The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (53 page)

At the smaller airport the Miami boyfriend had chartered a plane for the Cayman Islands, and there was something suspicious in it. The customs agent hinted around about a bribe, but the boyfriend couldn’t read the tea leaves, offered a $10 bill where it would have taken a couple hundred, at minimum, to suffice. The customs agent dropped the $10 bill on the ground, declared his indignation, asked what the American had to hide. Nothing, the boyfriend said, you can search me, my bags, whatever you’d like, don’t target me with your bigotry. It was a big bluff, disastrous when the customs agent called it. When he found $10,000 among the luggage, he thought, This is it, the big one, my career is made. But when he called his supervisor, he was told to impound the money but let the boyfriend get on the plane and let the charter take off. Why? the customs agent said. Why do birds sing? the supervisor said. Why do senators keep me on speed-dial? Why do snakes eat babies?

In full view of everyone in the supermarket, the police came inside and talked to Samir Nasser. They went into the back room, and then Samir went into the room beside the customer-service counter and got Anna and brought her into the back room. They stayed there for a long time, the father and the daughter and the police. Then the police left, and the store closed early, only a half hour after the police left, and six hours before it was scheduled to close. The girl and her father did not leave the back room until after the store closed.

Leblanc’s father went on the radio. My son is innocent, he said. He does not have even the money to hire a lawyer. If he was not innocent he would have the money to hire the best lawyer in Haiti. You see who has the money. It is the boyfriend of the kidnapped girl. I ask you, why was he allowed to get on an airplane to Miami and safely leave the country? Why was he allowed to go free while my son rots in a terrible prison? Why do I have to bring my son food every day while this man’s son eats in the finest restaurants in Miami? How did the boyfriend of the kidnapped girl end up with the ransom money her parents paid?

Samir Nasser went on the radio. The facts are not all in, he said. We do not know all the facts. But this American was not a person known to our family. My daughter did not know this American. We will not know the truth until the facts are all in, but we have reason to believe that this American was part of a kidnapping ring with the Canadian Leblanc. We hope the American government will send this man back to Haiti so he may be questioned by the police.

I knew a woman whose niece was a cook for the Canadian missionaries. She said one night during this time, Leblanc’s father drove to the Nasser house. Leblanc’s father stood outside the gate and knocked for a long time. Then he started yelling. Two security guards with sawed-off shotguns pushed Leblanc’s father and told him to leave the property. But Leblanc’s father would not leave. He was shouting and crying, and he said, You can shoot me if you want. What do I care? You have already taken my son from me for no reason. You should know what it feels like for someone to take your child for no reason. The security guards began to push him, roughly, in the direction of the property next door, where his truck was parked, and when he had been pushed to the property line, he yelled for the girl: Aren’t you ashamed? I know what you have done. Everyone knows. Then he drove away.

It’s not what happens next that interests me. Leblanc spent thirteen months, without charges, in a jail cell before the Canadian foreign ministry made one phone call and sprang him, and he got on an airplane for Quebec, where he’s living still. The boyfriend finished medical school, did his residency in obstetrics, and makes a comfortable living delivering babies in Boca Raton. The Beirut lost no business to the grumbling, although the Nassers erected a twelve-foot wall around the parking lot, and topped it with broken glass and concertina razor wire. What interests me is Samir Nasser, a few evenings later, sitting with the information he hadn’t yet processed into knowledge, of his daughter and her certain betrayal, her deception, his shame. His daughter for whom he had wished to fashion wings so she might flap them north to Providence.

He wanted to annihilate himself with drink, and took the bottle of Glenlivet that sat full on his office desk, and went to his lover’s house, and drank it until she couldn’t bear watching him drinking it, and then he went into the bedroom alone, and she knocked on the door and said, Come out. Don’t be alone in there. Go home to your family.

He left her house but wouldn’t leave her porch until he finished the bottle, and then, although he felt it wasn’t safe, or perhaps because he thought it wasn’t safe, he walked the streets of the city, walked and walked, and sometime past midnight he was lost, even though he was less than five blocks from his home. He began to call people on his cell phone, people in New York and San Francisco and Pétion-Ville and Port-au-Prince, but no one would answer the phone. Finally he called the woman he wished he could have loved, and when she answered, she answered with great kindness. Tell me what you see where you are, she said, and he described the kindergarten across the street, the green and yellow cartoon characters, the
X
-shaped patterns in the balcony concrete, and she said two blocks in the direction of the moon, then the buzzer, the guard at the gate, the night watchman, the door, your bed.

By the time he arrived, he had decided. She was his daughter, and until the end of the world he would believe that she had not done it, that Leblanc had engineered even this terrible frame-up out of a great intelligence he had underestimated. Leblanc had undone everything, had brought to bear the greatest slander, but for two centuries the Nassers had overcome greater slanders, and one day Anna would own a whole country of supermarkets, would count the money, and, on her deathbed, divide it among her children. Until then, for as long as he lived, he would keep her close. I will trust you forever, he would say. I will put you in charge of the money-changing station. So he installed bulletproof glass in the back room of the Beirut, behind the iron bars, and he installed her there, behind the bulletproof glass. I have seen her there, through the glass, her and her father growing old in chairs behind the iron bars.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

FROM
High Crime Area

E
ARLY SHIFT IS
6:30
A.M.
, which was when I arrived at the elder care facility at Eau Claire where I have been an orderly for two years. Maybe thirty minutes after that, when the elderly nun’s body was discovered in her bed.

In fact I’d gotten to work a few minutes before my shift began as I usually do, in nasty weather especially (as it was that morning: pelting rain, dark-as-night, first week of November), out of a concern for being late. For jobs are not easy to come by, in our economy. And in Oybwa County, Wisconsin, where I have lived all my life except for three and a half years “deployed” in Iraq as a medical worker. I am a conscientious orderly, with a very good reputation at the facility.

If I am interviewed by the county medical examiner I will explain to him: it is a wrongly phrased description—
Body discovered in bed.
For when I entered Sister Mary Alphonsus’s room in Unit D, my assumption was that the sister was alive, and the “discovery” was that she was not alive, or in any case not obviously alive. I did not “discover” a “body” in the bed but was shocked to see Sister Mary Alphonsus unmoving, and unbreathing, with a gauzy fabric like muslin wrapped around her head (like a nun’s veil or wimple), so that her face was obscured.

She was unresponsive to me. Yet even at this, I did not “discover” a “body”—it was natural for me to believe that the elderly woman might have lapsed into a coma.

(Not that death is so unusual in an elder care facility like ours—hardly! All of our patients die, eventually; Unit E is our hospice wing. But the death of the resident in Room 22 of Unit D was not expected so soon.)

In my Iraqi deployment my instinct for things
not-right
became very sharp. Out of ordinary situations there might arise—suddenly—as in a nightmare—an explosion that could tear off your legs. You had to be alert—and yet, how is it possible to be always alert?—it is not possible. And so, you develop a kind of sixth sense.

And so as soon as I entered the room after knocking—twice—at the door, I saw that things were
not-right
, and the hairs at the nape of my neck stirred. There was no light in the room and Sister Mary Alphonsus was still in bed—this was
not-right.
For Sister Mary Alphonsus was always “up” before the early shift arrived, as if pride demanded it. The nun was one of those older persons in our care who
does not accept that she is elderly
, and will turn nasty with you if you behave as if she is.

Sister?—in a lowered and respectful voice I spoke. Always I addressed Sister Mary Alphonsus with courtesy, for the old woman was easily offended by a wrong intonation of voice. Like a bloodhound keen for scent, this one was sharp to detect mockery where there was none.

Not a good sign, Sister Mary Alphonsus wasn’t yet awake. Very strange, the light above her bed hadn’t been switched on.

And a strong smell of urine in the room. Unexpected, in Sister Mary Alphonsus’s room, whose occupant wasn’t incontinent, and who was usually fussy about cleanliness.

When I switched on the overhead light the fluorescent bulb flickered like an eye blinking open.

The shock of it, then: seeing the elderly nun in her bed only a few feet away, on her back, not-moving; and wrapped around her head some sort of gauzy white fabric like a curtain, so her face was hidden. And inside the gauze the sister’s eyes shut, or open—you could not tell.

Died in her sleep. Cardiac arrest.

By the time of our senior consulting physician’s arrival at the facility, at about 9
A.M.
, it was clear that elderly Sister Mary Alphonsus was not likely in a coma but had died. The strip of gauzy material had been unwound from the woman’s head by the first nurse who’d arrived at the bedside, and dropped heedlessly onto the floor.

I am not a “medic”: I am an “orderly.” In all medical matters orderlies defer to the medical staff. I had not tried to revive Sister Mary Alphonsus nor even to unwind the cloth from her head, which did not appear to be tightly tied. So far as I knew, the patient might have been alive following a stroke or heart attack.

A legal pronouncement of death can only be made by a physician.

In a senior care facility like ours, Death strikes suddenly, often overnight. Often, within an hour. Cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolism, stroke—like strikes of lightning. If an elderly resident becomes seriously ill, with pneumonia for instance, or is stricken with cancer, he or she is transported to Eau Claire General for specialized treatment; but most of our residents have long-standing medical conditions, of which the most insidious is
old age.

In the matter of Death, when a living body becomes “dead,” there are legal procedures that must be followed. Our senior consultant was required to sign the death certificate and the county medical examiner’s office had to be informed. If the deceased had listed next of kin in her file, this individual or individuals would now be notified and arrangements would be made for removal of the body from the facility and for burial.

About this I knew nothing, and would know very little—though I would learn, inadvertently, that the elderly nun had died
intestate.

(
Intestate:
a fancy word for dying without a will! A kind of nasty ring to this word
intestate
, makes you think of
testicles
, worse yet in this facility of old men
testicular cancer.
Not a welcome thought.)

Next time I came into contact with Sister Mary Alphonsus was after Dr. Bromwalder’s examination, when the body was covered with a white sheet. With another orderly, I lifted it onto a gurney to push quickly and as unobtrusively as possible to the facility’s morgue in the basement—
Man, she heavy for an old lady!

I couldn’t resist peeking under the sheet: Sister Mary Alphonsus’s face was mottled red, a coarse-skinned face you could not have identified as female. The thin-lashed eyes were shut and the mouth that had resembled a pike’s wide mouth in life hung loosely open.

She anybody you knew, Francis?

No.

There’d never been any doubt in Dr. Bromwalder’s mind that the eighty-four-year-old woman had died of cardiac arrest, in her sleep. She’d been a cardiac patient: she’d had a chronic condition. It had not seemed to be life-threatening, but all signs suggested heart failure and not a stroke; under these circumstances, an autopsy was not warranted.

The gauze wrapped around the nun’s head was certainly too flimsy to have caused suffocation. It had seemed to the senior consulting physician but mildly mysterious—“eccentric”—but many “eccentric” things happen in elder care facilities, among patients who may be mentally as well as physically ill, and so not much was made of the gauzy fabric except by some of the nursing staff of Unit D, who were puzzled, curious—
Why would the woman do such a thing? What does it mean?

The fabric was believed to have been taken out of the sister’s belongings, some of which were kept in a small bureau in the room. It did appear to be a curtain, or part of a curtain—white, dotted swiss, somewhat soiled, a cheap material.

Maybe she was confused, in her sleep. Wrapped a curtain around her head thinking it was a nun’s wimple!

Maybe she knew she was dying. It was some kind of religious thing, like after a Catholic confesses her sins to a priest—penance?

Among the staff of Unit D, Sister Mary Alphonsus had not been a favorite. To her face the nurses called her
Sister
, behind her back
the old nun.

Or,
the old nun who’d run that terrible orphanage at Craigmillnar.