An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  She wondered what would be said in the little room she’d just vacated, or if they’d say anything at all. She could imagine them sitting in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, until some sign or motion from Oliver indicated that it was time. They’d close the coffin and it would slide through an opening in the wall, where, through a small porthole of thick layers of glass you could watch the flames if you were so inclined. Irene knew—her father had been cremated here. It took a long time. You didn’t necessarily expect that. She wondered if the family would stay. She guessed Oliver would, silent and bereft, erect in his chair, waiting for it to be finally and completely over. Waiting to receive a small, heavy container of what had been Anne.

  A tow truck had Irene blocked in, delaying her departure. She waited near the street in the shade of the trees watching as the rest of the Paris family and a few friends filed up the walk and disappeared into the somber, rock mortuary.

  “Stolen?” she asked the tow truck driver. He was having trouble, the car locked and in park and not a lot of room to maneuver. There was a yellow impound sticker on the windshield—a car parked on a side street, unmoved until someone noticed and called in to the police to report it.

  “Not stolen exactly,” he answered, “a rental that never got returned. They ran the license plate downtown.”

  “If you move your truck, I can get out of here and give you some room to maneuver,” Irene said. She waited while he backed out of her way, and in the rearview mirror she saw his two-fingered salute as she pulled away. He knew she was a deputy—if he didn’t know her, her car gave her away. In fact she knew him too but couldn’t remember his name. Scott, maybe. It was probably embroidered on his shirt, but she’d forgotten to look. He’d been with the towing company for years. He’d have an easier time now.

  BACK IN her office it was hard to concentrate. Irene began assembling all the papers and reports cluttering her desk that related to Anne Paris. She’d consolidate it all into a file and it would go into storage, a closed case. At some point, the documents would be photographed and everything would be stored on microfiche—or scanned, if the county budgeted for the technology—the hard copies destroyed.

  Unpinning the photo montage from her wall, she still wondered what she had missed, if there was something she hadn’t noticed or had failed to register as important. Irene was reminded of the movie Blowup, which she’d seen years before in re-release, a paean to the power of photography and what a camera might capture in a seemingly innocuous frame.

  Who had smoked the cigarette, she wondered, looking at the image of her own two boots and the butt between them, and when? There was no way to tell if it had been the night that Anne died or the night before or the night before that. It was a Marlboro, not a Camel Light, the brand everyone else who smoked seemed to smoke. The grass was trampled, suggesting that someone had stood there restlessly for a while, looking at the slough beyond the plums and rushes—or looking up through the orchard towards the house?—then crushed out the finished cigarette. Not the cigarette that Ira smoked on the beach, and not the cigarette that Julian Bernstein saw lit as he walked away along the beach. An inland cigarette, smoked by whom?

  In one of the photos taken from the beach that showed the Guevara house in the background, Irene now—with the benefit of her increased familiarity—could faintly make out a figure she hadn’t noticed before, just a dark pattern against the French doors that opened onto the porch, positioned as if looking toward the slough. Rueben Guevara, Irene thought, his attention drawn by her presence on the beach that morning or by the approaching sirens or perhaps by his knowledge of what was floating in the slough. She wondered if he had put the body there or had already discovered it through his telescope or on an early morning walk, and then had watched the unfolding scene. He hadn’t mentioned being aware of anything prior to his interview conducted that day. He was a wily one.

  The photos brought back the day—the clear skies and the promise of heat, Rosalie nattering on and on, the body that Irene didn’t yet know was Anne Paris rocking gently at the edge of the slough. It seemed like a long time ago, but it was only days.

  Irene unpinned the photos and accordioned them into unruly stacks. She would like to have left them up for a while, but they were part of the record of the case and should be filed with the rest.

  Verizon had produced a record of the calls Anne’s cell phone had sent and received over the two weeks preceding her death, and Irene had matched up the numbers with names. Not many calls and no surprises. Anne was on vacation and cell reception was spotty. The Atkins Hospital was on the list, both Storey Lindstrom’s office number and a landline on the ward—the patient, Irene presumed, who was missing his therapist before he went missing himself—and Anne calling her own office, for messages, she supposed. There were calls to and from Julian Bernstein’s cell phone and two calls from a pay phone in Shelton—an artifact from another civilization—Irene wondered how many pay phones even existed anymore. Julian Bernstein had said he’d called from Shelton once when he was in town and couldn’t get a cell signal, but only once, he was pretty sure. Same number, same phone, outside of the Safeway store, the evening Anne died. So the second call—if not Julian, who then?

  Everyone’s typed-up interview and the follow-up interviews, the medical examiner’s report, the coroner’s report, lists of evidence collected, lists of confiscated personal property, search warrants, interrogation reports—it was all there, a paper trail of the law enforcement effort to ascertain how Anne Paris’s body had come to be in the slough at the bottom of her family’s summer property.

  XXX

  Something was bothering Irene. There was something in the back of her mind, like a forgotten appointment, something she was supposed to have done. It was making her jumpy and uneasy. She was going home, she decided. It was early to quit, but she’d been working long days and hadn’t had a weekend. She’d run, she thought, run now, early, before dusk. It would be like getting back on the horse, facing down her fear, and she’d feel better afterwards. It would clear her head.

  Wanda glanced at the clock as Irene walked past. Inspector Gilbert was going to get an earful when he got back from vacation. Irene would be called on the carpet and asked for an accounting. Oh, well, she thought, she’d be hard to fire and she doubted he’d try. Besides, she had no apologies for her comings and goings.

  Victor’s bike was at the market when she passed, and she angled into a parking spot and went in. She picked up some chicken to grill, and leeks and peppers and a couple of ears of corn. At the checkout, while Victor was bagging the groceries, she told him she’d throw it all on the grill after her run and a shower, and when would he be home. She was taking tomorrow off, she told him, and she’d drive him down to Olympia if he wanted, to look at the bicycle he was interested in. When Victor smiled, she saw Luis—the same sweet dazzle, white teeth, crinkled eyes.

  “Cool,” he said.

  Irene was off-kilter and needed to get her equilibrium back. Supper with Victor and errands with him tomorrow would help.

  IT WAS really bad déjà vu. She was passing under the Simpson sluiceway and could see the log rafts below and smell the pitch, when a vehicle came up from behind and slowed beside her, the rumble of a diesel engine. She was afraid to look and kept running, her eyes straight ahead. It was daylight, nothing could happen. Keep running, stay calm. The vehicle kept pace. She refused to look. Then it sped up and pulled past her—a black Ford pickup, not new, not Patrick McGrath’s she didn’t think. Then it swerved into a wide spot on the shoulder, blocking her path. She slowed, panting, her heart flipping in her chest. The same spot as before, Irene thought, panic rising. She had her phone with her this time, clipped to the waistband of her shorts. The driver’s door swung open—she was poised to sprint in the opposite direction. But it was Theo Choate swinging out, wearing a suit, his tie loosened.

  “Irene,” he said, approaching her.

  She gasped, her hand on her heart, eyes wide
.

  He reached to touch her shoulder and she jerked away. She was starting to cry. She stood with her back to him, shoulders shaking, her face in her hands, trying to regain control.

  Finally she turned and faced him. “You scared me,” she blurted, her face flushed, cheeks wet. He reached for her and this time she let him enfold her in his arms.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered into her hair. “You scared me, out here on the highway by yourself.” For just a moment he felt her relax against him, pliant and supple, fitting her slim hot body into his, and he felt the sweat on her neck and the wet back of her shirt under his hand, before she gathered herself and pulled away.

  He released her. “You want a ride back?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, exhaling, “It’s good for me. I need the run.” She took a deep breath, looked at her watch, flung him a glance, and was off—running away, passing his pickup, heading north again with the same steady rhythm.

  Theo got back in his truck, but he waited. It took six minutes, and then there she was again, headed back. She dodged past the truck with barely a glance—he might not have existed. He watched her in the rearview mirror until she disappeared.

  SOMETHING HAD shaken loose in Irene’s mind. Something to do with assumptions. She was having trouble putting her finger on it. It was the pickup, thinking it was Patrick McGrath, thinking she was in danger—an assumption based on experience, thinking based on symmetry, if it was Patrick McGrath before, it will be Patrick McGrath again—when really it was almost the opposite, Theo Choate this time, looking out for her, worrying about her safety, almost her guardian actually. And she hadn’t pictured Theo Choate in a pickup, just as she hadn’t pictured him on a boat. She’d assumed something else from the education and the suit and the self-possession. A Saab maybe. Assumptions were not a detective’s friend. You had to keep your mind blank and accumulate facts. Truth was always in the facts. Collect enough facts, you learn the truth. You didn’t weigh facts, rank their importance, you just collected them. But human nature got in the way, what you knew about human nature and your own human nature, the desire for logic, for one thing to follow another, for patterns, for symmetry. As in poker you discarded, threw out the club when the rest of the hand was hearts, working on a flush. She was thinking as she ran. Trying to think outside the box, to cast a wider net—trying to reclaim her discards.

  WHEN SHE came back into town, Irene didn’t head up the hill towards home and the groceries she’d bought and the promised supper, but instead made a right onto Railroad Street and ran along the tracks, past the vintage Burlington Northern engine installed out in front of the post office for kids to climb on, past the J. C. Penney’s store where her mother had worked—now a Good Shepherd thrift store with a hand-painted sign in the window SI HABLA ESPAÑOL—and on to the outskirts of town to where the Shelton Police Station was backed up against the hill behind a gravel parking lot.

  The watch sergeant on duty was Hoyt Brenner. He had been a town cop as long as Irene could remember—he’d pulled her over and ticketed her for a California stop when she was a teenager. A good cop, not too much attitude, kept his head down and got the job done. He was way past where he could have retired and there was no way he would pass the physical agility test, so they kept him pretty much on the desk. He watched her walk in and head directly for the water cooler. She downed a cup of water and several refills, and then went into the visitor’s bathroom and splashed water on her face. She was flushed and drenched in sweat. When she came out, Hoyt was waiting for her, smiling pleasantly. She leaned her elbows on his counter.

  “Hey, Hoyt,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, “how goes it?”

  “Fine,” she said, “good.” She was getting her breath back, radiating an aura of heat.

  “You on duty?” he asked.

  Irene laughed. “No, off,” she said. “Out for a run. But hey, I’m here on business. I’ve got a question.”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “You guys impounded a car this afternoon, a rental that wasn’t returned?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who was the renter?”

  Hoyt shuffled through a pile of papers on his desk until he found what he was looking for. “Guy who rented it is Jan Guyot, G-u-y-o-t, according to the Budget records. Picked it up at Sea-Tac Saturday before last on a two-day rental and never came back. There’s nothing in the computer, no record, no warrant, no missing person.”

  “Home address?”

  “Don’t have it. We just ran the tag and let them know we had their car, and ran the name and driver’s license they gave us for warrants.”

  “Have you gotten inside?”

  “Haven’t tried. Budget’s sending someone with a key in the morning. We’ll take a look before we let it go.”

  “Let me know what you find, would you?” asked Irene.

  “Will do,” said Hoyt. He wasn’t even curious—too many years on the job.

  IRENE LEFT, calculating the time difference—past ten on the east coast. She had Storey Lindstrom in her cell phone. It took him a while and there was noise in the background when he answered. It sounded like a bar or a restaurant. He was out somewhere, enjoying his evening. She knew nothing about him, she realized, nothing about his personal situation. She tried to remember if he’d worn a ring. She thought she would have noticed.

  “Dr. Lindstrom,” she said, “Irene Chavez.”

  “I’m sorry?” he shouted. “Hello?”

  “Irene Chavez,” she yelled back, “out in Washington State?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, hearing her now, “how are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Listen, the patient of Anne’s you told me about who went missing—what was his name?”

  “The what—oh, Jan Guyot.”

  “Bingo,” she said.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. It’s too hard to talk now.”

  XXXI

  One last time Irene’s Crown Victoria glided down the driveway through the tunnel of trees and rolled to a stop in the blinding light and heat shimmer between the buildings of the Paris family compound. The place had become familiar—the purple spires of foxgloves nodding in the heat and the espaliered pear against the barn, the disheveled rose climbing the porch trellis to the upstairs windows, scenting the yard with its fragrance, the peeling white paint and silvered siding of the barn. But for Irene, even now, every time, it retained the surreal quality of the first time—a feeling of having jumped down the rabbit hole and entered an alternative universe where she lost herself and who she was in normal life, and where she was dazed and out of step, uncharacteristically uncertain.

  She opened the car door and got out. It was hot under a pale sky. Irene walked across the expanse of bleached grass toward the bluff. There was no sign of life—no curtain lifted, no one sitting in the Adirondack chairs and no one at the table or rattling dishes in the kitchen. If there was someone watching from behind the reflection in the glass of the study windows, Irene couldn’t tell.

  She stood looking out at the still water of the Sound for a few moments, the metallic surface disturbed here and there as a breeze she didn’t feel but could hear high in the firs touched down.

  She turned then and crossed the yard again and stepped up onto the porch of the study and rapped smartly on the door and waited. Nothing. She pushed the door open and looked in to be sure. Empty.

  She walked on past the barn—vacant—and on down the orchard path toward the beach. The lanes between the lichen-hung trees were neatly mown. Just in time for the end of summer and the Parises’ departure, Irene thought, marveling again at the sheer insanity of it—Libby’s self-imposed penance for some imagined transgression, or maybe her noisy, masochistic way of making sure her father knew she was earning her keep, out there doing a hard day’s labor while the rest of them read and sailed and pursued more refined pastimes. Libby was a
hornet in the family, riling things up, keeping everyone on edge. But she had not killed her sister, of this Irene was certain.

  At the bottom of the orchard, when she could see the slough and the vista beyond, Irene was arrested—out beyond the slough, out on the dune, silhouetted under a milky sky, the Paris family was incongruously arranged on the beach, all in black, still as chessmen, all turned toward Oliver Paris, hatless on the crest of the dune, one arm dipping and waving as though conducting or orating.

  The ashes, Irene realized, seeing the plume following his hand, spreading Anne’s ashes. She stood where she was, transfixed by the spectacle.

  High in the firs somewhere behind her an eagle whistled. A glint of light flashed across the corner of her eye and she jerked her head—the telescope of course, Rueben Guevara positioned in the window of his living room, trespassing still, participating unseen in the Paris family’s private ritual—a reflection bouncing momentarily off the lens as he panned the slough and turned the focus on Irene. Eyes everywhere. Here, on Gustavus Island where you thought you were invisible, thought you could pee in the woods unseen, make love on the beach, break and enter, there was no telling who was watching.

  Out on the dune Oliver Paris had become still, his arm hanging limp at his side, the canister empty. As Irene watched he took his hat from under his elbow and clamped it firmly onto his head, a decisive tug to the brim. The breeze was teasing the ends of his muffler. The little group shifted, turning away, beginning to move toward the path, their dark clothing flapping in the pale afternoon. The weather, Irene thought, was changing.