Death in Her Hands Read online

  Charlie came and rubbed his face against my knee, as though he sensed my anxiety. Sweet creature. Would I need a gun? An alarm system? Since I had moved in, I’d always left the door unlocked. I had nothing anyone would care to steal, anyway. But now, I felt the pine woods might actually invite danger. If there was a good place to hide, it was in the thick of those trees. That was where the killer was, I imagined, crouching in the shadows, biding his time until he struck again. My throat clenched. I dared myself to turn around, to look back over my shoulder through the kitchen window at the pines, but I could not. Someone could be standing there—I pictured Blake in oversized gym shorts and a blood-splattered T-shirt, a surly, skinny teen with a stunned, possessed look on his face. I held the note in my hands. Her name was Magda. Then I folded it defiantly and slipped it under a pile of mail on the table by the door. Leave it alone. Come on now, Vesta, I told myself. It will be there later, if you get bored. You’ve done enough imagining for one morning. Don’t make trouble for yourself. Just go on about your day.

  I turned on the overhead light, took off my boots, and hung up my coat, Charlie whining at my heels, hungry for breakfast. “I know, I know.” Everything in the kitchen was as I’d left it. Coffee can upside down on the counter to remind myself to go buy more. Clean dishes in the rack, one plate, one cup, the usual mess of silverware, no butcher knife. The radio was on, as it always was when I left the house. That was a habit I’d picked up long ago. When we were newly married and still young and poor—Walter slaving over his dissertation, me working as a secretary in a medical billing office—we lived in a city apartment and played the radio to muffle the noises of our neighbors coming through the walls. Walter thought it wise to leave it on anytime we went out at night, to ward off burglars. I found it a comfort to come home to music playing, or a news report. Welcome back, the announcers said. And if I ever had to leave Charlie alone at home, I liked knowing that he wasn’t just sitting in the dreary silence there, but keeping up with culture and current events, or listening to Bach or Verdi or Celtic music. If you’re just joining us . . . But I rarely left Charlie alone in Levant. We were attached at the hip, as they say. This just in . . .

  I heated a pot of chicken stew with rice on the stove and ladled it out into Charlie’s food bowl on the kitchen floor. I had been feeding him leftovers since we’d moved to Levant. As a result, I only cooked things we both liked, especially in winter: stews, roasts, sweet potatoes, gravy. On this home-cooked diet, Charlie was calmer, his eyes brighter, his whole presence clearer. I knew he appreciated my cooking. You see, these were the simple things that gave me pleasure: I fed my dog. I looked out the den windows at the water, peaceful and pale under the morning sun. There was my little rowboat still tied to the dock. I had yet to take it out to the island in the middle of the lake that spring. The oars were right there in the den, leaning against the wall. Over the summer, I’d been so proud to row around and look back at the land, at all my property. It was mine. I owned it, this gorgeous pocket of planet Earth. It belonged only to me. And the island with its strange promontory and perilous rocks, a few lone pines, a blueberry bush, and a clearing just big enough to lay a blanket down, all of that belonged to me, too. I took great comfort in ownership. Nobody could ever interfere. The deed was in my name alone, all twelve acres. I hadn’t even seen it all, because of my allergy to the pines.

  The responsibility of maintaining the property had been daunting at first, but I’d managed all right. I still had to call someone to come remove that dock. It was sunken down on one side, useless. I’d managed to drag it out of the water by tying the metal steps to the rear bumper of my car with twine, but the thing had flipped and the soft old wood had cracked in places. I’d covered it with a tarp but the snow made it worse, all warped and splintered. I had no use for the dock anyway. Usually I waded into the water and got into the rowboat that way.

  Charlie lapped at his bowl of water. I heated leftover coffee from the fridge in a pot on the stove. “We’ve had quite a morning, haven’t we?” I said. “A little horror story. Gets the blood flowing, right?” Charlie, hearing my enthusiasm, trotted up to me, his nails scratching the wooden floor. I knelt down to him, and he reared up on his haunches and put his front paws on my shoulders. “Oh, you want to dance?” I held his paws in my hands, the pads soft and pink, and steered him to and fro around the kitchen. It wasn’t his favorite thing, but he was a good sport. When I let go of his paws, he butted his head against my thighs, a kind of punctuation, and went back to his bowl of water. I got my coffee and a bagel from the fridge and went to sit in the breakfast nook, where I could look out at the water. I kept a pad of paper and a pen there to plan out each day.

  The bagels I had every morning for breakfast were from the supermarket and came precut in a package of half a dozen. They weren’t particularly healthy—bleached flour, full of preservatives—nor were they very tasty. They were chewy and dry, and sweet in a way bagels ought not be. But I liked them anyway. I hadn’t bought myself a toaster. It seemed like an unnecessary luxury when I had a perfectly good oven. But who wants to heat an entire oven just to warm a bad bagel? It didn’t matter. I ate them cold, one every morning, Tuesday through Sunday. Monday mornings, when I’d run out of bagels, I drove into Bethsmane and got a donut and coffee at the bakery and did my shopping for the week at the supermarket. I used the occasion to mosey around town, acting busy, though I had no real purpose. That was how life seemed to be—finding things to do to pass the time. The less I’d looked at the clock, the better I knew I’d enjoyed my day. Sometimes I stopped at the Bethsmane library, the post office, the hardware store. Other than those Monday morning escapades, I rarely went to town. Each day was like the day before, apart from the dwindling number of bagels, and the varying weather. I liked the storms that whisked in and out in the spring. The year before, I’d spent many rainy days indoors, mesmerized by the turbulence in the lake, the splatter of water flung on the roof and at the windows. Those days, my list of things to do was short: Read, Nap, Eat. The pad of paper I used to plan my days was legal size, the pages much longer than the paper Blake had used to write the note. But never mind that, I told myself. Each day I wrote out what I’d do, and each day I usually abandoned my plan halfway through.

  Walk.

  Breakfast.

  Garden.

  Lunch.

  Boat.

  Hammock.

  Wine.

  Puzzle.

  Bath.

  Dinner.

  Read.

  Bed.

  I had no television to distract me. Watching television had always made me antsy. Walter said it put me in a mood. He was right. I could never focus and enjoy things because I always felt I had a better idea than what I saw on the screen, and I’d busy my mind with that, and become excited and have to get up and walk around. I felt I was wasting my life away sitting and staring at the lesser version onscreen. Reading was different, of course. I liked books. Books were quiet. They wouldn’t scream in my face or get offended if I gave up on them. If I didn’t like what I read, I could throw the book across the room. I could burn it in my fireplace. I could rip out the pages and use them to blow my nose, or in the bathroom. I never did any of that, of course—most of the books I read came from the library. When I didn’t like something, I just shut the book and put it on the table by the door, spine facing the wall so that I wouldn’t have to look at it again. There was great satisfaction in shoving a bad book through the return slot and hearing it splat against the other books in the bin on the other side of the librarian’s desk. “You can just hand that to me,” the librarian said. Oh no, I liked to shove it through. It made me feel powerful.

  “Oh, forgive me, I didn’t see you there,” I’d whisper.

  That old library in Bethsmane was a small brick building with all the newest books in spinning racks like you’d have found at a Woolworth’s. There was a very nice reading room
that looked out onto a clearing. Some congressman who had grown up in the town had donated a large sum, a plaque proclaimed. On one side of the reading room there was a large desk with a row of fancy computers. Usually there were young people using them. The big leather armchairs were often empty. The people in the area weren’t too keen on reading. The way I chose books was usually by their covers and titles. If a book was named something that sounded too general, too wide open, I figured it was a book written in generalities, and so I’d find it boring, and I’d expect my mind would wander off too much. The worst books were those that offered banal instructions on how to improve oneself. I looked at them sometimes, just to laugh at the silliness. “Eat this and feel happy.” That was the usual gist. Sometimes I looked for books I’d heard being reviewed on public radio. It was hard to separate the opinions of the reviewer from my own. And in that, it was easier to enjoy a book, feeling that I’d already made up my mind to like it. I didn’t have to debate with myself so much, even if the book wasn’t all that interesting.

  As I ate my cold bagel and drank my coffee that morning at my table by the lakeside windows of my cabin, I wrote out my plan for the day. It was the same plan as for all the preceding days. Every day I rewrote it, after scratching out the identical plan I’d written the day before. Yesterdays were all failures. I didn’t want to be taunted by the evidence. I forged ahead. There was work to be done in the garden. I had seeds ready to plant: carrots, turnips, dill, and cabbage on one side; sunflowers and forget-me-nots on the other. It wouldn’t be the prettiest garden, but only I had to look at it. It was an experiment for me, and something to keep me grounded as the summer started. I’d owned that land for a year, and only now had I really started to get my hands into it. It made me feel happy and useful. There was plenty more digging to do, more weeds to pull, fertilizer to spread, and I could set the radio on the window ledge of the den and listen while I worked and while Charlie frolicked through the pines or splashed in the lake. With this plan set in my mind, I finished my coffee, put my dishes in the sink, and laced my boots back up. There, on the table by the door, was the mail, and the note from Blake I’d found in the birch woods. Her name was Magda. I opened the den window and turned the radio up. Here is her dead body.

  “Charlie,” I said, “let’s get some air.”

  It wasn’t as though I had forgotten the note. It had been there, writing itself over and over in my mind as I’d eaten breakfast and tried to think of other things. I’d managed to ward off any new thoughts about it in that time, but being close to it again, not even looking at it directly, just at the envelopes and papers I’d hidden it under, I could feel my heart swell and pound again. Oh, Magda. May you rest in peace, I said to her in my mind. What else can you do about a dead person than to wish them well? What more could have been expected of me in the situation? The note wasn’t any kind of summons or proposition. It was a note of acknowledgment, not an invitation. Still, it left so much unexplained. Nobody will ever know . . . Such certainty. Nobody will ever . . . It was odd, his assurance. It occurred to me then, there might be more in the note than met the eye. Maybe I ought to be reading between the lines. Her name was Magda. . . .

  Charlie licked my hand, interrupting my darkening reverie. Outside, the sun was shining. The garden called. No, I didn’t have to read the note again. I could proceed with life. I would. I had to. I put my sun hat on, knotting the nylon strings under my throat. Anyway, who was I to ask questions? I was just a little old lady, peacefully waiting out the rest of my life, disturbing no one, and responsible for no one but myself and my dog.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Charlie bounded out past me as soon as I opened the door. I watched as he scampered across the gravel path and down the slight slope toward the lake. He pawed the wet dirt there and splashed a bit in the shallow waters. It was still too cold for me to go swimming, but Charlie was impervious to the cold. Even in the winter, when the thermostat on the kitchen window read in the single digits, he’d frolic out there in the snow until his paws and belly were raw and red, then come back huffing and puffing and curl up on the rug in front of the fireplace. He was so dear. He was so human sometimes, rolling his eyes and yawning like Walter would when I was uneasy after dinner, as though to say, “Come relax here with me on the couch, let my body soothe you, it’s all right.” I could hear Charlie prancing around while I worked in the garden. He disappeared out there for long jags, chasing squirrels through the thick of the pines, looping back to me once in a while for a kiss and a little pet, for my sake, it seemed. He didn’t need me. Now that it was spring, he spent most of his time outdoors. I had to coax him in with treats and whistles when I wanted his company during the day. I never worried that he’d run away. By then I knew, he was mine. There were no greener pastures. He would always come when I called. He was like a teenager, confident and naive, exploring his world as though he owned it. His spirit was joyful and unworried. It seemed to me that he’d forgotten his early trauma with his siblings in the duffel bag, those poor sweet creatures. And how nice it was to know that one could forget such things. We are resilient. We suffer, heal, and proceed. Proceed, proceed, I told myself, taking up the trowel.

  The dirt was cool and gritty, and though I’d never learned much about planting and nursing, giving life to much of anything, I felt that my work in the garden was productive, sprinkling seeds and covering them, raking the unbroken ground, sifting through the clumps, and so forth.

  Besides the weekly book reviewer on public radio, the radio in Levant was all Christian sermons, or pop music, or dark rock ’n’ roll played on the station broadcast from the community college a few towns over. Late at night, if I couldn’t sleep, I’d listen to the Christian call-in hotline. People would ask questions about Scripture, and occasionally for advice about how to handle some difficult situation in their lives in a good Christian way. It fascinated me that strangers would trust “Pastor Jimmy” with such serious matters, had no qualms about airing their dirty laundry over the radio waves. Some of them even gave their last names and the towns they lived in. “This is Patricia Fisher from New Ashford.” “My name is Reynold Owens, and I live out here in Goshen Hills.” “Yes, hello. This is Lacey Gardner calling in from Amity. I think you know my husband?”

  “Mrs. Gardner, hello. How is Kenneth? How is his health these days?”

  Maybe one night I’d hear Blake call in. “You don’t know me,” he’d say. “But I have a problem. It’s Magda. She’s dead. Nobody will ever know . . .”

  “Magda, what a strange name,” Pastor Jimmy would say.

  My name was also strange. All my life people had asked me, “What kind of name is Vesta Gul?”

  “Vesta is an old family name. My mother’s mother,” I would tell them. “People call me Vi sometimes. My friends do. And Gul was my husband’s name. It means ‘rose’ in Turkish. But he was from Germany.”

  “Is that your accent? It’s a German accent?” asked the woman at the bank in Bethsmane. Walter did have a German accent, but I had none. I’d grown up in Horseneck. I was a normal person. I was like everybody else. If I had any accent, it was the accent of having no accent. Most people in Levant spoke with a rural drawl, sometimes so thick I could hardly parse out the strains of conversation I overheard now and then in town, or at the gas station where I filled up once a month. My Monday morning trips into town put me in touch with just a few shop clerks, the checkout girls at the grocery store, the gentle old man at the bakery. “Plain or glazed, today?” he’d ask.

  “Plain, please,” and “yes,” and “thank you” were all I had to say. At the library, it was easy to be silent. Just a nod here, a smile there. Charlie was the one I talked to, and much of the time we were silent together, just sharing the mind space between us, feeling things back and forth.

  Her name was Magda. Magda had an odd, rubbery ring to it, like magma, or madman. Thick and unguent and unruly. Or magnum, a word that for me
conjured up a smoking gun, or a box of prophylactics, things I would never think about. Her name was Magda. Magda was just her nickname, I surmised. Blake must have known her well. Why else would he feel moved to attend to her dead body? He must have loved her. But he hadn’t loved her enough to make a big stink over her death. The only stink Blake had made had been for me.

  I took off my gardening gloves and tore open the packet of forget-me-not seeds. They were surprisingly big, the size of small ticks, shaped like raindrops but prickly, like burs. I pinched a few between my fingers and dropped them in a hole I’d poked into the dirt with my finger. It seemed unbelievable that these tiny things would someday bloom into little blue flowers, according to the package. The label said simply that they grow in average soil, need little attention, and take a week or two to germinate. How long would it take for the flowers to bloom? I wondered. Could I wait that long? I imagined the next two weeks, waiting anxiously for the little green stems to sprout out of the ground. It might drive me mad to sit there and stare. I’d manage somehow. I’d think of something to keep me busy. A wave of impatience came over me. It was new, this feeling. Somehow it had eluded me all winter. I’d fallen into a kind of dreamland while the world had frozen over and grown thin, days so short they vanished as soon as the coffee was made. My mind had become eerily gray and peaceful, as if I’d been hibernating from November through April. But the days were growing longer now. Dawn was earlier, dusk was later. There was more time to be up and alive. A tide of passion was rising. Before Walter had died, I’d taken pills to soothe my nerves. But when he’d died, I felt it was disrespectful to try to numb away my grief, so I’d flushed them down the toilet. In the garden, I momentarily regretted that. Lorazepam was the name. If I wanted any now, I’d have to go beg some Bethsmane clinician. You can imagine how he’d look at me. No, I couldn’t bear to put up with that kind of humiliation. I would brave my nerves on my own.