The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (49 page)

She itemized the current status of her office: a laptop she had to run mostly on batteries or have charged up by the hospital's Land Rover's engine, so she didn't use it very much; her green manual Olivetti typewriter, on which she wrote up schedules, requests, and monthly statistics that were then given to the ladies in the typing room who did the official, clean copies on their heavy manuals. There was also the copier some nonprofit had given to the hospital before she came, and again she used it only occasionally, since it didn't run on batteries and instead relied on the town's erratic electricity. There were also her many medical books and personal medical kit, and the two wooden file cabinets made by the hospital carpenters that contained files by past administrators (others were kept in the small file room near the men's ward, an office piled up to the ceiling with paper folders). Then on her desk rested a framed photo of her father and mother when they were young, for while she was divorced with no children, Dr. Gaynor had so far refused to display photos of her brothers' children, her nieces and nephew, as if she had maternal instincts. Ticking off all these items, she couldn't think what Robinson could steal without the theft being very noticeable, and, in terms of generating income, quite useless.

With these thoughts, Dr. Gaynor walked past the former general store once owned by Mr. Gupta, an enterprising Indian who had now shifted into the up-and-coming video business, as the more prosperous local businessmen and government employees bought home generators to run their TVs. The wooden building of his emptied store had been bought by another new evangelical church, the New Church of the Prophet Hosea, which seemed to be holding a noontime service.

She had paused briefly to listen to the loud, enthusiastic singing coming from inside when out from the storefront came the very recent arrival Hastings Chiume, the only and spoiled son of the widow Mrs. Makela Chiume, also mother of six daughters, four married, two not. Before bumping into the doctor as he escaped his mother's eye and left the service, Hastings had been sitting on one of the wooden pews of his mother's breakaway church with the other delinquent sons and husbands, while across the aisle, in their section, sat his mother, sisters, and fellow women, singing lustily, “O living Lord from heaven, how well you feed your guests!”

It was after the song's end, while everyone was praying with eyes closed under the pastor's exhortations to “God bless everyone, no exceptions,” that Hastings exited swiftly, passing Mr. Mwale, who was standing in the rear, head bowed, as he waited to pass the collection basket, in which sat already the two
kwachas
belonging to the pastor to encourage parishioners to do the same. However bowed his head, Mr. Mwale saw Mrs. Chiume's son's defection and would be one of the older men who later nodded sympathetically when Dr. Gaynor's murder was announced on the radio and in the government newspapers, although Mr. Mwale had no reason to link it to Hastings's hasty departure on this day.

Hastings, paying no attention to Mr. Mwale except to note the money in the collection basket, slipped through the front door of the church and out into the sunshine, and this is where he collided with the white female head of the
chipatala.
This forced Dr. Gaynor, on contact, to step back, annoyed. She made a curt motion to indicate he could go ahead of her on the narrow, chipped-cement sidewalk. But in the ingratiating way many of the town's young men had, he bobbed his head up and down, saying,
“Pepani! Pepani!”
—how sorry he was. When he just stood there, nodding away, smiling, as if to indicate she should go first, she did so with a shrug, leaving the young man in his rope-tied khaki pants and secondhand white shirt just standing at the church's door, watching very alertly her continued passage down the sidewalk that paralleled the small, one-room stores.

Dr. Gaynor, unaware of the young man's intense scrutiny, gave no more thought to him, not even noticing he was now following her some paces behind. Hastings, a man of quick decisions, had spotted the slight bulge in the right pocket of the doctor's skirt, one of many locally famous black skirts the doctor wore every day to the hospital and over which she put her white doctor's jacket, kept starched and clean by her houseworker. So, back in stride, some dust getting into her lungs from a passing rumbling truck full of cornhusks, Dr. Gaynor had not the slightest idea that the
“Pepani”
young man was behind her until he suddenly brushed by her to the right, crying out again,
“Pepani!”
He then took the lead, increasing the lengths between them until he jumped down from the cracked sidewalk onto the tree-shaded parking area and disappeared from sight.

Dr. Gaynor showed brief annoyance again and then thought no more about the incident as she arrived at Mr. Pherri's, offering her
muli ulis,
for she had laboriously taken lessons on the local Chitumbuka greetings and other phrases. Mr. Pherri greeted her in kind and then fetched her blouse. It was after he had wrapped it up in newspaper and handed it to her that Dr. Gaynor put her hand in her right skirt pocket to take out her small, brightly embroidered coin purse, in which she kept her local
kwacha
money. It was a Guatemalan-made purse she had bought in a museum gift shop in Philadelphia when attending the University of Pennsylvania's medical school. She was much attached to it, it acting somewhat as a lucky charm and also as a remembrance of herself in a past when she and her about-to-be husband Richard, then also at medical school, walked the city sightseeing, eating cheaply, envisioning themselves in the future: joining a family practice in the suburbs, having kids, making lots of money, taking trips to Paris and other glamorous places.

However, as Robinson would say—and as he did often say about the reversals of fortune so many suffered, including himself—God had different plans for Dr. Gaynor. And so here she was, eight years later, on this Tuesday bus-departure day, halfway across the world from Philadelphia, Richard married to someone else, and she, Dr. Gaynor, looking for the change purse of her past. She patted herself crossly, peered intently at the ground as if the purse might have dislodged itself somehow, but finding nothing beyond the usual sidewalk debris—eggshells from eaten hard-boiled eggs (the vendors sold these from trays balanced on their heads), dog shit, cigarette butts, soda pop tops, used condoms—she apologized to Mr. Pherri. She must have left her purse at the office and would send someone later to pay him. She left, package in hand, feeling very aggrieved by the loss of her purse, and determining its missing either as a consequence of having lost it or having it stolen. If it were lost, it might be found again, and she briefly considered offering a reward. But that might encourage someone to hold on to it longer, until the reward was increased. Also she had enough to do without having to supervise Robinson in writing up signs and posting them on trees.

No, given the most likely scenario, that it had been stolen, the consequence was simply that she would never see it nor the money again. These things happen in both poor and rich countries, so why get upset? But she was upset, for she felt taken advantage of, especially since the locals knew she had come from so far to
help
them.

Back at the hospital, Dr. Gaynor continued to search, in case she was at fault. She opened her desk drawer, rummaged inside, and shook her wastebasket, even putting a hand into it and moving around the balled-up papers. (There was little else in it; Robinson or the others always found a use for anything she wished to discard.) But again no success. She hadn't lost much, at most the amount of five American dollars, but still, the immediate consequence of her loss meant she would now have to lock her office at all times, even when she went to use the hospital's one decent bathroom in the new donor-funded pharmacy. She asked Robinson, who had been looking too, to check under her desk, behind the wooden cabinets, under the neat, unopened package of copy-and-print paper for the brand-new printer another nonprofit had donated, still as shining and mute on its small metal table as the unused copier. However, Robinson came up only with a dropped Biro pen and some scattered papers as he swept away with his little broom the usual dead bodies—cockroaches, ants, and various flying insects—on the floor. Dr. Gaynor was always very liberal with the insect spray. She bought it in lakeside Karonga, where she went once a month to get supplies and to meet with her counterparts at the much larger and better-equipped hospital there.

After watching his hopeless search, Dr. Gaynor asked Robinson if he'd seen anyone in her office, anything suspicious, while she was out, and then, remembering the collision with the man outside the storefront church, she asked if he knew some young man with a dark blue baseball cap on backward that had
TIGERS
printed on it, probably gotten at the used-clothes stall in the market (“dead men's clothes,” everyone called them). The young man had been lean and almost as tall as her, in worn khaki pants, no belt, a limp white golf shirt with short sleeves. She tried to think of something else distinguishing but couldn't, just the baseball cap, which most of the local male youth wore anyway.

Robinson indeed knew Hastings; he had seen him in just such a baseball cap very early that morning, when he and his mother came to visit one of Hastings's uncles in the men's ward. The uncle was dying of AIDS, or
edzi,
as the locals called it, although the nurses told relatives he had pneumonia (something Dr. Gaynor, once she learned of it, did not approve of, but found it was a custom hard to break). After Hastings and his mother's visit, the staff began to complain how things had gone missing. Hastings was a well-known thief, said Robinson, which was why he had to leave Chitipa in the first place.

Dr. Gaynor pursed her lips and told Robinson to go fetch one of the policemen stationed in the tin-roofed, cement-block building up the street from the hospital. Robinson left to do her bidding, but came back almost immediately to say Mr. Myanka, one of the medical officers, had stopped him in the corridor to have him tell Dr. Gaynor that there was a father from Zambia outside in the courtyard and with him, on his back, was his possibly rabid son. The father was asking for admittance. Dr. Gaynor, who was now searching for her missing purse in the hallway, said brusquely that she didn't have time to examine the boy now, for it was imperative to have the police stop Hastings before he left on the afternoon bus, but to have the father and son put in the children's ward until she was free.

Now it is true that Dr. Gaynor, if she had not been distracted by her missing purse, would never have admitted a rabid boy to the children's ward because of the possible spread of the virus. The boy should have been taken to the German-built TB building behind the hospital, a brick structure that had started out for the few remaining full-blown TB patients but now, vaccination programs having been very successful, was used for people with short-term contagious diseases that needed isolation.

Yes, put him in the children's ward,
Dr. Gaynor said, and after locking her office, she first went to the men's ward to question the two ward nurses there as to when and how long a Mrs. Chiume and her son had visited. What had the son looked like? Had the nurses noticed anything was missing after the mother and son had left? Then, not finding satisfactory answers and, on her return to her office, not finding Robinson back, she went out the hospital's front gates and walked to the police station herself, but there was no one there. Thinking perhaps Robinson had been successful in his mission, she returned and headed for the children's ward.

There screens had already been put around the sides of the boy's bed, shielding it from the others—a bad sign, meaning imminent death. Dr. Gaynor stood at the end of the empty, blanketed cot and saw the father on the floor, leaning against the bed and holding his young son in his lap. Rabies was so highly prevalent in all the rural areas, she needed only one look to know the boy was in the last stages. She knew she had made a mistake; the father and son should have been in the old TB building, where there were individual small rooms. But it was too late now. The screens would give some protection, and luckily the children's ward had only three other patients. They could be moved to the women's ward while the children's was thoroughly disinfected.

The father, Mr. Chimpimere, when told the head of the hospital was present, bowed his head respectfully, then, speaking good English, told the story of his son. How he, the father, worked in the Copperbelt west of Lusaka, leaving his wife and four children back in their village near the border, and when the dog bit the boy, the mother said she had washed off the arm wound, bound it with a rag, and after a while it stopped bleeding. The boy, once over his initial fright and crying, went back to playing with his siblings and friends. After that, the mother decided to wait for the husband to come home, which he did every six weeks.

They had been in the fields when the dog attacked the boy, the wife weeding along with the older children. No one knew to whom the dog belonged, but some of the older male villagers working in nearby fields came when the mother cried out and they ran after the emaciated dog, finally beating it to death with their hoes and machetes. It had been a female, starving besides being rabid, her teats long and thin from nursing, his wife had told Mr. Chimpimere when he returned two weekends later, the boy by then running a fever and talking silly. The mother had given the boy some paracetamol tablets she bought at the open-air market, but her son's arm kept festering, and she tried washing the wound again, then binding it up in a poultice the medicine healer at the market said would help.

The father said he knew there were shots they gave nowadays for the dog sickness, but the hospital in his district had closed a year ago, as had the missionary one, so he had strapped the boy to his back and begun walking. It was twelve kilometers to the border and another twenty kilometers into Malawi to where Dr. Gaynor's hospital was. Many of the Zambians near the border came to the Chitipa district hospital, and so far none had been refused help, even though they weren't Malawian citizens.