Dear Mrs. Andersen,
This letter serves as your official notice that the probate challenge against Mr. Andersen’s estate has been denied and you remain the sole beneficiary…
Based on the details he can glean from the letter, his father died in early summer 2018, days before Gerry moved back to Baltimore. Had someone tried to contact his mother then? It was a confusing time, with different nursing aides coming and going. In fact, he had sacked one when he realized she sometimes took the day’s mail and chucked it into the recycling bin, unopened. Did his mother even know his father had not died in 2001, as Gerry had been told?
Told by her. That was the only reason he believed his father dead. Because his mother told him, in great detail, how he had died on 9/11.
Your father visits me. We make love in the garden.
In hindsight, he had decided that was the first clue of her dementia. But what if—
“Victoria,” Gerry says, “get my mother’s executor on the phone.”
*
THE EXECUTOR for Gerry’s mother’s estate is an old family friend, a lawyer who had lived on their street. Perhaps not the best way to choose one’s lawyer, but no harm had come to Gerry’s mother by conducting her affairs that way. Tom Abbott is a sweet, gentle man and Gerry had often wished he were his father. But even as a child he could see there was no spark between his mother and Tom.
“I think I’ve untangled things,” he tells Gerry later that afternoon, their third call of the day. “Your father died in June and left a will, dated 2015, in which he bequeathed everything to your mother. ‘Everything’ isn’t a lot—about two hundred thousand dollars, although she would have qualified for his social security, which was more than hers. Because his will was still in probate when your mother died, his bequest to her rolls into her estate. The money will be put in escrow and go to you when your mother’s estate settles.”
“Why was there a claim against it?” Not his most pressing question, not even close, but the best he can manage for now.
“Here’s where it gets a little complicated. Gerry—your parents never got a divorce. Your mother could have asked for one on grounds of abandonment or adultery, but she chose not to. When they separated, in the 1970s, divorce law was far more restrictive and your father may have believed he couldn’t initiate the action. Maybe he didn’t want to because, without a formal dissolution of the marriage, there would be no official orders about child support. Anyway, his second marriage, as a consequence, was never legal. And in 2001, he left that woman, just moved out and on. I don’t know why you assumed he was dead—”
Because my mother told me he was. “I’m not sure, either.”
“But he had no legal obligations to his common-law wife. Kids were long grown. Then he dies and leaves what he has to your mother. His ex challenged the will. They had been together almost forty years, after all. But common-law spouses don’t have standing in Ohio and, even if she did, his will is legal unless she can prove undue influence, or that he wasn’t of sound mind when he made it. He was free to leave everything to your mother and now it goes to you.”
“I’m not sure I want it,” Gerry says. Blood money. No, not blood money. Bloodless money. Guilt money.
Or—is it possible that his father and mother loved each other? Is that the part of the story he missed? Is that why his first novel had hurt his mother?
“You can give it away, once it’s yours, which should be by this fall. Donate to some cause in your mother’s name. Maybe it’s chump change to you, but it’s enough to do some good in the world.”
It’s enough, Gerry thinks, to cover my losses in transfer taxes and the like if I decide to sell this place sooner rather than later. If he leaves this apartment once he recovers—who would blame him, who would find it suspicious? The apartment tried to kill him, after all. The floating staircase was like a mouth that tried to devour him whole, the whale to his Jonah. There would be almost a kind of poetic justice to his father’s money covering the losses he would incur on all the taxes and real estate fees.
He has recorded his conversation with Tom on his smartphone, informing him, as Maryland law requires, that he is doing so. He then asks Victoria to transcribe it for him, something she grumbles about, but she is his assistant, after all.
That night, Gerry sleeps better than he has in some time. That is, he sleeps well until 2:11 A.M., when the phone by his bed rings and he picks it up and hears a female voice.
“Gerry? Gerry? I’m sorry I haven’t called for a while.”
“No,” he says. “No, no, no.” The calls had stopped after Margot, there aren’t supposed to be any more calls. He had removed the recorder that the private eye recommended. The obvious answer is the obvious answer.
“We need to talk, Gerry.”
The voice sounds different, or does it? Slightly more syrupy, but maybe that’s his brain, struggling for consciousness. He is so foggy tonight, he feels as if he’s swimming through sludge.
“Aileen!” he bellows. “Aileen!”
She comes up the stairs, moving quickly by her standards, huffing and puffing. “What’s wrong, Mr. Gerry?”
“Please check the caller ID on the kitchen handset.”
She grabs the kitchen phone from its cradle. “I must have dozed off, I didn’t hear it ring.”
Not again, Gerry thinks. Not again.
“Hey—there is a number—nine-one-seven—where’s that?”
Nine-one-seven. The area code for New York, the one used by most mobile accounts. “Bring it to me, please.”
She does. The number is familiar, but not immediately identifiable. He just knows he should know it. So few numbers reside in his memory now, the cost of using a cell phone, although he still remembers his mother’s number on Berwick, a number that no longer rings, connected to a landline that will never ring again. This number, though—it’s tantalizingly familiar. He picks up his cell phone and enters ten digits to see if it will spit out a contact.
He sees a familiar face in the little circle. Tiny as the face is, he can recognize the come-hither gaze, the coquettish affect.
“It’s Margot,” he says. “Someone has Margot’s phone. I thought you—” He doesn’t want to say out loud what he thought, that he presumed Aileen would take care of disposing of everything.
*
IT IS FOUR A. M. and the two have been sitting up, neither capable of sleep. Aileen can’t even muster the concentration to knit.
“I did,” she says for the umpteenth time. “I dropped her purse in the harbor, expensive as it was. A Birkin bag—it broke my heart to do that. A purse like that goes for thousands of dollars on the Internet. Anyway, if a phone was in there, it wouldn’t be any good, even if it was in an OtterBox. Besides—”
“Besides, what?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t look through her purse?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want to know what I think?”
Gerry does and he realizes how unfathomable this notion would have been to him two weeks ago. God help him, he wants to know what Aileen thinks.
“She has a partner.”
“What?”
“This thing that’s happening to you, it takes two people, I think. Margot was in cahoots with someone—and this person has her phone.”
“How, why?” Gerry considers all the times Margot lost her phone, left it in restaurants, cabs, salons. Margot was forever losing her phone. But why would some stranger then call him? “Even if there’s another person involved—why continue the ruse when Margot has gone missing? Why use a phone with a number I can identify? The point has been to drive me crazy, make me look as if I’m imagining things, right?”