An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  “Oh, well, the only weird part was that she wanted to send him the pills. It just seemed odd to me, impractical. It would have been easier and faster to send the prescription. I could have faxed it from town. Or she could have. And in Boston there wouldn’t have been any questions—I’m licensed in Massachusetts. She is too. But she wanted to fill it here and Fed-Ex him the tablets. It was just odd. Anne was maybe a bit of a control freak.”

  “You didn’t know he was here, then?”

  It was like dropping a bomb. Nikki stopped walking and looked at Irene. “Who?”

  “Julian Bernstein.”

  “Here?” asked Nikki, incredulous.

  “Here,” said Irene.

  “Where?” asked Nikki, disbelieving.

  “Down the beach in an abandoned cabin.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Nikki.

  But Irene could tell she did.

  “Anne told me everything. I was completely in her confidence,” said Nikki.

  “Apparently not,” said Irene.

  “When was he here?”

  “Pretty much the whole time,” said Irene. “He followed her out.”

  Nikki looked pained and disconcerted. “That would explain why she wanted to fill the prescription here then.”

  “You didn’t suspect?”

  “It never occurred to me,” Nikki said. “Now of course it makes sense. Sometimes she’d go for a walk and wouldn’t want me to come. She’d say she wanted to be alone. Sometimes she just wasn’t around and I didn’t know where she’d gone. I thought it was because she had a lot on her mind.” Nikki was silent, looking into the distance, shaking her head. “Shrinks are trained to keep secrets,” she said finally, “it’s their job and they’re used to it. Most people get uncomfortable keeping something from you and they just blurt it out. Not shrinks. They can keep the most outlandish things to themselves. But it was different with Anne and me. We’d been friends since freshman year in college. We told each other everything.”

  Nikki started walking again. “Anne had this way about her, which is very attractive to people, where she’s sort of conspiratorial, like she’s letting you in on something no one else knows? She comes in very close and gazes at you from under her eyes and lowers her voice and touches your arm. She’s very seductive. She makes you feel special. I’ve watched her. But I didn’t think she was doing that with me. I thought I was her best friend, her confidante. Me alone.” She looked at Irene, baffled and stricken. “Everyone must have felt that way.”

  Irene had a glimpse then of what it was like to be duped by Anne Paris—dumbfounding, stupefying, enraging.

  THE STRAUSS cabin was exactly as Irene remembered from over twenty years before, a weathered box set on pilings above the sand surrounded by a deck with a catwalk leading to a vertiginous stairway ascending the bluff behind. At high tide the water came up under the house. She had an unnerving sense of déjà vu following Nikki up the stairs to the deck where Nigel and Peter were arranged in attitudes of torpor in decrepit wicker armchairs, an assortment of empty beer bottles, and a lump of cheese softening in the heat, attesting to their afternoon’s activity.

  “Come up, sit down,” they welcomed, waving Nikki and Irene onto the porch where they dropped onto the bench that was built into the porch railing. “We’re having a child-free day,” said Peter. “Elliot’s taken the boys hiking, the women have gone to town, and we’ve been utterly indolent.” Without rising he reached sideways into a cooler and pulled out a couple of icy beers. Irene shook her head, but Nikki took one and twisted off the top.

  “You remember Detective Chavez?” Nikki said.

  The Strauss brothers nodded.

  “How’s it going down there?” asked Nigel. An open-ended question asked in a sympathetic tone.

  Irene shrugged.

  “It’s ghastly,” Nikki said.

  “How’s Oliver?”

  “It’s hard to know. You don’t see him—he’s holed up in his office except for meals, and then he eats without speaking. He’s devastated. We’re all sort of catatonic.”

  “What have you learned?” Nigel asked Irene.

  “A lot of people could have done it. A lot of people might have wanted to.”

  “Not an accident then?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Nigel, Irene noticed, was looking at her oddly. “Moran,” he said finally. “Irene Moran.”

  Irene nodded.

  “I thought I knew you,” he said. “It’s been bothering me.”

  “Irene Moran?” asked Peter.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Peter thought it over. “Shelton High. You were a year ahead of me.”

  “Right,” said Irene, “Nigel’s class.”

  “There was a reunion in June,” said Nigel, “twenty years. You didn’t go.”

  “No.”

  Nigel was studying her. “I went. It was pretty much as you’d expect. The ones who showed up were mostly pretty depressing. Most of them are still here. They never left. Some of them are grandparents.”

  Irene smiled. “Whoa,” she said.

  “What’s it like,” he asked, “living here where you grew up?”

  “It isn’t what I expected,” Irene answered, “but it’s okay.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Something different.” Nigel’s assumptions irked her. He’d gone to college in Madison and taught there now, molecular biology or something, but still came back in the summers to the cabin on the island, the academic calendar affording him long summer holidays. She stood up. She needed to get off the porch, out of the past and back into her own life. Nikki could walk back alone.

  XXVII

  Irene stood at the end of the long dock at the Shelton Marina where the Coast Guard had tied up Leland’s International 14 sailboat. One of the other deputies had been out and had taken a mold of the boom, and gone over the cockpit for evidence Irene might have missed when she looked it over earlier out at the island with the Coast Guard officer, but had found nothing. No hair or skin or traces of blood. The boat had been scoured by sand and salt water. Chesterine Reade and Felix Guzmán had both studied photographs of the boom and compared the plaster mold to the head injury, and they agreed that it was possible but unlikely that Anne had been struck and killed by the boom. Something a little less regular, a stick or a pipe with some sort of fitting was more likely in their view, their caution rendering their opinion less conclusive, and less helpful, than Irene would have wished.

  Leland wanted his boat back. Other than the broken tiller handle and scrapes and dings to the paint and gunwales, the boat didn’t have much damage. Leland had ordered a new tiller and wanted to install it and sail the boat home before his vacation came to a close. Furthermore, as soon as the Mason County Sheriff’s Department released the vessel, it would start racking up moorage fees—per foot, per day—a situation Leland wanted to avoid. There was no reason not to comply with his request, and Irene had told him she’d stop by the marina to remove the padlock and crime scene tape so the boat would be available whenever he wished.

  It was an elegant-looking craft with a narrow hull and tall mast. Standing there contemplating it on a hot, still evening, Irene tried to picture how it would have looked as Rueben Guevara and Julian Bernstein had described it, flying under full sail, wing on wing across a stormy sea. To her the image seemed more frightening than exhilarating, though listening to Leland, who was an avid sailor and was, by his own account, moderately accomplished in a certain class of boat, she realized sailing could become an obsession for some people. Not racing necessarily, but knowing your boat, learning to read the water and the wind and how to trim your sails exactly right to optimize performance. Leland applied science to everything—science was what he knew and was the prism through which he focused all his experience. He talked about the physics and geometry of sailing. He knew the arcane effects of principles like drag, displacement and sheer, words Irene understood in a muc
h more general way.

  Leland applied science to his theory of Anne’s death too, a contrarian theory to Irene’s mind which initially seemed out of character. Interestingly, Leland was convinced that Anne’s death was accidental, that she had been sailing in conditions beyond her abilities, that she made a relatively small mistake—though fatal in her circumstance—a miscalculation of how much wind the sails could hold and how much torque the tiller could take. The tiller handle failed, she lost control, the boat jibed, the boom swung with all the force of the gale, striking Anne, crushing her skull and knocking her overboard.

  Leland was attached to his theory and had thought it out carefully. He tested the facts of where Anne’s body was found and where the I-14 went aground against his knowledge of the winds and tides of Case Inlet, and winds and tides in general. He had shown Irene the navigational charts for the inlet, showing the depths and the underwater topography. He talked persuasively about eddies and currents, sandbars and underwater rifts, the location where he thought the incident had occurred and what time in the evening it had happened. In his telling it sounded plausible and convincing, his science irrefutable. You could put him on the stand as an expert and imagine him persuading a jury.

  In any event, Irene couldn’t dispute the science even though she thought he was wrong. She had the benefit of Julian Bernstein’s account, which she conditionally believed and which Leland hadn’t heard—but she thought that Leland was oddly invested in the accidental theory and wondered why. He was not an emotional man. He seemed quite buttoned-up. He told you what he thought, and all the reasons why, but not what he felt. Irene wondered if the very scientific professor had behaved very unscientifically and had chosen the thesis he preferred and had then gone about proving its probability, rather than assessing the evidence first and arriving at a conclusion later.

  Leland spoke with a kind of breathy urgency that made him seem anxious, but he was low on Irene’s list of potential suspects and she thought his manner probably suggested nothing more than a characteristic need to convince.

  “How do you feel about Anne’s death,” Irene had asked.

  “I’m very worried about Oliver,” had been his reply.

  Later, when she asked Rosalie about it, Rosalie made an exasperated puffing sound through her lips and said, “He doesn’t know what he feels. He doesn’t have feelings.” Her eyes filled and Irene realized she’d hit a nerve. Rosalie was very pent up too, for all her garrulousness. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she went on, “I just know that there’s some terrible hurt that he won’t deal with, won’t even admit exists, something that goes way back. He’s always been that way.” You couldn’t press him, she said, or he’d just retreat into silence. His view of the world, he maintained, was simply different, he didn’t choose to speculate about what couldn’t be measured or proven, so he left psychology and emotions to other members of the family. She herself, Rosalie said, was just totally and hopelessly ADHD, OCD—an alphabet soup that to her defined a whole universe of behavior. She just tried to stay focused. She was constructing a wood-fired pizza oven, she said, using entirely found materials.

  Irene felt suddenly sorry for Rosalie—smart and talented, but not happy. She wondered if the pizza oven would ever be finished. She’d noticed the pile of bricks and broken concrete, and the beginning of an edifice rising out of the rubble out near the clothesline behind the kitchen.

  IRENE WAS wrapping things up. Tomorrow she would stop in at the morgue and sign the paperwork to release the body to the Paris family, and would make a last appointment with Chesterine.

  IN THE course of the day Irene had learned something about what Nikki called the ‘art and science’ of psychoanalysis. And she’d learned a good deal about Oliver Paris, his recently deceased wife Julia, and their daughter Anne, all practitioners of this arcane and misunderstood mental health subspecialty.

  The art and science part, it seemed, as best as Irene could grasp, was a marriage of neurobiology—which was the measurable, observable science of the brain (which Freud had studied)— with a deeply sympathetic and intuitive interpretive pas-de-deux carried on through frequent (four times a week) and protracted (years long) sessions between patient and therapist in which the patient relived and came to understand seminal relationships and events, and with this new understanding got unstuck from old, trauma-induced, destructive patterns of behavior. It was an expensive and time-consuming enterprise, usually undertaken by comfortably fixed, highly intelligent, well-educated people.

  It was not something Irene could easily fit into her vision of the practical and necessary conduct of normal everyday life. To her it sounded excessive and self-indulgent—endless hours spent thinking about and talking about oneself. You didn’t go to a psychoanalyst for, say, anger management or trouble getting along with your boss—though sometimes those kinds of problems were the obvious presenting issues, and you had regular psychotherapy for a while until the psychoanalyst began to think that perhaps your problems went deeper and that you would benefit from the analytic experience.

  Most people wrestled with issues as they came up without revisiting childhood trauma and were, in the psychoanalyst’s nomenclature, “well-defended.” That is, they had built up useful defenses that worked adequately to shield them from old wounds.

  Irene, looking back on her own childhood, couldn’t imagine what experiences had made her into the self she’d become. She felt more like a product of her own desires and determinations than of her parents’ upbringing and the events of her early childhood, a deliberate growing up and away that culminated with separation, going away, in those first giddy days after high school. She didn’t remember a whole lot about her early years—the tragedy of a cat that vanished and never came back when she was four, the television always on in their house with no one watching until her father came home from work and parked himself in front of it in ‘his’ chair, a place no one sat but him.

  Sometimes though, she remembered, he’d haul her up into his lap and she’d lie there in the cradle of his arm, sucking her thumb, watching the flickering screen. He smelled of pitch and tobacco and damp wool. In her memory it was dark outside and the lights were on in their house and the kitchen windows were steamed up. There had been neighborhood friends and hide-and-seek on summer evenings, and four square and hopscotch in the street after school. Not a bad childhood—her parents had left her mostly alone—but they had nothing much to do with who she was now.

  XXVIII

  Theo was on the foredeck when he heard a clatter on the gangway that connected the parking lot to the dock. He looked up and saw Irene Chavez descending onto the pier. He busied himself with the caulking he was doing to forestall a hatch leak. In his sudden pleasure and confusion it didn’t occur to him that there could be a reason besides him that she’d be there at the Shelton Marina, but she walked on past his slip without a hail or even a glance, as far as he could tell. He watched her back retreating along the pier, feeling deflated and foolish. What was she doing here?

  When she stopped at the end of the long dock at the last slip, he remembered someone saying that there was an impounded boat the Coast Guard had towed in for forensic testing. He hadn’t put it together at the time, but now he did—the sailing accident— or homicide—out on Gustavus Island that she was investigating. Nothing to do with him. It took him down a peg, but made him smile at himself too—the ricochet of feelings between certainty and disappointment and the corresponding burgeoning of desire.

  Theo had come home at the end of a long day, climbed out of his suit and into a pair of shorts and an ancient tee shirt and had immediately addressed himself—while there was still a window of daylight—to a long-neglected list of tasks he needed to accomplish to winterize his vessel before the rains. It was August and the mercury was well into the eighties, the moisture sucked out of everything, impossible to imagine the coming sodden months; but every desiccated, shrunken bead of caulk around every hatch and fitting or window
would be an invitation for dampness to penetrate and black mold to follow.

  Now though, his ambition was derailed. Winterizing the trawler could wait. Irene Chavez may not have descended onto the pier to visit him, but it was a propitious moment and he was not going to let it pass him by.

  “Detective Chavez,” he said behind her. Irene turned. For a moment she didn’t recognize him—out of his suit and wearing shorts and, more startlingly, red Crocs on his feet, tanned and disheveled and here so unexpectedly, out of context and hard to place.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I live here,” he said.

  “Live here?”

  “I have a boat. I live aboard.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Live aboard? Live on a boat?”

  “I do,” he said. “Before this I fished in Alaska for a while. Did you know that?”

  “I’m not sure I did,” she said. “I think I would have remembered.”

  Irene was sure she would have remembered, and certain that she hadn’t heard anything about Theo Choate’s background to suggest that he’d ever done anything other than law. She was enough her father’s daughter to have an automatic respect for anyone who did hard and dangerous work—fishing definitely qualified—and that hadn’t been part of her picture of the new Mason County prosecutor. She tilted her head a bit, adjusting her assumptions and looking at him with new eyes, a little more interested suddenly in knowing something about him other than what he was going to do about Victor.

  “I tried to sell my boat up there but couldn’t find a buyer,” he went on. “Everyone’s trying to get out, no one’s buying in. There’s not the money in fishing anymore. No one wants a boat.” He smiled ruefully. “So I brought it down here. It’s just down the dock.” He jerked his head, “Slip twenty-three. An old trawler. I’ll show you.”

  There was a chain and a padlock as well as the mooring lines attaching the I-14 to the dock, and Irene knelt without answering and opened the lock and hauled the chain loose of the fittings, then she straightened up and ripped away the yellow crime tape, wadding it into a ball. Leland was now free to claim his boat.