An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

She was going to get to know them. It was a complicated family, she had learned that much already. Everyone, the neighbors as well, had been interviewed by one or another of the detectives, and tomorrow morning Irene would have everyone’s initial statements typed up and on her desk. She’d have the basic information of who everyone was and how they fit in relation to the dead woman, where they were last night and what they said they’d seen or heard. A start, something to build on.

  Irene slipped away from the light and went around the house and past the barn. As she got into her car she smelled cigarette smoke. Somewhere not far away in the falling dark, someone was smoking and watching her.

  She turned the car and drove up the steep track that tunneled through the woods and out to the dirt road before she turned on her headlights.

  VICTOR WAS at home. Always a relief to her. He was sprawled on the couch watching a boy-and-his-dog DVD he’d rented, a choice that made him seem young and innocent and which made Irene’s worries seem pointless and premature. But she knew better. The woods in Mason County were full of trailer houses where people cooked methamphetamines; and in greenhouses and garages lit by grow lights and in atrium windows, cannabis flourished. Sometimes when Irene got home at night hip-hop or rap was blasting from behind Victor’s closed door and he emerged only reluctantly and had nothing to say. Sometimes he wasn’t home at all. “Hanging out with friends,” he’d say when he came in late and she asked where he’d been. “Call,” she said, “or leave a note. Otherwise I worry.” It was hard to know what limits to set on a fourteen-year-old boy in a small town in summer. Or how to enforce those limits. He had a job bagging groceries and stocking shelves at the corner store and he mowed lawns around the neighborhood as well. He had his own money, time on his hands, and only one parent and she could pay attention only part of the time. Sometimes Irene was worried to distraction.

  “Hi, honey,” she said.

  He pointed the remote and paused the movie. “Hey, Ma.” He looked up and she ruffled his hair. Irene Moran and Luis Chavez together had produced a thin, brown-eyed, olive-skinned, dark-blond boy of sublime beauty. His perfection caused Irene to live in perpetual fear. In him she saw Luis. His skin was thin as silk, teeth fragile as glass, bones like twigs. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself, when she looked at Victor she saw Luis, battered, broken, a nightmare she couldn’t make go away. She kissed Victor’s forehead and smelled sweat and gasoline—reassuring, wholesome, hard-working boy-in-summer smells. “I’m going to watch,” he said, and started the movie again.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I made macaroni,” he added, “and didn’t eat it all.”

  IRENE STOOD in the kitchen eating leftover macaroni and cheese out of the pot with a wooden spoon and thought about the dead woman—Anne Paris, Oliver Paris’s third child and second daughter—the body across town now in the coroner’s office in a refrigerated drawer with a tag on her toe.

  Irene didn’t yet know with certainty the cause of death, but she knew certain facts about Anne Paris. Twenty-nine-year-old white female, only child of Oliver and Julia, younger half-sister to Leland and Libby, unmarried, a Barnard graduate. She’d attended medical school at the state university and was now—well, had been—a psychiatrist in psychoanalytic training, following in her parents’ footsteps, on staff at an elite, privately funded Boston mental institution. Last seen going out alone in her brother’s small, fast sailboat, the International 14. She’d been hit hard on the back of the head and had spent some time submerged in cold water. She was wearing a Hawaiian-print bikini top and bicycle shorts when she died. No life preserver.

  Irene could feel her mind engage. She was already thinking about tomorrow, formulating a mental list of the order in which she would proceed. This was not always the case. Her work was often discouraging and sometimes boring. The hours were long and the pay was only adequate. The county was depressed, the timber industry hit hard by the economic downturn. County coffers were depleted and budgets cut, the sheriff’s department included. Crime was up. Worse, though, was the lack of camaraderie.

  There was no overt disharmony among the detectives or within the department in general, but a woman on the force changed the dynamic, of that she was certain. Moreover, she’d come up from Los Angeles after four years with the L.A.P.D. and the Mason County boys were determinedly unimpressed. Irene didn’t let it bother her. They could work together, and did. She went out for a beer with one or another of them from time to time to demonstrate she was a good sport. But they weren’t really friends and she never felt covered. And that was a difference. L.A. was dangerous and depressing and she’d wanted out almost from the beginning, but there was always somebody watching her back. She was part of something. Here they gave you a car and a gun and if you called for backup it could take half an hour. She’d hired on as a deputy on patrol and she knew better than to think Inspector Gilbert had really wanted her to move up when he had an opening in detectives. But she was the most qualified candidate, and the sheriff was running for reelection and diversity looked good for the department. Plus, no one wanted to risk a disgruntled woman with a grievance dragging through the protracted process of Public Employee Relations Commission hearings.

  It was funny how things worked out. She’d grown up here. In this town. In this house. When she left she’d never looked back. Never planned on coming back. She would have laughed if anybody had said she ever would.

  The house itself was pleasant enough. A two-bedroom clapboard saltbox built in the twenties on the hill south of town. It was solid and there were some nice details—the ceilings were high, the downstairs floors were hardwood. From the upstairs bedrooms you could see the inlet and the Simpson timber mill. Through parsimony and indifference the house had been spared the usual unfortunate fifties and seventies updates. It was plain and old-fashioned. Irene had pulled up the carpeting, refinished the floors, stripped the wallpaper, and painted the walls white, trying to erase her childhood memories and evidence of her parents.

  There were no sidewalks in this part of town and plenty of space between the houses. It seemed a very long way from Los Angeles. Irene had come back for that reason. She couldn’t safely raise Victor on a cop’s pay in a city where everywhere you looked there was somebody who had everything and having things seemed to matter—cars and clothes and leisure. In Los Angeles if a boy had money he’d stolen it or his parents gave it to him. Gardeners mowed the lawns, not neighborhood boys. Immigrants bagged your groceries and washed your car. There was always someone willing to work for less. You couldn’t instill values, or Irene couldn’t imagine how you could.

  Assigned to gangs, she started busting kids hardly older than Victor, truant teens with guns and drug habits, and it was time to get out. She came home to Shelton and made an uneasy peace with her father and cared for him until he died. Her mother was already gone.

  “NIGHT, MA,” said Victor, standing in the kitchen doorway, “I’m going to bed.”

  “Give me a kiss,” she said. He rolled his eyes but walked over—he was already as tall as she—and presented his cheek for her kiss. This semantic interpretation of her request was understood between them and made her smile. Victor was moving away, detaching. She was bound to lose him, and trying to hold him would only push him out the door.

  After he’d gone up, she poured two fingers of Bushmills into a juice glass and added an ice cube. This had become a habit, a way of ensuring sleep. A habit she must monitor.

  She realized she’d been standing in the kitchen for a long time, leaning against the counter, lost in her thoughts of tomorrow and of the Parises and her worry over Victor. She walked through the living room and roused their old Australian shepherd from where he was sleeping beside the couch. He got stiffly to his feet and followed her outside. Irene stood in the warm night looking up into the stars while the dog made his bedtime rounds in the yard.

  III

  “She didn’t drown. She did aspirate seawater, but not much. It was the skull f
racture that killed her. Did you see it?” Irene had seen it the day before when they first hauled the body out of the slough and performed a preliminary forensic examination—a sickening depression on the back of the head. Now though, Chesterine Reade rolled the body as she spoke, without waiting for an answer. The back of Anne Paris’s head had been shaved. Irene’s stomach lurched.

  “What did it?” Irene asked.

  “A stick. A branch. Possibly a pipe of some sort. Something along those lines. Not a rock, in other words, or a hammer or a frying pan. Something more or less cylindrical about three inches in diameter. At least that’s what I think. Look.” Chesterine had glasses dangling on a chain around her neck which she positioned on the bridge of her nose as she bent forward over the body.

  Irene obediently leaned in close.

  “See here?” said Chesterine, pointing to aspects of the wound with the tip of a pen. “And here? See the laceration, how the skin is torn? Whatever hit her wasn’t completely smooth. Not like a baseball bat for instance. There was a knob or a knot or a protuberance. Some sort of asymmetry.”

  “The boom of a sailboat?” asked Irene.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Chesterine. “Are there fittings of some sort? I’d have to see the boom.” She rolled the body over again onto its back. “She had sex shortly before she died.”

  “Does it make sense that if she were hit by the boom and knocked overboard that she was dead by the time she hit the water?” Irene asked. “Not breathing? We know she was sailing.”

  “Sure. Anything’s possible. These water ones are hard. You lose so much evidence. Even time of death. The water’s cold and certain processes are retarded and other stuff is just washed away. But we’ll know a lot more when we get stuff back from the lab. And Felix will be up this afternoon.”

  Chesterine was the Mason County coroner, an elected position. She was a licensed practical nurse and a paramedic, qualified to determine cause and manner in most unexpected or unexplained deaths, but not a doctor and not qualified to perform an autopsy. Felix Guzmán, M.D., once the Pierce County Medical Examiner, had left that position in disgrace following a scandal involving photographs, the deceased mayor of Tacoma, and a particularly morbid autopsy assistant. Dr. Guzmán retired to Olympia and in time regained something of his reputation, working as a consultant assisting smaller counties and municipalities as a freelance forensic pathologist. Chesterine, a tall, potato-shaped person with a no-nonsense coiffure, and the imperious, dandified Filipino doctor made peculiar allies, but they liked each other and their combined expertise was formidable.

  “Look at this, though,” Chesterine said. She lifted an arm and swung it away from the body so Irene could see short blue stripes on the pale inside of the upper arm. “Same over here,” pulling the other arm away from the trunk to reveal similar bruises. Chesterine replaced the arms and leaned across the table and took hold of Irene’s arms, not hard, but hard enough to suggest how such markings could come to be made. It was an imploring gesture, a grasp simple to break free of. “That’s just theory, you understand,” said Chesterine, dropping her hands. She picked up a clipboard and began reading. “Five foot eight, 130 pounds. No apparent surgeries. Oval mole inside right thigh, two centimeters. Eyes blue, hair blonde, chemically highlighted. All her own teeth. No wisdom teeth. Pierced ears, pearl studs. Small compass rose tattoo mid-back at L-4. Paint flakes and sand under the fingernails, no apparent blood or tissue—we’ll do more testing on that. Semen in the vaginal swab.”

  Irene looked down at what had been Anne Paris. A long, slender trunk—one of those long-waisted girls men love—smallish, wide-apart breasts, narrow waist, flat stomach between prominent hipbones, long thighs and shapely calves, delicate ankles, toenails painted an iridescent car-body maroon. A Matisse sort of figure. It was hard to tell if she had been beautiful. Not pretty certainly in a conventional way, but unusual and perhaps oddly compelling. Full lips. Imposing narrow nose. Surprising dark eyebrows. She looked dead but from the front, undamaged.

  “Has the family been in?” Irene asked. “The father?”

  “No,” said Chesterine, “not necessary in these circumstances. You know, identified at the scene.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Irene picked up Anne’s hand and held it in her own. A big hand for a girl, bigger than Irene’s, narrow with long fingers ending in almond nails and manicured cuticles. Irene’s own hand was dark against the pallor of death, broad across the knuckles, bony and strong with pale, rounded nails. Irene still wore her wedding ring, a narrow gold band. She’d never taken it off, not once, in all the years since Luis put it there. She was superstitious about that. She put Anne’s hand down. Chesterine was looking at her. There were ways that you tried to breathe life back into somebody, get into their skin, know them when all possibility of knowing was past. You had to, in a way, to do the job.

  Mason County didn’t own a morgue. Instead the county rented space on an as-needed basis from the local funeral home, keeping bodies in the prep room cooler. One of the other drawers was occupied. “Who’s that?” Irene asked, changing gears.

  “No one you know. John Doe suicide, Soundview Motel. Wrists. Checked in as Jean D’Eau, if you can believe that,” giving it an exaggerated French accent. “The cops have it.” Which explained why Irene hadn’t heard about it. The town cops had jurisdiction within Shelton city limits, it wouldn’t be a matter for the sheriff’s department.

  IRENE WAS glad to be able to get in the car and drive. The morgue rattled her. She wanted a shower or a barbiturate or a drink. None of them possible or advisable at this moment. She wished now she hadn’t touched Anne’s hand. It gave her the creeps. There was a period of time, she thought, when the spirit had left the body but hadn’t gone far. Maybe roosting up in the corner of the room or hovering somewhere close-by. She felt observed and obliged now, beyond just the job.

  Luis she had touched as though he could feel pain—was in pain—gently gathering him to her as if her caress might heal him. But then she had shaken him and tried to call him back. It had seemed as though he wouldn’t have to go. He hadn’t been gone so long that he couldn’t turn around. Clinging to him, to the dead but not yet cold, corporeal, battered part of Luis, she watched the rest of him walking away down a hall and she screamed his name, “Luis!” But he didn’t hear or wouldn’t turn around. “Luis! Luis!” Half lying on him, clinging. The officer in that case standing back with averted eyes.

  She couldn’t allow herself to think this way.

  IV

  Gustavus was an island about twelve miles long and three miles wide, tapering to points at each end, roughly two-thirds the size of Manhattan and similar in shape. About two hundred people lived on the island, more in the summers. During the forties and fifties, families from Shelton and Olympia had bought bits of beachfront property and thrown up cabins built on pilings over the sand or perched on the bluffs above. The interior of the island was still largely owned by timber companies, Simpson and Manke, huge tracts of second growth fir and cedar ending in cliffs high above the beach, precipitous drops impractical or impossible to negotiate, which made much of the waterfront undesirable as vacation property. Thus, long stretches of beachfront remained uninhabited.

  The beach itself sloped gradually, leaving wide expanses of sand exposed at low tide. In the sixties a bridge replaced a six-car ferry, making access to the island less suspenseful, but even so the population grew slowly.

  Thirty-five years earlier Oliver Paris and his newly acquired second wife had purchased an old farmhouse and orchard in order to have something to do with the children during August when shrinks famously took a month’s vacation and Oliver had three weeks’ summer custody of the children of his first marriage. The property was located on Fergus Point, a broad promontory midway along the east side of the island with wide sandy beaches and a view of Mount Rainier.

  In those days, a research facility attached to a now-defunct pulp mill attracted scientists to Shelto
n, and a cultured stratum of PhDs bifurcated the scrappy mill town. Among these was Fritz Strauss, a British chemist who had been a childhood friend of Julia Sachs in London, both children of Austrian Jews who had fled Vienna in the late thirties and made their way to England. Fritz left London for the U.S. and graduate school and never returned. When Julia Sachs was offered a fellowship at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas in the mid-sixties, they reconnected and remained in touch. Later, Fritz and his wife Janet had two boys similar in age to Julia Sachs Paris’s brand new step-children, and a cabin on Fergus Point. In this way the families began a tradition of summers together, which continued now into a third generation.

  THE PARIS property consisted of a couple of cottages, a scatter of small outbuildings and a two-story barn, as well as the house itself, all painted a powdery white, flaking now to the wood beneath, surrounding an expanse of bleached mown grass, forming a compound of sorts where an older Honda minivan with California plates, a vintage Mercedes, and a Dodge Neon were randomly parked.

  Irene rolled to a stop and got out. It was still early, not yet ten, but already hot. The buildings had reached that stage of decrepitude where they seemed one with the landscape, camouflaged and natural. Oddly, the shabbiness of the estate conveyed a gentility that Irene found at once appealing and intimidating, a total disregard for convention that bespoke privilege.

  A thin fringe of tall yellow grass missed by the mower skirted the buildings. Moss grew on the roof shakes. Next to the house a pale pink rose climbed a trellis to the porch roof where a faded green whirligig in the shape of a roadrunner spun its wings when the breeze caught it. Foxgloves and an espaliered pear tree grew against the end of the barn. At the edge of the bluff a collection of weathered Adirondack chairs faced the Sound. Somewhere unseen in the orchard someone was running a mower. In an upstairs window a corner of a lace curtain lifted, then fell back into place.