The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

by Elizabeth George

  Dr. Gaynor, unaware of the young man’s intense scrutiny, gave no more thought to him, not even noticing he was now following her some paces behind. Hastings, a man of quick decisions, had spotted the slight bulge in the right pocket of the doctor’s skirt, one of many locally famous black skirts the doctor wore every day to the hospital and over which she put her white doctor’s jacket, kept starched and clean by her houseworker. So, back in stride, some dust getting into her lungs from a passing rumbling truck full of cornhusks, Dr. Gaynor had not the slightest idea that the “Pepani” young man was behind her until he suddenly brushed by her to the right, crying out again, “Pepani!” He then took the lead, increasing the lengths between them until he jumped down from the cracked sidewalk onto the tree-shaded parking area and disappeared from sight.

  Dr. Gaynor showed brief annoyance again and then thought no more about the incident as she arrived at Mr. Pherri’s, offering her muli ulis, for she had laboriously taken lessons on the local Chitumbuka greetings and other phrases. Mr. Pherri greeted her in kind and then fetched her blouse. It was after he had wrapped it up in newspaper and handed it to her that Dr. Gaynor put her hand in her right skirt pocket to take out her small, brightly embroidered coin purse, in which she kept her local kwacha money. It was a Guatemalan-made purse she had bought in a museum gift shop in Philadelphia when attending the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. She was much attached to it, it acting somewhat as a lucky charm and also as a remembrance of herself in a past when she and her about-to-be husband Richard, then also at medical school, walked the city sightseeing, eating cheaply, envisioning themselves in the future: joining a family practice in the suburbs, having kids, making lots of money, taking trips to Paris and other glamorous places.

  However, as Robinson would say—and as he did often say about the reversals of fortune so many suffered, including himself—God had different plans for Dr. Gaynor. And so here she was, eight years later, on this Tuesday bus-departure day, halfway across the world from Philadelphia, Richard married to someone else, and she, Dr. Gaynor, looking for the change purse of her past. She patted herself crossly, peered intently at the ground as if the purse might have dislodged itself somehow, but finding nothing beyond the usual sidewalk debris—eggshells from eaten hard-boiled eggs (the vendors sold these from trays balanced on their heads), dog shit, cigarette butts, soda pop tops, used condoms—she apologized to Mr. Pherri. She must have left her purse at the office and would send someone later to pay him. She left, package in hand, feeling very aggrieved by the loss of her purse, and determining its missing either as a consequence of having lost it or having it stolen. If it were lost, it might be found again, and she briefly considered offering a reward. But that might encourage someone to hold on to it longer, until the reward was increased. Also she had enough to do without having to supervise Robinson in writing up signs and posting them on trees.

  No, given the most likely scenario, that it had been stolen, the consequence was simply that she would never see it nor the money again. These things happen in both poor and rich countries, so why get upset? But she was upset, for she felt taken advantage of, especially since the locals knew she had come from so far to help them.

  Back at the hospital, Dr. Gaynor continued to search, in case she was at fault. She opened her desk drawer, rummaged inside, and shook her wastebasket, even putting a hand into it and moving around the balled-up papers. (There was little else in it; Robinson or the others always found a use for anything she wished to discard.) But again no success. She hadn’t lost much, at most the amount of five American dollars, but still, the immediate consequence of her loss meant she would now have to lock her office at all times, even when she went to use the hospital’s one decent bathroom in the new donor-funded pharmacy. She asked Robinson, who had been looking too, to check under her desk, behind the wooden cabinets, under the neat, unopened package of copy-and-print paper for the brand-new printer another nonprofit had donated, still as shining and mute on its small metal table as the unused copier. However, Robinson came up only with a dropped Biro pen and some scattered papers as he swept away with his little broom the usual dead bodies—cockroaches, ants, and various flying insects—on the floor. Dr. Gaynor was always very liberal with the insect spray. She bought it in lakeside Karonga, where she went once a month to get supplies and to meet with her counterparts at the much larger and better-equipped hospital there.

  After watching his hopeless search, Dr. Gaynor asked Robinson if he’d seen anyone in her office, anything suspicious, while she was out, and then, remembering the collision with the man outside the storefront church, she asked if he knew some young man with a dark blue baseball cap on backward that had TIGERS printed on it, probably gotten at the used-clothes stall in the market (“dead men’s clothes,” everyone called them). The young man had been lean and almost as tall as her, in worn khaki pants, no belt, a limp white golf shirt with short sleeves. She tried to think of something else distinguishing but couldn’t, just the baseball cap, which most of the local male youth wore anyway.

  Robinson indeed knew Hastings; he had seen him in just such a baseball cap very early that morning, when he and his mother came to visit one of Hastings’s uncles in the men’s ward. The uncle was dying of AIDS, or edzi, as the locals called it, although the nurses told relatives he had pneumonia (something Dr. Gaynor, once she learned of it, did not approve of, but found it was a custom hard to break). After Hastings and his mother’s visit, the staff began to complain how things had gone missing. Hastings was a well-known thief, said Robinson, which was why he had to leave Chitipa in the first place.

  Dr. Gaynor pursed her lips and told Robinson to go fetch one of the policemen stationed in the tin-roofed, cement-block building up the street from the hospital. Robinson left to do her bidding, but came back almost immediately to say Mr. Myanka, one of the medical officers, had stopped him in the corridor to have him tell Dr. Gaynor that there was a father from Zambia outside in the courtyard and with him, on his back, was his possibly rabid son. The father was asking for admittance. Dr. Gaynor, who was now searching for her missing purse in the hallway, said brusquely that she didn’t have time to examine the boy now, for it was imperative to have the police stop Hastings before he left on the afternoon bus, but to have the father and son put in the children’s ward until she was free.

  Now it is true that Dr. Gaynor, if she had not been distracted by her missing purse, would never have admitted a rabid boy to the children’s ward because of the possible spread of the virus. The boy should have been taken to the German-built TB building behind the hospital, a brick structure that had started out for the few remaining full-blown TB patients but now, vaccination programs having been very successful, was used for people with short-term contagious diseases that needed isolation.

  Yes, put him in the children’s ward, Dr. Gaynor said, and after locking her office, she first went to the men’s ward to question the two ward nurses there as to when and how long a Mrs. Chiume and her son had visited. What had the son looked like? Had the nurses noticed anything was missing after the mother and son had left? Then, not finding satisfactory answers and, on her return to her office, not finding Robinson back, she went out the hospital’s front gates and walked to the police station herself, but there was no one there. Thinking perhaps Robinson had been successful in his mission, she returned and headed for the children’s ward.

  There screens had already been put around the sides of the boy’s bed, shielding it from the others—a bad sign, meaning imminent death. Dr. Gaynor stood at the end of the empty, blanketed cot and saw the father on the floor, leaning against the bed and holding his young son in his lap. Rabies was so highly prevalent in all the rural areas, she needed only one look to know the boy was in the last stages. She knew she had made a mistake; the father and son should have been in the old TB building, where there were individual small rooms. But it was too late now. The screens would give some protection, and luckily the children’s
ward had only three other patients. They could be moved to the women’s ward while the children’s was thoroughly disinfected.

  The father, Mr. Chimpimere, when told the head of the hospital was present, bowed his head respectfully, then, speaking good English, told the story of his son. How he, the father, worked in the Copperbelt west of Lusaka, leaving his wife and four children back in their village near the border, and when the dog bit the boy, the mother said she had washed off the arm wound, bound it with a rag, and after a while it stopped bleeding. The boy, once over his initial fright and crying, went back to playing with his siblings and friends. After that, the mother decided to wait for the husband to come home, which he did every six weeks.

  They had been in the fields when the dog attacked the boy, the wife weeding along with the older children. No one knew to whom the dog belonged, but some of the older male villagers working in nearby fields came when the mother cried out and they ran after the emaciated dog, finally beating it to death with their hoes and machetes. It had been a female, starving besides being rabid, her teats long and thin from nursing, his wife had told Mr. Chimpimere when he returned two weekends later, the boy by then running a fever and talking silly. The mother had given the boy some paracetamol tablets she bought at the open-air market, but her son’s arm kept festering, and she tried washing the wound again, then binding it up in a poultice the medicine healer at the market said would help.

  The father said he knew there were shots they gave nowadays for the dog sickness, but the hospital in his district had closed a year ago, as had the missionary one, so he had strapped the boy to his back and begun walking. It was twelve kilometers to the border and another twenty kilometers into Malawi to where Dr. Gaynor’s hospital was. Many of the Zambians near the border came to the Chitipa district hospital, and so far none had been refused help, even though they weren’t Malawian citizens.

  Dr. Gaynor said as kindly as she could that the boy did indeed have the dog sickness and was very sick; unfortunately, there was not a great deal she and her staff could do at this stage. Even if the hospital had vaccines—which at the moment it didn’t, no matter how many times she ordered them—the shots could only be given in the early stages, when someone was first bitten or shortly after.

  During this exchange, the boy became very agitated, crying, “Dada Dada,” and moving so restlessly that the father had a hard time keeping the boy in his arms. The young boy was smeared with saliva, the father holding fast, crooning in his local language. Dr. Gaynor already had a face shield on, as did the two ward nurses, and Dr. Gaynor asked the taller nurse, Mrs. Kondowe, to give one to Mr. Chimpimere, telling him the virus was very contagious.

  But the father just shook his head. So Dr. Gaynor, putting on latex gloves, motioned to the father to move away while the nurse knelt down to hold the boy so she could examine him with her stethoscope.

  The boy, however, getting a look at the strange white woman in a mask, threw his head upward, arched his back wildly, and began to keen. The father became agitated, saying he did not want her to touch his son, that his son thought the lady doctor was a ghost and he was frightened. The father did not want his son frightened.

  Dr. Gaynor said not to worry, she wouldn’t examine the boy for now. She would wait, she said to the father before looking at Mrs. Kondowe, who nodded slightly, confirming Dr. Gaynor’s sense that the boy would be dead within the hour. Nothing could have been done; she decided not to give a sedative for fear the boy might choke in taking it.

  An hour later the boy did die, his tormented body still at last. Dr. Gaynor supervised the nurses in helping the father to wrap the body in one of the hospital’s cotton blankets, then putting the small, shrouded body on the father’s back, strapping it with the same piece of cotton chitenge skirt material the father had used to bring the boy in. Mr. Chimpimere, now with his son on his back again, seemed stooped—not so much from the slight weight of the dead boy but from the heavy weight of his son’s death. He said politely, “Zikomo,” the local word for thanks; Dr. Gaynor said she would try to see if their ambulance had returned from taking a body to its village for burial, and if so, it could take the father and son to the border. She was very sorry they couldn’t have done more, but the father came too late. He must tell his wife that when children are bitten by a dog or a bat, they must be brought to a hospital immediately. Also, once home, Mr. Chimpimere should tell his wife not to try to wash or hold the body, but leave it wrapped up for burial so as to prevent possible contamination. If his wife or any of his other children got sick, he must bring them here quickly. Dr. Gaynor suddenly heard herself saying all this in her lecturing manner, and so stopped, adding—again in a softer tone—how sorry she and the staff were.

  The hospital’s ambulance was not back, so Dr. Gaynor, along with Robinson and some of the staff, watched Mr. Chimpimere set off by foot with his dead son on his back, leaving through the hospital gates and turning left to reach the main dirt road.

  “It is God’s plan,” said Robinson, who was standing behind the silent doctor on the steps. “God’s plan!” he repeated in his young, knowing voice that often drove Dr. Gaynor to aggravation. “We must accept God’s plans, whatever our fate.”

  “Robinson, you are so naive!” said Dr. Gaynor exasperatedly.

  However, the little boy’s death did upset Dr. Gaynor more than the other deaths she had witnessed since being there. The children were the hardest, but the others had been mostly silent, just watching the doctor from fevered eyes, exhaustedly placid before they stopped breathing. But this boy had been so young, so frightened, and so beautiful! However, her face showed nothing as she led the others back into the hospital.

  Her stolen coin purse now forgotten, she suddenly thought she should call her mother in her nursing home in the States, although Dr. Gaynor usually only did this on the last Friday of every month. Her mother, after her stroke, had a special aide who was supposed to stay in the room at all times, but often during the day the aide wheeled the old woman out of her room and down halls into the TV room or social room, more for her benefit than for her patient’s. But she always knew to be in the room for Dr. Gaynor’s once-a-month call.

  Well, Dr. Gaynor would just have to take the risk of not finding her mother in her room. She went to the telephone room, where calls, if reserved, were made by one of the two clerks on one of the three rotary phones. The lines were kept busy, but as boss, she was not refused. While waiting for the connection, Dr. Gaynor debated whether or not to tell her mother about the dead boy. In the old days she told her mother about all her various patients and their problems. But now her brothers insisted she didn’t upset her mother any more than she had already done by taking these overseas assignments, especially this one in Africa.

  So Dr. Gaynor usually only spoke to her mother in her professionally cheerful voice, spoke in this voice which had gotten more hearty in the last two years, because even before the stroke her mother spoke about Africa as if it were still the heart of darkness, both literally and biblically.

  Dr. Gaynor also suspected that her mother, when first widowed and then stroked, thought her daughter would come home and care for her in the family house, for her daughter was a doctor, wasn’t she? Isn’t this what doctor daughters should do? her mother seemed to signal again as her hand clung like a ferret to her daughter’s during Dr. Gaynor’s last visit, yes, clung like a ferret, this cruel comparison popping then into Dr. Gaynor’s head. Dr. Gaynor had never entertained the idea of staying home with her mother. Now here she was, finding herself calling her mother for solace as if she were a hurtful child.

  “Mother?” said Dr. Gaynor as she heard pips, some crackling, the tinny sound of a phone ringing far off across oceans, then a click and someone answering, her mother’s aide no doubt.

  “Mother?”

  “Wait a minute, Dr. Gaynor,” and then there was her mother’s voice, soft but querulous, “Who’s this? Who’s this?” speaking in an unpleasant tone she had developed
after her stroke.

  “It’s Helen, Mom. It’s not Friday, but I had some free time so how are you, did you have a good week?”

  “Edward Allen?”

  “No, Mother, Helen, your daughter.”

  “I don’t have a daughter, I have two boys, Christopher and Kevin, do you know my sons?”

  “Mother, Kevin was our father, you mean Chris and Ted, are they there with you? Put Chris on . . .”

  But the phone made a banging noise and went silent. The aide’s voice came back on. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gaynor, your mother dropped the phone. She’s been very agitated recently. Also very incontinent.” Incontinent? That was new.

  Suddenly the line disconnected, and Dr. Gaynor decided not to try to call back. She felt very disturbed by the call, considered for a brief moment flying back to check on her mother, then thought she had best wait for December, when her annual holiday came up.

  But scarcely a week later Dr. Gaynor found herself flying back to Pittsburgh to attend her mother’s funeral. She was now sitting with her two brothers on folding chairs in the sanctuary room of the funeral home. She was far from Chitipa, far from her missing purse, far from the rabid dead boy, and now, finding herself so quickly here in the States, a small part of Dr. Gaynor worried that her phone call from Africa may have triggered some final insult to her mother’s fragile mind that had killed her. But Dr. Gaynor’s guilt hardly found root, for she immediately said to herself that her mother hadn’t even recognized her voice, so how could this have set off anything?