An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  ALSO BY VICTORIA JENKINS

  Relative Distances

  Cruise Control

  VICTORIA JENKINS

  An

  Unattended

  DEATH

  Copyright © 2012 by Victoria Jenkins

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to use the following previously published material:

  Excerpt from “Highway Patrolman” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1982 Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “Looking Back To See” by Maxine Brown. Copyright © reproduced by The University of Arkansas Press. Reprinted by permission.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jenkins, Victoria–

  An unattended death / Victoria Jenkins.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-284-8

  eISBN 1-57962-337-9

  1. Women detectives—Washington (State)—Fiction.

  2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.E514U53 2012

  813’.54—dc23 2012016405

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To the memory of Jim Crumley,

  mentor and friend

  I

  The body, face down and almost completely submerged in the tea-colored water of the slough, might easily have been mistaken for a driftwood log.

  The slough was shallow, less than an acre in size, its irregular banks fringed with reeds. Salt grass grew on a low dune that separated the slough from the Sound, and wild plum thickets and blackberry brambles crowded the inland edges. To the north a stately row of Lombardy poplars delineated the border where the wild Paris land adjoined the Guevara estate.

  Underground springs fed the slough and the runoff emptied into the Sound through a narrow channel that cut the dune and ran down the beach into a muddy delta. But at high tide the sea rose and salt water flowed up the channel and into the slough and mingled with the fresh water. During winter storms waves swept over the top of the dune carrying logs and debris.

  It seemed odd and implausible that the tides and waves of an August squall would carry a human body from the Sound into the slough. Odd but not impossible. Yesterday evening there had been a squall.

  THESE WERE thoughts in Irene Chavez’s mind early on an August Sunday as she stood in the stubble at the bottom of the Paris orchard where someone had cut the grass and pruned an opening through the prickly wild plum, creating a vista of the slough and the Sound and the snowcapped Olympic Mountains beyond, for anyone looking north from the windows of the Paris house above.

  No conclusions, she admonished herself. No conclusions. An unattended death was all. Anything could have happened. It could have happened in any way. There could be salt water in the lungs or fresh water or no water at all. There could be a blow to the head or a gunshot wound. It could be a heart attack or a choking incident or hypothermia. Could be suicide or a drug overdose. Death might have occurred in the slough or in the Sound or somewhere else altogether. She must wait and keep an open mind.

  The body was almost completely still, just the slightest gentle rocking movements as ripples lapped against it. A flock of wood ducks, lifting off noisily as Irene and Rosalie Paris approached, had left the water momentarily disturbed. Wood ducks, thought Irene, flying south. So soon. Still August. An early sign of fall.

  The slough was like a hologram, you could register either the skin of the water, a silvery mirror of the sky, or with a tilt of the head you could look through to what lay beneath. It was shallow, perhaps no more than three feet deep, four in places, and the bottom appeared weedy and muddy and coated with a rusty fur of algae and decaying plant material. The body was just beyond the reeds, face down, just below the surface.

  Irene was certain it was a body, something dead and inert, but she was going to have to go in, grapple it to shore, check for vital signs and perhaps attempt resuscitation while she waited for the paramedics. She would prefer not to disturb the scene.

  IT WAS unusual for Irene to be first on such a scene. The county was large and usually when a call came in to 911 volunteer firefighters were the first responders. Well-intentioned citizens with no comprehension of preserving evidence.

  Mason County covered the southwestern quadrant of Puget Sound, an area that encompassed parts of the Olympic Mountains as well as the islands and isthmuses and peninsulas of the South Sound. Along the shores of the Sound two-lane highways made long meanders around bays and estuaries, often adding miles and hours to distances between points which might be only minutes apart by boat or as the crow flies.

  Irene had been southbound on Highway 3 when she heard the dispatch, and she swung left onto Pickering Road and headed for the bridge and Gustavus Island.

  ROSALIE PARIS had been talking the entire time. She had started talking as soon as Irene’s unmarked Crown Vic glided down the driveway with the grill lights flashing and Irene got out. Rosalie had called it in.

  “I just was going for some blackberries for my scones,” she said in an urgent whisper. “Everybody’s still asleep but I was going to make scones—I do almost every morning—and I thought I’d put some blackberries in. These are the big seedy Himalayas, not the early sweet native ones, those are gone now.” Pulling Irene along with a hand on her sleeve. “But who cares. They ripen late here. The blackberries down on the edge of the slough are only now getting ripe. We always go across to Long Branch which faces west, you know, so it gets more afternoon sun—there they’re ripe in July, the blackberries, and we always have expeditions across. A flotilla, we call it. All sorts of boats go. The canoe, the I-14—that’s my husband’s sailboat—and the Strausses down the beach have a skiff with an outboard. Libby has a rowing shell and there are kayaks. And there’s swimming, which is better on that side for some reason.” She paused, then added, “I don’t swim, you understand, you couldn’t pay me to put on a suit.” Rosalie laughed and Irene threw her a glance. An interesting revelation which Irene stored for future reference.

  Rosalie, or Rosie as she had quickly amended, in jersey Capri pants under a baggy sweatshirt, attire she might have slept in, would have been pretty once in slimmer, blonder days.

  “And blackberry picking,” she went on, continuing her thought. “But anyway, now, in August—halfway through August, wow! Already. The summer just whizzes by—now is when the Paris blackberries are ripe.” She looked quickly at Irene. “I only need a few. Just a handful. No one minds.”

  An odd comment. “No, I shouldn’t think,” Irene said.

  “Anne makes jam,” said Rosie by way of explanation, “every year. Pints and pints and pints. She pulls an all-nighter just before leaving for home. Actually it’s fun. We all stay up and help, or watch, really. The kitchen windows all steam up. She puts a lot of lemon in and not much sugar. For scones I only need a few blackberries, a handful,” she said, going on, “so it doesn’t matter. No one would notice or care. But if anyone were awake I would have asked at the house as I went past. I looked in the kitchen window but I could tell no one was stirring. It wasn’t tha
t early, but they sleep late. I never do.”

  Listening to Rosalie’s parenthetically detailed account of how it was she came to be picking blackberries at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning in August at the bottom of her father-in-law’s orchard on a remote island in the southern part of Puget Sound, and how in the course of a kind of Aesopian attempt to reach a particularly enticing cluster she happened to see the body rocking gently against the reeds at the edge of the slough, Irene was at the same time thinking her own thoughts about the process of investigation, which was only now beginning, and beginning to formulate the report that she would give to her superior, Inspector Gilbert, when he arrived.

  “I hope it’s no one we know,” said Rosalie.

  “What makes you think it’s someone you know?” asked Irene.

  “I don’t think that,” said Rosie, “I didn’t say that. I said I hope it’s not. You can’t really tell anything from here.”

  “No,” agreed Irene. The voluble Rosalie, she thought, whose flood of information suggested utter candor and even idiocy, might actually be the scatterbrain she seemed or perhaps not, perhaps dumb like a fox. Either way she was interesting.

  Irene heard dogs faintly, a distant cacophony inland towards the center of the island, and then the sirens that must have set them off: The aid truck and fire engine responding from the volunteer station on the county road that bisected the island north to south along a section line. Now, she thought, she wouldn’t have to wade in for the body after all, she’d wait for the EMT personnel who would no doubt have a gaff or a grappling hook. She had not wanted to start the day wet to the waist.

  “Ms. Paris,” Irene said, laying a hand on Rosalie’s arm to interrupt the effusion of anecdote, “you might go back up, if you would, and show them the way.”

  Silenced, Rosalie listened for a moment and heard the approaching sirens. She had the theatrically expressive face of a kindergarten teacher, her mouth making an O.

  Irene looked up the slope into the untended orchard. The grass between the trees had been mowed but the branches met in tangles overhead and hung low between the rows. “Ask them to bring the ambulance down as far as possible,” she said.

  Irene had left her car up in the grassy expanse between the tall white farmhouse and the various outbuildings, but she had carried her kit down with her, a case containing the rudimentary tools she’d need to begin the investigation of an unattended death. Quickly now, moving with some urgency, she set to work, knowing that the dispatch had been heard all across the county and that behind the aid car would be patrol deputies and the entire detective contingent from Shelton, a horde of people trampling about in performance of their duties, who would perforce contaminate the scene.

  She unzipped the soft-sided case and quickly pulled out the camera and began recording a panorama from where she stood, turning slightly with each frame to capture a full 180 degrees of the orchard on the left, the slough, and then the dune and the path leading to the beach on the right. She photographed her own feet and the stubble surrounding them, then the ground to either side and ahead of her, including a trampled patch where a cigarette butt had been crushed out, which she collected in a ziplock bag.

  She took a series zooming in on the body and a telephoto panorama of the far edges of the slough. Who knew, something could show up, some bent reeds or a patch of torn cloth.

  She moved then to the right onto a path and entered a dim tunnel leading through a belt of tall firs and cedars choked with an understory of salal, Oregon grape and huckleberry, and in a moment emerged into the brilliance of the beach. It was like a secret passage, like the wardrobe in the children’s classics that opened onto an entirely different world. The beach. You knew it was there but still were unprepared for it. The light and the sudden expanse. The heat. Sandy here at the upper reaches, giving way to pebbles, then rocks further down.

  The tide was partway out. Or partway in. Irene didn’t have the tides firmly fixed in her head, though she should. She knew that they ebbed and flowed with the moon in such a way that there were two highs and two lows roughly every twenty-four hours, but in all the passing of various waterways over the last several days during the normal course of her workday, the schedule of the tides had not registered on her. It would be a help right now to know if the tide was coming in or going out, but it wasn’t readily apparent. Unless roiled by wind or wakes, there was no surf in the protected waters of the South Sound and the tide rose and fell imperceptibly. In any event, the sand was dry underfoot so there was no hope of finding meaningful footprints. Dry, so it was probably coming in. Therefore the low had probably been three hours earlier, and the next high would be three hours hence.

  Last night when the squall hit the tide would have been high. She would have to check to be certain. She knew the moon was full and that extraordinarily high and low tides accompanied the August full moon. Irene wondered if she had been taught the science behind the tides in school and had failed to retain it. She didn’t like having this hole in her knowledge base handicapping her now.

  She walked north on the beach along the jumbled driftwood and dune grass until she came to the outlet from the slough. Pickle grass, which was a succulent and not a true grass at all, wove together into a solid blue-green mat along the edges of the channel, and Irene gave up on staying dry and walked in the streambed itself, letting the water flow over her paddock boots. Standing at the lip of the slough, now looking across at a different angle to where the body floated, she shot another panorama. In this series the approaching paramedics would appear, led by Rosalie down the orchard path.

  She had done what she could to preserve the scene as she found it. Most likely her photographic documentation would yield nothing but scenery and ordinary landscapes containing no useful information. But Irene was a great believer in the camera, not necessarily as a divining tool but simply for its recording abilities. She would pin the panoramas to her office wall, and in the coming investigation she’d be able to reenter this moment when her mind was still fresh and hadn’t yet been dulled with detail, presumption and frustration.

  Irene turned and shot the Guevara house, the just-completed mansion to the north, visible now beyond the poplars. People in town who had worked on it called it Chez Guevara—a grandiose shingled and gabled structure rambling across a mown hillside, more hotel than house. She had not seen it before, though she’d heard about it when it was under construction. She wondered what the Paris family thought of their new neighbor to the north.

  Looking out across the water, Irene shot a panorama of the Sound from where she stood—McMicken Island far to her left, nearly touching the shore of Gustavus Island, a sort of Pacific Northwest Isle de Saint-Michel where people waded at low tide to pick oysters, then Heron Island further out and larger, and finally the long horizon of the Long Branch Peninsula a mile and a half away across Case Inlet, the destination of the blackberrying flotilla described by Rosalie. Even on this blue midsummer morning, scrubbed clean by last night’s storm, there was not a vessel or a sail in sight on these remote waters of the Sound. And hardly any dwellings visible on the forested land masses.

  II

  Fourteen hours later the long northern twilight was fading. The slough and the surrounding beach and orchard were strung with yellow crime tape, electric in the dusk. The body was long gone. The Mason County Sheriff’s Department was done for the day.

  Irene was the last to leave. It was her case. By rights this was fair, it should be hers, but she knew better than to make the assumption it would be assigned to her. The five detectives in the department were supposed to receive assignments based on workload rather than seniority or anything else, a method that afforded Inspector Gilbert plenty of latitude for interpretation. There were only so many ways to play favorites though, and eventually it could come back to bite you. Irene had been bumped off the vacation roster by the more senior detectives who requested August leave, and now one was fishing in Alaska in the middle of his two weeks and a
nother was scheduled to start his time off in a matter of days. The other two were working with Kitsap County deputies on a narcotics investigation. Irene had just made an arrest in a burglary case and had a possession with intent to sell going to court. Last night she’d been a fifth wheel on the Kitsap collaboration. Inspector Gilbert’s hands were tied. By default Irene got the case.

  She turned and walked slowly up through the darkening orchard toward where she had left her car. Lights were on in the Paris house. Irene didn’t know where it came from, perhaps it was universal, but other people’s lit windows always gave her a pang, a forlorn feeling of exclusion. She wondered what was going on in there. She wondered if they were trying to get a meal together despite the circumstances; if Dr. Paris and his remaining two children and their children and spouses and the houseguests and housekeeper were all gathered together in the kitchen of the tall, ramshackle farmhouse perched here on the bluff above this empty northern stretch of beach as they had done each August for thirty years. Irene knew from her own experience the relentless insistence which the mundane imposes on grief. The children are hungry, you have to eat.

  She stayed in the shadows and moved closer until she was standing just outside the patch of illumination thrown by the kitchen window. It was as she had imagined, the family gathered there, or some of them, moving about, the children at the table, someone at the sink, the housekeeper tending something on the stove. It was kaleidoscopic, as though choreographed, the passing back and forth, grave and formal like an old-time line dance. Something caught her eye and Irene looked up in time to see movement in a dark upstairs window. Someone watching her watching them through the kitchen window? Who? Whoever it was was in Anne’s room, the dead woman’s room. She’d been in that room herself earlier in the day, opening drawers, looking in pockets, collecting items.