Who is Maud Dixon? Read online

  “No, that’s not…” Florence paused.

  There was no windshield. It must have shattered on impact. And Helen, Helen who never wore a seat belt…

  He continued to stare at her intently.

  “So there wasn’t any…thing else in the car?”

  “What else?”

  She paused.

  “My shoes,” she finally said. “I’m missing my shoes. They were expensive.”

  Idrissi flared his nostrils. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and made a call, speaking rapidly in Arabic. When he hung up, he said to her, “No shoes. But they found a scarf.”

  “A scarf?”

  “Yes. A blue-and-white-striped scarf. Were you wearing something like that?”

  In her mind’s eye, Florence watched Helen flick her cigarette over the edge of the railing, her striped scarf slipping from her shoulders as she did.

  “Yes, that’s mine,” she whispered.

  “Okay, I will collect it for you.”

  “Thank you.” She stared resolutely at the thin blanket covering her legs. She wanted him to leave. And with a violent yank at the curtain, he obliged.

  She forced herself to breathe more slowly.

  He didn’t know there was someone else in the car. He didn’t know she’d killed someone. He didn’t know. Helen must have just…floated away.

  Florence put her hands over her face. She stayed like that for several minutes, until she realized that what she was doing was a type of performance, and that she had no audience. She put her hands back on the bed.

  28.

  Early the next morning, a nurse brought Florence some forms to sign; she was being released. The forms were written in Arabic, but Florence didn’t care. She printed the name Helen Wilcox where the nurse pointed and scribbled an illegible signature underneath.

  And just like that, the chance for Florence to tell them that she was not Helen Wilcox came and went.

  Her legs almost collapsed beneath her when she stood up. The nurse helped her to a communal bathroom in the hallway. It was small and filthy. For the first time she felt grateful for the bedpan she’d been using until then.

  She dressed stiffly, avoiding a brackish puddle on the concrete floor. Afterward, she spent a long time looking in the mirror. Her face was swollen and discolored. She had a strange feeling of disassociation, as if the mirror were in fact a window or a photograph of someone else. She remembered when people were drunk in college they would draw with Sharpie on the faces of friends who had passed out. She felt like someone had done that to her—painted on bruises and blood with stage makeup while she slept.

  But of course they were real. They were tender and raw. The salt-stiff fabric of her dress stung when it scraped against the abrasions on her body. The heavy tape wrapped around her torso pulled at her purpled skin.

  She turned on the hot water tap at the sink and held her hands underneath the uneven stream. It stayed a disgusting tepid temperature even after several minutes. She shut it off in frustration.

  Before she was released, they handed her a bill. It came out to ninety US dollars. She put it on Helen’s credit card. Then the policeman, Idrissi, arrived to drive her back to Villa des Grenades. She would rather have taken a taxi, but she didn’t want to raise suspicion. What innocent person would refuse a policeman offering a ride? Especially someone without any shoes.

  In the car, she turned to ask him, “Am I in trouble?”

  “As I said, it is against the law, alcohol and driving.”

  “But why do you think I was drinking? Was I Breathalized?”

  “What is that?”

  “I mean, do you have proof that I was drinking?”

  “The restaurant says yes.”

  “You talked to them?”

  “Of course I talked to them.”

  Florence shifted uncomfortably in her seat. The seat belt was hurting her ribs. “What will happen?” she asked.

  The car in front of them stopped suddenly, and Idrissi punched the horn. He leaned his head out the window and shouted angrily at the other driver. When they were moving again, he leaned back in his seat and took a deep breath. At the next stoplight he turned to Florence and said, “What will happen? Probably nothing. Tourism is important here. You understand?”

  Florence nodded. She felt ashamed, as she was sure he’d intended her to.

  “My nephew was in jail for six months for this. But my nephew, of course, is not American.”

  “I’m sorry,” Florence said lamely. She didn’t ask, although she wondered, why he hadn’t been able to use his police connections to help get his nephew out of it. Maybe that didn’t happen here.

  “Your English is very good,” she said, hoping flattery might soften him.

  “Yes, I’m chosen for the new brigade touristique,” he said through gritted teeth. “Police. Just for tourists.”

  “Congratulations,” Florence said unsurely.

  He scoffed and pressed harder on the gas.

  When they arrived at the house, Amina started down the footpath to meet the car. She stopped when she saw the policeman behind the wheel. He nodded at her. She just looked at him.

  As Florence put her hand on the door handle, Idrissi suddenly asked, “Where is your friend?”

  She spun to face him. “What friend?” she asked sharply. She thought she saw a shadow of a smile on his face, as if he’d been waiting to spring that question on her.

  “The one you ate dinner with at Dar Amal.”

  Of course. He’d spoken with the restaurant.

  Florence wondered if it was too late to come clean; to tell him about the whiskey and the scarf and the dark hole in her memory. She opened her mouth and shut it again.

  “She took a taxi home early,” she said so quietly that Idrissi had to lean in to hear her.

  “Why’s that?”

  “She wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Did the restaurant call the taxi?”

  Florence shook her head. “She did it on her phone.”

  “And where is she now? She didn’t come to see you in the hospital?”

  Florence shrugged. “Her plan was to go back to Marrakesh the next morning. I assume she still went. She probably doesn’t even know about the accident.”

  Idrissi stared at her and said nothing.

  Florence hesitantly returned her hand to the door handle. When Idrissi made no move to stop her, she opened it and climbed out.

  As she started to walk away, Idrissi rolled down the passenger window and called out, “Madame Weel-cock?”

  Florence turned.

  “Tell me if you have plans to leave Semat.” He held a business card out the window. She slipped it into her still-damp purse then stepped gingerly across the driveway in her bare feet to where Amina stood. The two women watched Idrissi drive away down the hill.

  When his car was out of sight, Amina turned and gestured at the bruises on her face and the cast on her wrist. “You are okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” Florence reassured her. She felt a rush of relief to be someplace familiar. She was grateful for this woman’s kindness, in stark contrast to Idrissi’s anger and suspicion.

  She followed the older woman into the house and went straight upstairs. Her body ached and she longed to lie down. But before going into her own room, she went to investigate Helen’s. All of Helen’s clothes were still hanging in the closet. Her jewelry was scattered on top of the dresser. Even her toothbrush was in its place in the cup on the sink. It all looked as if their owner were due back at any moment. A small part of Florence had been holding on to the hope that Helen really had left Semat on her own, but now she saw how foolish that was. Helen wouldn’t have left without her clothes, her toothbrush, her passport.

  Florence ran her hand lightly across the dresses hanging in the closet. The hangers responded with a quiet tinkling.

  She sat down heavily on Helen’s bed and pulled the pain medication she’d been given at the hospital from her purse
. She swallowed two hydrocodones with water from a half-empty glass that had been sitting there for two days. She collapsed backward and stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. It had been a mistake to lie to the police. But she couldn’t have told him that there was someone else in the car. They might look the other way when a tourist drove drunk, but they certainly wouldn’t if she’d killed someone in the process. Manslaughter was manslaughter.

  Besides, what was the point? Helen was clearly gone. It wasn’t like she was hanging on a piece of flotsam, waiting to be rescued. She was dead. Nothing could change that.

  Florence tried to consider the implications of this fact. She would never see Helen again. She now had no job and no home. No one would ever read another word by Maud Dixon. Florence waited for the tears to come. But the painkillers were starting to kick in and her head felt cloudy. Everything was muffled.

  Her thoughts kept returning to Helen’s body. Where was it right now? She knew from the sensationalized Florida news shows her mother liked to watch that bodies became unidentifiable after just a few days in the water, bloated with water and eaten away by fish. She also knew that in some cultures—most cultures—the treatment of dead bodies was of sacred importance, but Florence had never understood that, and she suspected Helen would not have sanctioned such sentimentality either. The dead were dead. The rites were just a salve for the living.

  She rolled over onto her side and looked around Helen’s room. It was much bigger than hers.

  Without another thought, she was asleep.

  29.

  Florence spent the next day in bed. Even if she hadn’t been in too much pain to get up and do anything, she was paralyzed by crushing anxiety. What had she done? How was it possible that in the last sixty hours she’d killed her boss—one of America’s most respected novelists—and lied to the police about it? It was like it had happened to someone else.

  She tried over and over again to remember the night of the accident. She shut her eyes and saw the drive to the restaurant, the whiskeys, the camel meat.

  And then what?

  She couldn’t keep the narrative going. She tried to gain enough momentum from the beginning of the story to sail through the point at which her memories stopped. Drive. Whiskey. Camel. Drive. Whiskey. Camel. Then what? Then…nothing.

  There was nothing there.

  Had she really drunk that much? She’d blacked out from drinking before, but not for years. Not since college. Of course, she had been drinking on an empty stomach. Stupid.

  She shut her eyes tightly again. Drive. Whiskey. Camel.

  And all of a sudden she remembered a rush of water. Was she just imagining it? No. There it was again—cold water, rising quickly.

  And there was more: A hand gripping her arm tightly. Whose hand? The fisherman’s?

  She opened her eyes and pushed up her sleeve to inspect her upper arm. Much of the skin on her upper body was discolored, but she thought she could discern four small bruises—each the size of a fingerprint—that were distinct from the rest.

  Just then Amina knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” Florence called out hoarsely.

  The older woman entered with a tray of toast and eggs. She returned a minute later with a large brass teapot and poured Florence a steaming cup of mint tea. It would have been easier for her to pour it in the kitchen, but Florence appreciated the ceremony of it. Her mother had rarely been able to take off a day from work when she’d been sick as a child, and she was enjoying Amina’s ministrations.

  Amina watched with satisfaction as Florence sipped the sweet tea. “Your friend is gone?” she asked.

  Florence hadn’t said anything about why she’d swapped rooms or what had happened to Helen. She hadn’t even explained where her bruises had come from. She could have blamed the lapse on confusion from the pain medication, but the truth was that she couldn’t stand the thought of Amina looking at her in the same way that policeman had. She nodded.

  “She will return?”

  “I don’t think so. She went back to Marrakesh.”

  “Without…” Amina gestured around the room that was strewn with Helen’s belongings.

  “She brought a few things in a small bag. I’ll bring the rest when I go.”

  Amina nodded.

  Florence spent much of the day dozing. She kept waking up in a confused panic. Maybe she’d gotten food poisoning, she thought at one point, eager for an explanation that would shift the burden of responsibility. Maybe Helen had somehow forced her to drink too much. She’d certainly been liberal with the wine back in the States.

  Finally, as dusk was falling, Florence reached over and took a double dose of her pain medication. The next time she woke, it was morning.

  * * *

  The heat had thickened overnight, and Florence could feel it lying heavily on her like another blanket. It might already have been ninety degrees. She kicked off the covers, pushed two pillows against the headboard, and shimmied herself up as gently as she could to a sitting position. She was sore, but the pain had lost its sharp edges. She reached for her phone before remembering that she didn’t have one anymore. She looked at the hydrocodones on the bedside table but decided not to take one. Yesterday had been a swirl of confusion and frustration and paranoia, fueled in part, she felt sure, by the pain medication. She couldn’t do that again.

  Sitting there in the hot, bright room, she could smell the sourness rising from her body. She hadn’t showered in more than two days. She smelled deeply, grotesquely of herself—flesh marinated in its own excretions. How much effort we have to put into concealing our own scent, she thought.

  She walked into Helen’s large tiled bathroom on shaky legs and took a long shower, holding the wrist with the cast on it outside the stream of water as best she could. Her scrapes stung, but it felt pleasantly bracing. The pain reinforced her physicality. She didn’t want to be in her head right now.

  Afterward, still wrapped in a towel, she patted on some thick moisturizer from a glass jar on the counter. She combed her hair back and looked at herself in the mirror.

  She understood how she could have been mistaken for Helen at the hospital, at least in comparison to the photograph in Helen’s sodden passport. The major points matched—slender build, blond hair, dark eyes. And her face was swollen and bruised, which obscured most of its individuality. She was reminded of a piece of writing advice Helen had once given her: You only need to give one or two details about a character’s physical appearance. It’s all the reader needs to build an image in her mind. Anything more is a distraction.

  Florence put on a pair of Helen’s underwear—gray silk. She opened the door to Helen’s closet and pulled out a beige linen dress with horn buttons running down the center. She slipped on a few of Helen’s bracelets.

  She remembered suddenly that Helen had been wearing chunky bangles on the night of the accident. Had she tried to swim out of the car? Could they have weighed her down?

  She patted her cheeks lightly. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It doesn’t matter. Don’t get sucked into an endless stream of questions again.

  Downstairs on the terrace she ate heartily. She slathered brioches with butter and jam and asked Amina to make her fried eggs. She drank three cups of coffee with cream. Afterward, she flopped down in one of the lounge chairs. Amina brought her some cold water with mint and lemon in it. The glass had already started sweating before she set it down. Florence closed her eyes and felt the heat press on her.

  Helen was dead.

  She rotated the thought around, like she was holding it up to the light, inspecting it on all sides. Helen was dead.

  She waited, again, to feel something: grief, maybe guilt. But neither came.

  Death is the most transformative event in anyone’s existence, she thought, yet once it has happened, it doesn’t matter to that person anymore. There’s no person left. At that point, any significance it has fragments and scatters. Its impact is diffused among the survivors.<
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  And who were they, for Helen? Her mother was dead, and she was estranged from the rest of her family. Who else was there? Her editor? By Helen’s account, they were not close. Greta? She might feel the sting of losing a client, but everyone has their share of professional disappointments.

  Really, the only person to feel sorry for was herself. She was the one who’d been injured, left alone in a foreign country, shorn of a job, a home, and a mentor in one fell swoop.

  Yet she didn’t feel anything. No pity, no regret, nothing.

  And in the lack of this emotion, of any emotion really, Florence was able to view the facts in a clearheaded way. And what she found so interesting about the facts, so very interesting, was that no one knew what had happened. She was the only person on earth who knew that Helen Wilcox was dead.

  30.

  It’s possible that some part of Florence knew what she was going to do the moment she heard Officer Idrissi whisper that name in her ear: Madame Weel-cock. Or maybe it was earlier—maybe it was the first time she walked into Helen’s cold, whitewashed house five weeks before and saw the ranunculus in the window, the glowing fireplace. Certainly by the time she found herself lying under Semat’s glaring sun on that unseasonably hot morning there was little doubt in her mind.

  She was going to become Helen Wilcox.

  And why not? Helen’s identity was just waiting there, unused, like a big, empty house. Meanwhile, she was living in a small, ugly, Florence-size hovel. Why shouldn’t she move into the abandoned mansion? Why should she let it fall into disrepair instead? She could go in and do some upkeep. Clean the gutters, wash the floors, make sure it stayed in good shape.

  She already had the keys; that was the amazing part. She knew how to be Helen. She was more experienced in the minor bureaucracy of Helen’s life than Helen was herself—she lived in her house and paid her bills and wrote her emails. She certainly thought she could pass, physically, for Helen; she already had. Helen’s passport and driver’s license photos were small and outdated anyway, obscured by both holograms and, now, water damage. Helen’s most prominent feature was the sharp bump on her nose, but it wasn’t really visible in a photograph taken straight-on. Besides, who really looked all that closely at these photos anyway?