After The Honeymoon

19. Missing - 2

Omar

"I am ringing the bell, no one is answering. Her car isn't even here," Simon was saying on the speaker phone when I noticed Noor and Salman pass a worried look at each other. We had really hoped that she would be holed away in her apartment in St. Loius, but her co-fellow reported otherwise. 

"Thanks for checking out her apartment," I managed to say despite the heaviness in my chest. 

"No problem. I'll check again in a bit. I am sure she just forgot to inform you of her change in plans." His reassuring words failed to mask the worried undertones. Disappearing for hours was not like her at all, even her colleagues knew that.  

"Maybe her phone died," Salman offered when I closed the call. 

That simplistic explanation did nothing to stem the feeling of absolute dread inside me. I knew on the face of it, it would seem like she would have checked into a hotel and forgotten to charge her phone. But I wasn't buying it.

Her living 5 hours apart away from me had always weighed on my mind. That's why I made her buy several battery packs as backup for if and when her phone died. I'd even seen her put them in her bag as she left. 

She didn't leave. You kicked her out of her own home. My guilty conscience chided me. Regret had been coming in waves interspersed with the paralyzing feeling of doom. The only solace I had was in the presence of friends who had taken charge of the situation. 

Noor had come over as soon as her husband and I reached home and had become the anchor that I desperately needed. Husband and wife were peering over the map of Chicago and its suburbs on the laptop while they sat together in my living room. 

"Madi called me around 4 pm. It sounded like she was in a coffee shop," Noor said. 

Her husband responded, "Would make sense if she was trying to finish up some work for that idiot."

I nodded, even though my brain was barely functioning then. 

"So if she was at Faraz's place at 2:30, which is located between here and her parent's house in Schaumburg, and she spoke to me at 4 and let's just assume that she had been sitting at a coffee shop during that time finishing up her work so that she could go to her parent's place, we could narrow the possible locations of that coffee shop to somewhere along this northwest corridor of the I-90 highway," Noor pointed to the map, trying to put together a timeline.

"That's still a pretty large area and doesn't explain where she is right now. It's past 10:30 and all of those coffee shops would be closed," Salman told his wife.

"Maybe she checked into a hotel in that area," Noor replied.

None of that made sense to me though, "Why wouldn't she just go to her parent's house and finish her work from there?"

I had already told Noor and Salman every detail of what happened that morning, including my mother's words and Madi's family's financial woes. I figured that if they were going to help me locate Madi they needed to know it all. 

It was a good thing I divulged it too, because when Noor expressed her insights, Madi's actions made more sense even if they did nothing to explain where she was now. And my patience was wearing thin now. 

"She would not want her family to think that she was having marital problems because of them and their financial issues. I think she would have tried to reconcile with you before she opened up to her parents so they wouldn't worry about her."

"But yaar she hasn't called me to reconcile, she is not in St. Louis, or at her parents' house, and all the bloody coffee houses are closed. So, where the hell is she?" The edge in my voice didn't go unnoticed by Salman.