An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  Irene caught her reflection in the cottage window and swung her jacket to cover the gun under her arm. She wore plainclothes, black jeans and a gray tee shirt, a uniform she put on every day; but as a matter of decorum she didn’t like to display her hardware and she always wore a jacket, even in summer.

  Softly, a call from behind her, “Good morning, Detective Chavez.”

  Irene turned. Ira Logan was standing in the open barn door. How long had he been watching her? Eyes everywhere, making her jumpy. Ira was the dead woman’s boyfriend. She took a breath. “Morning,” she said, and walked over. Behind him, up on blocks in the dim interior of the barn, was a 1963 TR3, his summer project—this much she’d learned the day before—rewiring it and creating a solid walnut instrument panel.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

  “You didn’t,” she replied and immediately regretted it. His look clearly announced his skepticism. He was a young doctor, trained to observe. Now she was flustered. She walked past him into the barn. The floor was packed dirt soaked with decades of spilled motor oil. As her eyes adjusted she could see a jumble of tools and lumber filling the other side of the barn, an overturned rowboat resting on sawhorses, garbage cans, and evidence of past summers in the form of a child’s deflated wading pool, badminton racquets and a croquet set. Various sizes of faded orange Mae West life vests hung from the rafters. A rusted barbecue. And interestingly, against the back wall, a rumpled down sleeping bag spread on a canvas cot under a trouble light dangling from an extension cord.

  “So,” she said, turning back to the Triumph, “this is it?”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced at him, smiling. “It’s so small. It’s teeny.”

  “You’re like six inches off the road,” he said. “Makes a Miata seem huge. You have no idea.”

  “How’s it going,” she asked, looking at a tangle of colored wire spilling out from under the dash.

  “This?” he asked, and rubbed his face. He was tired, she could see, or anxious, or both, a muscle jumping at the corner of one eye. “Well,” he said, taking a breath. “It’s going well. It’s not complicated, you know. It’s quite straightforward and much simpler if you’re doing it all at once. I have a manual and it’s like connect the dots. The only hard part is that the space is tight and often you’re working blind. You know, you can’t see your hands and your hands are too big.”

  She looked at his hands, big competent hands with greaseblackened fingers like Victor’s. Not like a doctor’s scrubbed hands at all.

  “But wiring is simple,” he went on, “positive, negative, ground. It’s not mysterious, your choices are very limited.” There was a pause. “How’s it going for you?” he asked. “Have you learned anything?”

  “It’s early days,” said Irene. She was glad to note that he said “like” like a kid, it made him more ordinary. She had to remind herself not to be too impressed by these people. Most of the time as a cop or a deputy sheriff you dealt with lowlifes, the sad edges of society, and it was going to be a challenge to probe and inquire into the genteel, educated, opaque Paris family. “What did Anne think of this project?” she asked.

  “She wasn’t in the slightest bit interested,” Ira said. He looked away, squinting, and Irene thought his eyes might have filled with tears he was trying to hide.

  “You know, I taught her how to drive a stick shift,” he said. “Up here actually, on the island, years ago now. We’ve been together seven years,” turning to look at her, “did you know that?”

  “Really?” said Irene. “That’s a long time.”

  After a moment he went on. “She’d never driven a stick before but she had this thing about cars, or at least she conveyed that she had a thing about cars, like we shared an enthusiasm, you know, and she wanted me to teach her.”

  He looked at Irene and pursed his lips, stopping himself, she thought, from going on. Then, in a different tone, “Anne is a very accomplished flirt—was—and she flirted with me over cars once upon a time. But when it came to this Triumph, she wasn’t in the slightest bit interested. She was studying for the psychiatric boards and I was working on my car. If you want to know the truth, we weren’t even sleeping together. She wanted to stay up late reading and studying. I wanted to fall into bed at ten o’clock. I’ve been sleeping in here. Or in the orchard sometimes to catch a breeze.” A silence. “Someone was going to tell you.”

  Ah, thought Irene, he had noticed that she had noticed the cot. “Explain to me about the psychiatric boards,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s not that big a deal, it’s a test, that’s all. Not everybody is good at tests. Anne certainly isn’t. This was her third try. She was embarrassed and she’d had an ultimatum from Atkins, where she was practicing. You know, pass the boards or you can’t see patients kind of thing. But everybody knows medicine is like the Ivy League in a way, you’re not going to flunk out. They’ll hold your hand. She got through medical school, she did her residency—she’s a good doctor, I know that. But you do have to sooner or later pass these board exams. Anne—she’s been tutored, she’s done everything. She’s just not a test taker. It’s a hoop you’ve got to jump through and most people jump through and that’s it. Everybody knows you’re a doctor, it’s a formality. But it was eluding her, it was an embarrassment. She was taking them in Seattle this time and she was determined to pass. It was a monkey on her back. I mean, jeez, she was what, three years out of med school.” He sighed, then said bleakly, “But it was making her a bear to live with.”

  Irene looked at him. Ira had faintly Mediterranean good looks—a tumble of dark hair, fair skin, quite a lot of moles, and one of those sprouts of beard beneath the lower lip.

  “It hasn’t soaked in.” he said. “I’m glad to have something to do,” indicating the car. Then, in another tone, regaining himself, “What happens now?”

  “Now,” she said, “I’m going to talk to everybody. Starting with Dr. Paris.”

  “Again?”

  “Again,” she said. “There’s a lot of talking in my business too.”

  “Shrinks listen, remember? And answer questions with questions. They don’t talk.” He smiled, his gloom lifting. “Will you be coming back to talk to me?”

  Irene laughed—as she was meant to—at his deliberately plaintive tone. “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, smiling now, “till then, then.”

  Ira Logan, Irene thought as she walked toward the house, was quite an accomplished flirt himself, making an interview with an officer of the law seem something like a date.

  Chesterine had said that Anne had had sex. With whom, Irene wondered.

  AN ELONGATED lean-to of a back porch containing a bathroom and a woodshed had been tacked onto the side of the kitchen at some point in history to replace the outhouse, which still tilted out in the orchard under a mantle of climbing wild rose. Irene heard water running behind the closed door. Someone was showering. She peered through the screen into the kitchen, which seemed to be empty. There were dirty dishes piled on the counter beside the sink under the window. “Hello?” she called, and waited. There was no response. “Hello?” Nothing.

  She stepped off the porch and walked to the edge of the bluff, which was alarmingly close to the house, and looked over. The cliff face was slightly concave here, undercut beneath where she stood. An old cedar growing nearby dangled roots into thin air. Below on the beach a mound of sandy earth gave evidence of a slide. Each year, Irene imagined, the precipice moved a little nearer. Soon you’d get vertigo standing at the kitchen sink.

  Behind her she heard the bathroom door open and she turned and saw Nikki Roth, the other Paris houseguest, Anne’s best friend, step naked out onto the porch, toweling her mane of hair. She tossed her head, flinging her hair up out of her face and back onto her shoulders, scattering beads of water, and saw Irene watching. She laughed and wrapped herself in the towel, but not hurriedly and not before Irene had gotten an eyeful of her extraordinar
y cloud of pubic hair, pale gold on either side of a dark brown center stripe. Nikki was deeply and evenly tanned, apparently her summer project, and naked she wore a pale bikini of milky skin.

  “Oops,” Nikki said, securing her towel. “We’re quite uninhibited around here.”

  “I’m looking for Dr. Paris,” said Irene.

  “Oh, well, he’s in his study,” Nikki said, as though stating the obvious.

  “Which is where?” asked Irene.

  “I’m sorry,” said Nikki, instantly contrite. “I didn’t mean to be unhelpful. It’s just that if you know him you know that that’s what he does. He gets up, he drinks his coffee, he goes to his study. Every single day.”

  “Even today?” asked Irene.

  “Even today,” said Nikki. “Or especially today. It’s the little white cottage on the other side of the house near the pump house. The little one. Do you know where I mean?”

  “I can figure it out,” said Irene.

  “We’re not quite ourselves,” said Nikki, “I’m sure you understand.”

  Well, thought Irene, as she walked on around the house, having circled it now and come back to where she’d parked, she wasn’t sure she understood at all. Uninhibited indeed.

  DR. PARIS’S study was a one-room cottage, open to the rafters, everything painted white. It looked, Irene thought, very much like what she imagined a shrink’s office would look like, except more rustic. There was a table piled with books and papers, and what seemed to be a single bed slipcovered in ivory linen, a threadbare Oriental carpet, his leather chair and ottoman, and the pressed-back kitchen-style chair he offered her, in which she now sat.

  Dr. Paris was quite tall and very thin, he had enormous feet which he now rested on the ottoman, making a teepee of his knees. He was gangly and loose like a marionette, which, along with the oversized feet, made him seem youthful, though otherwise he appeared frail. He wore corduroy pants and a gray suit coat buttoned over a dark blue cashmere muffler that was folded across his chest. Quite bundled up despite the heat. They sat in silence.

  Irene looked out the paned window above the table at her car parked in the open area between the buildings. Sitting here he would have seen her arrive. He would have seen her use his window as a mirror. His dusty window like one-way glass. He would have watched her go into the barn with Ira and then come out again and walk around toward the back of the house.

  She waited. He had an unusual tolerance for silence.

  “Dr. Paris,” she said finally, and stopped. She looked around the room. On top of a high, narrow dresser, a chipped porcelain pitcher held a bouquet of wild sweet peas. He followed her gaze.

  “She picked those,” he said. “Anne.” He spoke slowly and softly and Irene could hear a hint of a Southern accent.

  Irene didn’t know what to say. There was another silence. She shifted in her chair.

  Dr. Paris put his feet on the floor and leaned forward to square a pile of loose pages covered with angular handwriting lying on the table. He cleared his throat. “You know, Detective Chavez,” he said, “this is very difficult. I’m an old man. I’m very tired. To you it may seem pertinent how my daughter died, why she died, when she died, at whose hand or by what means. To me what’s pertinent is only . . .” He trailed off. He took a shaky breath and looked out the window. “If there is something you must ask me, ask me. Otherwise, please go.”

  “Dr. Paris,” said Irene—then, “Excuse me, sir.” Her phone was vibrating. She stood to take the call. “Chavez,” she said, and walked outside.

  It was the Coast Guard. They’d found the boat, the I-14. It was beached a mile or so south. If she wished, seeing as she was there on the island anyway, they’d have the officer zip up and collect her and she could take a look for herself.

  IRENE GOT what she needed from the car, the camera and evidence bag, then walked down through the orchard toward the beach without saying anything more to Dr. Paris. She’d try again on another occasion. He’d be relieved, that was all, watching her go, leaving him alone in his study with his grief and his writing and with the flowers picked for him by his now-dead daughter. She could feel his eyes on her back as she walked away.

  V

  A boater had called it in, the Coast Guard officer told her. Someone passing on the water who had seen the I-14 lying on its side high up on a deserted stretch of beach.

  A lapstrake hull, narrow and deeply V’d, of painted boards with an improbably tall mast, the International was famously fast and notoriously unstable. It wasn’t a class of boat intended for casual sailors. It was a fourteen-foot racing sloop, a little day sailer with a retractable center board rather than a fixed keel, no cabin or instruments, just an open cockpit with cleats and pulleys to manage the sheets, designed to be single-handed.

  The tiller was broken, the long handle that attached to the rudder, splintered off at the transom. In a big wind and high seas, the Coast Guard officer said, a panicky sailor might try to hold an impossible course, hauling on the tiller until the wood snapped.

  Irene looked out at the Sound and tried to imagine these placid waters as they must have been two nights ago, gray and turbulent and perilous. This morning in Case Inlet there was not a breath of wind to fill a sail.

  Some distance from shore a seal broke the surface as Irene watched, and looked around, a head like a periscope. It saw her and studied her for a moment, then sank below the surface again. The beach here was rockier than at Fergus Point, and more steeply pitched. A curve of the shore created something of a cove, a wide shallow bay at the base of a nearly vertical cliff rising several hundred feet above a tangle of willow and alders.

  Irene took photos, examined the boom and the gunwales and took scrapings in case some tissue might turn up. But the boat had capsized and it seemed unlikely that salt water wouldn’t have washed away all trace of anything that would be of interest.

  There was sand and seawater and a sodden half-full pack of Camel Lights inside the boat; and when Irene was finished she helped the officer tip out the water, then they pulled up the center board and righted the vessel and furled the sails. Irene sealed the soggy cigarettes in a plastic evidence bag. Then together they hauled the I-14 down the beach to the water’s edge and set it afloat again, fastened to the launch on a long line. The Coast Guard officer would tow it to Shelton for further forensic examination.

  Irene declined a lift back to Fergus Point. She wanted to walk back along the beach. If she hurried she could beat the tide. In the worst case she’d get her feet wet, and she was already soaked to the knees from wading out to clamber aboard the Coast Guard launch.

  She didn’t think it was very professional, and Inspector Gilbert might not approve, but there was no one to see and a long way to walk, so she took off the paddock boots she habitually wore, tied them together by the laces and slung them over her shoulder, and set off barefoot. The sand was warm underfoot and the sun hot on her shoulders. She stopped and took off her jacket and tied it around her waist. It was, she thought, a small stolen moment of summer vacation and she wished she could share it with Victor. In this northern climate you could live near water and forget to take your kid to the beach. In California, they’d often gone out to Santa Monica, or further north to Point Dume or to small coves along the Pacific Coast Highway, to picnic and swim. Here in Puget Sound the water was very cold and only the stalwart swam. If the weather held, Irene thought, maybe they’d go out to the coast on her next day off and hike to the shore at Cape Alava.

  Her thoughts wandered, not really focused on anything, idly observing her surroundings, the sand and pebbles underfoot, shore birds, the vegetation growing on the bank. The incoming tide. So it was with a jolt that she suddenly registered the completely unexpected presence of a figure on the beach some distance ahead of her.

  She didn’t know how long it had been there or if it had just now appeared. At this distance she couldn’t tell if it was moving toward her or away or moving at all. And she couldn’t tell if whoe
ver it was was aware yet of her presence. She moved closer to the leaning frieze of trees so anyone looking in her direction wouldn’t see her as a silhouette against the sand, but would have to make her out through a scrim of branches. Here she stopped and put her jacket back on, then retrieved her field glasses from her bag.

  When she located the figure through the lenses and brought it into focus she had another shock. The figure, which was a man, now magnified to intimate proximity, stood facing her with his own set of binoculars trained upon her, seemingly close enough to touch. It was weirdly unsettling. No normal behavior suggested itself, a wave or salute. Irene noted a description before dropping her glasses. Dark hair, trim graying beard, slender. Dark blue tee shirt tucked into khaki pants. Impossible to determine height or anything else about his appearance with the binoculars held to his face. She guessed he had gotten a good look at her, however. She wondered if he’d seen the gun.

  She began walking toward him, continuing to watch with her naked eyes, curious to see what he’d do—disappear, await her, approach her?

  And he vanished. He was there and then he was gone. He simply faded into the trees and vanished while she was still quite some distance away. She tried to keep the exact spot fixed in mind as she approached, but when she came up to where she believed he had stood she was no longer certain. The pebbly sand didn’t hold a footprint.

  She wished she’d thought to flash her badge. Fish her wallet out of her back pocket and flip it open next to her face for his watching binoculars. Perhaps then he would have waited. She had no way of assessing whether his disappearing act was in itself suspicious. There was nothing official about her appearance to compel him to wait or to reassure him if he had seen her gun. He might have been alarmed or simply not have felt sociable. Perhaps emerging from the trees and imagining himself alone and finding he was not, he simply chose to retreat.