An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  Irene stood still for a moment, perplexed. Then she put down her boots and her satchel, ducked through the branches and found herself in a grotto-like space formed between the bank and the overhanging limbs of alder and cedar. It was cool and dim, and Irene could see that although the bluff had appeared uninterrupted, here it was cut by a narrow canyon under a canopy of towering trees. The walls of the canyon were covered with moss and maidenhair fern and glistened with seeping water. A foot or two above the beach the suggestion of a path led steeply uphill from a bank of tangled roots. In the damp sand at the base of the bank Irene saw the hoof prints of a deer and what looked like a track made by a tire tread, which she recognized as having been made by a Mexican huarache.

  Somewhere up in that ravine, hidden in foliage, a man was watching her. She would like to talk to him. She’d like to know who he was and how he came to be on this particular stretch of uninhabited beach, and what he might know about the I-14 and its occupant during the storm that had dashed it ashore.

  She pushed back out to where she’d left her shoes, and looked north along the shore trying to gauge how soon the incoming tide would make the beach impassable. It was impossible for her to tell. She had a tide table in her satchel and the times of the tides now fixed in her head, but that information alone wasn’t enough to determine at what point the water would be up under the trees and spars, blocking her passage.

  The seal was back, keeping tabs on her. It snorted. A sort of wet woof. Irene sat down and brushed the sand off her feet and put her boots back on.

  IT WAS cool and damp after the heat of the beach. And quiet, like stepping into a room deadened by carpet and drapery. She climbed silently upward on a footing of moss and duff. Somewhere in the trees above a woodpecker hammered intermittently. The canyon widened as she ascended, and flattened into a glade. There, door handle-deep in nettles, was the husk of a car dating from some time prior to the late fifties when Irene’s mental catalogue of makes and models began. At some point then this path would have been an actual road, or enough of a road for an auto to negotiate. Unless perhaps, and perhaps more likely, the car, no longer working, had been dumped, pushed over the lip of the canyon and had landed on its wheels.

  Further on the undergrowth became thicker and clogged the way. Here a track angled in from the north to join the canyon, unused and overgrown but once a road of sorts. Irene had to step over fallen tree limbs, but the going was easier, and before long she emerged at the top onto level ground. Here the track she’d been following became more defined, two negotiable ruts wending away into a forest of second growth timber, a plantation of closely spaced Douglas fir, naked trunks shooting straight up over a hundred feet, interspersed with alders, and towering above a dense understory of elderberry and hazelnut. Sunlight filtered through the canopy.

  Now that she was here, Irene had no idea what she had imagined to accomplish with this foray. There was no sign of the fugitive from the beach. It had been a waste of time and worse, imprudent. He could be anywhere. He could have been watching the entire adventure. She felt like “it” in hide-and-seek. She imagined herself cupping her hands to her mouth and hollering “olly-olly-oxen-free” to make him emerge.

  It was lighter to her right toward the bluff and Irene walked in that direction, hoping to get a glimpse of the beach in order to assess the progress of the tide before retracing her steps. And there, as she shouldered through a huckleberry thicket, she came upon a mossy cabin in a clearing.

  She approached cautiously. A padlock fastened the door, suggesting there was no one inside. She knocked anyway and waited. There was no response. She circled around, found a window, and looked in through cobwebs. It appeared to be a single room with a sleeping loft, crudely built, studs and rafters exposed, plywood floors. There was an incongruous stuffed armchair from some earlier epoch upholstered in faded pink velvet, and an enameled wood-fired cookstove. In the loft, a mattress on the floor, and suggesting more recent tenancy, one of those ubiquitous black rollaboards and a stack of books and papers beside the chair. She could see a cheap Styrofoam cooler next to the stove and a thirty-five millimeter camera with a long lens on a table. Beyond that, not much else. Irene wished she could make a closer inspection.

  Aside from the obvious signs of a current resident, the cabin appeared abandoned, unused for decades. A blackberry runner climbed up the inside of the window she was looking through. And outside the forest was encroaching. Alder saplings grew right up against the walls, and foxglove and fireweed pushed up between the boards of what was left of a stoop. Irene wondered whose land she was standing on. She had supposed that the entire tract here above the beach belonged to Manke, but perhaps she was mistaken.

  Irene continued toward the bluff, pushing through the alders and thigh-high yellow tansy until she could see the water. A slide at some point had taken a chunk of the bank and a lounge chair perched crazily partway down. Trees had been knocked over and leaned every which way like jackstraws, obscuring her view of the beach.

  She turned back toward the cabin and found something of a path leading inland, which she followed until she came to a junction where the grass was trampled and there was a turnaround pattern of tire tracks. She had not heard an engine, but she supposed that there had been a car parked here and that her quarry had decamped. She felt more comfortable, no longer imagining herself watched.

  Irene wondered where the track would come out if she followed it. Here it seemed to run north, parallel to the beach. She had a pretty good mental map of the island, and it seemed likely that after a walk in the woods she’d emerge on the county road within a mile or less of Fergus Point. Alternatively, she could return to the beach and hope she could still get by. She felt truant at this moment, no longer confident in her judgment. It seemed unprofessional to be alone in the woods. No one knew where she was. She thought about calling in to the office but couldn’t pick up a signal on her cell phone. That was often a problem in Mason County, pockets where you’d break up and go dead.

  VI

  “I’m not sad, I wouldn’t say,” said Libby Paris, now Burton, Anne’s older half-sister. “Or not yet. It hasn’t soaked in. I just feel weird and rattled. It’s like things seem normal, and then you remember. I mean, we’re all always quite scattered here, and then we congregate and scatter again. Everyone’s always doing their own thing. It’s like at any moment she’s going to come walking around the corner of the house.”

  It was Libby who Irene had heard mowing earlier in the orchard. Libby was taller than her dead sister and narrowly built. Hips like a boy. A blue bandana was knotted over her hair. She was flushed beneath her tan and wore a coating of sweat and chaff so that she looked slightly blurred, as though seen through gauze or Vaseline.

  “Mowing seemed like a good idea,” she said. “At least it was something to do that was actually useful.”

  IRENE HAD emerged from the woods about where she’d expected, and had continued along the road and then down the narrow track of the Paris driveway. As she’d passed the study she imagined Dr. Paris watching her, puzzling over her reappearance from this direction. She had walked on around the house and found Libby splayed in an Adirondack chair drinking a bottle of beer.

  “Hey,” said Libby, looking up.

  “Mrs. Burton,” said Irene, “hello.” She was relieved at the prospect of restarting her day, conducting the business she had planned.

  “Libby.”

  “If you prefer,” said Irene.

  “I do,” said Libby.

  She had offered Irene a beer, which Irene would have liked but declined, and water, which Irene accepted and which Libby produced in a half-quart Mason jar with ice and lemon. Now they sat together in the chairs in the sun. Across Case Inlet, in the sky above Long Branch, Mount Rainier loomed.

  “Was she killed?” asked Libby after a moment. “Do you know that for a fact?”

  “It’s a suspicious death, Mrs. Burton.”

  “Libby.”

  “Wh
en we have the pathologist’s report we’ll know more.”

  “But you think she was killed.”

  Irene didn’t answer.

  “When we lived in New York, years ago after Elliot and I were first married, the man upstairs, Evan Rhodes—funny, I still remember his name—his wife was murdered. It freaked us out. It seemed dangerous or unlucky to know him. But sophisticated too in a weird way. You don’t think about that happening to people you know,” she said, “people in your own circle. Murdered.”

  After a while, when Irene didn’t say anything Libby asked, “Do you think that everyone always thinks, why can’t we just make it yesterday? Just rewind the tiniest bit? Because the world seems the same in every respect except that one. I mean, the sun is out and it’s pleasant. Soon it’ll be time for a swim. How are you supposed to hold onto that one bit of information which changes everything? I can absolutely picture Anne walking around the corner of the house right this minute and flopping down in a chair, and she’ll say something and you’ll instantly forget about me.” Libby sighed. “She was very charismatic.” They sat in silence.

  “You don’t smoke do you?” asked Libby after a while.

  “No, not anymore.” Irene answered.

  “Neither do I,” said Libby, “or at least I don’t buy them anymore.”

  “Did Anne smoke?” asked Irene after a moment, thinking of the cigarette pack in the I-14.

  “No. Not officially. Unofficially she smoked. She used to hand me her cigarette if she was smoking and Oliver appeared. Or Julia, when she was alive. Sometimes I’d be sitting there holding two cigarettes, mine and hers.” She laughed. “It was comic. I mean, they’re shrinks, they’re smart, but even so, they only see what they want to see. Selective inattention, they call it in the trade. In some ways Anne never grew up.”

  “Oliver. You mean Dr. Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Julia. Anne’s mother?”

  “Yes. She died last year very unexpectedly. A brain aneurysm.” She was quiet for a moment. “It’s astonishing how much you can miss someone you never really liked.”

  “You didn’t like your stepmother?”

  “No, not particularly.”

  “But you miss her now she’s gone.”

  Libby was silent for a long time, then said, “I miss the way things were. I’m going to miss Anne.”

  “Have you always called him Oliver?” Irene asked, “your father?”

  “Yes,” said Libby.

  “Somewhere I read that very bright children will do that,” said Irene.

  “Oh, that wasn’t our case,” said Libby quickly. “It was him. His idea. Some mid-twentieth-century egalitarian notion or something. Erase the patriarchal hierarchy. When Anne came along though, she called him Daddy.” Libby’s face crumpled momentarily and she looked away, fighting back tears.

  Irene wondered why, what it was in that thought that stabbed her. And then she was composed again.

  “So, how did you get along with your sister?” Irene asked.

  “Is this where I say I’d like my lawyer present?”

  Irene couldn’t help it, she liked Libby. “If you want a lawyer it’s your prerogative. I’m just collecting information.”

  “I got along fine with Anne. We never had words. Not once.” She turned and looked directly at Irene. “That’s the truth,” she said.

  At that moment Libby’s two boys skidded around the corner of the house on bicycles, armed to the teeth—BB rifles slung across their shoulders, cap guns in their belts. They let their bikes drop by the porch and approached shyly, looking at Irene.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Owen, the older one, who was ten as Irene recalled. Neal, the younger brother, leaned against his mother’s chair.

  “Hi, boys,” said Libby. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Playing with Sam and Jared,” said Neal.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Neal.

  “Are you the deputy?” Owen asked Irene.

  “I am,” said Irene.

  “Detective Chavez,” said Libby.

  “I’m Owen,” said Owen.

  “I know,” said Irene, “I’ve been briefed.”

  “Do you have a gun?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He thought this over. “Can I see it?”

  Irene flipped her jacket open and he craned to look. “Are you left-handed?” he asked.

  “What makes you ask that?” asked Irene.

  “I don’t know. It’s on your other side. I just wondered.”

  “Well,” she said, “you’re right, I am left-handed.” She smiled at him. “Are you?” And he nodded, packing his own pistol on his left hip.

  They were cute kids, she thought, thin and tan and very blond and quaintly boyish, playing outdoors with old-fashioned ordnance and bicycles instead of inside with electronics. She felt a wave of envy for Libby, and a yearning for Victor as he’d been at ten.

  It was now mid-afternoon, and one by one the Paris family and their guests appeared around the corner of the house and assembled in the chairs by the bank.

  “Stay for lunch,” they said. “You must.”

  Someone brought out a bottle of chilled white wine. Someone flung a yellow cloth over the picnic table. A breeze came up and stirred the branches high in the fir trees, ruffling the water out on the Sound.

  Irene felt like Alice down the rabbit hole, not at all in charge of events.

  IRENE’S OWN interviews the day before gave her a sketch of the family, along with the interviews conducted by the other officers and detectives, the notes of which she’d glanced at that morning, now so long ago.

  Leland and Libby were children of Oliver Paris’s first marriage which ended when Libby was seven and Leland nine. Libby had moved back to Texas with her mother, a schoolteacher, now dead, while Leland stayed with his father and new stepmother in San Francisco. Thus the brother and sister grew up in different worlds with little shared experience.

  Anne was born two years following the divorce.

  Libby became a satellite child—her words—every other Christmas and three weeks each summer, until as a rebellious teenager she put a stop to the visits altogether. As an adult she had remained remote from her father and his family until the death of her mother when loyalty no longer constrained her and she had children of her own, and she began spending August on the island once again.

  Leland and Libby both married young. Rosalie was Leland’s third wife and together they had a three-year-old daughter, Phoebe. From his first marriage Leland had teenage boys whose whereabouts were unknown, swallowed up along with their mother into Scientology and never heard from. Leland was a genetics professor at UC Davis and Rosalie stayed at home and looked after Phoebe.

  Libby and her husband Elliot, an actor, who had been off the island for an audition and who had returned in the small hours, lived in L.A. in the Hollywood Hills. Libby was a photographer— sometimes friends hired her for weddings or to take portraits of their children, and sometimes they hired her for housecleaning. During the school year she worked as a substitute teacher. Money was tight.

  And the houseguests, Nikki Roth and Ira Logan, Anne’s friend and boyfriend respectively since undergraduate days. Nikki was completing a residency in gynecology at Mount Auburn in Boston, and Ira was an emergency room physician just back from three months in Ecuador where he’d been part of a measles inoculation program organized by Doctors Without Borders.

  Also in residence was Yvonne, the French housekeeper brought along from San Francisco, who, despite forty years in the United States—almost all of it in the employ of Julia Sachs—was still unable to communicate in English. Julia had spoken French, and so had Anne, but Dr. Paris did not, and he and Yvonne managed with a common vocabulary consisting largely of culinary nouns. Dr. Paris knew enough to request fish for dinner—poisson—or to convey that a guest was expected—compagnie—and beyond that there was no directing Yvonne’s behavior
anyway.

  THEY BROUGHT out cheese, and cold salmon under a mesh dome, tomatoes swimming in balsamic vinegar, a plate of figs wrapped in prosciutto, and a long loaf of homemade bread that Yvonne brought to the table in a flood of tears and French. “Anne made it,” explained Rosalie, sotto voce. “It’s the last of the bread that Anne baked.”

  Everyone looked at Dr. Paris, who simply took the serrated knife and the breadboard from Yvonne and sliced the loaf without the slightest change of expression. He sat in a straight-backed chair at the end of the table. He had turned up the collar of his suit coat, though the sun was blazing, and added a hat, a stained gray fedora. The place to his left on the bench was unoccupied, unset. Anne’s usual place, Irene surmised.

  Libby went inside to make grilled cheese sandwiches for her boys and for Phoebe, which made Irene feel slightly more normal. To her, lunch, if she ate it at all, was fast food or a container of yogurt.

  It was silent around the picnic table. Only the clink of cutlery and the drone of circling yellow jackets, attracted by the salmon. Irene wondered if meals were always like this or if the silence was because of Anne. Their faces gave nothing away.

  Then Dr. Paris looked up and froze, his attention focused north toward the slough. Irene turned to follow his gaze and saw a figure approaching up the orchard path. It was a burly middle-aged man wearing a Panama hat, holding a German shepherd dog on a short leash and carrying a bottle in his other hand. The sun went momentarily behind a cloud. Dr. Paris rose and the man stopped about twenty feet from the table. Everyone was still. It was like a tableau vivant illustrating some ominous moment out of Chekhov.

  “Dr. Paris,” the man said.

  “Mr. Guevara,” said Dr. Paris.

  “Forgive the intrusion. I’ve brought a 1982 Latour à Pomerol which I hope you’ll accept with my condolences,” said Mr. Guevara. It was a little like watching a tennis match, the two principals spaced far apart and all heads swiveling from one to the other.

  “Thank you,” Dr. Paris said finally. “That’s very kind.” Some inarticulate cue passed between him and Leland, for Leland climbed out of his place at the picnic table and walked toward Mr. Guevara. The German shepherd growled, arresting Leland’s approach.