Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

  Phylloh, he thinks. Phylloh is stirring the pot.

  “I’m the one who comes and goes, running your errands during the day,” Victoria says. “If anyone gets a parking space, it should be me.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Gerry says. “But given that your schedules don’t overlap, why can’t you share it?”

  She opens her mouth, as if to object to this reasonable offer, then closes it, nods stiffly. She’s gotten what she wants, yet she’s still unhappy. Gerry has spent a lifetime trying to please women like this, women who cannot allow themselves to let go of their grudges and principles.

  “Anyway, remember that registered letter they tried to deliver to your mother’s house? The one I had you sign for? It was a wrangle, but the post office finally agreed to let me take it, after I showed them your mother’s death certificate, then explained why you couldn’t come in person. It took three trips.”

  Victoria offers him a legal-size envelope. It’s certified, not registered. Not an important distinction, but one that irks Gerry. An assistant should be detail-oriented. He extracts what appears to be a will, accompanied by a note from a lawyer.

  “This makes absolutely no sense,” he says, scanning the document. His father’s name, his mother’s name pop out at him, but everything else is a jumble.

  “What?” Victoria is forever saying “What” and it’s unclear to Gerry if she’s hard of hearing or reflexively says this in order to have something to say. Whatever the reason, it’s highly annoying.

  “It’s a letter to my mother stating that my father’s will was contested.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your father had died.”

  “Oh, he definitely died. In September 2001. How can a will be contested almost two decades later and why would my mother care?”

  Only it hasn’t been two decades, not according to this letter.

  Dear Mrs. Andersen,

  This letter serves as your official notice that the probate challenge against Mr. Andersen’s estate has been denied and you remain the sole beneficiary…

  Based on the details he can glean from the letter, his father died in early summer 2018, days before Gerry moved back to Baltimore. Had someone tried to contact his mother then? It was a confusing time, with different nursing aides coming and going. In fact, he had sacked one when he realized she sometimes took the day’s mail and chucked it into the recycling bin, unopened. Did his mother even know his father had not died in 2001, as Gerry had been told?

  Told by her. That was the only reason he believed his father dead. Because his mother told him, in great detail, how he had died on 9/11.

  Your father visits me. We make love in the garden.

  In hindsight, he had decided that was the first clue of her dementia. But what if—

  “Victoria,” Gerry says, “get my mother’s executor on the phone.”

  *

  THE EXECUTOR for Gerry’s mother’s estate is an old family friend, a lawyer who had lived on their street. Perhaps not the best way to choose one’s lawyer, but no harm had come to Gerry’s mother by conducting her affairs that way. Tom Abbott is a sweet, gentle man and Gerry had often wished he were his father. But even as a child he could see there was no spark between his mother and Tom.

  “I think I’ve untangled things,” he tells Gerry later that afternoon, their third call of the day. “Your father died in June and left a will, dated 2015, in which he bequeathed everything to your mother. ‘Everything’ isn’t a lot—about two hundred thousand dollars, although she would have qualified for his social security, which was more than hers. Because his will was still in probate when your mother died, his bequest to her rolls into her estate. The money will be put in escrow and go to you when your mother’s estate settles.”

  “Why was there a claim against it?” Not his most pressing question, not even close, but the best he can manage for now.

  “Here’s where it gets a little complicated. Gerry—your parents never got a divorce. Your mother could have asked for one on grounds of abandonment or adultery, but she chose not to. When they separated, in the 1970s, divorce law was far more restrictive and your father may have believed he couldn’t initiate the action. Maybe he didn’t want to because, without a formal dissolution of the marriage, there would be no official orders about child support. Anyway, his second marriage, as a consequence, was never legal. And in 2001, he left that woman, just moved out and on. I don’t know why you assumed he was dead—”

  Because my mother told me he was. “I’m not sure, either.”

  “But he had no legal obligations to his common-law wife. Kids were long grown. Then he dies and leaves what he has to your mother. His ex challenged the will. They had been together almost forty years, after all. But common-law spouses don’t have standing in Ohio and, even if she did, his will is legal unless she can prove undue influence, or that he wasn’t of sound mind when he made it. He was free to leave everything to your mother and now it goes to you.”

  “I’m not sure I want it,” Gerry says. Blood money. No, not blood money. Bloodless money. Guilt money.

  Or—is it possible that his father and mother loved each other? Is that the part of the story he missed? Is that why his first novel had hurt his mother?

  “You can give it away, once it’s yours, which should be by this fall. Donate to some cause in your mother’s name. Maybe it’s chump change to you, but it’s enough to do some good in the world.”

  It’s enough, Gerry thinks, to cover my losses in transfer taxes and the like if I decide to sell this place sooner rather than later. If he leaves this apartment once he recovers—who would blame him, who would find it suspicious? The apartment tried to kill him, after all. The floating staircase was like a mouth that tried to devour him whole, the whale to his Jonah. There would be almost a kind of poetic justice to his father’s money covering the losses he would incur on all the taxes and real estate fees.

  He has recorded his conversation with Tom on his smartphone, informing him, as Maryland law requires, that he is doing so. He then asks Victoria to transcribe it for him, something she grumbles about, but she is his assistant, after all.

  That night, Gerry sleeps better than he has in some time. That is, he sleeps well until 2:11 A.M., when the phone by his bed rings and he picks it up and hears a female voice.

  “Gerry? Gerry? I’m sorry I haven’t called for a while.”

  “No,” he says. “No, no, no.” The calls had stopped after Margot, there aren’t supposed to be any more calls. He had removed the recorder that the private eye recommended. The obvious answer is the obvious answer.

  “We need to talk, Gerry.”

  The voice sounds different, or does it? Slightly more syrupy, but maybe that’s his brain, struggling for consciousness. He is so foggy tonight, he feels as if he’s swimming through sludge.

  “Aileen!” he bellows. “Aileen!”

  She comes up the stairs, moving quickly by her standards, huffing and puffing. “What’s wrong, Mr. Gerry?”

  “Please check the caller ID on the kitchen handset.”

  She grabs the kitchen phone from its cradle. “I must have dozed off, I didn’t hear it ring.”

  Not again, Gerry thinks. Not again.

  “Hey—there is a number—nine-one-seven—where’s that?”

  Nine-one-seven. The area code for New York, the one used by most mobile accounts. “Bring it to me, please.”

  She does. The number is familiar, but not immediately identifiable. He just knows he should know it. So few numbers reside in his memory now, the cost of using a cell phone, although he still remembers his mother’s number on Berwick, a number that no longer rings, connected to a landline that will never ring again. This number, though—it’s tantalizingly familiar. He picks up his cell phone and enters ten digits to see if it will spit out a contact.

  He sees a familiar face in the little circle. Tiny as the face is, he can recognize the come-hither gaze, the coquettish
affect.

  “It’s Margot,” he says. “Someone has Margot’s phone. I thought you—” He doesn’t want to say out loud what he thought, that he presumed Aileen would take care of disposing of everything.

  *

  IT IS FOUR A. M. and the two have been sitting up, neither capable of sleep. Aileen can’t even muster the concentration to knit.

  “I did,” she says for the umpteenth time. “I dropped her purse in the harbor, expensive as it was. A Birkin bag—it broke my heart to do that. A purse like that goes for thousands of dollars on the Internet. Anyway, if a phone was in there, it wouldn’t be any good, even if it was in an OtterBox. Besides—”

  “Besides, what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You didn’t look through her purse?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to know what I think?”

  Gerry does and he realizes how unfathomable this notion would have been to him two weeks ago. God help him, he wants to know what Aileen thinks.

  “She has a partner.”

  “What?”

  “This thing that’s happening to you, it takes two people, I think. Margot was in cahoots with someone—and this person has her phone.”

  “How, why?” Gerry considers all the times Margot lost her phone, left it in restaurants, cabs, salons. Margot was forever losing her phone. But why would some stranger then call him? “Even if there’s another person involved—why continue the ruse when Margot has gone missing? Why use a phone with a number I can identify? The point has been to drive me crazy, make me look as if I’m imagining things, right?”

  Aileen leaves her chair and plops herself on his bed, which he finds odd, un-nurse-like, but he doesn’t feel he should protest. Still, her weight causes the mattress to shift, which gives him some discomfort in his braced right leg. First do no harm, Aileen. That’s for doctors, but nurses should strive for it, too.

  “If someone can make you believe a dead Margot is calling you from beyond the grave, maybe that would be enough to send you around the bend.”

  “But she didn’t say she was Margot. And what’s the point in sending me ‘around the bend’?”

  “Wasn’t that the point of the whole campaign? These mysterious phone calls that no one else heard, the mysterious ghost you thought you saw, although I still don’t know how that would be possible.”

  It would be possible if Margot stole his badge and keys the first time she visited. Everything is falling into place. The relief he feels is almost like, like, like—oh, never mind, Gerry hates similes anyway. He’s not losing his mind. He thinks not of Gaslight, but of Bette Davis in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, watching the laughing conspiratorial lovers waltz and talk, waltz and talk on the verandah below her, delighting in how they turned the poor woman’s mind against her. How his mother had loved that movie, which seemed to air every three months on Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. But between that film and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, young Gerry had been terrified of Bette Davis.

  “Margot kept suggesting she had something on me. But it wasn’t Margot’s voice on the phone. Obviously.”

  Aileen nods, taps her temple. “As I said, she has a partner. Probably someone right here in Baltimore—that’s the only way to explain that one call that came from a local number.”

  “Whom could Margot possibly know in Baltimore? Why would someone else have her phone? And if someone does—they must suspect that something has happened to Margot. They want something, but what?”

  “Money,” Aileen says. “Money or love. Isn’t that the reason for most things people do? We can live without one, but not without both.”

  “Money is important only insofar as it provides for our basic needs and safety. Relative to being fed and having a roof over one’s head, love is a luxury.”

  “Then why aren’t there more good movies about people trying to be fed and putting a roof over their heads?”

  “Don’t be ridic—” He decides to soften his critique. “There are such movies. And books. There are great stories about man versus the elements, intent only on his survival.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well—” Gerry finds himself struggling. He is sure that he used to give a lecture on this very topic and yet all he can think of right now is The Old Man and the Sea, a novel he loathes. “Actually”—wait, men are not supposed to say actually anymore—“there are many, trust me. But you’re right, it wouldn’t apply here. Margot may have wanted my love, but even Margot had to realize we were done. So, fine, money. Let’s accept your theory that she and her partner want money. Do you think the partner’s desire for money would trump any concern about Margot’s well-being, her possible murder?”

  “People overlook a lot,” Aileen says, “when they’re greedy.”

  Gerry has to concede this. Greed, lust, desire—they do lead a person to rationalize.

  “Okay, but how was—how is—this elaborate prank supposed to shake money loose?”

  “Margot said she knew something about you, right? Her partner would know whatever it is. The partner wanted you to recognize Margot’s number, wants you to panic. They want you to see through the trick this time.”

  “They?”

  “Well, she, now. The bill’s going to come due, mark my words.”

  And the irony, Gerry realizes, is that now he does have something to hide, whereas he didn’t before.

  “What do we do?”

  “Nothing. Remember your own advice—inaction is better than action. We do nothing, we wait. She’ll make another move.”

  He shakes his head. He can’t put his finger on it, but the logic of the story isn’t tracking. Something is wrong. Margot was too sophisticated to think that unearthing a woman who said Dream Girl was her life story would matter to him. He had weathered that attempt to scandalize him already, when Shannon Little published her anemic little book. Oh, such a claim might warrant a new flurry of attention, but unless someone could prove his book had been plagiarized from another text, or stolen from a student’s manuscript—no, no one would care and Margot, literary hanger-on that she was, would have been shrewd enough to know that. Besides, he hadn’t done those things. All he had ever done was refuse to tell the world “who” the dream girl was. Magicians are allowed to safeguard their tricks; why aren’t novelists?

  “What do you think happens next?” he asks Aileen. “If you’re right—if there is someone out there in whom Margot confided, someone who has ended up with Margot’s phone and has reason to believe I know something about her disappearance—what’s her next move?”

  She throws up her hands. “Who knows?”

  “So you’re a pantser, not a plotter?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  2001

  “ONE LAST QUESTION? And then Mr. Andersen will be happy to sign some books.”

  Gerry was in an independent bookstore in Bexley, Ohio. He was pretty sure he was in Bexley, Ohio. The days had run together long ago. This was the last stop of what felt like a never-ending tour and he hoped this was truly the last question he would answer for a while. If someone told him tonight that he would never have to speak about himself or Dream Girl ever again, he would be a happy man.

  “Gentleman in the back?” the store’s manager said.

  “You don’t seem to like men very much,” the gentleman said. And Gerald Arnold Andersen Jr. found himself looking at Gerald Arnold Andersen Sr. for the first time in almost twenty years, since his father had insisted on showing up at his college graduation in Princeton. (“I paid for some of it,” he said, which was not untrue, but his contributions were fitful and unreliable.) From that day on, Gerry had refused to have any relationship with his father. In interviews, he went out of his way to make it clear that he had been raised by a single mother, that his father was not in the picture at all. He omitted any mention of his father’s bigamy out of fealty to his mother.

  “My c
haracters are my characters,” he said. “I think it’s somewhat naive, as a reader, to talk about whether writers ‘like’ their characters. That’s not the point of what I’m doing. But perhaps I’m not the writer for you. I have you pegged as more of a MacDonald guy.”

  There had, in fact, been MacDonald novels in the house when Gerry was young and he credited his father’s detective stories with ushering him over the threshold into the world of adult books. His memories of MacDonald were nothing but fond. But he was thrown off by his father’s appearance and his words came out brackish, belittling. He had breached the basic etiquette of a book tour, in which the author must always be kind, no matter how ridiculous the question.

  And no matter if it was asked by your wastrel father, who, go figure, had shown up as Gerry was finishing his victory lap. Ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and counting, a film option, and now his publisher was going to re-release his three previous novels in handsome new editions with covers in the style of Dream Girl.

  Gerry Senior had to want something. But what?

  Not an autobiographical book. He didn’t even have the decency to buy a copy. But he lingered as Gerry signed books for the hearteningly long line of customers. Gerry’s media escort, a busty divorcée who had been dropping hints about sleeping with him—lots of jokes throughout the long day about how hilarious it is that she’s called an escort, etc., etc.—pegged his father, lingering at the back of the room, as trouble. He could sense it in her body language, how she made sure to stand in what would be Senior’s direct path, should he try to approach. But his father remained where he was, his back against the science fiction section. Did anyone see the resemblance? It killed Gerry how much he looked like his father. The Andersen genes were strong—in the rare photos that show him with his father’s family, you could always pick out who married into that tribe of blue-eyed blonds. His mother appeared outlandishly petite and dark in the family holiday photo taken when Gerry was not quite two. Legend had it that Grandmother Andersen had leaned over and hissed to her son: “Is she a Jewess?”