Who is Maud Dixon?(75)

“Yes, obviously you know that I’ve been pretending to be you. Is that what you want to hear? Because that transgression seems rather meager compared to whatever you’ve been up to.”

Helen raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“Did you kill Jeanette Byrd? Jenny?”

“It’s complicated, Florence.”

“Either you’re a murderer or not.”

Helen sat down on the bed next to Florence. “I’ll tell you what happened, okay? Just…give me a moment.” She took a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one. Her hand was trembling slightly, Florence noticed.

“Jenny got out of prison earlier this year. We hadn’t kept in touch so I had no idea until she showed up on my doorstep. It was in the middle of a vicious snowstorm, around seven or eight at night. I was reading downstairs by the fire when I saw headlights in my driveway. You’ve lived there—you know that no one ever visits, and it’s pretty much impossible to end up there on a wrong turn. So I went upstairs to get my gun—”

“You have a gun?”

“Of course I have a gun. Only a supremely naive or stupid woman would live all alone in the woods without one. So anyway, I came back downstairs and I saw that it was a taxi pulling in. I figured most murderers and rapists don’t take taxis to their victims’ houses, so I put the gun down and went to the door.

“And there she was. My god. I didn’t even recognize her at first. She used to be beautiful, Florence. Beautiful. All the boys in Hindsville were obsessed with her. The men too. There was one teacher who used to stalk her like a wounded animal. But there was nothing beautiful about that person. She looked like a meth addict. Her hair was long and dirty and it had gone entirely gray. Several of her teeth were missing. She’s my age, but she looked like she was sixty years old.” She stopped herself. “Was my age,” she corrected.

“She grabbed me and hugged me. And I can’t even describe how terrible she smelled. Like…cat sweat. Fermented cat sweat. But what could I do? I hugged her back. I invited her in. She was my oldest friend.

“I brought her back to the kitchen and poured us some coffee. And then we just sat there. It was uncomfortable. The last time I’d seen her we were seventeen years old. At this point, we had nothing in common anymore. Nothing. And she had this nervous tic of picking at her hands. The skin around her fingernails was totally worn away, like someone went at it with a Brillo pad. I finally noticed her glancing at the bourbon above the fridge, so I offered her some. We both put a little in our coffee, and then it got a little easier. She started to talk. She told me that I was the only thing that got her through prison. Me. That she understood why I did what I did. That she forgave me. That we were sisters—we always had been and always would be.”

“Forgave you for what?”

“What?”

“You said she said she forgave you.”

“Oh. That. I took away her alibi. She had asked if she could say that she was with me the night of the murder, and I said yes. Then my father explained what a terrible idea that was. Thank god. I mean, I didn’t know what perjury was. I thought lying to the police was basically the same thing as lying to a teacher. So I went back and told the truth—that we’d been together earlier in the night, but she’d gone off with Ellis at around eleven.” Helen paused. “That’s when her case fell apart.”

Helen took another drag of her cigarette and went on: “The more she drank, the more wired she got. Manic almost. She was pacing around the kitchen. She started picking up glasses and vases and asking me how much they cost, opening cabinets and slamming them shut. She was getting angry. Then suddenly her version of events was that it was my fault she’d been in prison. And all that time I’d been getting rich off her story.”

“She knew about the book?”

“Yes, it had made its way into the prison, and people were talking. As soon as she heard what it was about, she realized it was her life. She said I stole it.” Helen rolled her eyes.

“Well, you did, didn’t you?”

“All great writers steal. Dostoyevsky. Shakespeare. Everyone. Anyway, it was our story. It was always ours.”

“So what happened?”

“She went crazy, that’s what happened. She said she wanted the money I made from the book, that it was her money. This went on for hours: screaming, yelling, weeping. I finally got her to go to sleep in the carriage house at around four in the morning. The next day, we both slept late, and we actually had a nice time. We went for a walk, we talked, I made us lunch. But then I told her I thought she should go back to Mississippi. That it was a mistake to violate her parole. I even offered to help get her back on her feet. But she just…I don’t know. She snapped. She came at me.”

“What do you mean she came at you?”

“She grabbed a knife from that wooden block on the kitchen counter and she just rushed at me. I didn’t know what to do. Instinct took over. I grabbed a pot and I hit her as hard as I could. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? It’s like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. I thought she was going to sit up all dazed and cross-eyed, with a little halo of stars dancing around her head. But she didn’t. She just lay there. Dead.”

“Jesus.”

Helen said nothing.