If Jesse notices, he doesn’t let on. “That’s probably for the best,” he mutters. “Can’t be implicated if you don’t know, right?”
An old article appears, fuzzy and scanned at a poor angle. “I had to put it through a PDF converter app,” he says. “It didn’t translate all of it.”
“I can read Arabic.” As long as the letters have the necessary tashkeel, I can usually figure out any words I don’t understand from context. “But let me try the translation first.”
NASHRA: NORTH COAST
FAMILY PURCHASES TWENTY ACRES IN WESTERN ALEXANDRIA.
The largest real estate purchase in Western Alexandria’s history recently closed between Bamba Haikal and local municipalities. Government officials expressed their hope that the sale would catch the eye of commercial developers, leadingto population and industrial growth along the shoreline. Is the tide changing for this beautiful and underutilized section of the Alexandria coast?
“Yeah, my aunt mentioned we’ve been in El Agamy for a long time,” I murmur. I hadn’t expected that to mean over two hundred years, though. “My however-many-great-grandparents must’ve been loaded.”
“The wealth actually started with the first Haikal matriarch.” Another swipe. A black-and-white painting fills the screen. In it, a polished older woman lounges on a velvet parlor chair. She stares at the artist unsmilingly, her hands folded over the rounded arms of the parlor chair.
Pain cleaves my head, sudden and vicious. “I know her,” I gasp, and the pain grows teeth.
“Know her?” Jesse narrows his eyes. “Mansour, this woman is the Haikal family’s first matriarch. She’s been dead for over a century.”
A woman kneels in a mud-covered road, her tattered gown blowing in the storm. Dirt streaks her arms and forehead. Lightning cracks above her. She rocks back and forth, lips moving.
I shake my head, rubbing my temples. The memory makes no sense. “Maybe I saw a picture somewhere in my aunt’s house?”
The pressed suit and combed hair in the painting bear no resemblance to the bedraggled woman in my mind, but their eyes … the same flat, merciless brown.
“According to every article I could find, Bamba Haikal came into her fortune out of nowhere. She was an orphan without a home for most of her life. After she built the villa, the newspapers called her Sayida Bamba and vacationers started flooding El Agamy.”
“Bamba means pink in Arabic.” I offer the information seriously, as if it might contain a case-cracking clue.
“Good to know,” Jesse says. The second opportunity he’s had to mock me, and the second time he hasn’t taken it. “Bamba was responsible formost of the development in El Agamy. She built her home there and worked with schools and business owners to draw families into the area. But then children started to disappear, and people got spooked. The trickle of life dried up, and El Agamy stayed mostly empty until Bamba died. Her daughters took up the mantle to develop the area into a place families would want to start their lives.”
Jesse clicks his mouse, and a photo of a nauseatingly familiar villa replaces Bamba’s picture. The paint is much fresher, and the garden appears to be in bloom, but it’s otherwise the same.
“That’s the house,” I say. “The Haikal villa.”
“I was afraid you would say that.” Jesse swipes both hands through his hair, knitting his fingers behind his neck as he leans back in the chair. A stray lock of hair catches on his eyelashes, and before I know what’s happening, I reach for it.
Jesse and I freeze. A dark gaze fastens on my face as I curl my fingers away at the last second. “Just a strand, uh, in your eyes.”
Without looking away from me, he tilts his chin back, and the troublesome strand slides to his temple. “Better?” His voice sounds gravelly, borderline rough. I don’t need a mirror to know my cheeks are warming.
“You were saying?” I clear my throat.
His lips twist, as though hearing a joke only he can understand. His gaze finally returns to the computer. “As I was saying, generations of Haikals lived in the villa Bamba built. Lots of them also left. There are Haikals scattered all over the world. The ones who remained in the Haikal house were constantly struggling to make their neighborhood a place where people wanted to live. Bamba’s second granddaughter is quoted calling the tourists ‘idiots chasing the next coast like a cat chasing the end of a string.’ “ Jesse snorts.
He clicks to the next picture. In it, the house has gone into complete disrepair. Weeds grow around the rusted gates, blocking out the sight ofthe wild garden behind them. The balconies lean dangerously forward. The villa seems smaller, too. Like it shrank into itself for perseveration.
“Cut to 1966. A Haikal daughter is born, and she grows up a little off. A little too polite, a little too quiet. After a decade of peace, children begin to vanish in El Agamy again, and the police are at a loss. There’s never a struggle. Someone is hunting the children, and they’re doing it with the kind of skill nobody has seen in centuries.”
Jesse presses a button on the keyboard, and my mother appears on the monitor.
I stumble back, bumping my hip against the shelves. Mama can’t be older than sixteen or seventeen in the photo. Her curls fall freely down her back, framing her slim figure. Her legs are crossed at the knee, hands folded politely in her lap. She gazes into the camera with an arrogant tilt of her head, as though she cannot comprehend that anyone viewing the photo could ever be worth her time.
“I don’t understand.” I rub my chest, striving for calm and landing on queasy. “You’re saying my mom knew about the children disappearing?”
Instead of answering, Jesse draws up a list of images and converts them to midsize thumbnails. “This is your mom’s house throughout the years. Look at the way it changes, and then look at the dates of the headlines I pasted underneath.”
Dread builds in my chest, acid eating through my ribs and settling like a burning coat around my heart. My eyes slide off the screen, landing on Jesse. The terror must be plain on my features, because his gaze softens. The wheels of his chair squeak as Jesse rolls a little closer and says, “We can do this later.”
