Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

Author:Alexandra Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

27.

Florence woke with a start. She was out of breath and her heart was beating too fast. As she rubbed her eyes, she realized that there was someone else in the room with her. It was the man in the uniform she’d seen the first time she woke up in the hospital. The one the nurse had shooed away. Why did he only appear when she was asleep? He was like a figure conjured by her dreams.

“Madame Weel-cock,” he said. “Do you remember me? I am Hamid Idrissi of the Gendarmerie Royale. It is important that I now ask you questions about the accident.” His English was slightly off, but better than she would have expected from a small-town policeman in Morocco.

Florence looked around, hoping the nurse might appear to provide another reprieve, but no one came. She nodded at the policeman.

The man patted his pockets until he found a small beige notebook, which he pulled out along with a chewed-up pen. All his movements had a jerky abruptness to them, as though his joints were brand-new and he was still getting used to them.

“The first. Do you remember the events of last night?”

Florence shook her head.

Idrissi flipped back a few pages in the notebook and said, “Your car went off Rue Badr into the ocean at around twenty-two and a half hours. Luckily, there was a fisherman out late who saw this happen. He pulled you from the car and brought you to safety. You arrived at the hospital at twenty-three hours. Unconscious.”

An inappropriate smile came out of nowhere and spread across Florence’s face. She felt like the butt of a joke.

“My car went into the ocean?” she asked skeptically. “And someone pulled me out of it while it was sinking?”

“That is what happened, yes.”

Florence kept looking at him, waiting for the punch line. He stared back at her. He had a wary, tired look in his eyes. Her smile faded. She struggled to process this new information. It seemed absurd that something like that could have happened without her having any memory of it. The single most dramatic moment of her life, and she’d missed it. Typical.

That road, Rue Badr, was the one they’d taken to get to the restaurant. She remembered the way the shoulder of the road had simply dropped off the face of the earth. It seemed incredible that just a few hours later, their jaunty Ford Fiesta had hurled itself into the night sky and crashed into the blue-black water.

She tried to imagine herself and Helen suspended in midair, between land and sea. Had they known what was happening?

And more importantly: Where was Helen now?

She started to ask, but the policeman spoke at the same time: “Madame, what is your last memory of the night?”

Florence tried to think back. The camel meat. The tinny music. “Dinner,” she said. “The restaurant.”

“What restaurant?”

“It was up in the hills. Dar Amal? Something like that?”

He wrote this down in his notebook.

“And were you drinking alcohol?”

Florence willed herself to stay very still.

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