rimmed corner of a postcard poking out from the buff dross that had been stuffed through the letterbox. I could just see a narrow slice of aquamarine that screamed holidays. I tried to remember who was away, of our friends, you know—and where?—and pulled it out from the rest of the mail, thinking, a Caribbean beach perhaps, a Himalayan sky. But it was neither. It featured the ridge of a sand dune, its flanks lined with neat grooves mussed only by footprints—two sets, one coming over the crest of the dune and joining another on the other side, continuing together. I didn’t turn it over, at first. I was wondering which desert it might be. The Gobi? Namib? Arabia? And when finally I turned the card, the message, written in a sort of childish hand, said, ‘Meet me in Muscat.’”
“Sounds like a song.”
She nodded mildly, but stayed back there in her hall, or wherever she’d gone to.
“So you jumped on a plane?”
“Of course not. I had no idea who’d sent it. But a few weeks later, another card came, and then they kept coming at regular intervals until—”
“Hang on, back to the second card. I signed up for the long version.”
She glanced at him, then back at her toes. “That was delivered in late September. It featured an orange fort with a girth of palm trees and three mountain ridges in the background, stacked one behind the other, each a darker shade of blue than the one before it.”
“Nakhal.”
“And the message read: ‘In January.’”
Gabriel smiled. Thea smiled back. “Someone was messing with my head, but these anonymous nudges were kind of intimate, and I liked the turn of mind of the person who was sending them, even though I couldn’t identify them, so I had to operate on a hunch.”
“And your hunch said Kim? It would have, to me.”
“No, I’m not that bright. Anyway, I thought she’d long since, and with good reason, given up on me. But then another card came, as expected: a gray beach, flat sea, orange cliffs, and a leatherback turtle making her way to the low surf. Message: ‘At the Hyatt.’”
“But who was posting them? Doesn’t Kim live in the States?”
“Yeah. She asked an Omani friend of hers in Muscat to write them.”
Gabriel shook his head, still smiling. “This is wonderful.”
Thea looked over at Kim’s head, resting on the rim of her jacuzzi. “At that point I started looking up flights. We were due to go to the Rockies this summer, but I started thinking the boys could go without me. White water rafting isn’t really my thing—my danger-sports years are long over—and flights to Muscat were equal to the cost of getting to the Rockies. . . . And then those gorgeous postcards and the glassy swimming pools featured on the Omani websites started to do their work. To hell with mysterious meetings, I thought. Just give me that pool, that beach, that desert! The next card read, ‘Three o’clock.’ That one showed the entrance to a mosque, all blue and white mosaics, and mother-of-pearl.”
“So this dribble of details really took effect? I mean, had one card come—‘Meet me in Muscat in January at the Hyatt at three o’clock,’ would that have worked?”
“Oh, I’d probably have discarded it, but these amuse-bouches made me . . .”
“Crave the main course?”
“Absolutely.” She shook her head. “The last one should have given it away: two Bedouin women, swathed in orange and black scarves, holding those leather masks up to their hidden faces. As my niece would say, ‘Duh!’ But I still didn’t think it was Kim. I thought I’d hurt her irredeemably by never replying to any of her letters, after she had looked after me so well, and then we lost track of each other.”
“And the final message?”
“It said simply, ‘Twelfth.’”
“A date. Irresistible, I’d imagine?”
She paused, her thoughts not for broadcast. Then she lifted her hands from the water. “I stand before you—or, rather, slide around before you—so yes, irresistible, but I genu-inely had no idea who was behind it. You mislay a lot of people in the course of an average life.”
“Your husband didn’t mind?”
“Why would he? He was as curious as I was.”
“Could have been an ex.”
“He thought it probably was an ex, but he has more faith in me
