Florence sat down stiffly on the couch. Helen ensconced herself in an armchair and lit a cigarette. She looked entirely at ease. She was tanner than she had been the last time Florence saw her, but other than that she looked just the same. No bruises, no cuts, no broken bones.
Florence felt herself reluctantly pulled back into her old role, that of the supplicant, being careful, trying to accommodate Helen’s sharp angles. If Helen wanted to play this game, she thought, fine, she’d play.
“So where are you from?” she asked Helen.
“Florida,” Helen said with a smile.
“Whereabouts?”
“Port Orange.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s neither here nor there.”
“That’s okay. Here and there are overrated.”
Helen smiled with something like delight. Florence thought she saw something else in her eyes—surprise, maybe. She reluctantly felt herself flush with pleasure.
“Have you been traveling for long?” Florence went on.
“Oh, a week or so.”
“Where? Here in Morocco?”
“A bit. I was in Rabat most recently.”
“What brought you there?”
“I was taking care of some business.”
“What line of work are you in?”
“Manufacturing.”
“What do you manufacture?”
“Cogs, mainly.”
Florence started laughing. “Cogs.” She couldn’t help it. “For boats, I presume?”
“Oh, for all seagoing vessels, really.”
The rest of the group was following their banter with new attention, turning their heads from one to the other like spectators at a tennis match.
“Do you guys know each other or something?” Meg asked slowly.
“Heavens, no,” said Helen.
Florence just shook her head, a smile still on her face.
For the next few hours, the evening proceeded as these evenings do. Helen and Florence relinquished the group’s attention. Everyone continued to get drunker and drunker. But Florence didn’t let another drop of alcohol pass her lips, and Helen didn’t partake of anything besides cigarettes. It was as if they were slowly moving toward the foreground of a picture, getting sharper and sharper, while everyone else receded into blurriness.
Finally, at around midnight, after the rest of the group had shared a joint and fallen into a collective daze, Helen stood up and held her hand out to Florence. “Shall we?” she asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Florence nodded and took Helen’s hand. She was surprised to feel herself shudder violently. It was like touching a ghost.
42.
Helen steered her into the first room at the top of the stairs—the one that used to be hers but now bore the traces of Florence’s occupancy.
“Making yourself at home, I see?” Helen asked, looking around.
Florence blushed. She felt like she’d been caught trying on Helen’s underwear. She was, in fact, wearing Helen’s underwear. “I thought you were dead,” she said by way of excuse.
In the pocket of silence a burst of laughter wafted up from downstairs.
“Clearly you were quite broken up about it.”
“Helen—what’s going on?”
“Sit,” Helen commanded, pointing at the bed.
Florence obeyed.
“I had to go to Rabat,” Helen said.
“But you just disappeared. I thought you were dead. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t tell you—for your own benefit.”
Florence blew out her breath in exasperation. She didn’t want to wait for Helen to mete out information at whatever pace she saw fit. She didn’t like playing the fool anymore. “Is this about Jeanette Byrd?” she asked.
Helen narrowed her eyes. “Where did you hear that name?”
“A man from the embassy was here yesterday. Jeanette Byrd is dead. She’s buried in your compost pile. It’s pretty clear that they think you murdered her. No, correction, they think I murdered her. They think I’m Helen Wilcox.”
“And why would they think that?” Helen asked, gesturing around the room.
“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.”