An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  Libby’s boys, released, ran the length of a driftwood log, one behind the other, and jumped. Irene heard them shout. Phoebe slid off Rosie’s hip and followed her cousins.

  IRENE WAS here for the last time and she had come to tell the Paris family what had befallen Anne. She knew now what had happened, though she couldn’t prove it. There would be no arrest. But she had put it together with as much certainty as she’d ever felt about anything. She’d been on the right track from the start, her instincts good—it was just as she had suggested to Dr. Paris— Anne, loved by everyone, was loved too much.

  THE NIGHT of the squall, the night of Anne’s death, after the storm had passed and darkness had fallen, there was a lot of traffic along the orchard path to the beach.

  First came the trespasser, his car left up on the road, pulled inconspicuously into a trailhead above the mailboxes. He had Google map directions for guidance, but he didn’t walk down the driveway. Instead he ducked into the wet underbrush and pushed his way through the band of woods between the Paris property and the Guevara’s until he emerged into the orchard behind the barn, soaked to the waist. He stood at the edge of the orchard while his eyes adjusted to the ambient light. Then he advanced, stopping first beside the abandoned outhouse tilting under a canopy of climbing wild rose. He pushed open the latticework door and stepped into the narrow, dark space and lit a cigarette, sitting on the closed privy lid, listening and looking out at the orchard rows and at the lit windows of the Paris house visible through the branches. Unused for many years, there was no odor other than the fragrance of the rose and the lingering pleasant scent of cut grass wafting from the orchard. The hinges squealed when he stepped out again.

  He continued down through the apple trees, a commando darting from trunk to trunk, to where Irene now stood.

  Here, within the scrim of wild plum and reeds, he was hidden from the house, hidden should anyone approach along the path, and camouflaged should anyone look in his direction from the beach. From here, where he stood smoking another cigarette, he could see the canoe tied up to the buoy and he would have known that Anne was still out with the boat.

  He waited, standing in the dark listening to the wind, full of excitement and anticipation.

  Later still—the trespasser has grown weary and agitated, nothing worse than waiting, nothing harder on the soul, nothing more dispiriting, more anger-inducing. He has pushed through the huckleberry and salal that crowd the path to the beach and has emerged into a tangle of driftwood. He sits on a log looking out at the water. He’s watching for a sail. But his earlier exhilaration is waning.

  Then noises, someone approaching, footfalls on the orchard path. The trespasser’s spirits soar. He has been watching for a boat, expecting to see, far out where there is still some wind, the ghost of a sail. It has gotten late. He stands up in anticipation and almost steps forward to welcome and accost. But wait! There are two people coming. Two sets of footfalls, two shapes in the darkness blending into one as they emerge onto the beach. He stays where he is and watches them. He has been waiting there a long time by now and his eyes are animal eyes, accustomed to the dark, and he knows what he sees. It’s Anne. The glint of her hair and he can hear her voice in the timbre of her breath. He waits. They pass close by. They lean together. They kiss. She murmurs something. Then they move past him onto the dune. Just yards away. If they looked, they could see him. He hasn’t ducked or hidden. He’s standing among the logs, frozen. The reality of what is unfolding is so at variance with his imagination—her delight and welcome when she discovers him, and their embrace—their embrace.

  As he watches, she slips out of her jacket and lets it drop behind her onto the sand. She tugs her shorts down and he can see her pale belly, the dark triangle before she sinks down, opening her legs. The man is standing above her, loosening his trousers. Then he kneels and the trespasser can see her legs lift and wrap around him as he bends over her. He can hear them pant—surely they will hear his breathing, he’s choking, can’t get enough air. His mind has gone blank, his head exploding. He hears Anne’s cry of pleasure.

  He wonders if he’s fainted. There’s been a time lapse, he’s missed something. The man is walking away and Anne is standing and he is moving and the stick of wood in his hand is swinging and he hears the crack and feels the concussion and he sees her flying sideways, knocked off her feet, falling away from him. He hears the thud as she lands and the soft splash as she rolls into the slough.

  ONCE, WHEN things were very bad, he killed his cat. He loved his cat, loved it more than anything, his sole solace, the warm treasured presence at night, the pleased greeting at each return. His cat was part of himself, like a limb or an ear. Anne had said he must stop his cutting—his target behavior—replace it somehow to avoid harming himself.

  So when the need to cut got very strong he picked up the cat and buried his face in its soft, warm fur and carried it into the bathroom where he shoved it into the toilet bowl and sat down on the lid, flushing over and over, listening to the rush of water and feeling the frantic thrashing of the cat, waiting for a long time while it howled and scrabbled and became weak and finally drowned and was silent. He felt hideous and exquisite pain, but he endured it, thinking that afterwards there would be peace, but there wasn’t. Afterwards the cat was no longer there to comfort him. The cat was a limp rag of wet fur that had stopped up his plumbing. The toilet bowl had overflowed and he vomited into the sink. He ripped off his shirt and cut himself savagely. He sank to the floor, wedged between the tub and the toilet.

  He called and Anne came. She cancelled a patient and was there inside of twenty minutes and found him on the bathroom floor in a sodden mess of blood and fur and water. She lifted him up and held him and wound towels around his arms, and he wrapped his arms around her and felt her warm thinness through her clothes. He tried to kiss her but she whispered, “No, no, we mustn’t. We have to get you better first. We have work to do.”

  He let her lead him to her car and drive him to Atkins where she said he would be safe and he couldn’t hurt himself or anyone and she would be there. It was intimate in her car, warm and messy. There was a bottle of vitamin water in the cup holder and turkey jerky on the dashboard, file folders on the floorboards. It smelled of peanuts and cigarettes. She drove fast, leaning forward, braking and accelerating, dodging lane to lane, hurrying.

  HE CHECKED himself in and they did the work together. He was getting better. She guided him gently. She understood him and didn’t judge. They met every day. Alone in her office at the hospital and twice a week in group. She was always so pleased to see him. “Hello,” she said softly, “please, come in,” opening the door in welcome. He knew she looked forward to their fifty-minute hours as much as he did. The high point of each day. She looked at him with such kindness and warmth every time they met, always intensely curious about how he was doing, what he was thinking, how he had fared since their last meeting. He knew she loved him. She gave him hints and clues. He could call her any time, night or day, and she’d answer. He didn’t call her often, but enough to reassure himself it was true. She always answered or quickly phoned him back. She let him touch her, she let him take her hand, hold it sometimes while they talked, leaning forward in the two facing chairs. He knew that they were only waiting until he was better. When he was strong enough they would be together.

  But then she left him alone at Atkins with a substitute therapist. Abandoned him. It was August and she told him she was going on vacation. She told him where she was going and when she’d be back. She told him about the sailboat and swimming in the cold water, about the woods and the beach. She wanted him to be able to picture her in her absence. She wanted him to know that she was still present in the world, though absent for the moment from his, out on the other coast, but seeing the same moon that rose above his horizon. She said she knew it would be hard and she expected he would be angry and lonesome, but she would be back and they would resume, and he could call her if he needed to. He h
ad her cell phone number.

  What she didn’t tell him is that it would be intolerable. It wasn’t hard, it was impossible. He couldn’t endure it. And so he followed her.

  IT’S NOT much later. Only moments have passed. The trespasser has leaped down the shoulder of the dune in a shower of sand and has splashed into the slough beside Anne, rolling her over, turning her face up, fingers feeling for a pulse beneath her jaw, bending to put his mouth against hers, to breathe life into her, cradling her head in his hand. But under his palm on the back of her head is a spongy crater and he pushes her away, sickened, knowing she is dead. Now he is sitting in the reeds near her body. He’s wet and cold and someone else is coming down through the orchard.

  It’s Ira, passing nearby on his way to the beach to smoke his night-time cigarette. The trespasser hears his approach and watches without moving. He’s totally numb, his mind no longer works.

  Ira emerges onto the beach and stands on the dune looking out at the Sound. He too notes the canoe on the buoy, and feels a prickle of anxiety, knowing Anne has taken the I-14 and has not returned. He lights a cigarette. He wonders if there is something wrong and if there is something he should do. He thinks too about the car he’s working on, what he’ll tackle tomorrow. He wonders if what has gone wrong between him and Anne is fixable. He thinks about the work at the hospital in Boston he’ll soon return to. He thinks about the Ecuadorian girl. He sits down on a driftwood log and watches the constellations emerge behind the broken clouds as the storm moves south, thinking himself alone with his thoughts, while all the while behind him the trespasser watches from the edge of the slough; and behind him, up the hill, through the lens of his telescope, Rueben Guevara has seen the match flare and the ash glow on the end of the cigarette; and some distance down the beach Julian Bernstein has turned to look back, and waves in the darkness, imagining it is Anne lighting a cigarette on the dune while she watches him depart.

  SOMETIME IN the night the trespasser clambers out of the slough and returns to his car, pushing through thickets and underbrush, and drives himself off the island and back to the motel in Shelton where, in another lifetime, cagy then, and optimistic, he had rented a room, using an amusing alias in case his parents or someone from Atkins or anyone else came looking for him.

  He parks on a side street, slips into the motel room and lies down on the bed in the dark, shivering in his wet clothes despite the heat.

  It’s nearly dawn before he cuts himself. This time he doesn’t hold back. The razor goes deep in the soft underside of his wrist and he draws it slowly upward through years of scars, watching the blood spurt. The other side is harder, he’s already weak.

  NOW, IRENE realized, was the wrong moment to try to talk to the family. Her timing was off. And she didn’t want to be discovered here, watching, an uninvited guest intruding on a family affair. She turned and slipped into the orchard and walked hurriedly up the hill among the trees so as not to be seen.

  It didn’t matter, she thought. They didn’t want to know. They were content to go on not knowing. But she knew. She had put it all together and she had come out to Gustavus Island one last time to tell them, to tell Oliver Paris and the rest of them so they’d know. ‘Closure,’ in the vocabulary of grief. Now, interestingly, the knowing didn’t seem so important. It was important to her—she was a good detective and it mattered to her that she’d figured it out and wasn’t filing something unfinished—but in the scheme of things it didn’t seem terribly important. Telling them now, or ever, seemed prideful and unnecessary, more about her than about them. And it seemed oddly and disappointingly improbable that she hadn’t put it all together sooner. One random bit of information, seemingly unrelated, holding the key to it all— ‘John Doe suicide,’ Chesterine had said, ‘Soundview Motel. The cops have it.’

  SHE’D GRILLED that evening after her run, and told Victor that she was working the next day after all. She was on a case, she’d had a break and had to follow up. She thought he understood, and if he was disappointed, he didn’t let it show. It had happened before.

  Later though, after they had eaten, he said, “I could take the bus.”

  Irene thought this over. “But how would you get it home if you bought it?”

  “The commuter bus has a bike rack.”

  She wondered if he’d researched this—growing up, finding his own solutions. She was reluctant, she didn’t really know why, but she had said okay and Victor had smiled and said cool.

  The next morning she was there when the man from Budget showed up to collect the car. Jan Guyot had left his wallet and his meds and his phone and his carry-on in the car. It was haste, Irene figured, rather than a deliberate attempt for anonymity. A positive ID was made and Chesterine notified the family. Budget took the car. Irene called Atkins. Storey Lindstrom was badly shaken and didn’t want to get off the phone. He’d pulled the file and had read Anne’s notes overnight and was blaming himself. He hoped there wouldn’t be a suit.

  Irene wrote her report. Anne’s death would be filed: homicide/ suicide, case closed. There was already a message on her desk from a reporter for the Mason County Journal. There would be a torrid story in the paper about the summer residents, full of innuendo and inaccuracy and supposition, but by then the Paris family would be gone.

  Leland would pull Oliver’s ancient Mercedes into the barn, set it up on blocks, drain the radiator and disconnect the battery. The canoe and the Adirondack chairs would be carried into the barn; and in the house, sheets thrown over the beds and furniture, the floors swept and shades drawn, awaiting another summer.

  AT THE junction with Highway 3 Irene’s phone vibrated. “Chavez,” she said. It was Theo Choate blurting out an invitation. Was she free Friday and would she let him take her to dinner? “What’s today?” she asked, and he laughed. Then she said yes, thank you, she would like that, and they hung up. “Oh, my,” she said aloud, and flipped the visor and looked up and met her own startled eyes in the vanity mirror.

  Her radio crackled to life. The joint operation with the Kitsap detectives had paid off and they were moving in, calling for backup. Irene hit the gas and her grill lights and swung north, on to other things.