“Oh yeah.”
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you. She doesn’t know I’m here, but she wouldn’t be happy about it. She just wants to be left alone.”
“We’d given up looking,” Mr. Navarre said. “Her father tried to find her more than once, in the nineties. After he died, I was obligated to try again. He always thought she was still alive. Me, not so much. People die all the time. But unless I could prove that she was no longer among the living, and had left no heirs, I was barred from dissolving the trust.”
“So it’s still there. The trust.”
“Absolutely. Administering it has made me a very wealthy man. I have every reason to insist that you tell me where your mother is. She won’t have to do anything more than sign the receipt on a piece of registered mail. She can go on doing nothing, but she needs to know that she’s the beneficiary.”
“No. Sorry.”
“Sandrine—”
“That’s not my real name.”
Mr. Navarre nodded. “I see.”
“I don’t want anything to change. I just came by to ask you a favor.”
“Aha. I’ll hazard a guess. You need money.”
“Not even. I mean I do, but that’s not what I’m here for. Can I talk?”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’ve been living in Oakland, California. There’s a house there that’s in foreclosure, and the guy who owns it has to vacate it in less than two weeks. He’s a good guy, and the bank is trying to steal his equity. So I was thinking, there’s a lot of money in the trust, and you get to decide how it’s invested. My impression is that you don’t have to do much except write big checks to yourself.”
“Well, now, in fact—”
“The money’s mostly in McCaskill stock. You’re required to leave it there. How much work can that be? And you get, whatever, a million dollars a year for that.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“You’ve been in touch with your mother’s ex-husband. He told you.”
“Maybe.”
“Sandrine. Work with me here.”
“I’m the guy’s granddaughter. David’s. That makes me a Laird, and I’m asking you a small favor that doesn’t personally cost you anything. The amount of money is nothing compared to what’s in the trust. I want you to buy my friend’s house, right away, and then charge him some rent he can afford. It won’t be a lot of rent, so it won’t be a great investment. But you can invest the money any way you want, right?”
Mr. Navarre made a tent of his fingers. “I have a fiduciary responsibility to invest the money wisely. I would need, at a minimum, your mother’s written authorization. I admit that it doesn’t seem likely she’ll be challenging my decisions any time soon, but I need to be covered for that eventuality.”
“Does the trust say that I’m the heir?”
“There is a per stirpes clause, yes.”
“So let me sign.”
“I can’t knowingly let you sign under a false name. Even if I were inclined to make this particular investment.”
Pip frowned. She’d thought of a lot, during the two flights it had taken her to get to Wichita, but she hadn’t thought of this. “If I give you my real name, you’re going to use it to try to find my mother, even if I ask you not to.”
“Let’s slow down here,” Mr. Navarre said. “Look at this from my side. I do believe that Anabel is alive and you’re her daughter. This is a highly unusual situation, but I believe you’re telling me the truth. But if you come to me next month and say you want another investment, for some other reason — where does it end?”
“I won’t do that.”
“So you say now. But if all you have to do is ask?”
“Well, then we’ll have this discussion again. But we won’t. It’s not going to happen again.”
Mr. Navarre increased the steepness of his tented fingers. “I don’t know what happened in that family. Your family. I never understood your mother or her father. But the decisions he made about his stake in McCaskill created a heck of a lot of ill will. Given the tax hit he took, leaving her a quarter of the estate, he had to put most of the rest in charitable trusts. I know you think I get money for nothing, but liquidating enough shares to pay the estate-tax bill wasn’t nothing. And meanwhile Anabel’s brothers only got about eighty million apiece fungible. The rest is in trusts they control but don’t much profit from. All this to make sure the daughter who hated David got her money in a lump. To say I never understood it is an understatement. And now you won’t even let me tell her the money is there?”
That is correct, Pip thought. Everyone needs to keep conspiring to protect my mother from reality.
“I can work on it,” she said. “But it has to be me. I don’t want her getting some registered letter from you. If I agree to work on it, will you buy this house in Oakland?”
“Why should I do that?”
“Because I’m the heir and I’m asking for it!”
“So you’re crazy, too.”
“No.”
“You could speak to your mother and be a billionaire, but instead you’re asking me to buy a house in foreclosure for some third party. This person wouldn’t happen to be your boyfriend?”
“No. He’s a well-medicated schizophrenic in his forties.”
Mr. Navarre shook his head. “You don’t want to eradicate malaria. You don’t want to send poor kids to college. You don’t want to take a private trip to outer space. You don’t even want to be a cokehead.”
“Aren’t all the Lairds and McCaskills messed up from having too much money?”
“About half of them, yeah.”
“Didn’t one of my uncles try to buy an NBA team?”
“Better than that. He wanted the David M. Laird Jr. Charitable Trust to buy it.”
“So it sounds like my weirdness is totally within normal parameters.”
“Listen here.” Mr. Navarre sat up straight and fixed Pip with a look. “I’m never going to have to report to you. I’m older than your mother, and I have a fondness for fatty red meats. It’s not because I owe you any courtesies that I propose the following. You’re going to tell me your real name and sign an authorization. After you leave here, you’ll go to the Laird family doctor and leave a blood sample. Six months from today, if I don’t hear from you sooner, I will hire a detective to locate your mother. In return, the trust will buy your friend’s house. I give you that, you give me your mother.”
“You have to buy the house right away, though. Like, today or tomorrow. Monday at the latest.”
“Do you agree to the terms? You’ll have six months to sort things out with your mother.”
Pip was weighing her wish to help Dreyfuss against her aversion to having a conversation with her mother. She realized that even if she didn’t have the conversation, her mother wouldn’t know for sure it was her fault that Mr. Navarre had found her. Her mother could imagine it was Tom’s fault, or Andreas’s. She could sign the registered receipt, burn the letter without reading it, and go right on denying reality.
“My legal name is Purity Tyler.”
It was four thirty by the time she’d signed the authorization, been phlebotomized at the doctor’s office, and taken another cab to the airport. Jets on the tarmac shimmered in fumes and unabated sun, but something was happening to the sky, some premonition that its depthless blue would soon be a more local gray. Her connecting flight, to Denver, was showing a delay of forty-five minutes. She had to be at work the following afternoon, but it occurred to her that she could miss her connection in Denver and rebook for the morning. She’d boldly asked Mr. Navarre to reimburse her for her flights and cabs; the trip so far had cost her nothing.
She couldn’t see Tom without admitting that she’d read his memoir, and although she felt a craving for Leila’s forgiveness she worried that Leila still considered her a threat and wouldn’t be happy to see her. With her phone, she searched instead for Cynthia Aberant and found her listed as an associate professor in a community-studies program. The only impeccably kind and well-behaved person in Tom’s entire memoir was his sister. Pip dialed her office number and got her.