“How does your wife feel about the work you do? “ Elaine asked Gage. She stood with her back to the fireplace in the den, warming her hands. Observing her from the couch, Gage wondered whether the chill she was fighting was internal or external.
“Those news articles made it seem like you never sleep in your own bed.”
Gage glanced at his watch. It was mid-morning in Asia.
She caught the motion, and asked with an edge in her voice, “You need to be somewhere?”
“No. I’m worried about my wife. She’s in China.”
Elaine’s eyes widened. “Not near the earthquake, I hope.”
“Too near, but she’s okay.”
“Why is she there?” She stiffened and cocked her head as if there was another question concealed behind the one she’d asked.
“She’s an anthropologist. She teaches at UC Berkeley.”
“Oh, I see.” Elaine’s body relaxed again. “I wondered whether she was working on this, too. Michael thought Ibrahim’s wife might be living over there. Not in the earthquake area. In an autonomous zone called Xinjiang.”
Gage now understood Hennessy’s call from China to Abrams. He must’ve been thinking that he could get to Ibrahim through his wife. The fact that he’d kept traveling suggested that he hadn’t.
“She’s a Muslim, too,” Elaine said. “They met in Boston when he was in graduate school.”
“How did you…”
She pointed upstairs. “I said I didn’t find anything that exonerated Ibrahim, but I once found some bits and pieces about her.” She smiled. “I spent a lunch hour or two at work trying to fit shredded pieces of paper back together.”
She lowered her voice as though not wanting Vicky to overhear.
“That’s the reason I let him keep using the bedroom as his office even after he moved out. So I could spy on him. I felt a little guilty about it because the kids thought I did it so he could spend more time with them.”
“Do you know whether he found her?” Gage asked.
“I don’t think so, but that part of the story didn’t make it into the shredder.”
“Did you save the material you rescued?”
Elaine smiled and said, “Like a squirrel preparing for winter, I folded them up and tucked them away.”
She walked over to the entertainment center, selected a DVD from the shelf, and handed it to Gage.
He flipped it open and turned it toward her. Her mouth gaped. It was empty. No papers inside. She grabbed a second one from the stack and opened it. Then a third.
She ran to the doorway and yelled toward the stairs, “Vicky. Come down here.”
Her daughter entered half a minute later and Elaine displayed an empty case toward her.
“Did you or your friends—”
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?” Vicky smirked as she looked at the title. “You’ve got to be kidding, Mother. I haven’t watched that since I was ten years old.”
Elaine bit her bottom lip and lowered her hands, then said to herself, “I was in here when the FBI searched. I would’ve noticed. I’m sure I would’ve.”
“Not the whole time,” Vicky said, looking at her mother as though she was a grandparent edging toward Alzheimer’s. “Remember, they took us into the garage to point out which boxes were Daddy’s.”
Elaine’s head drifted down, “I guess that’s it.”
“Why’s that movie suddenly so important?” Vicky asked.
“No reason,” Elaine said. “You know how I am about keeping things in order, that’s all.”
Vicky glanced at Gage, then back at her mother as if trying to divine what course of events could’ve led to the opening of a child’s DVD. She scanned the shelf holding the others, then shook her head, and left the room.
Gage rose and led Elaine to the couch and took a notebook out of his suit pocket.
“Tell me what you remember about what was on those pages.”
Elaine leaned back and stared at the ceiling as though her husband’s notes were written there in invisible ink. She exhaled and closed her eyes.
“Ibrahim’s wife’s name is Ibadat. I looked it up. It means ‘devotion.’” She looked over at Gage. “It’s ironic because she stayed in the U.S. for a year or so after he was deported, then did kind of a European tour before she finally settled in China.”
“Do you know where in Xinjiang she’s from?”
“It was unpronounceable. Kizl-something. It’s hard enough to piece together shreds of handwritten English, much less in transliterated Uyghur.”
“Children?”
“I didn’t see anything about kids, or parents for that matter. There were a few words that suggested that she may have been a hydrologist or an agronomist or something like that.”
Elaine thought for a moment, and then said. “I think Michael had written out the notes in order to figure out a route to travel in searching for Ibrahim. One scrap I found had Algiers, Marseilles, and Dublin listed, in that order.”
“And when he died in Marseilles?”
“I thought that Ibrahim or terrorists working with him had led Michael into a trap.”
Gage looked out through the French doors toward the backyard. The fog had finally reached in from the river, but the snowfall had stopped, leaving mounds on top of the woodpile, the toolshed, the rusted swing set, and the brick barbecue. He imagined that it hadn’t been too many years earlier that young families had gathered out there for children’s birthdays and Easter egg hunts.
Elaine sighed. “I’m bushed. Or maybe just beaten down by all of this.”
Gage turned toward her. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s not you. It’s the mess everything has become.”
Her brows furrowed and she shook her head. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Everything was once so perfect. It really was morning in America for us when Michael and I met in high school in the eighties, now it’s all a nightmare.”
Elaine closed her eyes again. Gage could see her pupils moving under her lids like she was searching through pictures of the past.
“The Tupperware Family. That’s what my mother called us.”
She paused, then looked at Gage.
“When she was growing up, Tupperware and Corning glassware and color television and KitchenAid all meant progress, people on the go, on the way up. The American dream. She saw us as an updated version of her generation. Earnest FBI agent, fresh-faced school librarian, kids, a house, two cars.” She pressed her lips tight for a few seconds, then said, “I’m glad she didn’t live to see what it turned into.”
Gage didn’t respond. He still didn’t know whether her life could’ve come out otherwise. But he did know that pretending that her life was different than it was would destroy the trust they’d developed.
And they both knew that their conversation had come to an end.
As he walked down the front steps a few minutes later, Gage’s peripheral vision caught a break in the pattern of snowbound cars parked along the street. The windshield of one had been wiped during the last few minutes of the blizzard. The passenger side was misted, the driver’s side clear, but there were no fresh tire tracks in the slush or fresh footsteps in the snow on the street or on the sidewalk bordering the car.
Gage came to a stop near his rental car, patted the breast pocket of his suit, then frowned and turned back toward the house.
When Elaine answered the door, he said, “Don’t look past me, but I think someone has your house under surveillance.”
“That’s ridiculous. Only the FBI would still be interested and they got everything.”
“Trust me on this one. I have thirty years in this business. I’ve learned to read the signs.” Gage pointed toward the interior. “Go back inside and bring me an envelope.”
Elaine kept her eyes fixed on his and said, “I don’t think you’re right, but I’ll play along.”
She returned a minute later and handed him a soiled letter-sized envelope. “These are my Price Chopper coupons.” She smiled. “They’re having a two-for-one special on crescent rolls and canned yams.”
“I’ll make up for your loss,” Gage said, sliding it into his jacket pocket, “and take you out to dinner.”
“You mean you want to use me as a decoy to see whether they’re watching me or following you?”
Gage nodded, and then smiled back. “I think I like you, too.”