The Fire and the Veil (Veronica Barry Book 2) (13 page)

Veronica shot an imploring look at the heavens. “Nothing big, just this thing for her school. She’s coming to pick me up in a few minutes, Daniel. I have to get my things together.”

“Oh,” Daniel said.

He’s going to get sick of me blowing him off, Veronica thought. “How about after?” she said. “I don’t think it will take that long. How about we meet up at Penny Coffee, at, say, five? We could have an early dinner. I’ll buy!”

Daniel chuckled. “Sounds good to me.”

“Awesome. Okay, Daniel, I have to get going.”

“Right. See you at five.”

Veronica hung up.

“All in favor of the name, ‘Paw Prints for Change,’ raise your hand,” Shona was saying. Four hands went up. “All in favor of ‘Furry Heroes.” Only Regina raised her hand. She glared at the others. “All in favor of ‘All About Animals.’” At least eight hands went up. “‘All About Animals’ wins,” Shona announced.

“I still think it’s weird for it to be AAA, like the car insurance,” Regina muttered.

“Majority rules,” Shona said. “Good name, Angie.”

Veronica looked at Angie in surprise. She was smiling widely, looking happier than Veronica had seen her look in a long time. Well, at least one good thing had happened so far today.

Chapter 9

Khalilah drove a red hybrid Honda sedan. Veronica sat in the passenger seat and put on the seatbelt. “Thanks for doing this,” Khalilah said as they left the school’s parking lot.

“I just hope I get something,” Veronica said.

“Me, too.”

The mosque was only seven blocks away. Khalilah pulled up in front of it. Only the medium-sized wooden sign in front of it identified it as a mosque—otherwise it looked like a small house. The outer walls were covered in yellow paneling. The windows had white trim. On the far side of the front lawn, a man was pushing a mower. Other than a cap on his head, he was dressed like any other person. It looked very bland and ordinary. Veronica wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but this was not it. Perhaps she’d expected something with more of middle eastern feel. Turrets, perhaps? Minarets? The Taj Mahal? Veronica laughed at herself silently.

They got out of the car and walked to the front door. Khalilah held the door and allowed Veronica to precede her. A man sat in an office on the side of the entryway, his door ajar. He saw Veronica come in and stood, making his way over. Veronica was not prepared for this—what was she supposed to say? That she was thinking of converting?

“Hello, Nasir,” Khalilah said to the man.

“Khalilah, always a pleasure,” he responded. He was wearing a collared shirt and a navy sweater-vest and khaki pants. He also wore a little cap like the one the man mowing the lawn did. “Is this the teacher you mentioned?”

“Nasir, Veronica Barry,” Khalilah said with a nod. “Veronica, Nasir Moshar.”

“How many mosques have you visited so far?” Nasir asked.

“This is our first,” Khalilah said. “But we have four more to see this afternoon. I told Nasir about your interest in taking your students to see a mosque, Veronica.” Khalilah smiled at the man.

It would have been nice to know the cover story in advance, Veronica thought, but she simply smiled as well.

“Well, if you plan to make it to all of the mosques, you’d better move along,” Nasir said, returning their smiles. “I explained to Khalilah that I prefer it if you only look through the doorway at the men’s musalla, miss.”

“Yes, that’s fine,” Veronica said. “I’ll just get an idea.”

Nasir led them to the door directly opposite the front door and opened it. Veronica made a show of looking around inside. The room was bare. The floor was wood, and there were small rugs rolled up and stacked on the side of one wall. There was also a stack of chairs in one corner. Along the opposite wall were several low wooden bookshelves with red-bound books. Veronica couldn’t make out the titles, but she guessed it was a set of Qur’ans. At the front of the room there was a plain wooden podium.

She turned and nodded at Nasir and Khalilah.

“You’re welcome to spend as much time as you like in the women’s prayer room,” Nasir said. “It’s this way.” They went through a short corridor, and Nasir opened a door into a room almost as large as the first one. “I only ask that you remove your shoes, please.” He indicated an empty shoe rack that stood just outside the door.

Veronica slipped off her flats and Khalilah did the same with the low pumps she wore.

“Do you have any questions?” Nasir asked.

Veronica racked her brain for something to ask. “Um, do you have a very homogenous congregation?” she managed.

“I don’t understand,” Nasir said.

“Well, I mean, everyone who comes here to worship. Are they all from similar backgrounds?”

“Oh, I see. No. We have people from very different backgrounds. Very diverse. Many of the families who come to Masjid Al-Taqwa have been doing so since it was first founded in 1974. The masjid—that is the Arabic word for mosque, you understand—was founded by Pakistanis and immigrants from other parts of the world. We had a different facility back then. We moved from east Sacramento in 1989, you know. But we also have many refugees. In the nineties we got many from Sub-Saharan Africa. Somalia, Ethiopia. But also Bosnia, and other eastern European countries. After that, there were many from Russia, especially Chechnya. And now we have many from Iraq. I, myself, am from Kashmir, in South Asia. The Islamic world is very large and diverse.”

“Yes, I see,” Veronica said, nodding. She stepped through the door into the women’s prayer room, willing Khalilah to keep Nasir occupied so Veronica could go about trying to have a vision. She didn’t have much control over what she did when one came on, and she hoped she didn’t do anything that would alarm him.

“Nasir, may I ask, I didn’t see anything like a mihrab anywhere,” Khalilah said.

“Yes, when this house was chosen as a new site at the end of the eighties, there were those who didn’t care for it, since it lacks a mihrab and anything that could be converted into one,” Nasir explained. He turned to Veronica. “The mihrab, miss, is usually an indentation in a masjid’s wall; it marks the direction of Mecca.”

“I’ve seen more modern interpretations of mihrabs,” Khalilah said, eyeing Veronica, who gave her a look of helplessness, holding her palms up briefly when Nasir’s focus was on Khalilah. “Let me show you my thought,” Khalilah said, taking Nasir’s arm and guiding him back toward the front of the building. “You can spare us for a moment, can’t you, Veronica?”

“Sure,” Veronica said, letting out her breath in relief.

Khalilah and Nasir’s voices faded down the hall. Veronica turned and looked around the room. It, too, had rolled up rugs on one side and shelves of books on the other. Sure enough, now that she could step closer, she saw that the books were Qur’ans. She chose one and opened it. It had Arabic on one side and English on the other. She placed it back on the shelf.

Surely Amani had read from some of these books. If Veronica could find one of them, she might be able to see something by touching it. But if she tried to open herself up with each book she handled, she’d be here all day, and she’d have dozens of irrelevant visions to sort through.

Veronica took a deep breath. Maybe she could get help. She closed her eyes and made her breathing slow down, become even. “I could use some help,” she whispered. “I need to know about Amani Ahmad. Help me find her book. Give me some image of her, so I can try to find her. I want to help her. Please, help me help her.”

She opened her eyes and looked at the shelves. For a moment, nothing changed. But then she thought she saw something. A blur. A shadowy blur by the bookshelf closest to the door. It was a spirit.

Veronica gazed at it, watching it gather substance. Gradually it was more shadow than blur. After another moment, it began to take shape, but the shape was still somewhat formless. In a flash of insight, Veronica understood it. It looked like a woman in a hijab—maybe an abaya, in fact. Flowing robes that covered head to toe.

“I see you,” Veronica said. “Show me which book I should touch.”

The woman-shadow raised an arm and pointed directly at one of the Qur’ans. Veronica stepped forward and reached for it. “Thank you,” she told the spirit. She rested her fingers on the spine of the book, then took it into her hands.

She closed her eyes and clutched the book, slowing down her breathing again. If this worked, it would be the first time she called up a vision on purpose since the day she’d run around Saint Patrick’s, trying to figure out what had happened to Angie.

Nothing was happening. Veronica began to worry that Khalilah would run out of things to distract Nasir with. Worrying was breaking her concentration. She considered hiding the book in her purse.
Oh, sure,
she thought.
Good idea: let’s steal a holy book from a house of worship.
No,
she told herself.
Just stop fretting and focus.

She took two deep breaths and then closed her eyes, feeling the fabric that covered the cardboard cover of the book with her fingers. She relaxed, thinking about her breathing, the feel of the fabric, the silence in the room.

She could see the room the way it looked with the rugs laid out. People—women—in hijabs, some in full abayas, milling around, putting books on the shelf, rolling up the rugs. Some older women were in chairs. She saw one young woman in a full abaya put a book on the shelf, and she knew that it was the same one as the one she was holding from the location. The young woman must be Amani. Another woman, middle-aged, in a long-sleeved dress and simple head scarf, approached her.

“I was hoping you’d come today,” the woman in the scarf said.

“Yes,” Amani said. “I had to. He’s worse than ever, Yesenia.”

“I told you,” Yesenia said.

“I’m afraid of him.”

“Do you think he’ll do something?”

“I’m sure of it,” Amani said. “I’ll find myself a prisoner.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Yesenia said. “I can talk to Nasir—”

“No!” Amani said. “I can’t.”

“This is a matter of your safety, Amani. We can’t just do nothing, and wait for him to act. It will be too late.”

“Oh, thank you, Nasir!” came Khalilah’s voice, cutting through the flimsy reality of the vision.

Veronica opened her eyes, feeling a bit dizzy to find herself in the same room, except that it was empty. She replaced the book. The vision hadn’t shown her very much, but it was all that she was going to have time for.

Nasir and Khalilah appeared in the doorway.

Veronica smiled at them. “Thank you for allowing me to visit,” she said, not sure what to call Nasir. She had a sense that Muslims didn’t say ‘father’ like Catholics. And she wasn’t sure he was a priest. Did Muslims have priests?

“It was my pleasure. I will be sure to tell the others about your ideas,” Nasir said to Khalilah.

“Good,” Khalilah said.

“We’d probably better get to the next mosque,” Veronica said to her.

“You’ve seen all you need here?” Khalilah inquired, her dark-eyed gaze intense.

“I think, as much as I can,” Veronica said, giving her a quick smile. She stepped to the shoe rack and put her flats back on. Khalilah followed suit with her own shoes.

They thanked Nasir again as they left and Veronica noted that Khalilah just called him by his name. But then, Veronica had been to Protestant churches where members of the congregation called the minister by his or her first name as well.

“Is Nasir the mosque’s… priest?” Veronica asked as they went down the walk.

“No, he’s just one of the caretakers. Muslims don’t have priests,” Khalilah said. “Some mosques have an imam, but in others that role gets passed around. It’s like being the leader of a Bible study. Sunnis have mufti and maulana. But it’s not the same, it’s more like scholars than clergy.”

They sat in Khalilah’s car and closed the doors.

“What did you see?” Khalilah asked, starting the car.

Veronica took a deep breath. “Not a lot. But I think I did learn a couple of useful things.”

Khalilah said nothing, only glancing at her quickly as they pulled away from the curb.

“I think Amani knew her attacker,” Veronica said. “She was afraid of him. She knew he wanted to abduct her—she said she was afraid she would end up a prisoner.”

Khalilah nodded. “Did she say a name?”

“No,” Veronica said with regret. “But someone else knows who he is. Another woman who goes to that mosque. Her name is Yesenia.”

Khalilah processed this silently.

“If we can find this woman, Yesenia, she can tell us who abducted Amani,” Veronica said.

“That may be complicated to do,” Khalilah said. “I don’t know how to find out who she is.”

“Maybe it’s time to involve the police,” Veronica said. “I can tell Daniel.” It would be a relief to get Daniel involved. She hated feeling like she was sneaking around behind his back. “He’s a smart guy, he won’t just go off half-cocked and arrest Jahid and Hamza for no reason—”

“No,” Khalilah said. “I have to find her first. I have to get her to a safe house. Then we can call the police.”

Veronica sighed. She was feeling much less sure about Khalilah’s plan. Every moment they went stumbling around trying to find Amani themselves was another moment the woman was at the mercy of her abductor.

“He might be hurting her,” Veronica said. “Can we really afford to take our time with this?”

Khalilah pulled the car over to the curb and stopped it. “Veronica, you know I appreciate everything you’re doing to help me,” she said. “You just don’t know what these people can be like. It’s hard to believe that they would hurt their own flesh and blood. But it’s centuries-old tribal law.”

“So now you’re saying that they
are
going to kill her?”

“I don’t know!” Khalilah exclaimed. “I can’t be sure of anything. I don’t want to take the risk!”

“I’ll tell Daniel not to let her go home,” Veronica said. “He has resources we don’t have, Khalilah. He could track this Yesenia woman down in fifteen minutes, just make some calls, flash his badge, ask questions. Nasir would just tell him who she is.”

“And as soon as he started asking those questions, Jahid and Hamza would hear about it.”