Dream Girl(55)

“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.”