“Where? Here in Morocco?”
“A bit. I was in Rabat most recently.”
“What brought you there?”
“I was taking care of some business.”
“What line of work are you in?”
“Manufacturing.”
“What do you manufacture?”
“Cogs, mainly.”
Florence started laughing. “Cogs.” She couldn’t help it. “For boats, I presume?”
“Oh, for all seagoing vessels, really.”
The rest of the group was following their banter with new attention, turning their heads from one to the other like spectators at a tennis match.
“Do you guys know each other or something?” Meg asked slowly.
“Heavens, no,” said Helen.
Florence just shook her head, a smile still on her face.
For the next few hours, the evening proceeded as these evenings do. Helen and Florence relinquished the group’s attention. Everyone continued to get drunker and drunker. But Florence didn’t let another drop of alcohol pass her lips, and Helen didn’t partake of anything besides cigarettes. It was as if they were slowly moving toward the foreground of a picture, getting sharper and sharper, while everyone else receded into blurriness.
Finally, at around midnight, after the rest of the group had shared a joint and fallen into a collective daze, Helen stood up and held her hand out to Florence. “Shall we?” she asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Florence nodded and took Helen’s hand. She was surprised to feel herself shudder violently. It was like touching a ghost.
42.
Helen steered her into the first room at the top of the stairs—the one that used to be hers but now bore the traces of Florence’s occupancy.
“Making yourself at home, I see?” Helen asked, looking around.
Florence blushed. She felt like she’d been caught trying on Helen’s underwear. She was, in fact, wearing Helen’s underwear. “I thought you were dead,” she said by way of excuse.
In the pocket of silence a burst of laughter wafted up from downstairs.
“Clearly you were quite broken up about it.”
“Helen—what’s going on?”
“Sit,” Helen commanded, pointing at the bed.
Florence obeyed.
“I had to go to Rabat,” Helen said.
“But you just disappeared. I thought you were dead. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t tell you—for your own benefit.”
Florence blew out her breath in exasperation. She didn’t want to wait for Helen to mete out information at whatever pace she saw fit. She didn’t like playing the fool anymore. “Is this about Jeanette Byrd?” she asked.
Helen narrowed her eyes. “Where did you hear that name?”
“A man from the embassy was here yesterday. Jeanette Byrd is dead. She’s buried in your compost pile. It’s pretty clear that they think you murdered her. No, correction, they think I murdered her. They think I’m Helen Wilcox.”
“And why would they think that?” Helen asked, gesturing around the room.
“Yes, obviously you know that I’ve been pretending to be you. Is that what you want to hear? Because that transgression seems rather meager compared to whatever you’ve been up to.”
Helen raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“Did you kill Jeanette Byrd? Jenny?”
“It’s complicated, Florence.”
“Either you’re a murderer or not.”
Helen sat down on the bed next to Florence. “I’ll tell you what happened, okay? Just…give me a moment.” She took a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one. Her hand was trembling slightly, Florence noticed.
“Jenny got out of prison earlier this year. We hadn’t kept in touch so I had no idea until she showed up on my doorstep. It was in the middle of a vicious snowstorm, around seven or eight at night. I was reading downstairs by the fire when I saw headlights in my driveway. You’ve lived there—you know that no one ever visits, and it’s pretty much impossible to end up there on a wrong turn. So I went upstairs to get my gun—”
“You have a gun?”
“Of course I have a gun. Only a supremely naive or stupid woman would live all alone in the woods without one. So anyway, I came back downstairs and I saw that it was a taxi pulling in. I figured most murderers and rapists don’t take taxis to their victims’ houses, so I put the gun down and went to the door.
“And there she was. My god. I didn’t even recognize her at first. She used to be beautiful, Florence. Beautiful. All the boys in Hindsville were obsessed with her. The men too. There was one teacher who used to stalk her like a wounded animal. But there was nothing beautiful about that person. She looked like a meth addict. Her hair was long and dirty and it had gone entirely gray. Several of her teeth were missing. She’s my age, but she looked like she was sixty years old.” She stopped herself. “Was my age,” she corrected.
“She grabbed me and hugged me. And I can’t even describe how terrible she smelled. Like…cat sweat. Fermented cat sweat. But what could I do? I hugged her back. I invited her in. She was my oldest friend.
“I brought her back to the kitchen and poured us some coffee. And then we just sat there. It was uncomfortable. The last time I’d seen her we were seventeen years old. At this point, we had nothing in common anymore. Nothing. And she had this nervous tic of picking at her hands. The skin around her fingernails was totally worn away, like someone went at it with a Brillo pad. I finally noticed her glancing at the bourbon above the fridge, so I offered her some. We both put a little in our coffee, and then it got a little easier. She started to talk. She told me that I was the only thing that got her through prison. Me. That she understood why I did what I did. That she forgave me. That we were sisters—we always had been and always would be.”
“Forgave you for what?”
“What?”
“You said she said she forgave you.”
“Oh. That. I took away her alibi. She had asked if she could say that she was with me the night of the murder, and I said yes. Then my father explained what a terrible idea that was. Thank god. I mean, I didn’t know what perjury was. I thought lying to the police was basically the same thing as lying to a teacher. So I went back and told the truth—that we’d been together earlier in the night, but she’d gone off with Ellis at around eleven.” Helen paused. “That’s when her case fell apart.”
Helen took another drag of her cigarette and went on: “The more she drank, the more wired she got. Manic almost. She was pacing around the kitchen. She started picking up glasses and vases and asking me how much they cost, opening cabinets and slamming them shut. She was getting angry. Then suddenly her version of events was that it was my fault she’d been in prison. And all that time I’d been getting rich off her story.”
“She knew about the book?”
“Yes, it had made its way into the prison, and people were talking. As soon as she heard what it was about, she realized it was her life. She said I stole it.” Helen rolled her eyes.
“Well, you did, didn’t you?”
“All great writers steal. Dostoyevsky. Shakespeare. Everyone. Anyway, it was our story. It was always ours.”
“So what happened?”
“She went crazy, that’s what happened. She said she wanted the money I made from the book, that it was her money. This went on for hours: screaming, yelling, weeping. I finally got her to go to sleep in the carriage house at around four in the morning. The next day, we both slept late, and we actually had a nice time. We went for a walk, we talked, I made us lunch. But then I told her I thought she should go back to Mississippi. That it was a mistake to violate her parole. I even offered to help get her back on her feet. But she just…I don’t know. She snapped. She came at me.”
“What do you mean she came at you?”
“She grabbed a knife from that wooden block on the kitchen counter and she just rushed a
t me. I didn’t know what to do. Instinct took over. I grabbed a pot and I hit her as hard as I could. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? It’s like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. I thought she was going to sit up all dazed and cross-eyed, with a little halo of stars dancing around her head. But she didn’t. She just lay there. Dead.”
“Jesus.”
Helen said nothing.
“So then what happened?”
“I panicked. You have to understand. I saw it all coming out. They’d find out who I was. That I wrote that book. God, can you imagine the publicity? It would have been so awful. So vulgar. I couldn’t stand the idea of it.”
“Helen.” Florence looked at her in disbelief. “You killed Jenny to protect Maud Dixon’s identity?”
“No,” Helen said, eyes narrowed. “I killed her in self-defense. I buried her to protect Maud Dixon’s identity. I mean, really, who cares what happens to a dead body? It didn’t make any difference to her.” Florence remembered that she had made the same argument to herself when she’d thought Helen was dead. As if reading her thoughts, Helen said, “Did you tell anyone about my dead body after you thought you’d killed me?”
“It’s not the same thing,” said Florence unconvincingly.
“Of course it is. Anyway, it all happened so fast. It wasn’t like it was a rational decision. I was high on adrenaline and all I was thinking was that I couldn’t let that body be found in my house. I couldn’t bear the scrutiny. I didn’t want the questions. I’m a very private person, Florence, you know that.”
Florence found herself nodding, as if this were a good reason for burying a body.
“So you put her in the compost pile?”
“Well, it was February. In a snowstorm! Do you know how hard the ground was? Besides, a compost pile is actually the perfect place to dispose of a body. A whole cow will break down in under six months—teeth, bones, everything. I learned one useful thing growing up on a farm.”
Florence remembered Helen telling her that she’d learned how to chop off a chicken’s head when she was eight years old. Maybe she hadn’t been lying.
Helen went on: “Of course the next morning I realized what a colossal mistake I had made. But I couldn’t exactly call the police at that point. What, drag her out of the compost pile, brush her off, and lay her back on the kitchen floor? Seems a little harder to claim self-defense after you’ve buried the fucking body.”
Florence said nothing. She tried to imagine Helen shoveling kitchen scraps and dirt and wood chips on top of the body of her oldest friend. Somehow it seemed like it hadn’t really happened. Like Helen was just telling a story.
“So that’s when I started to think about running,” Helen said.
“Running?”
“Just giving up on Helen Wilcox. Walking away from it all. I was ready for a change anyway. I hadn’t been able to write anything worthwhile in ages. You’ve read the new book. You know it’s not as good as Mississippi Foxtrot.”
Florence shrugged. She thought of telling Helen about her discovery in the Paul Bowles book, but she didn’t want to interrupt the story.
“It was just a thought experiment at first, a game I played with myself—how would I disappear? Where would I go? How would I get a new identity? Could I continue to publish as Maud Dixon? How would I get paid? Should I tell Greta?
“I settled on Morocco because there’s no extradition treaty. And it seemed like a nice place to live. Nicer than North Korea anyway. Good weather, good culture, good food, lots of expats, but also enough corruption that I could easily establish myself with a fake name. But it was all just speculation until I got that phone call.”
“From Jenny’s parole officer?”
Helen nodded. “She called in early March. She said Jenny had missed their first meeting and asked me if I’d heard from her. I said I hadn’t. And then she said, ‘Well, isn’t that interesting’ because she’d received a voicemail from Jenny and the call had come from my house.” Helen shook her head. “My god, what an idiot. Only Jenny would call her parole officer from an out-of-state landline.”
“And the parole officer sent the local cop?”
“You know about that too, do you? Well, of course you do, you were there. Yes, he showed up after they finally issued an arrest warrant for Jenny. She’d missed a few appointments by then. This cop clearly thought I was harboring a fugitive. But he didn’t have a warrant, so I told him to leave. That was a mistake. I realized it afterward. If he came back with a warrant, he could tear the place apart. Maybe even the backyard. Maybe even the compost pile. I should have just cooperated and given him a nice little tour. But I didn’t. That’s when I realized I was actually going to have to start laying the groundwork for running. Remember? I suggested we go to Morocco the very next day. If and when he came back, I wanted to be out of the country, with a new identity ready to go. And if they found the body, I’d put the plan in motion. I’d leave Helen Wilcox behind and become someone else.”
Florence shook her head. Something wasn’t clicking. “But why did you bring me?”
“Honestly? Because I was scared. I didn’t know if I could go through with it alone.” Florence watched Helen’s face. She felt a pool of warmth welling up inside of her. She pushed it back down. “Bullshit, Helen.”
Helen let out a small laugh. “Okay, fine. I needed you to report me missing. I couldn’t just disappear without a trace. I knew they’d assume I’d run and come looking for me. But if you reported an accident, that would at least allay their suspicion. I needed you to truly believe I’d died. Really, it was for your own protection. I didn’t want you to be an accessory to a crime. Your ignorance was your alibi.”
Florence abruptly stood up from the bed. The missing piece had finally clicked into place.
“You planned that accident? Helen, I almost died!”
“Florence, no, of course I didn’t plan the car accident! I would never do that to you. My plan was to hire a boat and go for a swim out past the waves, and then I was going to disappear from there. The car accident was just that—an accident. I promise. But I saw the opportunity, and I took it.”
“What do you mean you took it? Were you even in the car? Where are your bruises? Where are your broken bones?” She thrust her cast in Helen’s face.
“I don’t know, Florence,” Helen said calmly. “I was lucky. It all happened so fast. I swam out of the car and made it to the beach at the base of the cliff. We went over the edge pretty close to where the cliff started to rise. It was only a ten-foot drop into the water. On the shore, thank god, I saw that that fisherman had rescued you. I stayed on the beach until my clothes were dry. Then I hitched a ride to the bus station. I’d hidden a lot of cash at the riad we stayed in in Marrakesh. I retrieved it and went on to Rabat. That’s where I’d arranged to get new papers.”
Helen was explaining it all so dispassionately, like she was recounting a recipe for lasagna. As if Florence would be a fool for not understanding. Maybe she was a fool, because she didn’t understand. Not at all. The facts weren’t cohering into a cogent narrative.
“So why did you even come back?”
“I was sitting at a café in Rabat a few days after the accident and I happened to glance over at my neighbor’s paper, and there it was—my name, Helen Wilcox. I asked him to tell me what it said. And that’s when I realized what had happened. I realized that you were pretending to be me. Or I don’t know, maybe you’d hit your head and you thought you were me. And you had no idea what you were getting into. I knew the police would come after you. For Jenny. For this mess I’d left behind.”
Florence felt like her legs were going to collapse. She sat back down next to Helen. They were silent for a moment.
“Listen,” Helen finally said. “I know this is a lot to process. And I understand that you might be angry. You have every right to be angry. But I have tried at every turn to keep you as safe as possible. I came back to protect you. I have always had your best intere
sts at heart.”
There was an unfamiliar tone in Helen’s voice: needy and pleading. Florence realized all of a sudden that she held all the power. She could turn Helen in if she wanted. She could call the police right now. She’d love to see the look on the faces of Officer Idrissi and Dan Massey when she produced the real Helen Wilcox.
But then what? Then Florence would have no choice but to fly back to the US with no home, no job, and no money. Knowing that she’d put Maud Dixon in prison.
Florence put her head in her hands.
“You’re exhausted,” Helen said. “Why don’t you get some rest. We can talk more in the morning.”
Florence nodded. “Here, let me get my stuff out of your room,” she said halfheartedly.
“It’s fine. You stay. I’ll go down the hall.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.” At the door, Helen turned back to Florence with a sly smile. “Do you want to know what my first reaction to seeing that newspaper article in Rabat was?”
“What?”
“I thought, Good for her. I was impressed you’d pulled it off. I realize that might be an unorthodox response to learning that your assistant has stolen your identity, but as you know, the herd mentality has never held much appeal for me.”
Florence smiled wearily. “I guess I learned from the best.”
“I can’t deny that. Though even I might have slipped up. There’s really no one here who knows you’re Florence Darrow?”
“Well…I sort of had to tell this guy I’m seeing.”
“Does Helen Wilcox have a boyfriend?” Helen asked, amused.
“Kind of. That guy Nick? With the dreds?”
Helen grimaced. “I see I still need to teach you a thing or two about your taste in men.”
Florence laughed. “He’s sweet.”
“Sweet is just a polite way of saying dull.”
In a gentler tone, Helen added, “Listen, all joking aside, I know I’ve given you a lot to take in, and I understand if you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just remember that we’re on the same side here. My plan is still to disappear, but I’m going to do it in a way that leaves you safe. And very well compensated. Okay?” She caught Florence’s eye.
Who is Maud Dixon? Page 23