“And where is she now? She didn’t come to see you in the hospital?”
Florence shrugged. “Her plan was to go back to Marrakesh the next morning. I assume she still went. She probably doesn’t even know about the accident.”
Idrissi stared at her and said nothing.
Florence hesitantly returned her hand to the door handle. When Idrissi made no move to stop her, she opened it and climbed out.
As she started to walk away, Idrissi rolled down the passenger window and called out, “Madame Weel-cock?”
Florence turned.
“Tell me if you have plans to leave Semat.” He held a business card out the window. She slipped it into her still-damp purse then stepped gingerly across the driveway in her bare feet to where Amina stood. The two women watched Idrissi drive away down the hill.
When his car was out of sight, Amina turned and gestured at the bruises on her face and the cast on her wrist. “You are okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Florence reassured her. She felt a rush of relief to be someplace familiar. She was grateful for this woman’s kindness, in stark contrast to Idrissi’s anger and suspicion.
She followed the older woman into the house and went straight upstairs. Her body ached and she longed to lie down. But before going into her own room, she went to investigate Helen’s. All of Helen’s clothes were still hanging in the closet. Her jewelry was scattered on top of the dresser. Even her toothbrush was in its place in the cup on the sink. It all looked as if their owner were due back at any moment. A small part of Florence had been holding on to the hope that Helen really had left Semat on her own, but now she saw how foolish that was. Helen wouldn’t have left without her clothes, her toothbrush, her passport.
Florence ran her hand lightly across the dresses hanging in the closet. The hangers responded with a quiet tinkling.
She sat down heavily on Helen’s bed and pulled the pain medication she’d been given at the hospital from her purse. She swallowed two hydrocodones with water from a half-empty glass that had been sitting there for two days. She collapsed backward and stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. It had been a mistake to lie to the police. But she couldn’t have told him that there was someone else in the car. They might look the other way when a tourist drove drunk, but they certainly wouldn’t if she’d killed someone in the process. Manslaughter was manslaughter.
Besides, what was the point? Helen was clearly gone. It wasn’t like she was hanging on a piece of flotsam, waiting to be rescued. She was dead. Nothing could change that.
Florence tried to consider the implications of this fact. She would never see Helen again. She now had no job and no home. No one would ever read another word by Maud Dixon. Florence waited for the tears to come. But the painkillers were starting to kick in and her head felt cloudy. Everything was muffled.
Her thoughts kept returning to Helen’s body. Where was it right now? She knew from the sensationalized Florida news shows her mother liked to watch that bodies became unidentifiable after just a few days in the water, bloated with water and eaten away by fish. She also knew that in some cultures—most cultures—the treatment of dead bodies was of sacred importance, but Florence had never understood that, and she suspected Helen would not have sanctioned such sentimentality either. The dead were dead. The rites were just a salve for the living.
She rolled over onto her side and looked around Helen’s room. It was much bigger than hers.
Without another thought, she was asleep.
29.
Florence spent the next day in bed. Even if she hadn’t been in too much pain to get up and do anything, she was paralyzed by crushing anxiety. What had she done? How was it possible that in the last sixty hours she’d killed her boss—one of America’s most respected novelists—and lied to the police about it? It was like it had happened to someone else.
She tried over and over again to remember the night of the accident. She shut her eyes and saw the drive to the restaurant, the whiskeys, the camel meat.
And then what?
She couldn’t keep the narrative going. She tried to gain enough momentum from the beginning of the story to sail through the point at which her memories stopped. Drive. Whiskey. Camel. Drive. Whiskey. Camel. Then what? Then…nothing.
There was nothing there.
Had she really drunk that much? She’d blacked out from drinking before, but not for years. Not since college. Of course, she had been drinking on an empty stomach. Stupid.
She shut her eyes tightly again. Drive. Whiskey. Camel.
And all of a sudden she remembered a rush of water. Was she just imagining it? No. There it was again—cold water, rising quickly.
And there was more: A hand gripping her arm tightly. Whose hand? The fisherman’s?
She opened her eyes and pushed up her sleeve to inspect her upper arm. Much of the skin on her upper body was discolored, but she thought she could discern four small bruises—each the size of a fingerprint—that were distinct from the rest.
Just then Amina knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Florence called out hoarsely.
The older woman entered with a tray of toast and eggs. She returned a minute later with a large brass teapot and poured Florence a steaming cup of mint tea. It would have been easier for her to pour it in the kitchen, but Florence appreciated the ceremony of it. Her mother had rarely been able to take off a day from work when she’d been sick as a child, and she was enjoying Amina’s ministrations.
Amina watched with satisfaction as Florence sipped the sweet tea. “Your friend is gone?” she asked.
Florence hadn’t said anything about why she’d swapped rooms or what had happened to Helen. She hadn’t even explained where her bruises had come from. She could have blamed the lapse on confusion from the pain medication, but the truth was that she couldn’t stand the thought of Amina looking at her in the same way that policeman had. She nodded.
“She will return?”
“I don’t think so. She went back to Marrakesh.”
“Without…” Amina gestured around the room that was strewn with Helen’s belongings.
“She brought a few things in a small bag. I’ll bring the rest when I go.”
Amina nodded.
Florence spent much of the day dozing. She kept waking up in a confused panic. Maybe she’d gotten food poisoning, she thought at one point, eager for an explanation that would shift the burden of responsibility. Maybe Helen had somehow forced her to drink too much. She’d certainly been liberal with the wine back in the States.
Finally, as dusk was falling, Florence reached over and took a double dose of her pain medication. The next time she woke, it was morning.
*
The heat had thickened overnight, and Florence could feel it lying heavily on her like another blanket. It might already have been ninety degrees. She kicked off the covers, pushed two pillows against the headboard, and shimmied herself up as gently as she could to a sitting position. She was sore, but the pain had lost its sharp edges. She reached for her phone before remembering that she didn’t have one anymore. She looked at the hydrocodones on the bedside table but decided not to take one. Yesterday had been a swirl of confusion and frustration and paranoia, fueled in part, she felt sure, by the pain medication. She couldn’t do that again.