An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

Suddenly Libby yelled and let go of the mower—the dead man switch killed the engine when she released the throttle bar and silence settled. She was stumbling backwards, slapping at her arms, then turning and running.

  A sting on the side of her own neck, and Irene understood— wasps, nesting in the ground, and Libby had mown over the hive—now she was running too, side by side with Libby, running pell-mell uphill between the rows of trees. Didn’t they say not to run, Irene thought—stop and roll into a ball—or was that in a bear attack? It didn’t matter, instinct ruled and they were running as if their lives depended on it, angry wasps swarming after them. Libby tore off her helmet as she ran—wasps caught in the mesh—and flung it.

  Up behind the barn, beyond the orchard and into the open pasture, they slowed and stopped, breathless, bending over, hands braced on knees, panting, checking behind themselves. But the wasps had stopped too—some sort of territorial limit had been reached. Irene straightened and then, looking at Libby, grabbed her hand and swept away wasps stuck all along her arm, wrist to shoulder, welts already rising.

  She shook her head—something buzzing in her own hair.

  Libby yanked off her shirt—wasps stuck and stinging through the cloth, and snapped it like a wet towel. They turned wordlessly for each other’s inspection, Libby thin as a boy in a black bra, her back a washboard of stung ribs.

  Libby’s face was flushed and sheeted with tears, her eyes red. She’d been crying, Irene realized, even before the wasp attack. She didn’t even pretend to compose herself—she pulled her shirt back on and sat down and put her head in her arms.

  “Can I do something?” asked Irene.

  Libby wagged her head.

  “Baking soda? Benadryl?”

  “It isn’t that. It’s not that bad,” said Libby, her voice choked and muffled. “I’m not allergic or anything.” But she was pale and shivering, some sort of reaction setting in.

  “Elliot?”

  At that, Libby lifted her head, looking at Irene. “Ha!” she spat, her eyes narrow, her face furious, “No, not Elliot.”

  What’s up with that, wondered Irene. She was silent for a while, sitting in the pale stubble of mown grass, contemplating the snow-covered majesty of the Olympic range rising in the distance beyond the orchard, Libby weeping beside her. She wanted to use the moment, auger in while Libby was undefended, ferret out the reason for her rage—because these were angry, helpless tears, this wasn’t grief, it was fury. Something had happened and Irene wanted to know what. “What’s up?” she asked finally, lamely.

  Libby looked up and sluiced her cheeks with the sides of her palms. “I hate this,” she said. “I hate it,” her arm making a sweeping, inclusive gesture encompassing the orchard, the barn, the house, the bluff. “What a sham, what a lie. Everything’s a sham. My whole family, my life.”

  She was quiet then, her outburst over, her tears drying. But after a moment she glanced at Irene, calmer now, picking at a welt on her arm.

  “You want to know something?”

  “Sure,” said Irene.

  “The giardia everyone’s had?”

  “Yes?” said Irene.

  “It isn’t giardia.”

  Irene thought about the mouse that Nikki said had fallen into the well and drowned there, contaminating the water, making anyone who drank it sick with the same nasty protozoa you might catch camping in the mountains if you drank stream water— beaver fever they used to call it. Or something you got in Mexico, a more severe version of turista, lingering sometimes long after you came home, tiny creatures swimming in your gut, making you intermittently sick. She thought of the little amber bottles of Flagyl in everyone’s medicine chest.

  “No?” said Irene.

  “No,” said Libby.

  “What then?”

  SHE’D HAD, Libby said, some odd and unpleasant symptoms and she’d talked to Nikki, a gynecologist after all—that’s what they’d been talking about that day on the beach, the consultation, remember?—and Nikki wrote a prescription which Libby filled in town, for herself and for Elliot. He should take it too, her husband. She didn’t question why. She hadn’t, Libby said, thought much about it one way or the other. Mostly she’d focused on the recommendation not to drink alcohol while taking the medication, because she liked to have a beer in the afternoon and wine with dinner and it would be hard to give that up, though only for two days, a short course of treatment. But then—and this was the revelation—it registered—probably something she had known all along on some level but hadn’t consciously acknowledged—that the prescription was the same as the prescription Elliot had been given earlier, also by Nikki, for, he said, giardia.

  A busman’s holiday Dr. Roth was having out here in the Pacific Northwest where the Walmart pharmacy didn’t have to honor her credentials, but did, filling prescriptions for Flagyl for Anne and Ira—Julian Bernstein too, when Irene investigated further—and Elliot and Libby. At the time, Libby remembered, Elliot had said she should take it too, prophylactically, which she thought was silly, and which she didn’t do. She wasn’t sick and she wasn’t drinking the water and she didn’t understand why he was worried. If she’d done as he suggested—taken the medicine then, she said now—she would never have known.

  A protozoa, it turned out, caused giardia, if you drank contaminated water, but a similar protozoa in the reproductive tract caused an equally nasty condition, trichomoniasis, which had nothing to do with drinking water. Trich, as Nikki abbreviated it, was something you caught from an infected sexual partner. The mouse in the well, Libby said, was a ruse, a fabrication—so plausible, such a marvelous subterfuge—who dreamed that up? Anne and Nikki, putting their heads together and concocting a fable— ‘You won’t believe what happened this summer, we couldn’t drink the well water.’ And no one drank the well water. They drank Pellegrino and wine, and lemonade out of cartons for the kids, and no one suspected, no one questioned, no one asked for water quality testing. They just laughed and joked about the exigencies of summer houses and country living and feigned concern that Oliver might forget and drink the water. Giardia would be hard on an older person. So brash and clever. Something so simple and obvious that later Irene couldn’t imagine she’d overlooked it. The truth hiding in plain sight, right there in the open for anyone to see. The kind of mistake she was trained not to make.

  XXV

  The fight, Libby said, had started over something else. Namely, money. No surprise, most couples fought over money. Elliot had come back from L.A. flush with success, sure he’d get the part, and he’d rented the car in Portland, which they couldn’t afford—he should have let the airline bus him up to Sea-Tac and driven his own car home—and then—and this was what she’d been ragging on him about—he hadn’t gotten it back. The Neon was still sitting out there in the grass beside the barn, every day another day of the bill mounting, while their own old Volvo station wagon, which he’d left in the airport garage—an outlying lot and a shuttle van being all too plebeian—was racking up its own tab. She didn’t understand.

  They were all sad and preoccupied, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do. Elliot didn’t need to be here. He could have returned the car. He could have gotten out of bed and into the Neon, driven to Sea-Tac and been back in a matter of hours. He could have taken the boys and made a day of it, taken them hiking on Mount Rainier. They might have opened up in the car, talked about how they were feeling. He could have used some initiative, thought of someone besides himself. He might have considered her and the boys, the impact of everything on them. But he didn’t think that way. He thought only of himself and his own hand-wringing angst over professional rejection and his desire for a cigarette and his need for a drink. He sat by the phone like a girl—not literally sitting by the phone but you know what I mean, Libby said—waiting for his agent to call, not taking care of business. And she was tired of it. She was stretched thin to breaking.

  It made her low and downhearted when Elliot was disappointed, knowing but s
till hoping, refusing to call the agent himself, but she had her own disappointment—God, they needed the money that job would bring, and the psychological boost—and she couldn’t keep him up all the time. It was like keeping a balloon in the air and trying to do everything else at the same time, the dishes and housework, helping the kids with their homework, reconcile the checkbook and decide which bills to pay, all the while one eye on the balloon, making sure to keep it up, giving it her full attention whenever it threatened to sag. She couldn’t do it anymore. Someone needed to make a living, and substitute teaching wasn’t enough. And she, Libby said, wanted a drink too but couldn’t because of the medication she was taking. At that point in their arguing, she said, the light bulb went on.

  Libby went silent. She compared the prescriptions—his little vial, empty now but still there on the floor by the mattress, and hers, the tablets he’d given her which she hadn’t taken, and the new prescription from Nikki, which she’d filled in town, and its twin for him. Identical dose, same instructions. Her heart was fluttering and she couldn’t catch her breath. They had to fight in undertones because the boys were sleeping at the other end of the loft.

  “It wasn’t giardia, was it?” she asked.

  “What?” he said.

  “You didn’t take this for giardia,” looking at him, shaking the bottle in front of his face. “You had what I’ve got.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, looking baffled. It made her furious.

  “Who?” she demanded.

  “Who what?” answered Elliot.

  She wanted to strangle him. She wanted to hit him, flail out, smack him. “Let’s see,” she said instead, her voice a steely parody of deduction, heavy on the irony, “who’s had ‘giardia’?” She ticked them off her fingers. “Ira. Anne. You. And now, me.”

  Elliot was kneeling in the middle of the bed behind her. She felt his hands come down gently on her shoulders and she shrugged him off, turning fiercely toward him. “Don’t lie to me,” she spat.

  He sat back looking dumb and wounded, tears glistening in his eyes in the light of the candle lantern. “Libby,” he said, “I would never have done that to you.”

  “What? Done what?”

  “What you think. What you’re saying.”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m asking who?”

  The tears spilled over, looking at her, shaking his head slowly, emphatically. “No,” he said. “Never.”

  “Anne,” Libby said. “My sister. How could you?”

  IT HAD gone on, Libby said, Elliot protesting, she pressing, pushing for a confession, hoping for an explanation or some sort of plausible fabrication she could believe in, both of them crying, until she heard the boys stir and turn, even in their sleep hearing the ragged edge in their parents’ hushed voices. She pulled the comforter off the mattress and stalked out of the loft and down the stairs, into the barn where she lay down on Ira’s cot. She lay awake wondering what was to become of her, her marriage, her children, of life as she knew it. When the sky was lightening, she heard Elliot on the stairs. He went out through the granary and she watched his silhouette as he walked past the open barn door without seeing her. But in a few minutes he was back, searching for her. He came in and sat on the foot of the cot and reached for her hand.

  “It was only once,” he said. “Anne was crying. We were here in the barn. She was sitting on the steps to the granary over there. Something about Ira, and Julia being dead, and how lonely she was. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t start it. I just felt bad for her and I put my arm around her. And then we just . . .” He trailed off.

  LIBBY LOOKED at Irene. “If Anne were alive, I’d want to kill her,” she said. “She had everything, she didn’t need my husband. I don’t think she even wanted him, she just wanted to know she could have him. I’m sure it cheered her up. A little diversion for her. She was like that. All the toys in the sandbox.” Her voice ragged.

  If what Libby was saying were true, Irene thought, she had a powerful motive—rage and jealousy, sexual infidelity. Already she’d had much to resent—the discrepancy of paternal affection, the discrepancy of means and education, the presumed discrepancy of future inheritance—and now this, if this was true. But the timing didn’t fit to make it a motive. If she was telling the truth, and Irene thought she was, Libby didn’t know until now, just last night, days after Anne’s death.

  “Did you?” Irene asked.

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you kill her? Did you sneak up behind her and whack her on the back of the head with something heavy and shove her body into the slough?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  They sat side by side in the mown field looking out at the distant mountains. Finally Libby said, “And I wouldn’t have anyway. Because I loved her. That’s why it’s so confusing. How can you hate someone and love them at the same time? It’s the way I feel about Elliot also.”

  “What will you do?” asked Irene after a while.

  “I don’t know,” said Libby. “Maybe leave. Maybe nothing.”

  “Where’s Elliot now?”

  “He’s returning the Neon, then taking the boys hiking.”

  They looked at each other. Libby didn’t exactly smile but her expression softened into a kind of woeful irony. She was pale and shivering despite the heat, her face dirty and tracked by her tears. Irene could feel her own wasp sting on the side of her neck and one on her wrist, the venom in her system, chilling her too, making her a little light-headed and slightly nauseated. “What will you do about all these stings?”

  “Swim, I guess.” said Libby. “I wish there was a bathtub I could fill up with baking soda, but the salt water will help.”

  “Come on,” said Irene, standing and reaching a hand to pull Libby to her feet. They headed toward the barn and for a moment, before she let go, Libby walked with Irene’s hand in hers. In another world, Irene thought, they could be friends.

  XXVI

  Irene had left Libby at the barn and had gone in search of Nikki. She’d found her in the little guest room that was tucked under the eaves behind the kitchen, packing. “It’s my last day,” Nikki said. “Leland’s driving me out to the highway to catch the county airporter.”

  “We need to talk,” said Irene.

  “Come,” said Nikki, “I’m walking down to the Strausses’ to say good-bye before I go.” She zipped her suitcase closed and rolled it through the kitchen and out to the porch where she left it standing behind them as they walked down the orchard path.

  Her investigation was coming to a close, Irene thought, everyone dispersing. Soon, within days, tomorrow even, she’d have to release the body, let Oliver Paris have his daughter’s remains to cremate, transport, or bury here, if he could get permission.

  “So,” said Irene, “giardia?”

  “Right,” said Nikki.

  “You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  “Right,” said Nikki again.

  They had taken off their shoes at the bottom of the orchard path—Nikki, in sleek black yoga pants, her traveling attire, slipping out of incongruous, impractical gladiator sandals, and Irene unlacing her boots and rolling up her black jeans. Now they walked far out on the sandy spit, the bluff and the house a long way back over their shoulders.

  “The whole giardia thing was just a story we concocted when Anne realized she had something and there was more than one partner and people had to be treated and would ask questions,” Nikki said.

  “People like who?” asked Irene.

  “Well, like Libby, for instance.” Nikki looked carefully at Irene. “I don’t think I’m telling you something you don’t already know.”

  “No,” said Irene.

  “In the world of medicine you’re not supposed to prescribe for yourself,” said Nikki. “Most of the time no one cares, pharmacies will fill it—it’s really just narcotics and opiates that make them jumpy—and you’re really only supposed to prescribe in states where you’re licensed. Bu
t most of the pharmacies don’t care. If you’ve got a printed prescription pad with your license number on it, they’ll fill it. But Oliver’s old school about that kind of thing and Anne was too. Worried about questions, you know, raised eyebrows. Heaven forbid a rebuke. So when Anne had symptoms, she asked me for a prescription. She knew what it was—she’s a doctor after all—and I knew what it was, and she thought she knew where it came from.”

  “Ecuador,” said Irene.

  “Right,” said Nikki. “That’s what Anne thought but she wasn’t one hundred percent certain. With trich, women experience the symptoms, men don’t even know they have it. So she was a little bit out on a limb when she accused Ira. But in Ecuador he’d had, what, an imbroglio? Is that what they call it?”

  “Fandango is what he said to me,” said Irene.

  Nikki laughed. “Anne lucked out. He told her about the girl down there. He was abject, she was righteous. And then she had a reason for banishing him to the barn, which, to tell the truth, she’d been wanting to do anyway. So everyone was dosing themselves— well, not everyone, but Anne was, and Ira and then Elliot.”

  “And Julian Bernstein,” Irene added.

  Nikki shot her a glance. “Yes, Julian Bernstein, too. Which was a little weird.”

  “How so?” asked Irene.

  “You’re a good detective, aren’t you?” Nikki asked.

  “I am, yes,” said Irene. “Thank you.”

  “I wasn’t sure you had figured out about Julian Bernstein.”

  “And were you planning on telling me?” Irene asked.

  Nikki flashed her a look. “Maybe. I don’t know. It didn’t seem pertinent and it seemed a little squalid.”

  “I like to decide for myself what’s pertinent and what’s not, and squalid is often pertinent,” said Irene. “Anything else that’s not pertinent that you’re keeping to yourself?”

  Nikki laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  Irene eyed her, not at all certain that this was the case. “So what was the weird part about Julian Bernstein?”