You would expect noise. Shouting. People running. Police sirens. But there was nothing. Not so much as a single fretful decibel. After that initial alarming shriek, only silence.
I checked my watch. Five-thirty am. I was on the second lap of my daily jog around the complex, taking advantage of dawn’s cooler temperatures, when I heard the scream. I cut away from the path and ran through a grove of mango trees towards the main gardening shed where I found Keren on her knees, rocking herself back and forth, and mumbling, or moaning, I wasn’t sure which. In front of her, a woman lay slumped against the base of a banyan tree.
She was obviously dead and it looked like she’d lain there all night. Her flesh was ashen, waxy, her mouth open, as if she’d been about to say something but was interrupted. Her lips were fixed in a gruesome rictus, her eyes wide open in a blank, dreadful stare. My own eyes filled instantly with tears. It was the shock.
‘Who is she?’ I meant to whisper but the words came out louder than I intended. My voice sounded harsh and strained. I reached into my pocket for a cigarette to calm my nerves only to remember I no longer smoked. I’d made the decision on my second day at the Serenity Centre to take advantage of its motivating mantra and quit.
Light was just beginning to finger its way across the sky. The rain had ended but water still dripped from the trees. The ground was saturated. Keren stopped her rocking. ‘It’s Arlene. Craig’s wife.’ Keren’s voice was low and muffled, as if she were speaking through a blanket. ‘She only just got here a couple of days ago. What can have happened?’
She reached out a hand to close Arlene’s eyes, but I stopped her. ‘Best not to touch anything, don’t you think?’
Keren murmured assent. ‘Of course.’ She stood up and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I’ll go and get Marcus,’ she said, but made no move to go, instead gazing mournfully at Arlene’s body, biting her lower lip as if uncertain what to do or say next. ‘Yes. Marcus,’ she reiterated at last. ‘He should be the one to tell Craig. And Cameron, their son.’ She gave me a helpless look. ‘I was on my way to the yoga hall, you know . . . to set it up . . .’
She held out a small brown bottle, the sort that carries pills. It was empty. ‘I found it,’ she said, ‘just over there . . . by Arlene. I’m fairly sure they were hers.’
‘If they were prescription pills, the label will have her name on it.’
Keren turned the bottle around and we examined the label. Norp-something. We couldn’t decipher any more than that; whatever else it might have told us had been washed off in the rain.
‘Might be Norpramin,’ said Keren. ‘It’s an antidepressant.’ She put the bottle in her pocket and left. I watched her go. I wanted to follow, return immediately to my room, shut the door, pretend I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. And, this time, leave it to others. But my inquisitive mind got the better of me and I stayed put to contemplate Arlene. How forlorn she seemed. How lonesome. There was no reason for me to have known Craig had a family. Other than the fact he was Marcus’s right-hand man, I knew nothing about him, but I’d got the impression he was single.
The ground was soft and gummy and my foot sank a little into the mud when I stepped closer to the body. Arlene’s blonde hair and her green stripey dress were wet and streaked with mud. The laces on her blue sneakers were unfastened as if she’d left somewhere in a hurry. Her right foot was half out of its shoe. There was a leather sandal nearby, but it was broken and looked as if it had been there for weeks. I was tempted to poke around in the mud but resisted the urge, less out of deference to police procedure and more because I didn’t want to inadvertently touch something that might bite or sting.
In the distance through the trees, I noticed a few people milling around the entrance to the yoga hall. There were never more than four or five at the six am yoga session. None of them looked in my direction and, as far as I could tell, no one had yet noticed anything amiss. Most of the Centre’s residents didn’t emerge from their rooms until breakfast at seven-thirty.
By the time Keren returned, just after six, the sun was high and the day already warm. ‘Told the yoga group to go ahead without me,’ she said. ‘Marcus is on his way. He’s asked us not to speak . . . you know, not to break Noble Silence.’
I glanced towards the administration building where Marcus spent his days. I’d met him, briefly, on my arrival at the Serenity Centre, and while I admired his altruism, I got the feeling he was a man who held himself apart. He’d seemed reserved, unapproachable even, a demeanour at odds with his objective in creating the Centre: to provide a refuge where people could get help to dry out or kick bad habits – mostly of the hard drug-taking kind – or find a way of living that’s less troubled than the life they’ve lived so far. A sanctuary in which to share and holler out their pain, to rant and rave, if that’s what their healing required.
Maybe Marcus needed sanctuary himself. By now I was shivery and trembling, and I hurried back to my room, leaving Keren with the corpse. I stumbled through the door and dashed into the bathroom where I vomited. After that I lay down on the bed. It was a hard, narrow cot, but right then I wasn’t bothered by its austerity. My mind was reeling, as if I were in the throes of vertigo. Arlene’s grey inert face swam before me, then morphed into Rachel Quentin’s lurid image, the eyes gouged and the mouth tacked shut.