Murder in Paradise Read online

  In the Midwest, people showed up with food. If you had a baby, if you got sick, if someone you knew died. Hot dishes of beef and Velveeta, or egg noodles with gravy poured over the top. And pies. Especially pies.

  Food made people feel better. Food opened doors.

  “It’s blackberry,” she said. “I’m tempted to eat it myself, but I’d rather share.”

  At that, the knob turned, the door cracked, and a woman’s broad, pale face peered out at her. “You are not with police?” she said with what Abi assumed was a Russian accent.

  “No, I’m a friend,” Abi said. “Can we talk?”

  The door opened a little wider and the lights clicked on and the woman motioned for her to enter.

  The woman, who introduced herself as Vera, wasn’t alone. Ten others, maybe more, were crushed into the trailer. Some on the couch. Others on the floor. Others peered at her from down the hallway.

  “I should have bought another pie,” Abi said.

  It wasn’t until ten minutes later, after serving out bleeding slivers of the pie onto paper plates, that Vera began to open up to Abi’s questions.

  Yes, Alexei was her husband. No, she hadn’t gone to identify the body, because she was worried about being deported. They had lived here for three years now. No, they didn’t have any enemies. They weren’t involved in any protests. They had committed no crimes. They worked, sometimes eighty hours a week. She worked as a housekeeper, and he’d worked as a janitor and landscaper.

  “He was on way back from work when crash happened,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “On highway.”

  “But where did he work?”

  “Stelling is name the boss,” Vera said. “At Shellsong Estates.”

  Chapter 20

  It was after midnight when Abi got home. The kitchen light was on, and she tossed her keys on the counter and poured a glass of water and gulped it down. Jeremy only snored when he drank too much, and the buzz of his breathing carried down the hall. She remembered the slurred rush of his voice earlier. And his lips, purpled by wine. He had wanted to tell her something…

  She wanted to tell him something now. She entered the bedroom and found him half undressed, still wearing his pants and one shoe. The sheets had been shoved aside messily, except for one section that curiously shawled his head.

  She freed his face from the sheet and he puffed his lips before letting out a fresh snore. She pulled off his shoe and let it thunk to the floor. She thought about nudging him awake. But he looked too peaceful. She wanted to allow him that peace; she knew that, come tomorrow, their lives might never be the same.

  She wished she could take a sleeping pill or have a glass of wine. But her hand brushed her belly, remembering the baby. So she snapped off the lights, climbed into bed, stared at the ceiling, and listened to her heart pound in her ears, thinking, I will never sleep, until at last she did.

  She woke to the smell of coffee and the scrape of a whiskery kiss at her cheek. For a moment, still lost in the fog of sleep, she felt happy. But only for a moment. She sprung up in bed so quickly that Jeremy splashed the mug on the sheets.

  “Whoa,” Jeremy said. “It’s okay. It’s me.”

  She looked around, at the sun-washed bedroom, which seemed so far from any threat.

  “Bad dream?” he said.

  “I wish.”

  “Sorry to startle you.” He offered her the mug. “It’s a few ounces lighter, but here.”

  She wrapped both hands around the mug, comforted by its warmth. She knew she should probably not drink caffeine, but she needed it. Needed every nerve alert and aware.

  “Sorry I didn’t wait up for you,” he said. “I was kind of bombed.”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Are you finally going to let me tell you why I was in such a good mood?”

  “I…,” she said. “I need to tell you something.”

  He was smiling, but now the smile failed at its edges. “Come on, Abi. You’re not going to talk over the top of me like you did last night, are you?”

  “This is important.”

  The smile was gone now altogether. “And what I have to say apparently isn’t?”

  “It’s just…” She took a long gulp of the coffee, but it only made her chest feel full of acid, so she set it aside on the night table. “You’re right. Go ahead.”

  He described the private dinner with Eric Stelling. Course after course after course—served to them alone. And then, the money. The ten thousand dollars he had gifted Jeremy in thanks for his service to the community.

  Abi could feel herself stiffening further with every word, until she felt so rigid she might break. Jeremy sensed her reaction and slumped. “You’re not happy, obviously. How can you not be happy?”

  “I don’t trust that man. I have reason to believe—”

  Jeremy stood and swiped at the air, as though to knock away what she said. “Unbelievable,” he said over his shoulder as he left the room. “Everything’s about you, isn’t it? You’re the reason we moved here. Your job is the only one that matters. Your opinions are the only ones that matter. Your victories are the only ones that matter.”

  “That’s not—” she said, but he had already turned on the shower and the hiss of water drowned her out. “True.”

  She should tell him. She should just lay it all out there, as crazy as it sounded. She had been ready to last night, but now his mood had stymied her. And the sun—the constant, yellow-gold glow of Napa—made the darkness of last night feel so distant and impossible.

  A knock at the door rushed her out of bed. Abi pulled on a robe, hurried down the hall, and peered around the corner. She saw a shadowed profile in the frosted glass of the front door. Someone was out there.

  She started forward, then paused. “Just a second,” she said, and dashed into the kitchen and pulled a knife from the drawer. “Stupid,” she muttered to herself. Probably she was being paranoid, but it felt reassuring to have some sort of defense. She slipped the blade into the robe’s pocket, where she gripped it tightly.

  On the front stoop waited the last person she expected to see. Jamet, her gyno. She wore her bird feather earrings and red-framed glasses and an earth-colored top woven with vines. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you? I hoped it wasn’t too early.”

  “No. It’s all right. I needed to be up anyway.”

  “I looked you up in the directory and saw you lived close, so I thought I’d just swing by.”

  “Oh. Well. Hi.”

  “Can we talk for a sec?”

  It was only then that Abi realized she was barricading the doorway, holding it open only a crack. She released the knife, waved Jamet in, and said, “Excuse the mess. We’re still moving in.”

  “From the looks of it, your version of mess is my version of clean.”

  “Can I get you coffee?”

  “I don’t have too long actually.”

  The way Jamet said it—and the way she pinched her mouth—made Abi realize she had bad news. She felt a sudden disappointment and wished some other terror had waited behind the door. As they moved into the living room, Abi said, “I assume this is the sort of news I should take sitting down?”

  The expression on Jamet’s face was warm, but worried. “Your baby is going to be okay. So are you.”

  They sat on the same couch and Jamet reached out to hold her hand.

  There was a beat here, during which Abi almost allowed herself to breathe, and then Jamet continued. “But the diagnostics show that the child has Down syndrome.”

  The next five minutes passed in a daze. Abi nodded. She spoke—asking questions—but felt separate from her own voice. Jamet pulled out a white bottle of pills and handed it to her. “You’re a doctor, so you might think I’m a bit crunchy. But I push a lot of natural supplements on my moms.” She turned the bottle one way, then the other, making it rattle. “I think folic and gingko can help fight some of the developmental issues in your ch
ild. So start taking two pills twice a day ASAP.”

  Abi said thank you unthinkingly. She accepted a hug from Jamet when she showed her to the door. “Here’s my card,” Jamet said, digging it out of her purse. “That’s my cell. Call me anytime. Seriously.”

  Abi thanked her and closed the door and leaned against it with all of her weight on the knob.

  She had tried so hard to become a mother, and now she was finally pregnant, but… She had worked so hard to get a good job, and now she had one, but…

  The situations felt entwined. Equally punishing. It would be so much easier not to acknowledge either of them.

  She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, gripping the doorknob as if deciding to stay or go. But eventually Jeremy appeared, buttoning his shirt, snatching a banana off the counter. “Did I hear someone?” he said as he headed to the garage.

  “Yes,” Abi said. “Just a friend. Stopping by to say hello.” She wondered whether he was still mad, but her mind was too busy to care. She thought about saying more to him, try to explain. But no. A gnawing sense of doubt had taken over her.

  Her body had failed her. Maybe her mind had too. She had proof…of what exactly? That several people (some of them in influential positions) had died of conotoxin poisoning. She suspected this came from wine and suspected a connection with the Stelling Estate, but this is where things got hazy. She had no source material. She was waiting on toxicology on the jeans. And she had no bottle.

  “I’m out,” he said. “Big day. We’re doing a vaccination push at the clinic.” He paused on his way to the garage. “Shouldn’t you be getting to work?”

  A bottle. She needed a bottle. She remembered then the cluster of wine on the bedside table in Neysa’s bedroom. Did one of them carry the Stelling label? She would know for sure soon.

  “Yes,” she said as she hurried to the bedroom to get dressed. “I’m going to work now.”

  Chapter 21

  Abi drove by the Bures’s home twice before parking around the block and walking to it. She didn’t know what to expect, perhaps to find it burned down or garlanded in crime scene tape and sprinkled with fingerprint dust. But the house was just as she had left it.

  The door remained unlocked, and she moved through the cool, dark space quietly. She felt like she had to go through every room before she could get started, just to ascertain she was alone. Clouds of fruit flies remained, swarming out of the drains and the garbage and the wine bottles. The smell of the place was better, but a vinegary tang remained in the air.

  Every wall of every room was adorned with photos. Paul and Neysa, in happier times, tracked Abi as she moved through the house. When she peeked through doorways, she couldn’t help but feel that at any moment she might find Neysa seated on the couch or lying in the bathtub, green-skinned, saying, “They killed me. And they’ll kill you too!”

  Her body was gone, but the shape of it remained wrinkled and stained on the bedsheets. Abi stood over this impression for a time, uttering something between a prayer and a promise. Even if it was too little, too late, she would do what she could to help.

  Two wine bottles stood on the night table. Neither of their labels read Stelling—she felt some sense of deflation—but Abi collected them anyway for testing. Had there been three before? Or even five? She couldn’t remember. There were many red rings on the wood, dried scabs of wine, but that meant nothing.

  Then something occurred to her. She checked the garage and found the garbage can and recycling bins alongside the sedan parked there. Abi was someone who always followed the rules: after working a scene, she bagged up all of her gear in a biohazard bag for disposal at the hospital.

  But other people were sloppy. She was a doctor, and the coroners were administrators with a sliver of the training. And coroners working for companies like Millennium were valued more than anything for their speed and efficiency.

  With one hand she crossed her fingers, and with the other she lifted the lid on the garbage can. Inside it she found the biohazard bag that contained a face mask, nose plugs, booties, and shed latex gloves. Nested beside it was a bottle of red wine that sloshed when she picked it up and read the label.

  Kendall-Jackson. Merlot.

  “No,” she said aloud. That wasn’t the puzzle piece she was searching for.

  But then, with a flutter of her heart, Abi noticed the paper was loose. She scraped it back to reveal another label beneath…this one for Shellsong Estates, Black Wine.

  Abi booted up the computer she found in Paul’s office, and while it hummed and blipped, she went through his desk drawers and his filing cabinet. She found nothing there but old tax files, instruction manuals, contracts, mortgage information, and a few issues of Playboy dating back to the eighties.

  The desktop was not password protected. She clicked through Word and Excel documents, hunting for something, anything. Here were old Christmas letters and even a half-finished novel. When she searched “Black Wine,” the engine showed zero results. She called up Paul’s email and found nothing relevant—except the curious fact that the final two months of his life seemed to be missing. There were eight weeks of no correspondence, as if his life during that time had simply been clipped away.

  When Abi had moved into his office at the hospital, it was a mess, as if every drawer had been emptied and then smashed roughly back into place. If they—whoever they were—had indeed overturned his workplace, then they wouldn’t have left his home unmolested. They would have come here. And they would have deleted or shredded anything seen as a threat.

  She spun the desk chair, ready to stand from it, and her foot nudged the wicker trash can. She saw on top a receipt from Best Buy, listing a Wi-Fi–enabled 32 GB USB card. She tossed it aside, and beneath it was a torn piece of cardboard, the packaging for the device. She read the description, then read it again and said, “Oh, shit yes.”

  This could be—must be—the memory card pulled from Paul’s camera. If it was Wi-Fi enabled, and if he had properly set up the software, it would have uploaded his photos as he took them. Her phone did that automatically, backing up all photos into the Google cloud.

  She shook the mouse and the computer came alive again. She opened his email and this time selected the icon for Google photos. The computer chugged, slowing down momentarily, and she said, “Please, please, please.”

  And then the page finally materialized, and the photos began to blip to life, one after the other, the screen crowding, streaming with hundreds and then thousands of images.

  She had only looked at a few before she put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh my God.”

  Chapter 22

  Jeremy’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing. He had left it in his jacket pocket, which was hanging in the staff lounge, and had forgotten to silence it, so the ringtone carried down the hallway and through the door of the exam room. Over and over. Sometimes a minute of silence would make him think it was done—and then it started back up again.

  Probably it was a telemarketer, some number he needed to block, offering him a credit report or auto insurance. But maybe it was his parents, who were getting older and had their share of health problems. It occurred to him, for a moment, that it might be Abi, calling to apologize; but no, she hated talking on the phone and preferred to text or speak face-to-face.

  Regardless, he didn’t have time to talk. The waiting room was crammed with people, every chair taken, with a crowd spilling outside onto the steps and sidewalk. They had advertised Vaccine Awareness Day throughout the community with posters and flyers and newspaper ads listing the health and societal benefits: “Don’t Miss Your Shot.”

  Jeremy’s head throbbed with a hangover. He hadn’t found the time for a coffee break, and his thoughts were fuzzy. He tried to move as speedily as he could, introducing himself to the families, mostly mothers and their children, asking them to read and sign a waiver. They rolled up their sleeves and he stabbed them with a needle, or two, or three, or four; then slapped a Band-Aid on them
, gave them some “magic” M&M’s, and sent them on their way. He had done it so many times that their faces were starting to blur and his thumb was developing a tender spot from the plunger on the syringe.

  And now the phone. The damn phone. It wouldn’t stop, but he couldn’t answer it.

  Despite the incessant ringing, despite the headache, despite his annoyance with Abi, he felt good. The dinner last night had given him a strong sense of purpose, of professional worth, personal pride.

  Abi was the reason they moved here, but since their very first night in Napa, she had been stressed and dark-mooded. It was as though all her hope and excitement about their new life had died with that woman in the restaurant.

  She wanted to hang up a painting of a barn and cow in their bedroom. She wanted to check on the scores from the teams back home. Rarely an hour seemed to go by when she didn’t mention something about Wisconsin.

  One of the things Abi loved about her home state was how everyone took so much pride in it. They cheered for the Packers and Brewers and Badgers, yes, but also for polka and cheese and brats and beer and corn and ice fishing and cranberries. Everyone who lived in Wisconsin loved the hell out of the state, and that gave the people there a sense of connection and identity.

  But Jeremy had a different mind-set. Wisconsin was what people settled for, while Napa was what people dreamed about. The luxury cars, the mansions perched on hillsides, the tasting rooms and rowed vineyards and Michelin-starred restaurants. Everything they had left behind seemed so small and drab and trashy by comparison. He took pride in living in a place most could only hope to vacation. People sometimes used the word elite as an insult, but he was happy to be among the elite. He was worthy of jealousy.

  Now that they were here, Abi didn’t seem to appreciate it, and it was cheapening his experience.