Who is Maud Dixon?(2)
In practice, however, Lucy lacked the confident sophistication that Florence assumed would be the natural inheritance of a childhood like that. She was painstakingly shy, and Florence sometimes suspected that Lucy’s mother had told her to find just one friend in New York and she’d be fine. Florence had been the first person Lucy met at Forrester.
They had never really been incorporated into the company’s larger social scene, mainly because Lucy hadn’t tried and Florence hadn’t succeeded. Since Florence had also cut off contact with her old friends from Florida—she thought of her past as a gangrenous limb that needed to be severed for the greater good—Lucy was, for all intents and purposes, her only friend.
They wormed their way through the crowd, past a long table piled with grapes and cheeses, toward an imposing mahogany bar in the back. A bartender in a black satin vest smiled at some point just above their heads. They did not, apparently, meet the qualifications for his undivided attention. Lucy was used to being overlooked—in fact seemed to prefer it—but Florence had had just enough success with men to be disappointed when her charms went unnoticed.
Florence was not unattractive, but without exception the first thing anyone noticed about her was her pallor. She looked like someone who had grown up in a bunker rather than the Florida sunshine. Evidence that she had been born in the wrong place, she often thought with satisfaction. Her fair skin flushed easily, whether with shyness or fervor was never quite clear, as if her creator had been torn between the competing impulses of purity and perversion. Some men found this effect entrancing, but many were put off. She also had dark, nearly black eyes and dirty blond curls that sprang from her head like Medusa’s. Despite the hundreds of dollars her mother had spent over the years on gels, sprays, and holding creams, Florence still had not learned how to tame them.
“What’ll it be, ladies?” the bartender asked in a practiced tone. The light glinted off the stiffened spikes of his hair. Florence imagined crunching them under her fingers like frost-covered grass.
Lucy pointed to a placard advertising the specialty cocktail. “I’ll try the Dewar’s Decimal System, I guess.”
Florence ordered a red wine.
“I’ve got Cabernet or Pinot.”
“Either,” she said in a tone she hoped sounded breezy. She knew nothing about wine.
They each took a sip, then set off to find a group with breachable borders. They spotted some other assistants huddled by the food table and joined the fringes. A junior editor named Amanda Lincoln was arguing showily with a tall, lanky twenty-something in a tan corduroy suit.
“There’s literally no way, you fucking misogynist,” Amanda said.
Gretchen, a perky assistant whose desk faced Florence’s, turned to explain, “Fritz claims he knows for a fact that Maud Dixon is a man.”
“No,” whispered Lucy, drawing her hand up to her mouth.
Maud Dixon was the pen name of a writer who’d published a spectacularly successful debut novel a couple of years earlier called Mississippi Foxtrot. It was about two teenage girls, Maud and Ruby, desperate to escape their tiny hometown of Collyer Springs, Mississippi. They are thwarted at every turn by their age, their gender, their poverty, and the cold indifference of their families. Everything comes to a head when Maud kills a contractor traveling through town on his way to a job in Memphis. He had made the mistake of setting his sights on sixteen-year-old Ruby and refusing to look away.
The murder ultimately releases both girls from the clutches of their hometown. One ends up in prison; the other lands a scholarship to Ole Miss.
Critics had remarked upon the sharp, unsentimental prose and the freshness of the perspective, which caught the attention of the literary crowd, but the book didn’t really take off until a famous Hollywood actress chose it for her book club. Whether by prescience or by luck, the novel had appeared at the height of the #MeToo movement and perfectly captured the strain of righteous, brutal anger in the air. Whatever happened the night young Maud Dixon stabbed Frank Dillard—an undeniably menacing, lecherous figure—behind the Driftwood Tavern, you couldn’t quite bring yourself to blame her for it.
The book had sold more than three million copies in the U.S. alone, and there was a mini-series in production. Curiously, its author, Maud Dixon, was a cipher. She did no interviews, no book tours, no publicity whatsoever. There wasn’t even an acknowledgments page in the book.
The novel’s publishing house—one of Forrester’s competitors—admitted that “Maud Dixon” was a pen name, and that the author preferred to remain anonymous. Naturally, this set off immediate and rampant speculation about her identity. “Who is Maud Dixon?” was the question asked in countless magazine articles, online forums, and publishing lunches all over town.
The two known Maud Dixons in America had been duly tracked down and ruled out. One lived in a nursing home in Chicago and couldn’t remember the names of her own children. The other was a dental hygienist who’d grown up in a middle-class town on Long Island and by all accounts had never shown any talent for or proclivity toward writing.
Many people assumed the story was autobiographical since the author and the narrator shared a name. A few amateur sleuths had identified crimes that shared certain markers with the one in the book, but none matched closely enough to be a smoking gun. Besides, Mississippi sealed the court records of juvenile offenders when they turned twenty. The town of Collyer Springs didn’t even exist. The investigation stalled there.