“No, not a lawyer. Trust me,” she says. “I can take care of this.”
“How?”
“Trust me,” she repeats. She takes off her coat, drapes it over a chair. He does not remonstrate with her for this. “Put yourself into my hands.”
Not the image he would have chosen, but he will do exactly that. He has to. He literally cannot imagine what it would be like to follow any other course of action. To call the police or a lawyer. To tell Thiru. No, he will trust Aileen.
She continues with appealing confidence, energized by this new task: “Cancel Claude. Then call Victoria and tell her not to come in today.”
“On what grounds?”
“You’re the writer. Make something up.”
He does. He calls Victoria and tells her that he needs her to drive up to Princeton and inspect its special collections. “I want to find out what the experience of accessing my papers will be like for future researchers,” he says. “Tell them that you are interested in seeing the collections of Toni Morrison and, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
“Do you think those are the best, um, comps?”
An impertinent question, but he doesn’t have the luxury of challenging Victoria’s assessment of his place in American literature. Although, he can’t help noting to himself that his body of work is larger than Fitzgerald’s.
“My thinking is that those will be two of the most in-demand, that library staff should be used to scholars asking to see their papers. If they can’t handle this request, then I can’t expect them to do well by those who might want to examine my papers.”
“The drive alone—”
“I know. It is a lot. You could take the train, but it wouldn’t save much time in the end. And it will be a long day no matter how efficient you are. Why don’t you stay in a hotel—I can recommend a nice inn, near campus—and spend the night, break the work up over two days and then take Friday off to make up for all the extra hours.”
Aileen, who is scrubbing the floor, gives him a rubber-gloved thumbs-up.
Aileen’s efficiency today surprises him. Aileen, so slow and dull when going about her normal job of caring for him, has rallied admirably in the matter of removing a corpse and cleaning up after it. It’s like a reality television show in his own living room. He had watched from his bed as she wrapped Margot’s body in a fitted white sheet, presumably one of the ones he keeps for the never-used sofa bed in his study, then dragged it down the stairs like a toboggan.
“Good thing you like the skinny ones,” Aileen had said, huffing and puffing.
“Where will you—”
“The fewer questions you ask,” she told him, “the better. Not knowing anything, not remembering anything—that’s an asset.”
So the body has been removed, the floor is scrubbed. She has washed the letter opener, a cheerful Lady Macbeth, humming as she works, and placed it back on the end table he uses as a nightstand. Gerry asks the Google app on his phone a question: “How do police find blood evidence on objects?” This takes him down a rabbit hole of luminol stories. The letter opener is far from their only problem. Maybe they should just get rid of it? But they can’t get rid of the poured concrete floor, which potentially could hold on to its trace memories of Margot’s death forever.
“Aileen, do you think that—？”
“You have to let me do the thinking.”
Terrifying, but he accedes.
She asks for his credit card and makes a series of mysterious phone calls. He catches references to cubic feet and expedited delivery. Aileen gets testy at one point. “Tomorrow is not expedited,” she says. “Today is expedited. Don’t you know what words mean?” She hangs up on that person, dials another number. This conversation is odder still. “Yes, I am aware that deer season is over, but I hit one with my car.”
And, more often than usual, given that she is not normally here during the day, she appears by his bedside with pills. He wants to protest, but he is so grateful for the sleep, which provides the hope that this is a nightmare from which he will wake.
He picks up the letter opener, presses it to his own face, just below the eye. Skin and bone would be no match for it.
2016
“YOU MUST HAVE THE UNI.”
Gerry looked up, skeptical. Already grumpy at being tricked into going to a fancy restaurant—he had thought he was meeting Thiru for soup dumplings, having no idea where Extra Place was, beyond being on the Lower East Side—he was in no mood to be told what he must eat, or drink. He wanted to get out of the restaurant as fast as possible.