Over Her Dead Body(50)
“Sorry, yes. I’m just trying to figure out how someone . . . why someone . . . I mean, who would do that?” I stammered.
I flashed back to that horrible morning when the message came in. I had never met Silvia Hernandez. I didn’t know if she was young or old, joyful or morose, had a lisp, a stutter, or any other distinguishing vocal characteristics. I detected an accent but had no idea if it was supposed to sound Mexican, Central American, Puerto Rican, or right off the boat from Spain. She was a complete unknown entity to me. Which of course was why I was chosen.
“You said you never actually spoke with her,” Charlie reconfirmed.
“That’s right,” I said, recalling how I’d stared out my window right after hearing (not) Silvia’s shocking “news.” Cars were whizzing down the busy street beneath my third-floor condo; people were going to work, kids were going to school. I’d felt a rush of anger: A woman just died! Would it kill you to stop for a few fucking minutes!
“She left a message, and I left her one back,” I said.
“But she never called you again after that?” Charlie asked.
“No. We texted.”
“Can we see the texts?”
I opened the text chain.
“Her first text after my message was ‘Sorry, not getting service here,’” I said. I hadn’t questioned the validity of her assertion, then or now; it was true, the cell service on Louisa’s street was spotty. If she wasn’t on her Wi-Fi, it’s totally possible that she couldn’t make a call.
“Then what?” Winnie asked.
“Then I texted that I could be there in an hour,” I said. “It was rush hour traffic,” I added, so they wouldn’t think I was blowing it off.
“And then?”
I looked down at my phone. “Then she texted, ‘I called the funeral home, they are already on their way. Should I have them wait for you?’” I had rationalized that it was perfectly logical that Silvia would know which funeral home to call—she was her nurse, after all, and saw her more regularly than Winnie, Charlie, and me put together. Plus I was too grateful to question Silvia’s eagerness to take care of everything. I had never seen a dead body and was perfectly happy not to break my streak.
“And you said not to wait for you?”
“She responded like two seconds later, ‘They are here. OK to take her now?’”
“And you said yes.”
“It didn’t make sense for them to have to wait for me—it’s not like there was anything I could do to help the situation.” I tried not to sound defensive, but I could feel my face getting hot.
“No, of course,” Winnie assured me. “Go on.”
“Then she wrote, ‘She passed in the library, in her favorite chair.’”
I remembered how I’d gotten a chill, just as I had one now, as I pictured Louisa cozying into that chair with a book and a cup of tea, for the last time. I remembered thinking it was a relatively dignified way to go, and that Louisa would be happy about that.
“Her last text was, ‘I am very sorry for your loss, Mr. Nathan, I loved her, too,’” I read.
“And then nothing?” Winnie asked.
I shook my head. “That’s it.”
“Why don’t we try texting that number now?” Winnie asked. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but I just said “OK” and gave her my phone.
“What should I say?”
“How about ‘Who the fuck are you and what the hell happened to our mother?’” Charlie offered.
“I don’t want to scare them,” Winnie said. “We want them to engage.”
As Winnie’s thumbs hovered over my keyboard, I thought back to Louisa’s dinner announcement that she wanted to change her will (“Needed to” change? “Was going to” change?), then finding her asleep on the sofa after I did the dishes. Yes, she was tired, but she didn’t seem on the verge of death. But it could be like that sometimes. A classmate of mine from UCLA died of an aneurysm in a yoga class. One minute she was in downward dog, the next minute a blood vessel burst in her brain and she was unrevivable. She was only twenty. Another guy, a young dad I knew from the golf club, died in the pool during his morning laps. His heart just stopped. Electrical failure, they said. All that to say, Louisa’s sudden death had felt credible to me. Because I knew that even people in the pinnacle of health could die without warning.
“How about this?” Winnie said. “Hi, Nathan again. We want to pay you severance for your service to Louisa, can you please call me?”
“That’s good,” Charlie said. “Maybe they’ll call because they want the money.” So Winnie pressed “Send” and handed me back my phone.
“Let us know if they text back.”
I nodded, even though I knew fake Silvia would never text back, risk blowing her cover. I knew who she was, of course. The terrifying unknown was, Why had she done it?
Looking back, I marvel at how easy it would have been for me to catch the perpetrator of this crazy scheme in the act. If I had just told (not really) Silvia to wait until I’d gotten there, if I had called the funeral parlor myself to arrange for the pickup, if I had insisted (fake) Silvia call me instead of doing this all by text, the whole charade would have unraveled. But instead of exposing the ruse, I fell headlong into the trap that was set for me.