An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  “Phsssst, Gus.” said Mr. Guevara, silencing the dog. And then to Leland, “I am so sorry.” And he leaned down and stood the bottle carefully upright on the uneven turf.

  Suddenly Phoebe screamed. Everyone looked. A yellow jacket on the back of her hand. Rosalie slapped it away.

  “Baking soda,” said Libby. “Quick.”

  “Meat tenderizer if you’ve got it,” said Ira.

  “Ice,” said Owen.

  “Make sure the stinger’s out,” said Nikki.

  “Yellow jackets don’t lose their stingers,” said Leland from where he stood, seizing a pedagogic moment while his daughter yelled. “That’s only honeybees, and it’s fatal—they die—but yellow jackets can sting again and again.”

  Rosalie jumped up, scooping up Phoebe, and hurried into the kitchen.

  “Can I have the rest of her sandwich?” asked Neal.

  “No,” said Libby. “She may still want it.”

  Calm settled back over the scene, though inside Phoebe was still crying and Yvonne was exclaiming, “Mon Dieu! Mon pauvre cherie!”

  Mr. Guevara touched his hat, then turned and departed.

  Leland walked over and picked up the bottle and delivered

  it to his father. Dr. Paris sat back down and put on glasses to inspect the label. “How extraordinary,” he said.

  Leland climbed back into his place at the table and looked at Irene. “There’s been a dispute,” he said. “Mr. Guevara has built steps from his property down onto ours and he’s been walking across our dune and using our beach. It’s very aggressive and annoying. Have you ever heard of the right of adverse possession?”

  Irene had not.

  “I have the same wine,” said Dr. Paris. “In 1982 I bought twelve cases of this same wine when it was still in the barrels in Bordeaux. The weather that year in Bordeaux was magnificent. It was hot and dry. It was an exceptional year. I did a lot of research and made a very sound investment. This is not an easy wine to come by. It’s now much sought after. I have always considered this my wine. How extraordinary,” he said again.

  “What will you do now about Mr. Guevara?” asked Libby.

  “There’s nothing to do,” replied her father.

  “Don’t you think it’s a peace offering?”

  “If Mr. Guevara wants peace with me all he has to do is remove his steps.”

  “Well, it’s a gesture.”

  “It’s a gesture with no meaning,” said her father.

  Inside the phone rang. Dr. Paris got up and went into the bathroom on the porch.

  Irene tried her cell phone but again couldn’t get a signal. She got up from the table and walked around the house, trying again beside her car, but there were still no bars. The phone had worked from here earlier in the day. Dr. Paris walked past, returning to his study. He didn’t see her or feigned not seeing her. She went back to the table.

  “It’s more than just topography,” said Leland when Irene mentioned her telephone difficulties. “Wind, humidity, particulates in the air. Sometimes you’ll get a clear signal and other times nothing. Aircraft. Your batteries, many factors affect the signal.”

  Rosalie emerged from the house with Phoebe on her hip, a big plaster of baking soda across the back of her hand.

  “Is that the first time you ever got stung?” asked Owen.

  Phoebe nodded, two fingers in her mouth.

  “I’ve been stung hundreds of times,” said Owen.

  “Owen,” said Libby.

  “Well, I have,” he argued. “Lots, anyway.”

  “We shouldn’t eat outside,” Rosalie said peevishly. “At this time of year the orchard is full of wasps. It’s dangerous to walk there.”

  “I don’t know that that’s true,” said Leland.

  “Who called?” asked Elliot.

  “Oh,” said Rosalie. “It was for Anne. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Who was it?” asked Ira.

  “It was your landlord, calling from Boston. He told me his name but I’ve forgotten already.”

  “Julian?”

  “Julian.”

  “I could have taken it,” said Ira.

  “I didn’t think of that,” said Rosalie. “Phoebe was crying and it just seemed so weird and I couldn’t think what to say. I just said she couldn’t come to the phone at the moment.”

  VII

  While Irene was on the landline inside trying to explain to the clerk in the county assessor’s office which plat maps she wanted copied and on her desk by the close of business, lunch around the picnic table had devolved into a general removal to the beach. Irene came out of the house to find the table cleared and everybody gone, except Ira. He dangled an aquamarine swimming suit by one strap. “Here,” he said, “Everyone’s gone to the beach.”

  Irene was nonplused.

  “Or not,” he said smoothly. “It’s up to you. We always swim in the afternoons. Or some of us swim and the rest sit on the beach.”

  “I’m working, Dr. Logan.”

  “Sure. Whatever,” he said. Then quizzically, “You can’t ask questions in a bathing suit?”

  “Whose is it?” asked Irene.

  He hesitated. “Well, yes, there’s that.”

  How extraordinary, Irene thought, what a bizarre proposal. She wondered if Ira cared at all that Anne was dead, or if her death hadn’t registered yet, or maybe it was a callous veneer intended to mask his true feelings. Or maybe he thought he was merely being hospitable, thinking of her as a guest to be included in the afternoon’s activities, put at ease in awkward circumstances. She couldn’t tell. Whatever it was, it was bizarre.

  “I’ll walk down with you though,” she said, “I want to look at the steps. Mr. Guevara’s steps.”

  “You’ll be hot,” he said, looking her over.

  “Oh, well,” said Irene. Ira was wearing loose trunks and a grease-stained tee shirt and Teva sandals, she noticed. He stood up and slung a towel over his shoulder and together they set off down the orchard path.

  “Why are you interested in Mr. Guevara’s steps?” asked Ira.

  “I’m interested in everything,” said Irene. “Why do you suppose your landlord was calling?”

  “Oh, I know why he was calling,” said Ira.

  “Why?”

  “We’re late with the rent. Anne didn’t want to write the check.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why do you think?” he asked.

  Irene didn’t answer, waiting.

  “You know, I don’t know why,” he snapped, looking away. “She probably thought it was my turn. She was quite meticulous about pecuniary matters. But I’m just back, you have to realize, from three months of unpaid humanitarian work and I’m a little strapped.”

  “So what was going to happen?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well,” said Irene, “I mean, it wasn’t going to go away, right? The rent.”

  “Anne got help from her family,” he said. “She had it, I didn’t, it’s that simple. This month I didn’t have it.”

  “So she was going to pay?”

  “Eventually, yeah.”

  Irene could tell he was annoyed. He didn’t like being pressed.

  “Were you guys splitting up?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it wasn’t going well.” He paused, as though considering what to say next or whether to say anything.

  Irene waited.

  “She had a beef, you know.” He shot her a look. “I wasn’t a hundred percent straight arrow in Ecuador and she knew it.”

  “How’d she know that?” asked Irene.

  “She just did,” he said, subject closed.

  “How?” Irene persisted.

  “If you must know,” he said, “I brought something back.” He flashed her a look.

  “As in?” Irene asked.

  “As in an STD.”

  “Ah,” said Irene. “I see.”

  “It was nothing,” he went on. �
��It meant nothing and she knew it was nothing. It was stupid and meaningless. But obviously I had to tell her. We had to be treated, both of us.”

  “How’d she take it?” asked Irene.

  “You know, like anyone would. Who was it, what was she like. How could I, why did I, how many times, was she pretty, did I love her. Maybe it was that or maybe she was preoccupied, but she just quit talking. I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, but this family, they can be perfectly pleasant and at the same time as remote as Pluto. It’s like a door closes. I mean, she was completely opaque. I’ve been with her for seven years but I had absolutely no idea what was going through her head. She could have decided something about us and I’d be the last to know.”

  “What will you do now?” Irene asked.

  “About what?”

  “About the rent.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then after a moment, “That’s a good question. I hadn’t thought about it. But I can’t imagine going back there to live.”

  “All your things are there,” said Irene, “and hers.”

  “Books and clothes,” Ira said, “everything else is hers.”

  “It’s an apartment?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “actually the third floor of a house. He lives in the downstairs. Julian, the landlord.”

  “In Boston?” Irene asked.

  “Cambridge. Same thing, just across the river.”

  Irene was quiet, thinking. “Dr. Logan,” she said, “perhaps I’d better speak with your landlord.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Ira.

  “I’m not kidding,” said Irene.

  They walked in silence for a few moments. “I just want to finish my car and get out of here,” Ira said morosely.

  “Well,” said Irene, “you mustn’t do that without first speaking to me.”

  IRENE COULD see where the offending steps had been, but they were gone. Removed or washed away by the tide. Mr. Guevara’s clipped green lawn rolled down toward the beach and ended abruptly at a chest-high seawall of poured concrete. Where it ended—just at the edge of the outlet from the slough where the wild beachfront belonging to the Paris family met the groomed Guevara property—the earth was washed away.

  “They were built of log rounds,” said Leland. “Varying lengths stood on end and sunk into the ground to make a little staircase.” Leland waded across the channel and crouched down, scraping at the sand with the side of his hand. “Here,” he said, “look.” Irene crossed to join him, soaking her boots once again. There in the sand he had uncovered a tarnished brass monument set into a stone, placed long ago by the United States Geological Survey. “Here’s the property line,” said Leland. “You can see how his steps came down onto our land and he’s worn a path across our dune.”

  She looked over her shoulder where he pointed at the bruised and trodden sea grass and pickle weed.

  “The right of adverse possession,” he went on, “is this arcane law that says essentially that if someone uses someone else’s property for some certain period of time under certain specific circumstances, eventually they can legally claim it as theirs. Most people have never heard of such a thing, but Mr. Guevara is a lawyer.”

  Irene looked up toward Mr. Guevara’s house. Little pink streamers of tape fluttered at intervals along the edge of the slough. She wondered if they’d been there yesterday and she’d failed to notice. She couldn’t remember. “Someone’s done a survey,” she said.

  Leland straightened up and looked. He was tall like his father, though unlike him thickening through the middle. He wore a bristly mustache and clip-on sunglasses over wire-rimmed bifocals. “Whaddya know,” he said.

  “Was that tape there yesterday?” asked Irene.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, “I couldn’t say.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Irene. “It’s easy to find out. I took photos.”

  IRENE AND Leland turned and walked back towards where they’d left the others on the dune. It was hot, but in the angled northern light the fringe of trees behind the beach reached cool fingers of shadow across the sand. Here, even at summer’s zenith, you were reminded of evening or the approach of fall—some coming chill.

  It looked like a normal summer afternoon, towels spread on the sand and a red-and-white umbrella casting an oval of shade over Phoebe. The Strauss brothers, Nigel and Peter from down the beach, along with their wives and children, had joined the group, their canoes pulled up onto the sand. But the adults were silent and somber in the sun, not reading or talking, while the children played at the water’s edge. To Irene it looked like something out of a magazine illustrating how other people lived, the completely unselfconscious languor. Or someone’s memory of a perfect summer, the image that captured an earlier time of innocence or happiness or childhood. Looking back there’d be no way of knowing which afternoon of which summer—everyone so young. How old were the children? What year was it I wore that bathing suit? Or you’d look for Anne. Was it before or after the summer Anne died?

  “Who’s going in?” asked Leland as they approached, producing a kind of general shift in the languorous scene and a clamor from the kids, “I am! I am! We’re already in!” they shouted.

  Irene watched as everybody got up from their towels, stepped out of shorts, peeled off tee shirts, then moved down to the water’s edge where they waded in and stood at various depths hooting and exclaiming at the cold. Ira plunged in and began a crawl straight out as though he meant to swim across to Mount Rainier.

  Nikki and Libby stayed on the dune, reclining against a driftwood log. “I’m having a medical consultation,” Libby said to Irene.

  “That’s fine,” said Irene, “I’m on my way. I’m done here for the day.” But she continued to stand for a moment watching the swimmers and thinking of her growing to-do list. Ira was right, she was overdressed and hot.

  Nikki’s exuberant pubic hair escaped the edges of her bikini in a blonde nimbus, and as Irene watched she sprayed a mist from a plastic bottle across her thighs and stomach. Ah, peroxide, Irene thought. That explained that. One mystery solved.

  Nikki saw Irene watching and laughed. “I tried waxing one year and it was excruciating,” she said.

  Irene smiled. The effect, Irene thought, was oddly celebratory and more comic than provocative, like clown’s hair.

  Libby’s boys were calling for her to come in. Irene knew that she should move on, out of earshot of whatever it was Libby was relating to Nikki, back to her own world and neglected responsibilities; but she stayed where she was, standing behind the log the other women leaned against, oddly languorous herself, mesmerized by the brilliance of the afternoon, the sparkle off the water dazzling her.

  “You need to be treated,” said Nikki.

  “Treated how?” asked Libby.

  “Flagyl. It’s quick and effective but unpleasant because you can’t drink any alcohol while you’re on it.”

  “A calamity,” said Libby and laughed. “And then that’s that? It goes away?”

  “It does,” said Nikki.

  “Hallelujah. Will you write me a prescription?”

  “I will,” said Nikki. “It’ll be out of state but usually no one cares.”

  “Can I swim? I mean, is there any reason not to?”

  “Swimming’s fine,” said Nikki.

  “Well, then,” said Libby, and she got up.

  Flagyl. It was ringing a bell. An empty vial in the drawer of Anne’s nightstand that Irene had collected yesterday, along with birth control pills and a bottle of Xanax.

  “What does she have?” asked Irene as Libby walked away. She wasn’t sure that Nikki was going to answer.

  “Giardia,” said Nikki finally, looking up at Irene.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a bug, a protozoa. Gets in your gut.”

  “Did Anne have it too?” Surprising Nikki.

  “Uh-huh,” she replied. “Yes, she did. She was over it now. They have to test the water. There’s
something in the well. A mouse fell in and drowned, or a mountain beaver. No one’s drinking the water.”

  Pellegrino on the table at lunch.

  Nikki got to her feet. “Now I’m going to swim before they all come in.”

  Far out, Ira had turned and was swimming back toward shore. Rosalie stood in the shallows swinging Phoebe. Libby’s boys and Sam Strauss were wrestling over an air mattress while their mothers swam parallel to shore, doing the sidestroke, their heads out of water. Nikki ran down the beach and splashed in up to her knees, made a shallow dive and came up whooping.

  Irene turned and walked along the dune to the path. She wished there were a way she might have put on Anne’s aquamarine suit and become a part of them for the afternoon.

  NEAR THE house Irene encountered Dr. Paris, who appeared agitated.

  “Detective Chavez,” he said, “come with me a moment.” He led her to the end of the barn where there was a stoop and a door that opened into an old granary—now a tool room—running the width of the barn, floored with wide planks and partitioned off from the rest of the building. At the back of the room a flight of stairs disappeared upward. A workbench occupied the wall beneath a cobweb-dimmed window and under this was a wooden packing crate placed on its side containing dusty bottles of wine. Dr. Paris lowered himself onto one knee and Irene crouched beside him.

  “Every year I bring up a little wine when we come,” he said. “Something nice for special occasions—you cannot find a decent bottle of wine in Mason County—and over the years a bit of a cellar has accumulated out here in the barn. There’s no inventory and I don’t remember from one year to the next what I’ve brought up or how much has been drunk. However, I was certain there was a bottle of the ’82 Latour à Pomerol. And there isn’t.” He pulled one dusty bottle after another out far enough for Irene to see the labels. “’82,” he said. “That’s a very old and very valuable wine.”

  He looked at her. She could see the direction his mind was working. He levered himself up, a hand braced against his thigh. Irene stood beside him.