A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  “But we don’t know that. And you can’t run out on people, even if they are stupid.”

  Ann held up one hand. “I’m sorry. Is your “ Friend seemed hardly the right word. “…Shipmate missing or something?” The word shipmate seemed to confuse them.

  “You mean Wendy?”

  “I don’t know who I mean. Whoever you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah,” said the first girl. “Wendy. No, she’s not missing.”

  “I mean, but she’s not around.”

  “How “ Ann stopped. Like most communications with Americans, this one was so laden with jargon word usages as to be a set-up for misunderstanding and then everyone becoming self-righteously angry. You’ve become a foreigner. But no one else wants you. What on earth are you going to do? Popping back to here, now, but no more enlightened about this situation than her own, she said, “How can I be of help?”

  “We just want to know is she all right. I mean, about the baby and stuff.”

  “Okay,” Ann said slowly. They are not asking for your opinion or for information, despite the question format. They are asking you to do something, whether or not that’s possible or rational. So, try to figure out what it is they want you to do. “Has she…come to see one of the doctors here?”

  “She won’t come.”

  “We tried that.”

  “We thought you could talk to her.”

  “Where is she?” Ann said, thinking one less blond white girl to worry about.

  “We don’t know.”

  “We think she’s got a new boyfriend.” Suddenly, Ann was remembering McGee, describing the schooner’s female crew. I offered myself. The dining room door swung open and people began filing in. Neil Hutchinson was in the lead, looking harassed, followed by four palagis, three women and a man, presumably the hospital inspectors, and then the head nurse, the head administrator and a tall blond man. Wills McGee. He had shaved his beard off.

  “Um,” said one of the girls.

  “Could we go someplace else?” said the other.

  “Sure,” Ann said. “Though I’m not sure where. Samoa not being much on “

  private spaces.”

  In the end, they found the doctors’ lounge empty. But the interval had given Ann a little time to think. “The basic problem is that unless she’s willing to ask for help, because she is legally an adult, you can’t force help on her. Is she still living on the boat?”

  “Not really.”

  “She like took some of her stuff, but not everything.”

  “Kind of like overnight or whatever.”

  Ann thought of something else. “Whose baby do you think this is? I mean, if she is pregnant? It can’t be someone she met here. Not and know this soon.”

  The girls looked at each other.

  “She got around.”

  “Probably Ped. The guy with the beads.”

  “She did them. The beads.”

  “Thought they were, like, really cool.”

  “He can get a little rough, though. Pissed her off.”

  “Yeah, that and too much work.”

  The other girl made a face. “You just have to know how to like deal with him.”

  The first girl grinned. “Yeah: just keeping handing him another beer ‘til he falls over.”

  “Or goes flat.”

  They both giggled.

  “She kinda went for the Aussie with the boat.”

  “No way: not another boat.” The two girls were talking to each other. “Besides, he’s around all the time. And you don’t see her.”

  “When,” Ann said slowly, knowing that it was what she should have been asking all along but had been afraid to, “Was the last time you talked to, what’s her name, Wendy?”

  They looked at her, their faces blank.

  “Couple days ago, maybe.”

  “Why?”

  Okay, smart girl, what do you tell them? “The police,” she said, hesitating over the words, “Are looking for someone of roughly Wendy’s description.”

  Ranks closed with an all but audible thump.

  “Whatever it is, it isn’t her.”

  The other one snorted, and they both stood up. “You people are all the same.”

  “People come in on a boat, they get blamed for everything.”

  They stomped out, rubber slippers flapping. Ann supposed she should have run after them shouting, no, you’ve got it all wrong. We’ve got this body. But she doubted that it mattered. She would have to tell Han, though.

  Just then, she heard the rumble of palagi voices, most of them at the shrewish end of the scale, coming down the corridor from the direction of the dining hall. Shit. My presentation. What the hell time is it? She had long since given up on watches. The clock on the lounge wall said two, but it couldn’t be after noon yet. The group passed the open door of the lounge, headed for the pair of air-conditioned rooms loosely designated as Neil’s office suite. As soon as the voices disappeared through Neil’s door, Ann darted out into the hall.

  And all but ran into the back of Han’s wife, Sakiko. Bad day for the sisterhood. What the fuck’s she doing here? A horrible moment passed as Ann wondered if she could move backward as fast as she had moved forward. Too late: Sakiko turned and looked at Ann.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “I am looking for the ward. I wish to visit a friend.” Her voice was gentle, almost musical. The hallway was dark: no lighting and only dim natural light from the front lobby. As she had yesterday at Sa’ili’s, Ann thought, she doesn’t recognize me. Or at least, not specifically. Sakiko was dressed in another a-line shift, this one daffodil yellow. She held a bouquet of hibiscus—red, dark pink, butter yellow—in both hands, as a child would.

  “Um,” Ann said. “Through that screen door there and just keep going straight.” For a moment, the other woman hesitated. Here it comes, Ann thought.

  But all Sakiko said was, “Thank you,” and walked the few steps farther on to push through the connector screen. Ann turned away, oddly shaken, and went into Neil’s office.

  Better just find out what the hell’s going on with the inspectors and then try to pick up the pieces.

  “They’ve gone over to the wards,” Neil’s secretary told her, smiling. “Via the chapel.”

  “That sounds appropriate. What about the divisional reports?”

  The secretary shook her head. “After lunch maybe.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll try to catch up with them.” The earlier rain had stopped. But now it was pouring again. “Only maybe not via the chapel.”

  She went back out into the main hospital and into the screened breezeway connector, the way she had directed Sakiko. She slowed, afraid of running into the other woman again. Sakiko had never been real to Ann before. Just a concept. Her lover’s problem wife, and herself, the soul-mate mistress. Ahead of her, down one of the long screened corridors, Ann saw Sakiko again and stopped. Sakiko was standing and looking around as if lost, in her little-girl dress with her bouquet of flowers in her hands. Ann’s father would have painted her like that, through a silvery sheen of screens, a fluid dark line like ink drawing and then broad patches of clean, confident color. One way to make people disappear: paint them. Too bad I can’t do that. A bulky figure in a nurse’s uniform appeared and directed Sakiko into a far passage.

  Ann turned and peered through the screening into the little quad between the buildings where she had stood with Han and McGee yesterday. She wanted to hate Sakiko. But what she felt was a jumble of shame and anger. But more at Han than Sakiko. And more at herself than either of them.

  How many ways can you be an idiot? What about this situation do you not get? Lover: cop, married; with kid. Okay; so the curriculum vitae is amazing. The family, the history, the intelligence; wit, insight, edge, bo
dy like a guitar, tense, resonant. But, withal, just another jerk who can’t make up his mind about his personal life. Or at least not in any way that would seriously inconvenience him. She touched the screen. It flaked rust onto her fingers. She brushed her fingers against her shirt. And if you tell the truth, down in the deep-and-dirty, you would never have set him up to father a kid on you, but there was a part of you that prayed it would happen. Not for the kid, either. But as a way to hold Han. And that is a terrible thing.

  The rain stopped suddenly, the way it had started. She felt its loss, like an inability to cry. Sun came out, and the last of the water rattled down through the gutters. The acrid smell of rusty screening was as intense as flowers in a garden and, in Ann’s experience, more typical of Samoa. She thought of Sakiko again, with her big bouquet of flowers and her little yellow dress. She had no idea what Han and Sakiko’s relationship was about. Something to do with the sister who had carried him over the DMZ. The one thing that she, Ann, would never be able to share with him. She clenched her hands and then, feeling stupid and melodramatic, consciously relaxed, stretching each finger.

  “Jesus,” she said out loud. “Maybe you should get a dog.”

  “I thought about that,” said Wills McGee. He must have come out of the side passage from the morgue and come up behind her without her hearing him. “But bloody hard to manage on a long sail.”

  Ann snorted, smiling in spite of herself. “You caught me talking to myself.” She wanted to be annoyed by the distraction but had the grace to recognize that as really stupid.

  “On your way to lunch?”

  “Not really. I’ve still got to put together my report for the inspectors.”

  “Cancelled,” said McGee, with a grin. “They have decided that Neil isn’t taking the inspection seriously enough and have retired to the hotel to lick their wounds, or their genitals or something, and regroup.”

  “Oh, God. What did he do this time?” It was easy enough to fall in step, a relief to talk-story about someone else. They walked out of the hospital together.

  “Well, you heard about the bit yesterday, with the five cockroaches in the OR?”

  “Actually, it was the surgery ward bathtub, but, yes.”

  “He offered, as a ‘measurable improvement objective’, to reduce the number to three.”

  Ann laughed. “Neil’s contract’s almost up, and I think it feels good.”

  McGee looked at her, his face speculative, flattering. “How about some lunch?”

  “Maybe a gallon of iced tea?”

  “Fair enough.”

  They walked down the road toward the little store at the corner, their feet crunching over the shell-and-coral rubble. He was, she thought, stunningly attractive without the beard. And maybe just a little too aware of it. But there was no denying she was flattered. Flattered and confused and wondering if it were some kind of joke on her. They walked on down the drive into the tunnel of trees shading the village, talking, but Ann wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t know how to flirt, but she did know how to smile and laugh and let people talk about themselves, which is all most people really want. And so where does his being a white South African fit in to all this? Must one always bear the burdens, as an individual, of one’s passport? Whatever your personal opinions and choices have been, you are always tainted with the rest of the world’s perceptions of where you came from, unless your leaving was a visible act of opposition. Kicking around the South Pacific in a forty-foot yacht isn’t much in the way of martyrdom. Like being with him before, driving him out to the dump, she thought about chocolate: no redeeming social value. She loved Han. But there was no question that he was like vegetarian cooking, damned hard work, whatever his nutritional value.

  She surfaced into the conversation just as McGee said, “What d’y know about the anchorage here?” His tone didn’t sound like he’d asked twice, so she hoped for the best. He was nodding toward the slice of water just visible through the trees and the cluster of village houses. “Your copper, Han, said it’s managed by the bloke who runs the little store.” The your was an extra, and it was she who had mentioned the store, but she let it go.

  She shook her head.”It’s probably not quite that straightforward.” She grinned suddenly. “Whatever Old Mrs. Nozaki has led you to believe. The guy who runs the store is her nephew by marriage. He’s from this village and I think holds a mid-level title. Water rights, as we would think of them, are communal here.”

  Under the trees, it was, perhaps, a tiny bit cooler. But not a lot: it was that awful mid-day moment when the heat of the land and the heat of the water just balances, no air moves, and steam rises from every surface. Through the spindly trunks of tall coconuts and the massive mangos and banyans, in the deep shade of the traditional houses or the screened porches of the palagi-style houses, people sat quietly, maybe fanning themselves. But no sensible creature stirred more than that. A radio sounded off somewhere, chattering the mid-day show from Apia.

  “But he may have some mandate from the village council of chiefs to negotiate anchorages. There are other boats there, and they’re not local. I doubt the fishing’s good enough, this deep into the cove, to make it worth defending. Might as well get money out of it somehow.”

  A trio of slat-ribbed dogs trotted across the road. All three were mid-sized, short-haired, brindle, ears at half-mast, long thin faces, the two females with saw-tooth rows of pendulous teats. They stared challengingly at the two humans then shied away. McGee grinned.

  “What was that about getting a dog?”

  “They are rather primal, aren’t they. Lowest common denominator, generic canine. Certainly an argument for controlled breeding. Or at least birth control.” She thought about the girl from the boat, Wendy. Could there possibly be any way that the dead girl in the morgue wasn’t Wendy. The physical description wasn’t exactly right, but could you really tell that well after that long? She should say something to McGee. He at least knew the crew from the dock. Okay, but he didn’t say anything about recognizing her when was doing the post.

  They were coming up to the store. “Why,” McGee said, “When you say that about dogs, is it bloody obvious and perfectly reasonable, and when you say it about people, they call you a fascist?” He stepped ahead of her into the hot, dim building.

  CHAPTER 17

  Han drove the winding shore road back towards Fagatogo and Nozaki’s as fast as he could get away with and still be occupying most of his mind with the death of Thorvald Pedersen. He thought about McGee’s notion of a gunshot. But what were the chances of anyone dying of a gunshot wound on the leeward coast of this island and at least five people not reporting having heard the shot within minutes of its happening? Let alone the twelve to twenty four hours now that had elapsed since Pedersen was last seen in Paki’s Bar and Grill by Welly Tuiasosopo? Essentially zip. Even if the skipper had gotten pissed at his AWOL sailor, shot him as he climbed back on board the yacht, and dumped the body in the bay, somebody not immediately connected with that boat would have heard and reported it. That was the way Samoa worked. McGee said Pedersen hadn’t been bashed over the head or choked and was probably dead when he hit the water. But when you’re missing three quarters of the body, that still leaves a whole lot of things to die of.

  Knife wound, Han thought. Into the low belly and straight up. Now there’s a wound your average shark could appreciate. And what better moment to deliver such a wound than when a man’s heaving himself over the side rails of a boat? Just tip him back into the water: no muss; no fuss. Han remembered the skipper talking to the crewman in the whaler. Han had assumed that was instructions to go find Pedersen. What if instead it was instructions for dealing with a dead or wounded Pedersen? Who else would understand those instructions but the three compatriots themselves? Two, now. And could there be a better motive for getting rid of him than knowing that he’d impregnated and then kil
led the blond girl, Wendy? Or that they had? But somehow the first scenario seemed more likely. Just another take on personnel management.

  Passing in front of the court house, he thought about stopping to pick up a search warrant for the schooner. This was the first time he’d ever had to search a private yacht. Did it count as the dead man’s vehicle, home or workplace? Did you have reason to suspect, lieutenant, that crucial evidence would be lost if you did not pursue the search without delay. Yes, sir. And could you explain those reasons? Yes, sir. Because if I stop now, the Attorney General, who is filling in as D.A. while that post, like so many upper level technical governmental posts in American Samoa, is semi-permanently vacant, and who hates my guts for sending his girl-friend to jail, will find some way to delay issuing me a search warrant for at least a week if not forever. Han put his foot down on the jeep’s accelerator and blazed out the far side of the village.

  At Nozaki’s, he discovered that neither the schooner’s dinghy nor the whaler were tied up to the boat itself, nor were they docked at Nozaki’s. Didn’t necessarily mean there was no one aboard. He went into the store. One of the old lady’s innumerable grand-children was behind the counter, a pallid kid—for a Samoan—trying to coax his whispy beard into a Maori facial tattoo pattern. Which suggested that he’d picked up his attitude in Auckland rather than L.A., but the results were much the same. Fortunately, like influenza, most of them survived it.

  “I need to get out to the schooner. Anybody around who could take me?”

  The kid twitched an eyebrow and raised a shoulder.

  “Your grandmother around?” Han saw the tiny spark of alarm behind the kid’s eyes. “Why don’t you go find her for me?”

  “Noon time,” the kid said unhappily. “She’s sleep.” Han could understand the kid’s concern. He wouldn’t want to be the one to rouse the old dragon either, but he was feeling testy.

  Fortunately for the kid, a quiet voice beside Han said, “Take the canoe.” The old fish-master was standing at Han’s elbow. He was bare-footed, so maybe that explained the silence of his appearance, but it was still eerie. The old man led Han back out onto the dock. Han looked down into the tiny wooden outrigger, floating beside the plank floor. “It does not tip. No fear.”