“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.
My father was a tournament poker player. He tried to teach me how to play. The rules were easy: three of a kind beats two pair, full house beats a flush, high cards are better than low. Calculating the odds of having a winning hand was also fairly simple. Subtract the cards in play （on the table and in players’ hands） from the total in the deck （fifty-two）; everything is a ratio. But good players don’t play the cards, my dad told me. They play the people. The winner is not the person whose cards come up. It’s the person who correctly reads his opponents, knows what their betting patterns are, when they have the cards and when they’re bluffing. As good as I was at counting cards and math, I was a miserable poker player. Someone clearly knew that, because I’d been played to a T.
If I hadn’t been so squeamish about seeing Louisa’s dead body, I might have been suspicious about how efficiently （not） Silvia had wrapped things up. Perhaps I had committed so firmly to acting with integrity, it didn’t occur to me to question anyone else’s. Or maybe I was just a dumb fuck. Whatever the case, my choice not to scrutinize the situation was a catastrophic error in judgment. But catastrophic errors in judgment were not out of character for me. One might say I was an expert at making them and had once again flexed that well-developed muscle.
Of course, there was another reason I hadn’t questioned the authenticity of the message: the idea that someone would impersonate Louisa’s nurse for any reason, including, but not limited to, relaying news of her death, was absolute lunacy. Only a psychopath would do that, and it felt completely out of the realm of possibility.
It was a tough pill to swallow that not only was there a psychopath on the other end of that message, but I’d also just gone on a date with her.
CHAPTER 40
* * *
ASHLEY
I peeled off my tweed suit and crawled into bed. There was no point getting out because （a） it was rainy and miserable outside; （b） I’d just been fired from my job for not showing up today; and （c） apparently I was rich now and didn’t need said job. I guess that’s what you would call a classic case of good news, bad news. Given that I didn’t exactly relish being a tour guide, the good should have canceled out the bad. So why was I so depressed?