“You don’t think it’s possible, do you,” he asked, “that he’s been in here and now he’s given me a bottle of my own wine as a peace offering?”
Irene didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know whether it was more plausible that the dignified old psychoanalyst was entertaining an elaborately paranoid fantasy or that Mr. Guevara indeed was so baroquely Machiavellian. “I don’t know how you’ll ever know the answer to that,” she said finally.
“No,” he said. “You’re right, of course. But now I must mistrust either my memory or my neighbor.”
“Or anyone else,” said Irene. “It isn’t locked, is it?”
“What?” he asked.
“The barn.”
“Oh, no,” he said, “not when we’re here. We never lock anything. When we’re gone, of course, in the winter, we lock up.”
“So anyone could have come in here and taken a bottle of wine.”
“Why?” he said.
“Well, to drink, I suppose,” said Irene. “I don’t know.”
“Without permission?”
Irene shrugged. “Maybe.”
Dr. Paris just looked at her. He was attached, she could see, to his own scenario, intent on believing that his mind was playing tricks or his neighbor was. “Where do the stairs lead?” asked Irene.
“There’s a loft where Libby and her family stay.”
“May I look?”
“Unfortunately, Detective Chavez, apparently you are entitled to do anything you choose. You may look, if that is what you want. I’m going back to work.”
Irene went up the stairs and looked into a long, low unfinished room extending the length of the barn up under the eaves. There were mattresses on the floor and a chest of drawers, books and board games, clothes hung from the rafters, and a fan backed up against a small window. It was very hot. Irene looked but didn’t linger.
VIII
The western sun blinked through the trees as Irene drove off the island, dazzling her. She called home when she could pick up a signal, but the machine answered and she didn’t leave a message. In the car she felt more herself, in her own world with the radio crackling. The Paris family, she realized, rattled her, left her upset and feeling inadequate. She would be a part of their world until she knew how Anne had died, coming and going and inserting herself, but she was an alien on Fergus Point, a visitor from another culture. She must remember this.
Irene had gone to high school in Shelton with the Strauss boys, the Parises’ friends from down the beach. Nigel was in her class and Peter one year behind. There was one occasion at the end of her senior year, skip day they called it, when nearly the entire senior class cut school and drove out to Gustavus Island. They swam and sat on the porch of the Strausses’ cabin drinking beer and talking about the past and future, and for one afternoon—too late for it to matter—they blurred the distinctions that stratify small-town high schools. When the sun went down they built a bonfire on the beach and roasted marshmallows, and Nigel Strauss, the research chemist’s son, draped his arm around Irene’s shoulder. At that moment anything seemed possible—any pairing, any future.
After that they went back to class and reassembled into their cliques and groups, took their finals and went off to college or to the army or to June weddings and small-town jobs. But for Irene that one day opened a window.
Irene’s father had worked his entire life in the woods as a logger until he couldn’t any longer because of age and injuries, and then he worked in the mill. Her mother was a retail clerk at J. C. Penney’s until the store closed, and then she worked as a home health aide until she couldn’t do the lifting. Irene hadn’t thought about college. At eighteen she hadn’t thought about much of anything. But two weeks after graduation she packed a few things into a secondhand VW Rabbit, and she and her best friend Cherry left Shelton behind. They headed south to build new lives for themselves. Outside of Stockton the water pump on the Rabbit gave out. They took a room at a cheap motel, and when their money ran out they got jobs with housekeeping and tried to save. After a couple of weeks Cherry gave up and caught a northbound Greyhound for home. Irene moved into an apartment that a Mexican girl she worked with shared with her brother and two other girls.
In the fall Irene enrolled in community college, quit the motel and went to work picking walnuts. She liked being outdoors in the pale fall afternoons. Without intending it her life became entwined with the farm workers, with her roommates and their families, illegal aliens who came north to work in the fields. She went to workshops and organizing meetings. She tutored her friends in English and the Pledge of Allegiance. Lives outside of her own engaged her. It took her four years, but she got her AA degree and was accepted at UCLA. By then she had met Luis Chavez.
Irene hadn’t planned on Luis. She had her life mapped out. She was determined and self-sufficient. She’d get her bachelor’s, then a JD and a career, perhaps specializing in immigration law. She spoke Spanish, though she couldn’t write it. She tried to resist Luis. Over and over she told him it was over.
Luis was legal. He’d crossed at Brownsville when he was sixteen and during one of the amnesty windows he’d gotten his citizenship. He was a carpenter, his English was nearly unaccented, and he was culturally assimilated. He drove a blue Ford pickup and played the harmonica. Kids loved him. He had mournful eyes, teeth white as soap, dusty brown skin. He was tall and thin with rounded shoulders and wristbones like doorknobs. His palms were warm and hard as cement. Irene couldn’t resist him when he smiled. He liked his work and didn’t yearn for anything he didn’t have, except Irene. In the evenings he’d come around to the house she shared and sit on the stoop drinking a beer, fixing things that were broken.
When Irene told Luis she was going to Los Angeles, he said he’d go with her. She said no and he drove away and didn’t come back. A week later she was washing dishes and watching out the kitchen window when he pulled up in front of the house after work and swung down from his pickup. He was wearing dusty jeans and steel-toed work boots with logger heels, and a faded tee shirt with the sleeves ripped out. He bounded up the walk and when she met him at the door he took her hand in both of his and dropped to one knee. In his pocket he had a plain gold band with Luis & Irene engraved on the inside.
They were married in Stockton by a justice of the peace in front of a few friends.
In Los Angeles they rented a stucco bungalow in Culver City beneath the landing pattern of LAX. Luis found work and made a decent wage, and Irene went to school in Westwood and worked part time in the registrar’s office. It wasn’t a bad life. They made friends and cooked sometimes in the backyard. They went dancing on Saturday nights when a band played in the tavern down the street, whirling on the ends of each other’s arms or all wrapped up together and barely moving. They went to the beach and sometimes to the mountains or out to the desert to hike in Joshua Tree. Once Luis took her to Monterrey, Mexico, to meet his mother before she died.
Irene was twenty-four and pregnant when she graduated from college. Law school would have to wait. They moved to Van Nuys and Irene stayed home with the baby until he was three. When he started preschool she got part-time work answering the phones in a law office. In time she took a prep course and scored high on her LSAT; and when Victor began kindergarten in the fall, Irene was going to be starting her first year of law school at UCLA.
You thought life would go one way, one day following another, and you looked ahead and imagined you could see the way things would be tomorrow and the day after, and on into next year and beyond.
Luis was jumped in a bank parking lot only blocks from home one evening when he stopped at an ATM to deposit his paycheck. He gave his attackers his PIN code but they beat him anyway. Or maybe they beat the number out of him. It didn’t matter. They used rocks and fists and feet.
An arrest was never made.
Somewhere along the line during that first summer after Luis died, Irene had made an adjustment to necessity. She had a child and was
now his sole support. Grief was a luxury and she couldn’t afford it. Irene closed a door. Now she couldn’t go to law school—that was out. Three years of tuition and no income, and student loans to pay back at the end of it. But a receptionist’s pay wasn’t adequate.
Some of her friends thought vengeance motivated her to join the police force, but it wasn’t that—the training was quick and the pay was good. She just wanted a job, some way for a single mother to provide a reasonable life. She requested a graveyard shift and got it because no one else wanted it, and she hired the daughter of someone Luis had worked with to sleep over at night. She was home in the evening to make supper and to give Victor a bath, and to read to him before bed. And home again in the morning before school.
Irene was smart and thorough and balanced. She never used her service weapon. Her performance evaluations were uniformly excellent. Her partners liked working with her. She was neat and punctual, her reports were terse and accurate, her penmanship legible. She promised herself never to use crude language, and kept her word. She said sir and young man when other officers said motherfucker.
IRENE CAME into town along the rail siding—where rolling stock loaded with logs was waiting for an engine—made a right at Lumbermen’s Building Supply, and drove up the hill past the Dairy Queen to the gray stone courthouse.
It was a grand building for a small mill town, set high above the street atop massive granite steps. It gave Irene a lift, she had to admit, an ongoing sense of awe and importance to work here. The town cops had a low, modern structure on the other side of the tracks, a typical DMV kind of institutional shoebox of a building with industrial carpeting and no headroom. Here the marble paving in the foyer had been replaced with black-and-white linoleum squares and metal detectors awkwardly embraced doorways like post-modern arbors, but there remained nevertheless an august remnant of reverence for due process. Like everywhere, considerations of space, security and modernization conflicted with the geometry of design, but it was a glorious old building with enough frosted glass, carved wood and soaring marble columns to remind officialdom and citizenry alike of the sober business of law and governance.
The sheriff’s offices themselves were a warren of cubicles on the first floor, partitioned by modular dividers that didn’t reach the ceiling. Only Inspector Gilbert had an actual door to close.
The Gustavus Island plat maps Irene had asked for were on her desk. She tried calling home again but the machine was still answering.
IT WAS late by the time she got home, past eight but still light. Victor wasn’t there. She opened a beer and carried the bottle out into the warm evening and sat on the back porch steps. For the second time that day she wished she had a cigarette. Most of the time she forgot she’d ever smoked. Above the horizon Venus hung in a pale green sky. The dog brought her a Frisbee and Irene threw it for him from where she sat until he wouldn’t give it back anymore.
Seeing Nigel Strauss during the afternoon had upset her. He hadn’t recognized her. She supposed he hadn’t really looked up and paid any attention. They were all absorbed in their grief and loss in their own ways and she was an intruder, an official, nothing to them and practically invisible on the beach in the afternoon when they all went swimming for the first time without Anne. But seeing Nigel caused Irene to remember the weight of his arm across her shoulders all those years ago, and the kiss that followed. And that made her think of Luis. A breeze was stirring the hot evening air against her skin. She couldn’t let herself think in that direction.
She turned her mind back to Anne Paris.
JULIAN BERNSTEIN, the Cambridge landlord, hadn’t answered when Irene had called, and so she’d left her name and her office, home, and cell phone numbers on his voice mail without explaining why she was calling. He still wasn’t at home when Officer Sean Egan of the Cambridge police drove out to the house on Huron at Irene’s request and put a seal on the third floor apartment— though by then in Boston it was close to eleven.
Irene wondered what she’d do about Victor if she had to fly east for a few days. She wondered if he was old enough to leave at home alone. What did other parents do, single parents with no family and jobs that took them out of town?
Irene felt like the tar baby, stuck in so many places. For reasons she couldn’t account for, reasons beyond the smooth, regular boom of the I-14, Irene was quite certain Anne’s death was not accidental. But she wasn’t at all sure how long Inspector Gilbert would allow her to conduct an inquiry into a death that the sheriff’s department could probably quite reasonably determine to have been an unfortunate boating accident and close the book on. She would have to move quickly to establish sufficient motive, opportunity and plausibility to keep an investigation alive. Tomorrow she hoped to have the autopsy report from Dr. Guzmán, which could—if she were lucky—contain compelling evidence to suggest foul play, though what that would be Irene didn’t know. In the meantime she had a search warrant for the cabin in the woods.
IX
Irene glanced at the clock when the phone woke her. It was ten minutes past midnight. The voice on the other end was Harley Rose, one of the town cops, pleasantly informing her that he’d pulled over a couple of kids in a pickup who didn’t look old enough to be driving. He’d taken them in and booked them after discovering wrapping papers and a Velvet tin half full of marijuana in the glove box. One of the boys was Victor and she could come pick him up if she wanted.
Irene hung up and pulled on a pair of jeans. Her heart was thudding. This was the moment she’d been dreading, her worst fears realized. Victor in trouble. She brushed her teeth, hoping Officer Rose wouldn’t smell the nightcap she’d had still on her breath. She imagined the kind of parent she’d appear to be, slumbering while her stoned fourteen-year-old was out joyriding.
The police station was just down the hill and Irene was there within fifteen minutes, but Harley Rose was in no hurry to get through his paperwork and hand Victor over. Normally peers of a sort, Irene thought he was amused by the situation in which she found herself—an ordinary citizen like anyone else up against the obdurate law.
“That was fast,” he said. “The other kid’s spending the night.”
“Who is the other kid?” asked Irene.
“Patrick McGrath. And he’s in more trouble than your kid is.”
“How’s that?” asked Irene.
“He was driving,” said Harley, and Irene felt a small wave of relief. “They say,” Harley went on, putting an ironic emphasis on say, “that your kid’s got a curfew and needed to get home and the McGrath kid’s dad was asleep—that part I believe, passed out is more like it—and so they took his keys and helped themselves to the truck.”
There was a concession in Harley’s narrative that the putative curfew suggested at least some parental oversight, despite the fact that his arch look informed her that he knew that she, like Mr. McGrath, had been sleeping.
“I can take Patrick home,” she said.
“Doesn’t work that way,” said Harley.
“Why not?” asked Irene. She knew as well as he did that there was some latitude there.
“Just doesn’t.” said Harley. “Release ’em to the parent, and in this case the parent doesn’t have a vehicle at his disposal. Can’t get into town.” Harley smirked and Irene wanted to hit him.
“What about the mom?” said Irene.
“I’m not touching that one,” said Harley. “It’s a custody deal. He’s supposed to be with his dad at the moment.”
Irene knew Patrick McGrath. He was a nice kid, a little hyper maybe, but lately he’d been taking Ritalin and seemed more modulated. And Irene knew Patrick’s mother, the receptionist at her dentist’s office, but she didn’t know the dad. He was living in a trailer somewhere out of town and Victor wasn’t supposed to go there. Victor wasn’t supposed to go anyplace where Irene didn’t know the parents.
Victor didn’t look up to meet her eyes when Harley led him out. He was silent and rubbing his wrists as he got in
to the car beside her. They made their way through town, then headed north on Highway 3. Irene was afraid to say anything because she didn’t know what would come out of her mouth. Just out of town at the wide spot in the road next to the siding she’d passed earlier, Victor said, “Mom, can you stop? I’ve got to pee.” Hardly more than a whisper. She slowed and pulled into the cutout and stopped. It took him a long time and when he got back his cheeks were wet.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he replied.
But Irene knew what it was. Victor had said he needed to pee and Officer Rose had kept him cuffed in the holding cell hoping he’d wet his pants. Petty bullying, safe and seemingly inconsequential, but brutal in its way. Relief had made Victor cry.
Irene turned off the engine and they sat silently in the darkness. She wanted to cry herself, overwhelmed by fury and sorrow. She wished she could gather Victor up in her arms and make it all go away. But she couldn’t and shouldn’t try, she knew that.
After a while he said softly, “Mom, let’s go.”
She had called Patrick’s father and said she’d come out and pick him up and take him back to town. He could collect his truck and do whatever he wanted about his son.
Irene didn’t even know how to begin with Victor, but it was easier to talk in the dark while she was driving and didn’t have to look at him. “What were you thinking?” she said finally.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said again. After a while he added, “It wasn’t our marijuana. We didn’t even know it was there.”
Irene believed him. The knot inside her chest loosened. “But you knew what it was, right? When you saw it?”
“I knew what it was,” he agreed. “A lot of people smoke it.”
“Like who?” she asked, thinking of all the homes he’d been in, after school and on weekends, the friends and parents of friends. But she knew he was right. Sometimes walking the dog in the evenings she’d smell it in the neighborhood, somebody sitting on a porch or a stoop taking a hit. Most of the time, as law enforcement she didn’t pay much attention. You could probably find a stash in the nightstand drawer in a lot of perfectly respectable bedrooms. It was useful though, if you wanted to bring someone in for something else. But it could make people stupid if they smoked too much. Make them soft and vague, sap ambition, blur focus.
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