WRAPPED UP IN our own paranoia, we tried to convince ourselves that we had nothing to fear. If even half of what we’d been told was true, it was Maria who had every reason to be just as scared as her son said she was.
To date, we hadn’t seen a single shred of physical evidence that Maria was actually alive. The last physical trace of her was a signature on court documents from the US government settlement. But even this signature seemed suspicious.
Located within hundreds of pages of court documents, the signature meant she was agreeing that letters using her name and image would never be sent in the United States again. On closer examination, we noticed that both of the forms she’d signed were missing key information. While the settlement agreement filled out by Patrick Guerin included the name and signature of the notary who’d verified that he signed the document, Maria’s agreement included nothing but a stamp—supposedly from a notary in Provence, France, but with no name or signature. Even stranger, the printed version of her name underneath the signature was spelled incorrectly—it was missing an “L,” so it read “Maria Duva.” On a second form, many of the required fields, like phone number and email address, had been left blank. And even if it were Maria who had signed the form, it would have been almost a year ago, so there was no way to know if she was still alive today.
Aside from the signature, the most recent evidence of Maria had come from a year earlier, when she was seen picking up her pot of jelly. So we decided to try getting back in touch with the town hall in Callas to see if anyone had seen her.
The year before, its employees had been willing to help, giving us Maria’s home address and telling us about the jelly she’d picked up. This time, the woman who answered the phone seemed hesitant to tell us anything, saying that she had a directory of everyone who came to pick up jelly this holiday season, but that she couldn’t tell us whether Maria was on this list.
Once again, Maria’s son, Antoine, was our last shot.
Since leaving Callas, we’d tried to reach Antoine numerous times with the hopes of finally speaking with Maria ourselves, even if it was just over the phone. He claimed she was alive and kept promising that at the least he would answer more of our questions and possibly even facilitate an interview. But then he would go dark for weeks.
• • •
For a while, we wondered if the “filmmaker,” the “Romanians,” and “Patric” were all the same deranged person, one who had lured us into his or her own twisted game. We started to come back to reality when we finally received a call from the filmmaker. He seemed unfazed by his months of silence, telling us he had a day job and had been very busy. He was also willing to give us his full name, as long as we didn’t print it. To our relief, a quick search showed us that the biography he gave us about himself checked out. He was definitely not the young man who killed his father.
Whew.
With his identity confirmed, we thought it far less likely that all the messages we’d recently received were part of some broader conspiracy. Still, we were no closer to figuring out who this so-called Patric character was and why he’d reached out to us.
After Jean-Claude’s confusion, Julia got back in touch with Patric. He became extremely defensive, saying snidely that if we were already in touch with Jean-Claude then we apparently didn’t need him anymore. For some reason, he continued to want to meet us in person.
Jean-Claude, annoyed with all of our questions about Patric, stopped responding to our emails. However, as we looked through his past messages, we saw that perhaps unwittingly Jean-Claude included his cell phone number. With nothing to lose, we broke down and called him in Thailand.
He answered right away in a very friendly voice and was surprisingly courteous even after we told him who we were. It was surreal to actually be talking with him after all the months of emailing back and forth with the man. We spoke for an hour. When we brought up Patric, he again said he didn’t know a man with the full name we had been given. He did have an idea of who it might be, though. He also described a childhood friend of forty years, who he said was the only person he knew with a name that came close to Patric’s. According to Jean-Claude, the friend’s most recent visit had been around a decade ago, not a mere three years as “Patric” had claimed to us.
Despite Patric’s claim, Jean-Claude remained adamant that he was not the mastermind behind the Maria Duval letters. Instead, he told us he simply knew her through acquaintances in the mail-order industry such as Jacques Mailland. Jean-Claude also said that the former friend claiming to be Patric had met Maria only once, twenty years ago, maybe in the resort town of Cannes. “I had a drink with him and Maria,” Jean-Claude told us.
Jean-Claude also had some theories as to why this man would be telling us false stories about him. He said that while they had been close for a long time, this man had become jealous of him and that something had happened during his most recent trip to Thailand that put an end to their friendship. “To be honest, the meeting [in Thailand] did not end up very nicely,” he said. “The relationship ended up badly. I don’t think he has a very positive opinion of me.”
Given this man’s vengeful motives, Jean-Claude told us that nothing “Patric” said could be trusted and that anything he claimed to know about Maria was also likely suspect, given their single meeting over one drink so many years ago.