Murder in Paradise Read online

  Ruth made a shooing motion with her hand and said, “Go away, please. We’re trying to enjoy ourselves.”

  But Abi said, “It’s all right.” She reached into her purse and dug out a five-dollar bill, bunched up so that it looked like she was trading one flower for another.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Abi said. “You look like you might be sick.”

  The woman said, “Gracias,” before twisting up her face in pain and slumping to the ground.

  Chapter 10

  Abi’s father ran a small farm. Seventy Holsteins, five hundred acres. He had a hired man who helped with the milking, but otherwise he handled most of the work himself. There weren’t many small farms left. Not like his. Most had either closed down during the eighties or gone big.

  The A Plus Dairy was big. A two-thousand-head operation outside of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, run by Abi’s cousins. They milked day and night, rotating the cows through an automated carousel. Abi had toured the facility once. She remembered one of her cousins explaining, “We tried to hire local, but high school kids are always telling you they can’t make it because of prom or a game or exams. Nobody wants to scrape cow manure and dip teats in iodine. Except illegals.”

  Undocumented workers, who lived in a trailer park outside of town. They weren’t eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP, so to avoid the cost of the emergency room, they relied on a team of doctors who scheduled home visits once a month. Abi remembered hearing stories about living room births and a man who broke, set, and splinted his own leg.

  So she didn’t call 911 now. She called Jeremy instead.

  The woman—Sonora—sat in the passenger seat of the Subaru. Hunched over her stomach and hugging it. “No hospital, no hospital,” she continued to say between gusting breaths. The roses sat on the dash, their petals fluttering with the air-conditioning.

  “It’s okay,” Abi said. “Everything’s going to be fine.” Though she didn’t feel certain at all. Maybe she should just drive straight to the emergency room? But then what? Would she have to volunteer to pay the medical fees? What if the woman died? Would Jeremy be furious at her? Should she have just stayed out of this altogether, like the women at the bistro, who scooted to the very edges of the patio when Sonora collapsed as if whatever she had might be catching?

  On the sixth ring, Jeremy finally picked up. Sonora mewled in pain and Abi stomped down on the accelerator, saying, “I need your help.”

  The free clinic had closed for the night, but it was only a few miles away and Jeremy was still there.

  “No hospital, no hospital,” Sonora continued to chant.

  “Yes. I mean no. No hospital,” Abi said, echoing her. “It’s okay. I’m taking you to the free clinic.” She searched her brain for whatever specks of high school Spanish remained. “Gratis? Libre?”

  The Stelling Free Clinic looked like a concrete bunker with windows cut into it. No beauty to it, only function. The brutalist architecture of the Cold War. Jeremy stood on the steps of it, waiting for her. He wore a rumpled gingham shirt and khakis and his forehead was wrinkled with concern.

  By the time she parked crookedly out front and killed the ignition, he already had the passenger door open. He crouched down and blinked twice and touched the woman on the arm. “Sonora?”

  Abi ran around to the other side of the car to join him. “You know her?”

  “She was in here earlier today.”

  “Was she having trouble then? Is that why she came in?”

  He always moved and spoke so slowly, calmly. As if an old calculator churned inside him and couldn’t be rushed. She found this soothing most of the time, but at panicked moments like this, she found it maddening. “No,” he said, and pinched Sonora’s wrist to get at her pulse. “She was here for her son.”

  “How many months pregnant is she?”

  “I can only guess. As I said, she was here for her son. I didn’t examine her.” He felt Sonora’s forehead and then briefly touched the Band-Aid along her shoulder. “But my head nurse did…”

  “Do you think it’s preeclampsia?”

  “Abi…why did you bring…” He opened his mouth to say something more, then seemed to think better of it. “She needs a hospital.”

  “No hospital!” Sonora said.

  At that moment, Abi heard some footsteps padding down the front steps, and soon a nurse with a crooked nose stood between her and her husband. “Let’s get her inside,” she said.

  Abi didn’t help people. Her “patients” were past helping. She reverse-engineered. She analyzed and diagnosed. She found vomit in the lungs of the drowned, a bullet in the spine of the gunshot, someone else’s skin beneath the fingernails of the strangled.

  So she remained on the periphery of the exam room as Jeremy and the nurse, Stacie, did their best to help the woman.

  They spoke in quiet voices, saying, “Blood pressure is one-eighty over one-ten,” and “Her water has broken,” and “She’s dilated to four.”

  The air smelled like blood and the ammoniacal tang of embryonic fluid. Sonora’s moans were punctuated by screams.

  “Jeremy said you examined her earlier today,” Abi said. “How was she then?”

  Stacie glanced at her with a look of annoyance but did not respond.

  “I assume, from the Band-Aid, you gave her a shot of some sort?”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get a proper introduction earlier, but can we please talk later?” Stacie said.

  “We should try to get a phone number for her husband.”

  “I don’t see a wedding ring.”

  “Her family, then.”

  Abi took out her phone and tapped it against her chin and paced in a circle.

  “I’m going to call nine-one-one, okay?” Abi said.

  Stacie said, “Put that phone away!”

  Her voice had a cutting edge to it. Maybe it was just the stress of the situation, but Abi felt an urgent dislike for Stacie and the way she otherwise ignored and dismissed her while standing shoulder to shoulder with Jeremy. “We’ll help her.”

  Abi brought towels, latex gloves, gowns, and masks. She hooked the IV bag to the wall mount and untangled the line to hand to Jeremy. When she tried to peel open Sonora’s clenched fist to hold her hand, pink rose petals fluttered to the floor. “Can you give us space, please?” Stacie asked.

  The boy, delivered stillborn, was tiny. His skin was furiously red. He had a black thatch of hair and a tiny wrinkled face. Jeremy cut the cord and lay the child on Sonora’s chest, and she fell asleep almost instantly holding him.

  Jeremy remained by the table, stunned and quiet, but Stacie heaved a sigh and walked to the sink and gave Abi an assessing look, as if seeing her for the first time. “Sorry if I was sharp before.”

  “I’m—” Abi said, struggling to find the right words. “I’m sorry if I got in the way. I was only trying to help.”

  “So was I.” Stacie peeled off her latex gloves and tossed them in the biohazard bin. “This is hard to understand, but we’re kind of operating under the radar here. We have to if these people are going to come to us.”

  “I understand.”

  Stacie knobbed on the water and frothed her hands with soap. “Anyway. I know it’s depressing as hell, but I always try to look on the bright side. What kind of life was that kid going to have anyway?” She shook the water off her hands. “Maybe we spared him.”

  It was then that Abi noticed the ring Stacie wore on her middle finger. The same as the CEO of the hospital, Matthew O’Neel. A black band.

  Chapter 11

  The week passed quickly. When Abi wasn’t working, she was unpacking boxes, painting walls, running off to Home Depot for an edging brush or caulk or a new light fixture. She didn’t really have time to think about anything other than her job and her home.

  Occasionally she flashed on the image of Neysa Bures—drunk, with sleep-mussed hair—screeching, “They’re killing people!” But then she’d shake it off and get back to whatever dema
nded her attention.

  Abi and the morgue attendant hoisted frozen bodies onto carts and let them thaw in the refrigerator for a day or two before she began the external exam. It was a painstaking process: collecting hair and fibers, sampling fingernails, doing a UV sweep for any residue, maybe even X-raying the corpse to pinpoint a bullet’s location.

  Then Abi cleaned and measured and drained, scissored and sawed, peeled and detached, weighed and chemical tested. Here was a middle-aged man who died of cardiac arrest, the result of a cocaine overdose. A grandmother who had an aneurysm while swimming laps at the YMCA. And a young woman with a blood alcohol level of 0.3 who choked on her own vomit.

  Four questions dominated her thinking: natural, accidental, homicide, or suicide? Every time she reached for the freezer door, every time she plopped a liver onto a scale. Natural, accidental, homicide, suicide. The four words looped through her mind so often they became a kind of dark nursery rhyme.

  She came home every day exhausted and reeking of chemicals and blood. No matter how long she stood underneath the shower, she couldn’t scrub or shampoo the smell away. She couldn’t read, because her eyes ached from concentrating all day. She spent most of her workday alone—her only company a morgue attendant and the dead—yet her voice was hoarse from speaking, as she recorded her findings into a digital player.

  Abi had scheduled and rescheduled an OB appointment but kept pushing it off. She believed she was twelve weeks, but it was difficult to tell, since her period had always been erratic. She had miscarried a half dozen times now; it didn’t seem possible that she might actually carry a child to term, and even if she did, that was no guarantee. She couldn’t help but remember Sonora, clutching her stillborn child so tightly, as if she could wish it back inside her.

  And then Abi examined the body of a man named Alexei Petrov, who had been in the fridge for a few days. Forty-three years old. Five foot five, one hundred fifty pounds. He’d died in a car accident after his truck crossed the median and struck an oncoming vehicle. When she unzipped the bag, she couldn’t help but cringe. His face had ballooned and blackened on one side and was dented inward on the other. A shard of bone poked out of his collar. One of his legs was roughly severed.

  At times like these she couldn’t help but want to hurry the exam. Cause of death: crushed to a pulp. Wasn’t it obvious? But she was a rule follower and a perfectionist. She would unpuzzle this body one piece at a time.

  During the external exam, she almost missed the swollen index finger on his right hand, a red lump near the tip. It hardly stood out beside his other injuries, but she noted it in her recording before moving on.

  It was another hour before Abi noticed the telltale signs of an asphyxia death—blood-deprived tissue, the buildup of lactic acid, tiny hemorrhages and veins over the heart and organs broken by intravascular pressure. Some liver necrosis. Discoloration of the skin separate from the injuries sustained in the accident.

  It was as though Alexei had been strangled or suffered an asthma attack, without any other supporting evidence. He’d drowned on air.

  Abi returned to the finger with a magnifying glass and noticed the pricked skin—a sting, or a bite. The longer you waited, the more things broke down. But she had blood, urine, and vitreous fluid from the one intact eyeball, as well as bile and lung samples for toxicology testing. She hoped to know by day’s end what had killed him.

  But first—she checked the clock on the wall and pulled off her face mask—she was expected to attend the dedication ceremony for the new ICU.

  Chapter 12

  Everyone gathered in the windowed atrium of the new ICU. The sun warmed the room, as did all the nurses and doctors and orderlies and reporters and donors crammed together there. There was a table of refreshments, with a bowl of punch, urns of coffee, and tiny plates for cheese and desserts and fruit.

  People milled about, talking through half-chewed bites of Gouda and strawberries dipped in chocolate. Cameras flashed. Abi always felt nervous and exposed in large gatherings, and she knew almost no one here. The best thing to do in situations like this, she believed, was to appear busy. So she was either filling her plate or moving along the edges of the crowd, smiling and nodding, always appearing like she was heading somewhere. She was relieved when one voice called out over the others and everyone went silent.

  It was Matthew O’Neel. He wore a cream-colored sport jacket and a gingham shirt, his skin so tan it looked caramel. His bleached white teeth flashed when he spoke. “We’re here to usher in a new era of healing here at the Queen of the Valley Medical Center.”

  He highlighted their expansion: not just twenty new beds, but twenty new rooms. Private care to reduce infection and make every child and family feel cared for uniquely. The ICU would be using the most advanced technology, including a new extracorporeal program for children who needed heart and lung support. He introduced three new pediatric specialists and pledged to hire twelve new nurses. Matthew spoke like a politician, emphasizing the final word of each sentence and pausing to provoke applause.

  “And this achievement,” he said, “would not have been possible without one man.” He smiled and held out an arm, motioning for someone to join him.

  It was difficult for Abi to see. Not only because of the wall of bodies, but also because the man who stepped forward was rather short and slight.

  She could barely hear Matthew over the cheers and whistles when he said, “Thank you to one of the most generous men I’ve ever met, Eric Stelling.”

  Abi craned her neck, then edged forward to see the businessman, winemaker, and philanthropist. He was a giant by reputation, so she was surprised to observe him now.

  He was pale by anyone’s standards, but even more so beside Matthew. He wore a purple silk shirt and shiny slacks over tasseled leather loafers. Rosy blotches bloomed on his skin when he began to speak, his voice so quiet and gentle that everyone leaned forward to hear.

  “I’m very pleased to be here today and to have helped make this possible. This is a donation close to my heart. You see, I was born prematurely. At five and a half months, my mother gave birth. I was so small I could have fit into a pocket. I wasn’t expected to live.” His voice had a flutelike quality, and his hand moved in such a way that he seemed to be conducting his own words. “But I did. Because of the attention I received from a place much like this. We must care for the next generation, especially in a location as special as Napa, where tomorrow’s engineers and doctors and politicians and artists will rise.”

  Everyone brought their hands together in applause, and he nodded appreciatively and readied to speak again. But someone else called out then and made Stelling wrinkle his forehead with concern.

  “It’s ironic, right?” A woman lurched into view. “They work so hard to eliminate one life while trying to save another. Some people just aren’t worth as much.”

  It took Abi a moment to place her out of context. Paul Bures’s wife. Neysa. Her pajamas had been replaced by a summer dress, and she wore makeup now, but it looked like she had put it on in the dark, her mouth a red gash.

  The crowd backed away from her. She pointed a finger at Stelling. Her words slurred and her eyes were wild with drunkenness. “I know better. I know what’s really going on here!”

  Matthew O’Neel overcame his initial shock and searched the crowd until his eyes settled on a broad-shouldered orderly. “You,” he said, waving him over. “Help me out?”

  Neysa took another step and stumbled, falling forward—into the arms of the orderly. He tried to speak to her comfortingly. “Let’s get you some water and a chair, ma’am.”

  But she struck feebly at him and her voice rose to a high cackle. “You go ahead and eat your fancy cheese and you pat yourselves on the back and you feel good about the future. You go ahead. The louder you applaud, the harder it is to hear the knives they’re sharpening.”

  “Please, ma’am,” the orderly said.

  “Leave me alone!” She clawed his face. He cri
ed out and released her, and she charged forward a few uncertain steps before her eyes settled on Abi.

  “You. You’re one of them.”

  Abi felt the attention in the room swing suddenly toward her. “I…I’m sorry, Mrs. Bures. What are you talking about?”

  All the energy seemed to drain out of Neysa then. Her face slackened and her volume lowered to a whisper. “Or maybe you’re just pretty and dumb. Either way, you do what they want. Be their little pet. Or you’ll be as dead as my husband.”

  The orderly was joined by a nurse, and the two men corralled Mrs. Bures and escorted her through the crowd and out of the atrium.

  As they did so, Stelling lowered his gaze and shook his head sadly.

  “I’m sorry, everyone,” Matthew O’Neel said. “We still mourn for Paul Bures and we’re all sad about the difficult time his wife is going through. Mrs. Bures is obviously not well and we’ll be sure to get her some help.”

  But Neysa wasn’t finished. She cried out, “Murderer!” just as she left the atrium. The word rang and tremored in the air like the aftermath of a church bell.

  Chapter 13

  When Abi told the doctor about her previous miscarriages, they decided on a more aggressive diagnostic screening than standard in the first trimester. In addition to the ultrasound, they would take blood and placenta samples. Her gynecologist, Jamet, spoke in a fast, friendly, chirpy voice that distracted Abi from the fact that her legs were stirruped apart.

  “Here I am,” Jamet said, popping up on the other side of the sheet to smile at her, “dealing with babies. And here you are, dealing with stiffs.” Her earrings were long feathers and her purple-framed glasses sat on her nose a little crookedly. “Everybody’s either coming or going, huh? Guess that’s life.”

  Abi laughed, despite her discomfort. It seemed like everyone she had met so far in Napa was status-driven and fake friendly. By comparison, Jamet seemed so earthy and sincere. When the appointment ended, Abi nervously considered asking her out to coffee. Was that weird? Was she that lonely? Were you even allowed to be friends with your gynecologist?