The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Saral Waldorf God’s Plan for Dr. Gaynor and Hastings Chiume

From Southern Review

Dr. Gaynor was on the move again, walking briskly into town on her lunch break, just what she did most days in the dry season. She wished to pick up the blouse being made for her by Mr. Pherri, who held two jobs, one as tailor running his old foot-pedal Singer sewing machine on the raised wooden porch of Mrs. Tsembe’s general store, the other as scrivener, or mlemba, who, moving to a rickety table at the other end of the porch, wrote letters or filled out documents for those illiterate.

As Dr. Gaynor moved along, wondering if Mr. Pherri had finished her blouse as he so earnestly promised to do, she had no premonition that today in town, on the way to her tailor, she would have a brief encounter with the young man who would kill her two weeks later.

Some of Dr. Gaynor’s staff, watching her leave through the small hospital’s back gates — gates seldom used because of the morgue next to them — also had no premonition of their boss’s impending death. At best, they had noted some blackbirds chattering in a tree, which might mean visitors coming, and that could include death and his minions. However, since the three-times-a-week bus was always dropping off visitors or relatives in Chitipa, these sightings of blackbirds seldom reached an ominous level. On this day, no one saw anything unusual about Dr. Gaynor’s decision to go into town; they only thought her quite crazy as usual, quite kerezeka, to want to walk anywhere when, as boss, she had at her disposal the hospital’s Land Rover, her driver growing fat as he sat in the tiny transport office eating and drinking and waiting to take her somewhere.

The very fact her staff members made these same remarks about their boss and her noon walks into town showed how, in general, nothing much did happen in Chitipa, this the last district town in the mountainous northwest corner of Malawi before the Zambian border, a town reached only by a wide and winding bulldozed-dirt road the government kept promising to pave.

In truth, it was this main dirt road from the lakeside town of Karonga to Chitipa, high on a plateau, that offered the best chance of excitement, because even during the rainy season, when bushes and wild grasses sprang up in its middle, the three-times-a-week, blue-and-white government-owned bus always got through — sometimes on time, most of the time not, but it got through. Gears grinding, up it made its way, goats, sheep, and suitcases piled on its top, batteries and auto parts packed inside, as well as expensive items, like toilet paper, for the local elite. There were also the days-old newspapers in both English and Chichewa, the cooking oils and salt and sugar, the many cartons of cigarettes and matches that vendors bought to resell in allotments of one, two, or three, the large bars of yellow lye-looking soap sold in wholes or halves, and always at least two sacks of incoming mail, for electricity was still too irregular for people to depend on the new cell phones used in the cities or even the old land phones, of which the hospital had three.

Most importantly, the white-and-blue bus brought people, people returning from matoling, from visiting relatives or friends elsewhere, or from attending marriages and funerals — especially funerals, because all government and privately employed workers got three paid days off for any family funeral, wherever in the country. It also brought people the police might be looking for, or people who could turn dirt into gold, and its arrivals and departures were pretty much the biggest events of the week, coming Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, leaving the next day on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Usually the same bus, usually the same driver.

Of course events happened locally too, people being born, people dying, people getting sick, some brought immediately to the hospital but most waiting it out at home or seeing Mr. Chimbalala, the traditional healer, at his camp nearby. For not until about to die did people actually go to the hospital, because no one wanted to die at home. Dying at home meant pollution and ghosts and the home had to be abandoned or purified in elaborate rituals, which were expensive and time-eating.

So it went: bus days overlapping with the local birth days, sick days, funeral days, school days, harvest days, church days, and then the big-drama days, the days when someone stole one of the hospital’s two motorcycles and tried to sell it in Mzuzu, or when someone snuck into the home of Mrs. Kondowe and took her disabled TV set, or when the young husband in Vwaza killed his wife with his machete because he thought she was having an affair, which she was. Then there was that big-drama day, just six months after Dr. Gaynor had come to the hospital, when a government helicopter from Zomba landed at the now-abandoned airfield near the hospital to deliver the body of a high-ranking government official for transportation to his village, Lufita, his arrival causing much excitement. After harvest days, there was also the drama of the big-fire days, when fields were burned at night, men keeping the fires moving like cattle, penning them on the edges with big flat sticks and brooms. Crime was down on these nights because the town and surrounding farms were so lit up no one was stupid enough to take a neighbor’s chickens or beat a wife.

However, this Tuesday, a departure-bus day, was turning into a low-drama day, like the low-drama, arrival-bus day before, and Dr. Gaynor hadn’t much on her mind as she approached town, where the bus was waiting for its early-afternoon departure. She walked quickly and efficiently, eyes forward, not swiveling her head side to side slightly as so many of the female vendors did, the women who sat under the large, shady mango trees of the town’s dirt parking lot, their wares laid out before them on overturned wooden crates.

Dr. Gaynor felt, as head of the hospital, she had to maintain a professional if not severe air when dealing with the townspeople, and not show, as they so often did through their turned-sideways heads and fluttering eyelids, this calculating curiosity, as she saw it, a curiosity ever-vigilant for something from which a profit might be made.

She felt herself no fool when it came to the motives of her fellow townspeople and knew vigilance was needed on her part too. Her demeanor had to be pleasant but professional, her dress modest, her white doctor’s coat worn over her black polyester skirt even when she went into town, nothing to inflame the minds of the male locals, as had happened apparently with the low-cut-dressed wife of her expat predecessor.

Dr. Gaynor had no ambition to stir interest in herself, and, as was to be written up at her autopsy, she wasn’t the sort who would stir up male interest, being an unexceptional, white-skinned, thin, middle-aged female of thirty-eight years who had borne no children. She had no signs of recent sexual intercourse. She carried marks of two surgeries: one old, perhaps done in adolescence, where the appendix had been removed; the other, on her left leg, more recent: titanium screws holding together the fibula. Maybe she shattered it in some accident. Her body type was recorded as thin, ectomorphic — or what the female vendors called nkuku, chickenlike, when the breasts are flat and empty of milk after nursing.

Passing the Ladies of the Ladles, as Dr. Gaynor called them, for the vendors were always stirring or picking things from their boiling iron pots, she knew many disapproved of her. This came with the territory, as her predecessor, the English doctor Jamie Swain, now working at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Lilongwe, told her (he later supervising her autopsy, since she was a white woman and he the only white doctor in the city). However, if Dr. Gaynor’s mind was anywhere on this day, it was on her assistant, Robinson Tmembo, and the alacrity with which he had just said he would guard over her office — something he often said when she left for hospital rounds or surgeries or for town errands — but this time there had been some added eagerness that made her wonder just how trustworthy Robinson was, given the young man’s frequent quest for her office key so, he said, he could come early and sweep, or stay late and clean up. There was no question he was a hard worker and fervent member of his Living Waters Pentecostal Church, telling her how God in his infinite wisdom had led him to her, but was it her or her property?

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.

Dr. Gaynor said as kindly as she could that the boy did indeed have the dog sickness and was very sick; unfortunately, there was not a great deal she and her staff could do at this stage. Even if the hospital had vaccines — which at the moment it didn’t, no matter how many times she ordered them — the shots could only be given in the early stages, when someone was first bitten or shortly after.

During this exchange, the boy became very agitated, crying, “Dada Dada,” and moving so restlessly that the father had a hard time keeping the boy in his arms. The young boy was smeared with saliva, the father holding fast, crooning in his local language. Dr. Gaynor already had a face shield on, as did the two ward nurses, and Dr. Gaynor asked the taller nurse, Mrs. Kondowe, to give one to Mr. Chimpimere, telling him the virus was very contagious.

But the father just shook his head. So Dr. Gaynor, putting on latex gloves, motioned to the father to move away while the nurse knelt down to hold the boy so she could examine him with her stethoscope.

The boy, however, getting a look at the strange white woman in a mask, threw his head upward, arched his back wildly, and began to keen. The father became agitated, saying he did not want her to touch his son, that his son thought the lady doctor was a ghost and he was frightened. The father did not want his son frightened.

Dr. Gaynor said not to worry, she wouldn’t examine the boy for now. She would wait, she said to the father before looking at Mrs. Kondowe, who nodded slightly, confirming Dr. Gaynor’s sense that the boy would be dead within the hour. Nothing could have been done; she decided not to give a sedative for fear the boy might choke in taking it.

An hour later the boy did die, his tormented body still at last. Dr. Gaynor supervised the nurses in helping the father to wrap the body in one of the hospital’s cotton blankets, then putting the small, shrouded body on the father’s back, strapping it with the same piece of cotton chitenge skirt material the father had used to bring the boy in. Mr. Chimpimere, now with his son on his back again, seemed stooped — not so much from the slight weight of the dead boy but from the heavy weight of his son’s death. He said politely, “Zikomo,” the local word for thanks; Dr. Gaynor said she would try to see if their ambulance had returned from taking a body to its village for burial, and if so, it could take the father and son to the border. She was very sorry they couldn’t have done more, but the father came too late. He must tell his wife that when children are bitten by a dog or a bat, they must be brought to a hospital immediately. Also, once home, Mr. Chimpimere should tell his wife not to try to wash or hold the body, but leave it wrapped up for burial so as to prevent possible contamination. If his wife or any of his other children got sick, he must bring them here quickly. Dr. Gaynor suddenly heard herself saying all this in her lecturing manner, and so stopped, adding — again in a softer tone — how sorry she and the staff were.

The hospital’s ambulance was not back, so Dr. Gaynor, along with Robinson and some of the staff, watched Mr. Chimpimere set off by foot with his dead son on his back, leaving through the hospital gates and turning left to reach the main dirt road.

“It is God’s plan,” said Robinson, who was standing behind the silent doctor on the steps. “God’s plan!” he repeated in his young, knowing voice that often drove Dr. Gaynor to aggravation. “We must accept God’s plans, whatever our fate.”

“Robinson, you are so naive!” said Dr. Gaynor exasperatedly.

However, the little boy’s death did upset Dr. Gaynor more than the other deaths she had witnessed since being there. The children were the hardest, but the others had been mostly silent, just watching the doctor from fevered eyes, exhaustedly placid before they stopped breathing. But this boy had been so young, so frightened, and so beautiful! However, her face showed nothing as she led the others back into the hospital.

Her stolen coin purse now forgotten, she suddenly thought she should call her mother in her nursing home in the States, although Dr. Gaynor usually only did this on the last Friday of every month. Her mother, after her stroke, had a special aide who was supposed to stay in the room at all times, but often during the day the aide wheeled the old woman out of her room and down halls into the TV room or social room, more for her benefit than for her patient’s. But she always knew to be in the room for Dr. Gaynor’s once-a-month call.

Well, Dr. Gaynor would just have to take the risk of not finding her mother in her room. She went to the telephone room, where calls, if reserved, were made by one of the two clerks on one of the three rotary phones. The lines were kept busy, but as boss, she was not refused. While waiting for the connection, Dr. Gaynor debated whether or not to tell her mother about the dead boy. In the old days she told her mother about all her various patients and their problems. But now her brothers insisted she didn’t upset her mother any more than she had already done by taking these overseas assignments, especially this one in Africa.

So Dr. Gaynor usually only spoke to her mother in her professionally cheerful voice, spoke in this voice which had gotten more hearty in the last two years, because even before the stroke her mother spoke about Africa as if it were still the heart of darkness, both literally and biblically.

Dr. Gaynor also suspected that her mother, when first widowed and then stroked, thought her daughter would come home and care for her in the family house, for her daughter was a doctor, wasn’t she? Isn’t this what doctor daughters should do? her mother seemed to signal again as her hand clung like a ferret to her daughter’s during Dr. Gaynor’s last visit, yes, clung like a ferret, this cruel comparison popping then into Dr. Gaynor’s head. Dr. Gaynor had never entertained the idea of staying home with her mother. Now here she was, finding herself calling her mother for solace as if she were a hurtful child.

“Mother?” said Dr. Gaynor as she heard pips, some crackling, the tinny sound of a phone ringing far off across oceans, then a click and someone answering, her mother’s aide no doubt.

“Mother?”

“Wait a minute, Dr. Gaynor,” and then there was her mother’s voice, soft but querulous, “Who’s this? Who’s this?” speaking in an unpleasant tone she had developed after her stroke.

“It’s Helen, Mom. It’s not Friday, but I had some free time so how are you, did you have a good week?”

“Edward Allen?”

“No, Mother, Helen, your daughter.”

“I don’t have a daughter, I have two boys, Christopher and Kevin, do you know my sons?”

“Mother, Kevin was our father, you mean Chris and Ted, are they there with you? Put Chris on...”

But the phone made a banging noise and went silent. The aide’s voice came back on. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gaynor, your mother dropped the phone. She’s been very agitated recently. Also very incontinent.” Incontinent? That was new.

Suddenly the line disconnected, and Dr. Gaynor decided not to try to call back. She felt very disturbed by the call, considered for a brief moment flying back to check on her mother, then thought she had best wait for December, when her annual holiday came up.

But scarcely a week later Dr. Gaynor found herself flying back to Pittsburgh to attend her mother’s funeral. She was now sitting with her two brothers on folding chairs in the sanctuary room of the funeral home. She was far from Chitipa, far from her missing purse, far from the rabid dead boy, and now, finding herself so quickly here in the States, a small part of Dr. Gaynor worried that her phone call from Africa may have triggered some final insult to her mother’s fragile mind that had killed her. But Dr. Gaynor’s guilt hardly found root, for she immediately said to herself that her mother hadn’t even recognized her voice, so how could this have set off anything?

Dr. Gaynor looked around. Attendance was sparse. Her brothers, Chris and Ted, sat with her in the front row of chairs, while behind were Chris’s latest wife and two of his four children. Ted had come with his partner; there were also several aides and colleagues from the nursing home. Their mother had put resuscitation orders on her advance directive, because, she wrote, she was Catholic and not to do so was a sin. Where she picked up this idea, her sons didn’t know, for she had only been an Easter-and-Christmas Episcopalian most of her life.

“Catholic?” Dr. Gaynor said in a tone of bemusement to her brother Chris, who had picked her up at the airport in his SUV that he was going to get rid of because of the gas, because of the bad times, because of his wife ruining its gears. As they drove directly from the airport to the funeral home, he went on and on in his explosive, bad-tempered way. Dr. Gaynor just repeated, “Catholic? Whatever put that in her mind?”

“At least she didn’t leave everything to the church!” her older brother snapped. “She was really getting loony at the end.”

“They had her on a lot of antidepressants and other medication,” Dr. Gaynor said, intending to explain how these affected the elderly, but Chris had already moved on to fulminate about some oxygen therapy expense the home had ordered for their mother without his consent.

Now, in the sanctuary, as the taped music poured over them, Dr. Gaynor said again to her brothers that she found it odd how her mother had died so quickly. It had been less than a week since Dr. Gaynor had called her; it had been the day that a rabid boy came to her hospital and died and she felt like calling her mother. Her mother hadn’t seemed herself then. Was the doctor visiting her on schedule? The nurses checking her vitals and giving her meds?

“Listen, we should be thankful!” said Chris, her older brother, testily. “They were going to have to move her up to the Alzheimer’s floor, and that would have cost us all double what we’ve been paying.”

Dr. Gaynor did not like her older brother’s complaining tone, which had begun to sound so much like her now-dead mother’s. “Why was that a problem? I was willing to pay. You know I’ve always been good for that!” she said curtly.

“You’re always good for the money. It’s the heavy hauling you run out on.” And on that sharp note, still resonating after the funeral and reception and after more sibling bickering, Dr. Gaynor flew back to Lilongwe, the capital. Yes, God bless everyone, no exceptions, as you would say, Robinson, she said to herself angrily as she thought about her brothers and thought about her mother and looked at the blank landscape of gray clouds from the plane window.

She had already made an international call to Michael, a fellow expat doctor working in Zomba, that she was stopping over in Lilongwe to pick up some supplies before going back to Chitipa and could he come up to see her. Michael and Dr. Gaynor had met at a medical symposium in Lilongwe a year ago and saw immediately they were kindred spirits; it had taken a while for them to sort out the personal aspects, the carnal side of the relationship lasting less than six months. Now they were just best friends, as they told one another, the best of best friends. And Mike was Dr. Gaynor’s best friend. She felt she could tell him anything, and had already told him about her stolen purse by someone called Hastings — Hastings! How the locals loved these English names! — and she had told him about the rabid boy and his fear of her, and how that somehow made her call her mother, who then died, not right after the call, but two days later. Michael had just laughed at her concern that these events could in any way be connected. None of her assistant Robinson’s God’s plan here, he said, just life as usual.

This Dr. Gaynor was thinking about, yes, life as usual, as here she was back in a cat’s whisker to the heat and bustle of Lilongwe, when she turned down Chilembwe Road to the newly refurbished Capital Hotel at the northern end of the city. It was a major hotel, with a long tree-lined driveway and portico under which taxis let out their customers, a doorman in white gloves opening the doors.

Lilongwe, even though the biggest city in Malawi, didn’t really have a center. Like many African cities, it had grown this way and that, from being no more than a cluster of vendors along the side of the road in precolonial times to an open-air market that added a craft market, then morphed into Asian-owned shops next to bus stations and Spar markets, finally now a jacaranda-lined, spread-out capital city, with glassy high-rises and grand-looking stone-and-brick government buildings, all interconnected by small shopping malls, so one either had to find a bus or grab a matola taxi to get from one part of the city to another.

It could become something like Calcutta in time, Dr. Gaynor thought as she walked back to the hotel, her large backpack now filled with boxes of real Band-Aids she had bought at the pharmacy in the small mall she had just visited. Her backpack also contained twelve boxes of rubber gloves, ten boxes of disposable needles, and other ordinary items taken for granted in stateside hospitals, items like the newer type of paper tape instead of the old-fashioned adhesive tape, which was an insult to the skin.

Pleased with her day’s shopping, and the small mall being so close to her hotel, she had decided to walk back instead of taking a taxi. So when the attack came, she was furious with herself. Everyone knew muggings were frequent near the fancy hotels and restaurants, where the mzungus came to spend money. However, since she could see the hotel’s driveway right ahead, she had no expectation that anyone would dare to mug her so close.

But they did, three young men, one of them behind and pulling her by the backpack straps so she fell down backward to the ground while another began cutting the straps to take off the backpack. A third, now that she was down, was on top of her and feeling her across her waist, where, from practice, he must have known most tourists still used money belts for their cash, credit cards, and passports.

“I’m a doctor!” she cried out. “I don’t have anything but medical supplies in the backpack!” And she aimed a fist at the nose of the young man on top of her, scoring such a hit the nose began to bleed, and Hastings Chiume, yelling in pain, felt to see if the slag had broken it, then took out his knife even while she kept yelling, “Listen, for God’s sake, you idiots, I’m a doctor, I’m here to help you people!”

But it wasn’t until he was trying to cut, then yank off the chained purse around her neck that he recognized the woman in her T-shirt and sunglasses as the bitchy doctor who ran the hospital in Chitipa, whom he had bumped into that day two weeks ago in the town. The stupid lady with the bulging purse in her pocket! Then the doctor, suddenly thrusting her head up as she tried to shake him off, said with surprise, “You’re the one who stole my purse!” and, flattered, Hastings wanted to say something boastful to her, like, Hey, Doktorama, you’d better learn not to carry purses and backpacks when I am around, because see what could happen.

But people were beginning to run out of the hotel and down the driveway, and a taxi driver, stopped to let someone off, got out of his car, so Hastings and his friends knew it was time to go. After a few more yanks and jabs with the knife until the chain came apart, Hastings and his friends ran off, the loot later distributed in the rented room they shared with two others.

Meanwhile Dr. Gaynor — arterial blood spurting out from Hastings’s knife cuts, blood she was trying to stem with her hands — kept calling out more and more feebly, “Help me, call an ambulance, for God’s sake! I’m bleeding to death! I can pay! I can pay!”

The next morning Hastings was at his stand at the huge outdoor Wall Market, a place filled with hundreds and hundreds of tables and stalls, around which people milled and bargained. Hastings was squeezed on his left by Mr. Swembe, a sing’anga or witch doctor from Tanzania who was selling bat’s blood as a cure for AIDS. On the other side was Mrs. Champire’s stall; she ironed items brought to her by customers from the secondhand clothes market, using one of her three flatirons kept heated over a charcoal brazier.

On this day Hastings had laid out on his small table, two crates put together, the profits from his gang’s raids the day before, which included wallets, purses, and Ray-Ban sunglasses, as well as a lot of capsule containers that the others gave Hastings because they had no use for them. He also got most of the stuff they got off Dr. Gaynor, who had really tried to hurt him. Let her suffer now like everyone else!

But she had been right. Her possessions were almost all practical and medical. He could sell the Band-Aid boxes and syringes, but maybe not the rolls of funny paper tape, because when he had tried using some of the tape for his bruised face, the tape broke too easily. There had also been bottles of pills that Hastings had never heard of before but decided to push as the newest brand to help men with problems down below.

Hastings was proud of his table, for he catered mostly to clients searching for things to make them feel better. He had a lot of stuff he got from the chemists’ shops, pills and cough medicines that had expired a long time ago, so they sold them cheap to vendors like him. Other wares came from tourists like the doctor. Tourists always carried a lot of pills on them to ward off death. Besides his medical supplies, Hastings also sold food cans — especially condensed milk cans whose expiration dates were long past — paperbacks either stolen or discarded by tourists, and stolen credit cards, which had to be used fast, before their owners reported the thefts.

A woman carrying a screaming baby on her back came and looked over Hastings’s wares. After a while Hastings couldn’t take it and asked her why was her baby yelling so, did it need to be fed? It wasn’t good for his business. Something had hurt her son on his head, the mother replied, unconcerned, examining the bottles, shaking one of them and watching it cloud up. So Hastings came out from his table and looked at the baby, who was trying to work himself out of the chitenge material holding him fast to his mother’s back. He could see the baby had been bitten by something on the head, causing a big ugly red abscess to fester above his left ear.

Hastings, who considered himself as knowledgeable as anyone about sicknesses, told the mother she should take the baby to see a doctor to have the abscess opened up and the poison let out. If a dog had bitten the baby, the mother should take it to the hospital to see if the baby had rabies, which would kill him and maybe her too if she didn’t act fast. Meanwhile he would use one of his powerful cleaning fluids on it, then bandage it with one of the new Band-Aids he had in stock. Some were Band-Aids for children and had little smiley faces on them.

“A doctor gave them to me to sell,” Hastings told the mother. “But I’ll let you have it free!” And as he painted the baby’s sore with the red stuff out of one of his bottles and put a yellow Band-Aid over the wound, he whistled cheerfully.

Let the Chitipa doctor see him now! I’m a doctor! Hastings mimicked to himself as the mother thanked him formally. Yes, God was good! No exceptions!

Later, did Hastings repent? Did he become a changed man, turn himself in, especially after the American Embassy offered a large reward of five thousand kwacha for information that led to the perpetrator or perpetrators of this unconscionable crime, the murder of Dr. Helen Gaynor?

Of course not. Hastings, after a year’s stay in Nairobi — until interest in the doctor’s death died down — moved on from his medicine table to a small pharmacy, then expanded to own several more, not just in Lilongwe but also in Blantyre, in the south. He married the daughter of a highly placed government official and had many children, for his life wasn’t some work of fiction. His life, and Dr. Gaynor’s, they were part of God’s great plan at work, as Dr. Gaynor’s former assistant Robinson said often and indignantly to the doubters, even back when he, with his now-dead boss’s office key finally in hand, swept and kept Dr. Gaynor’s office safe until the new doctor from Holland arrived.