An Unattended Death

by Victoria Jenkins

  But he didn’t, and they stayed, completing their residencies and beginning their respective practices. One spring evening she came home, pulled up in front of the house but didn’t get out of the car. Julian was on his way out. He walked past her Subaru on the way to his Saab and glanced in her driver’s side window and saw she was crying, her face flushed and contorted, cheeks sheeted with tears, eyes red as she looked up at him, her assurance dissolved, her fearsomeness evaporated. He bent to look in at her. “What?” he said, opening the door, and she wagged her head mutely and stepped out and into his arms, sobbing against his shirt. When he got the story, which was later in the darkness of his bedroom after much fierce, then tender, lovemaking—a performance he would not have thought himself capable of—it was a sad litany of Ira’s infidelities, irresponsibilities, and ambivalence.

  So, he said, began their affair. She would break things off with Ira, she promised, but not until the summer, after her boards. For the moment she needed calm in which to study, the status quo, with the addition of the excitement of their secret and the anticipation of the life they would build together. Julian bought Anne an extravagant diamond, which she accepted but wouldn’t wear. Not yet, but soon, she promised.

  Julian admitted he was baffled and angry and could not fathom why they had to wait and why he was required to share her for the interminable interim until the end of summer when her boards were behind her.

  And, in fact, not long after she departed with Ira for the west coast and the annual month of summer vacation with her family at her beloved island, the wait became unendurable, and he followed. It was unplanned, he said, impulsive. He looked at Gustavus Island on Google Earth and zoomed in until he could pick out the roof of the Paris house and see the slough and the dune and the sandbar, all as she had described. He Map-Quested the address, bought a ticket and flew west. He rented a car and called her when he got cell reception, which was on the dirt road by the mailboxes. She came flying up the drive and out of the tunnel of trees, barefoot and tanned and blonde and wildly thrilled to see him, locking her pelvis into his and sinking her tongue into his mouth, but he couldn’t stay, his presence mustn’t be discovered. Quick! She knew a place. She slid behind the wheel and spun the car in a doughnut of sprayed gravel and hightailed it out to the blacktop. She turned off the county road into an overgrown lane at a trailhead that his eye would have missed, and nosed the car through huckleberry and salal and bracken ferns beneath towering firs, branches leaning in, raking the paint. She knew all the paths and all the secret places—she had roamed the island since childhood—and she parked in the woods and took Julian’s hand and led him through the underbrush and into the clearing of the Donley cabin. They used the tire iron to pry open the door and climbed into the loft together and inaugurated their hideaway. Here, she said, he could stay undetected. He could shop in Shelton, buy groceries and books and anything else he needed, he could read and write and she would visit every day and every night. She would slip away and walk or sail to him.

  And it was, as she promised, a secret summer idyll.

  THE EVENING of the squall Julian was on the beach watching for her when the I-14 rounded the point, flying before the wind, wing on wing on a green sea. The wind was ferocious, roaring south, pushing towering dark clouds, soughing in the firs growing on the lip of the bluff above. Julian could hear the trunks creak and groan and he wondered if it was safe where he stood. This was the kind of wind that toppled trees.

  As he watched, Anne tried to tack toward shore and the boom swung, the sails flapped, then filled, and the boat heeled violently and he could tell she had lost control. He watched the I-14 swamp and go over, and when the mast hit the water he kicked off his shoes and plunged into the waves. He made a shallow dive and came up in a strong crawl toward the capsized vessel. He caught sight of her head intermittently between the waves as he swam toward her. When he reached her she was coughing and laughing, clinging to the boat.

  “The tiller snapped,” she yelled. It wasn’t her fault but Leland was going to kill her and they should try to swim the boat to shore, otherwise who knew where it would end up. She had to shout to be heard. They grabbed the gunwales and pulled, kicking hard and swimming with one arm, trying to tow the boat, but the wind was sweeping them south, beyond the mouth of the Donley canyon toward the next point, the tip of the island beyond, and the open water of Dana Passage. Julian was cold and hampered by his clothing. Lightning flashed in the incoming front, and thunder rumbled.

  “Let go,” he shouted, prying at her fingers, “we have to get out of the water,” pulling at her, grabbing her arms hard above the elbows, yanking, breaking her grasp, turning her toward the beach.

  She didn’t want to leave the boat—“No!” she shouted, “you never leave the boat,” fighting against him. But the storm was nearly on top of them and he jerked her hands loose and the I-14 was swept out of her grasp.

  Even swimming hard, when they finally reached shore they’d been carried well south and they had to wade, waist-deep in the waves, clambering over the spars, chilled and silent. It had started to rain, wind-driven sheets, and the canyon, when they reached it, had become a slippery torrent. They made their way upward, grabbing branches and saplings for handholds. Overhead a freight train roared through the firs.

  Finally back at the cabin, they stripped off their wet clothes, hung them from the rafters, and Julian lit a fire. They huddled together in front of the stove wrapped in blankets, warming slowly, and sharing a bottle of good red wine Anne had brought that they’d been saving.

  She was quiet and remote, unhappy about the end of their adventure and the fate of her brother’s I-14, and in her silence Julian read reproval, as though she mistook his good judgment for faintheartedness, which wounded his pride, and so a chasm yawned between them.

  Later, when the rain had stopped and the wind had died and their clothes were dry, they dressed and walked through the woods together. He wouldn’t let her go back alone. He gave her his fleece jacket to put over her shoulders. They walked in silence, Indian file along the path, Julian following the pale scissoring of her bare legs, then hand in hand when the track opened up and they could walk abreast.

  No lights were on at the Paris house or in the barn or study when they came down the drive, but even so they crept behind the barn and circled past the old outhouse. It was late by then and the tide would have receded and Julian wanted to walk back by the beach—it would be quicker that way. Anne walked with him down through the orchard and out to the dune and they kissed in the moonlight, a long, thoughtful, healing kiss. She pulled back and smiled and he could see the glint of her teeth, the whites of her eyes. They could make love, she said, right here, right now, on the dune. His heart soared in gratitude—whatever chill had come between them was gone. She slipped out of his jacket and spread it on the sand and pulled him down with her. It was quick and sweet and wordless, just her breath and gasp and his own hoarse moan.

  A little later, looking back as he walked away, he could see the pale forms of her arms and legs—she wouldn’t keep his jacket, no way of explaining it she said—luminous in the darkness where she stood watching him go. One arm lifted and waved. He waved back and walked on. When he looked again he could no longer see her, but he saw the flare of a match. Smoking, he thought, a cigarette before going up to bed. He walked on, tired, satisfied and already looking forward to tomorrow.

  But the next day she didn’t come.

  “And the rest you know, Detective Chavez,” he said. “I tried calling, couldn’t reach her. I called the house. I was frantic, of course, and quite helpless. And angry, if you want to know. Yes, there had been a little rift, but we’d mended things. I was furious that she would just vanish without a word of explanation.” A pause. “Then I talked to you,” his voice cracking.

  He shrugged slightly, looking at her. She relived that early morning call, remembering what he’d said and what she had said. Thinking back she was sure that Julian had been co
mpletely and genuinely stunned when she told him Anne was dead. He’d had other things to hide—his whereabouts and his relationship to Anne—but that she was dead, he hadn’t known. His whole account sounded entirely plausible.

  “Do you smoke?” she asked.

  He looked at her, surprised. “I used to,” he replied, “not anymore.”

  “But Anne smoked,” she said.

  “A little.”

  “Where did she get the cigarette?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “You said she was smoking as you walked away. Where did she get the cigarette?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where’d the cigarette come from? She’d been soaked to the skin, her cigarettes were in the boat.”

  He shot her a wary glance. “I didn’t make that up.”

  “No, I believe you,” she said. “But how do you know it was her?”

  He swung his head around sharply. “Whoever struck that match was standing where I left her.”

  “Right,” said Irene.

  He studied her in silence, then shuddered slightly. “That’s creepy,” he said.

  Irene was thinking of Ira, who had admitted to a night-time cigarette on the beach. Or Elliot or Libby or Rueben Guevara. Any one of them, or anyone, hidden in darkness on the edge of the slough, watching. “Where exactly was she when you left her?” Irene asked.

  “We came out on the path,” he said, “and that’s where she kissed me, but then we walked a little, just a bit north and up into the dune grass.” He was quiet for a long time, thinking. “There could have been cigarettes in my jacket pocket,” he said finally. “I bought a pack to keep at the cabin. She didn’t smoke much but she liked one now and then. She could have taken that pack when we left and put it in her pocket. Or in her shorts pocket. I don’t remember. If she did, it didn’t register with me.”

  “She gave the jacket back to you, Dr. Bernstein, and there were no pockets in her shorts,” said Irene.

  He was quiet.

  HE WAS free to go. He declined the offer of a ride home in a cruiser, and she shook his hand, thanked him for his cooperation, apologized for the inconvenience, and promised to call if there was news. But he lingered for a moment, as though undecided, then offered to buy her a drink—it was painful, he said, and there was no one but her who knew about him and Anne and no one to talk to. “There’s a place just around the corner.”

  “Not a good idea,” said Irene, but still she was sorry for him and she almost changed her mind when he turned and pushed out through the double doors, letting in a wall of heat.

  Sean Egan was at her shoulder. “Hey, boss, knock one back with the boys before you go?” he asked. “I’m off shift.”

  Irene smiled. “He asked me the same thing.” Sean Egan had come and gone through the afternoon while she questioned Julian Bernstein.

  “I know, I heard,” he said. “There’s a place just around the corner.”

  “No,” she said, smiling. “But thanks.”

  IRENE SAT in the break room and called the airline and waited interminably on hold before she finally got an agent and found a flight home with an open seat. With an hour yet to kill, she signed out at the desk, stepped into the hot evening, and walked down the block and around the corner. Green neon advertising Rolling Rock spilled into the twilight. She stepped inside with her head down. She didn’t want to see Julian Bernstein sitting alone at a table or at the end of the bar, or catch Sean Egan’s eye in the back bar mirror, but she did want a drink before heading to the airport. She asked for an Irish whiskey and carried it over to the jukebox. She felt unmoored and a long way from home, present in other people’s lives like a space traveler in an alien world where everyone else knew the conventions. She punched in a Bruce Springsteen ballad to ground her in a more familiar universe. My name is Joe Roberts/I work for the state . . . and the harmonica’s wail.

  There was a touch on her shoulder. Sean Egan, standing at her side. “It’s the Boss,” he said, smiling, and she wasn’t sure if he meant her or Bruce Springsteen. All in one motion he lifted the glass of whiskey out of her fingers, set it on the jukebox, took her hand in his, laced an arm around her waist, swung her in close, guiding her backwards into a two-step, then looped her out in a turn under his arm and reeled her back in again. It felt good to be dancing, moving to the music with someone’s hands on her. She liked Sean Egan, she realized, liked his calm irony and liked that he knew exactly what he wanted. She wondered how you got to be like that when you were still so young. She found herself checking for a ring. There was none. She wondered if he was even out of his twenties, and didn’t think so. It was a good thing, she thought, that she’d booked that flight, because otherwise, if he’d asked, and she thought he might, she would be tempted to tarry in Beantown.

  They didn’t dance the night away, but they danced until she had to go. Her shirt was soaked beneath her jacket, the holster under her arm pasted to her side, her face flushed and her hair hanging in damp tendrils. He walked her out to find her car and kissed her softly before she got in. “You’re a good one, boss,” he said.

  XXIV

  Irene heard the mower somewhere down in the orchard. She glanced in the barn as she walked past. No Triumph. She should not have let Ira go. She was kicking herself. She wondered where he would have gotten to by now. Time was turning somersaults. Somewhere above the Great Lakes rolling through the wheat fields of Ontario. That is, if he was going where he said he was going, which was a completely unreliable assumption. Now she could picture the apartment he was going home to—if he was going home. He could just as easily have crossed the border directly north into Vancouver and be building a new identity. Or be on a plane somewhere bound for a new life. She’d let him go scot-free out of the country. That, among other things, was going to take some explaining if he didn’t turn up in Boston in a couple of days. She wondered if he did, if Julian Bernstein would let him keep the apartment if he wanted to.

  And she wondered if Ira knew about Julian and Anne, had known or suspected all along, if that knowledge and Anne’s duplicity festered and poisoned him. She wondered if it was Ira’s match Julian had seen as he walked away. Ira lighting a cigarette after whacking Anne on the back of the head with a rock or a length of iron-hard driftwood. Maybe Ira had stood in the dark on the edge of the slough watching his girl kissing the landlord, watched them lie down on the dune and make love, heard her gasp and seen her smile. She wondered if he’d walked up behind her as she straightened her clothes, overcome by rage and jealousy, whacked her on the head, then slipped her limp body into the slough as Julian walked away. Because, if Julian was telling the truth, and Irene believed he was, Anne was alive and well on the dune long after the storm and the wreck of the I-14, which confirmed, for Irene at least, that Anne’s death could not have been accidental and had happened there, where her body was found.

  She had to reorder everything she knew now, reassemble her hypotheses to include the new information, everything she’d learned in Boston. It was brain-numbing. She had fit pieces of a puzzle together so things made sense, and all of a sudden there was a new element to incorporate and she had to begin again, deconstruct the theories she’d developed back into a random collection of bits of information. She wondered what else she might have missed and what other assumptions she’d made without even knowing.

  She shouldn’t have let Ira go. He had migrated to the top of her list and was now her prime suspect.

  She walked into the dimness of the barn and looked around. The cot was there, the oyster shell ashtray, the prescription vial— the books and sleeping bag gone. Irene sat down on the cot and read the label on the little amber bottle. Flagyl. The medicine for giardia. He’d had it too then. She tried to remember if she’d drunk the water. She had. She remembered now the jar of water Libby gave her, still water with a slice of lemon—was that out of the tap or something that came out of a bottle? At the lunch on the bluff, now seemingly so long ago but really less
than a week, there had been Pellegrino in green bottles. She couldn’t remember what she’d had then. She knew she hadn’t drunk the wine, though she’d wanted to. She wondered how long it took for giardia to make itself known. She felt slightly queasy thinking about it.

  IRENE WALKED on down into the orchard toward the racket of the mower. It was Libby, as Irene had supposed, at the bottom of the orchard attacking a last unmown corner of pasture behind the slough where the grass was waist-high. Libby leaned down on the handle, rearing the mower up on the oversized back wheels, then advanced, lowering the blade onto the standing grass. It looked like punishing work, and the noise it made was a relentless roar. Irene wondered why she did it, why the family didn’t just hire someone with a tractor. It wasn’t as though they couldn’t afford it. It seemed bizarre that Libby would undertake to do it. She was on vacation.

  Libby was wearing jeans and a faded blue tee shirt, sodden with sweat, a pith helmet draped with mesh on her head. Her arms were lean and darkly tanned. She hadn’t seen Irene approaching, and Irene stood in the shade of a pear tree some distance back, watching. She thought about what Elliot had said, that Libby was born with teeth, and how unsettling that would be.