Who is Maud Dixon?(53)

Florence didn’t answer. She didn’t know what Meg was talking about. Her voice seemed very far away.

Meg kept repeating the word with slight variations. “Owl. Owl. Owl. What a weird word. Is it one syllable or two? I can’t even tell.”

“What?” Florence had lost the thread of the conversation.

“Two, I guess. Ow. Wull. Ow. Wull.”

Florence’s feeling of wellbeing slid away. She opened her eyes and looked at the girl next to her. When Meg laughed, the dolphin on her stomach looked like he was having a seizure. Dark hair sprouted jaggedly from her toes, like the upturned legs of a mosquito. Florence felt exposed and unclean. She wanted to be home. She wanted to be in Helen’s room, among Helen’s things. This is not the type of friend Helen would make. This was not right at all.

She stood up abruptly and began gathering her belongings. “I have to go,” she said. She tugged the towel out from under the younger girl’s body roughly. Meg rolled passively onto the sand like a log.

“Alright,” she said cheerfully. “But hey, you should come to this party tonight.”

“Party?”

“I mean, it’s not like a party party. But there are a bunch of expats who gather at this house with a lot of, like, super interesting, creative people. I think you’d like it a lot.”

It didn’t occur to Florence to wonder how Meg might know what she would or would not like. She simply felt flattered that someone would consider it at all. She envisioned herself surrounded by poets and artists wearing colorful kaftans while candles flickered in brass lanterns.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “I would like that.”

Florence explained that she didn’t have a car, and Meg offered to pick her up at Villa des Grenades at eight.

Florence trudged across the hot sand back to the road. She had planned to go into town for lunch, but instead she walked into the first restaurant she saw, a dismal tourist trap advertising “American-style hot dogs,” and drank a Coke while they called a taxi to take her home. She watched the hot dogs roll around in their greasy excretions and thought of pickled heads.





32.



Florence pulled at her lip. She was sitting at the dining room table, still in her damp, sandy clothes, looking at an email from Greta Frost. She read it several times, but the words never changed.

Hi M. Checking in again. Give me a call. I want to discuss TPR in further detail. G.



Florence tried to draw some nuance from the words on the screen. She came up with nothing. She Googled TPR. It was either the stock symbol for a large fashion company or the acronym for a method of teaching foreign languages to children. Neither of those made any sense in this context. She drummed her fingers lightly on the keyboard for a moment. Then she pressed Reply and wrote:

I’ve unfortunately come down with a bad case of food poisoning.



She reread what she’d written and erased it. She sent instead:

Can’t talk today—I’ve been poisoned by a thoroughly rancid piece of octopus. The upshot: I’m getting more insight into Moroccan toilet bowls than I ever thought I would…

M.

An answer immediately pinged back:

What a shame. Get better soon. Stay in touch.

Florence wiped a smudge off the screen and shut the laptop gently. There, she’d begun being Helen Wilcox with someone who actually mattered. The charade was on. She knew that a reckoning with Greta was inevitable, but at this point she just hoped to delay it for as long as possible, at least until she had a clearer idea of how to handle her.

Greta was the major hitch in her plan: She interacted with Helen on a regular basis, she was thoroughly invested in the progress of Helen’s work, and she already wanted to talk to her on the phone.

Florence supposed she could try to convince her to go along with the plan. Greta certainly did have a professional interest in keeping the Maud Dixon name alive and kicking. But enough to ignore the death of someone she had worked with—very successfully—for three years? To aid and abet identity theft? It was hard to say. How could she even broach the idea without admitting everything? It was a tell-all-or-nothing kind of proposal.

Well, there were other avenues besides collaboration. Florence had time. She had options. She was certain of one thing: Now that she’d been given this gift, no one—no one—was going to take it from her.

*



That afternoon Florence slept long and deeply. The sun was setting by the time she got up and showered. She was putting on makeup when Amina knocked gently on the door.

“Come in!” Florence called from the bathroom.

Amina hovered in the doorway. Folded in her hands was Helen’s blue-and-white-striped scarf. Florence froze, mascara wand in hand.

“Where did you get that?”

“Le gendarme,” Amina said. The policeman.

“Idrissi? He’s here?”

“He left. You were sleeping.” She added, looking uncomfortable, “He asked about your friend. When she came home, when she left.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. I don’t stay nights here.”

“Good,” Florence said quietly. “Thank you.”

Amina made no indication that she’d heard. She placed the scarf on the bed and smoothed out a wrinkle. Just then, the doorbell rang, and Florence jumped. She looked at her watch. It was a few minutes before eight. It must be Meg.