Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “How’s the steamboat going?” she asked him.

  Cleaver sighed. His right eye twitched. “It’s nearly complete. To be honest, I’m thinking of moving to another part of Long Island. Somewhere quieter. With so many of you young people moving here lately, I’m not certain the peace will continue. Perhaps my ark, as they call it, will be seaworthy after all.”

  Beth remembered what Paul had told her about Cleaver donating money for the preservation of Bug Light. “That would be a shame. I hear you’re the man responsible for keeping the lighthouse up.”

  “That’s an idea,” Cleaver said with brightening eyes. “Maybe I’ll just buy that and make my home on an island, out in the blue and away from all encroachment.”

  Arthur shut his umbrella and climbed into his car, the gray suede upholstery hyena-spotted with flecks of rain. He waited for the hearse to pass on Main Road before heading off in the direction of the causeway.

  Beth hurried along the sidewalk, passing the fire department and its open garage doors. She decided to try calling the post office on her cell, but the automated prompts only led her in a circle back to the introductory main menu. She tried one of the 800 numbers she remembered from the flyers and entered a similar labyrinth: “Press one for cribs, two for clothing, three for . . .” She pressed zero. Another option menu. Zero. Another. Zero. Zero. Zero. Main menu.

  Finally, she found Mike Gilburn’s card in her purse and dialed his number. His live, hoarse voice grumbled “Gilburn” on the other end. How satisfying to call a number and find a human being on the other end.

  “Hi, Mike, it’s Beth.” The silence of incomprehension followed. “Beth Shepherd. From high school. From Magdalena Kiefer’s driveway.”

  “Oh, Beth,” he said in a lighter tone. “Sorry. I’m drowning in paperwork here. Hey, I heard you’ve moved back to the old neighborhood. Have you seen your friend, Alison—what’s her married name now, Eschmeyer?”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said quickly. “Look, I wanted to apologize for my behavior the other day. I know I probably seemed a little unhinged.”

  “No need to apologize. Don’t wor—” She didn’t let Mike get too far in his pardon. She was calling to reset the alarm.

  “You told me to call if I still believed her death wasn’t an accident. I mean”—what was the correct term for a normal death?—“natural.” She tried again. “You told me to call you if I still had doubts.”

  “Yes, I guess I did,” he said slowly, his sinuses thick with disappointment. He sounded younger over the phone. If she didn’t know him, she’d think Detective Gilburn was in his twenties. “I thought I made it clear that we weren’t treating this case as a homicide.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I wanted to follow up. I wondered if any further evidence came to light. For instance, an autopsy.”

  “We’d have to exhume her in order to perform one. The coroner consulted with her physician. Beth, she was eighty-three.”

  “I’m aware of that. But, Mike, Magdalena invited me to her house a few days before she died for the sole purpose of telling me that she suspected someone had killed Jeff Trader. She was certain of it. And she was frightened.”

  “And all I can say, again, is that she was eighty-three. Old people suffer delusions. I wouldn’t be surprised if that stress contributed to her heart attack, or at least her decision to play around with her beehives.” Mike exhaled into the receiver. She knew he was trying to summon his patience for a woman he’d known since puberty. She heard him shuffling papers on his desk and wondered if Mike had a special app on his phone that produced the sound, just to help shorten irritating calls. “I’ll be blunt with you. We have no reason, none at all, to assume there was any foul play. And the Southold Police Department doesn’t have the manpower to follow up on every suspicious whim of a neighbor, even if that neighbor is a friend of mine. We don’t have a special homicide unit. I’m homicide. I’m felonies. I’m fender benders. Hell, I’m lost pets.” He laughed in frustration. “I’ve had all of that under my jurisdiction for a year now. And I’m afraid I have you to thank for the six other phone calls I’ve gotten about the Kiefer case.”

  “So others have called?” Beth stopped in front of the Tabachs’ white Cape Cod. The brown heads of hydrangeas were bobbing like workhorses in the rain.

  “Yes, and two of them mentioned you as the reason they were concerned.”

  “I haven’t said a thing.”

  “They must have heard you screaming at the scene. Six calls about an elderly woman’s death. And more than thirty calls related to that creature that washed to shore. My phone’s been ringing around the clock. ‘Test my water, it doesn’t look right.’ ‘Is it safe to eat local produce?’ Don’t be offended, but maybe being isolated out in Orient has gotten to you a little bit. All this quiet after you’ve been in the city for so long.”

  Beth offered no defense.

  “And now I’m getting calls about suspicious persons in the vicinity. Outsiders with criminal backgrounds. It’s not the job of the police to vet every character that passes through the North Fork.” Mike eased out of his tirade, as if he’d worn himself out. “Give me your number. If anything does turn up I’ll contact you.”

  She recited ten digits, wondering whether he was even writing them down.

  “If I happen to get my hands on proof, will you listen then?” she asked. Did Jeff Trader’s journal actually count as proof? At least it was something she could hold in her hand, something that couldn’t be dismissed as a hysterical invention.

  “It would be a pleasure to see you if you have anything tangible to show to me. But, Beth, I’m going to be straight with you. It didn’t do either of us any favors that the single witness to Magdalena Kiefer’s death, one Stephanie Smith, was seen leaving the scene under your supervision. I’ll bet her name was Stephanie. She sure looked like a Stephanie. Stephanies are known for their Mexican accents. It’s a good thing we aren’t investigating because my superiors would drill me for not charging you with hampering a police investigation. Just so we’re clear.”

  Again she offered no defense.

  Mike paused. When she heard his voice again it sounded more weathered, as if it had aged ten years.

  “I guess you heard about my divorce.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Jill’s gone. Been gone a few months, and I don’t blame her. After three years, we couldn’t wear down the parts of each other that didn’t fit. I’m just thankful we didn’t have children. Although maybe kids would have been one way to wear us down.” He went silent, expecting Beth to fill the dead space. Mike was a guard dog that was suddenly rolling over to expose his vulnerable underside. She didn’t pet him. She needed him to stay on the job, a guard dog with a nose and teeth. “All right,” he said with a sigh. “You tell your neighbors to check the paper this week. There’s an official report on the Plum creature coming out. That should put an end to some of these calls.”

  Beth unlocked her car and wiped her face with a tissue. She turned the windshield wipers to high as she drove east on Main Road, slowing them as the downpour receded. Beth tried turning them off altogether, but they continued to whisk across the glass in skidding bursts. By the time she pulled into the Drakes’ driveway on Little Bay Road, a cold sun simmered in the sky and the wipers still wouldn’t shut off.

  The Drakes’ house was surrounded by a white picket fence, suggesting not so much exclusion as invitation. ORIENT TAPESTRIES, BY APPOINTMENT read the sign that hung from a chain on the porch below a sweep of floral woodwork. A glance through the window revealed a motley of batiks, saris, woven rugs, and embroidered linens artfully arranged on the window seat, advertising Holly Drake’s incongruously down-home far-east imported textile business. Beth rang the bell. When Holly answered, her freckled skin looked dewy from the shower, her hair wrapped in a yellow towel.

  “What a surprise,” Holly said. “I just saw you at the funeral. Are you here to look at some fabrics?”

&
nbsp; “I was actually hoping for a word with your husband,” Beth replied.

  “Oh, Cole’s in the den watching the game. I was just changing. Come in.” Holly opened the door wider, and Beth noticed Holly’s fingernails, chewed down to the cuticles. Like any house accustomed to hosting strangers, the front rooms were organized to emphasize routine happiness. A photo of the young couple hung above a vase of orchids. A shot from their wedding leaned on a polished table, with Holly guiding her husband’s cake-clenched fingers toward her open mouth. One of Holly’s saris was tacked like a gigantic butterfly on the wall. The lacquered pinewood floorboards allowed no dust to rupture their oily crescents and hand-carved pegs.

  Holly led Beth into a room outfitted in rugs and gold-leaf textiles, FedEx boxes and packing material. The bulk of Holly’s business was mail order, and a humming desktop computer displayed a slide show of draped fabrics that were shot on the window seat on the opposite side of the room. The sound of televised crowds and sports announcers echoed from the darkness of the den. Holly pushed the sliding doors open, cautioning Beth to be careful of the sunken step. Cole was slumped on the couch, staring at the flat screen. He pulled a remote control from between his legs and pressed the mute button as Beth took a chair across from him.

  “It’s an antique,” Holly warned her. “I wouldn’t move around too much. But you’re so light.” Where was Holly from originally? Chicago? Sarasota? Swampscott? Beth couldn’t remember. Her accent seemed sculpted by cable news executives.

  Cole looked at his wife with a blank expression, and Holly excused herself to finish changing.

  Beth had known Cole Drake most of her life. He’d been two years ahead of her in high school, and his presence was like a long list of negatives: too lean and injury-prone for organized sports, too morose and handsome for marching band. Cole was never friendly; Beth, quite popular at Sycamore, always thought he looked like the kind of kid who should grow up in one of the huge western states where land put a natural barrier between people. Even now, he eyed Beth like he was still hostile toward her likeable teenage self. Beth could have done without visiting Cole altogether, but he’d been the only other visitor to Magdalena’s house she’d seen in the days before her death.

  “I spoke with Arthur Cleaver today,” Beth said. “I asked who handled Magdalena’s will. He said you did.” Cole glanced at the television for a moment, waiting for the score, then brought his brown eyes silently back and waited for her to continue. “I’m not sure I’m even allowed to ask this, but I was her friend, so I wondered what you two talked about when you visited her the day before she died. I saw you out my window.”

  “Come to collect, huh?” If he had punctuated that sentence with a laugh it might have broken the tension.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect to receive anything. It’s more—well, I also spoke with Magdalena a few days before she died, and she seemed worried about something. She was really broken up about Jeff Trader’s death. Did she mention him to you?”

  “He died intestate. No will and no inheritors. His property will go to the state to settle.” Cole checked the score and scowled. Whatever vague clue Beth had been hoping to glean, this trip hardly seemed worth the gas it took to drive here. What would Cole know about a woman like Magdalena Kiefer, anyway? The only virtue she probably appreciated in him was his efficiency.

  Beth narrowed her approach. “She didn’t say anything strange to you on that visit? Maybe she mentioned someone she distrusted? Or anyone she was worried about?”

  Cole crossed his arms over his lap and wedged his tongue against his cheek. He held his emotions the way men were forced to hold their wife’s purse: close to the chest with their jaw muscles clenched in embarrassment. Gavril never minded holding Beth’s purse.

  “Magdalena distrusted a lot of people,” he said. “For good reasons or for no reasons at all. She distrusted me, for one. Your mother, for another. I never cared for her in particular.” Beth assumed Cole was still referring to Magdalena, not Gail. “But, no, she didn’t say anything to me that day. And if she had, I would have assumed it was a symptom of her age. Those hippie types get a little lost in the head when the years start adding up. She wanted to leave everything to her nurse. Not the house, but all of the stuff in it. Most of her money will go to that woman’s son, although it’s going to be a headache for me to send her small savings to some kid’s address in Mexico when he actually lives ten miles down the interstate.”

  Holly tiptoed through the room in a yellow velour tracksuit, her curly red hair falling over her shoulders. “Don’t mind me, don’t mind me,” she whispered as she passed the couch and opened the glass door to escape into the backyard. Beth shifted on the wobbly chair and leaned in to focus Cole’s attention.

  “So that’s why you went over to her house. She wanted you to change her will.”

  Cole had the lawyer’s trait of speaking each sentence in the same dreary monotone.

  “That’s right. And you’ll be happy to know that she left you a few things. An armoire and a grandfather clock.” Beth remembered admiring those pieces on her visit. “You clean up pretty well, actually. Not that a couple of beat-up antiques really amount to a motive for killing her, do they?” Cole smiled, at last, though without a hint of warmth.

  “So you also think Magdalena was murdered?”

  “Did I say that?” He grunted. A last-minute field goal leveled the score. Beth was competing with a stadium of twenty thousand. “It’s no secret you think she was. I’ve heard more than one person tell me you’ve been swearing murder up and down. I’d be careful if I were you. Holly’s been locking all our windows at night. She’s hounding me about getting an alarm put in.”

  “I have not been saying that.”

  Cole didn’t like loud noises. The fluctuation in her voice unnerved him. He propped the pillows against his ribs.

  “But I’ll tell you something, since you’ve come all this way. There was something peculiar. You may know that I’m not fond of the board and all their benevolent plans to save us, so you can take what I say or don’t. But Magdalena demanded that I come see her that day so she could alter the key beneficiary in her will. She was going to leave her house and acreage to OHB, but out of nowhere she wanted that struck. Had me run over to sign a new will without that condition. You can say, as some do, that she was waiting for the trust to be set up, shifting around her assets before the big announcement, but that’s not what it seemed like to me. Seemed to me like she changed her mind altogether. She wouldn’t tell me why, and it wasn’t my place to ask. But my guess is, she didn’t want the historical board to have it. Didn’t want to put it all in Bryan Muldoon’s pocket. Problem is, without any relatives, the land goes to the state to settle. Same as Jeff Trader, in case you’re in the market.”

  “Does the historical board know she changed her will?”

  “Bryan, George, and Sarakit all phoned me separately the day after she died. They weren’t exactly pleased by the news.”

  Cole leaned back on his sofa, unmuted the game with his remote, and called an end to the conversation. Beth stood up and thanked him. As she began to leave she heard his voice through the televised screams.

  “Funny, you moving back here.”

  She turned. His attention was on the screen.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You moving back here. In high school, you were always going on about New York and all the fancy things you were going to do out there. And now you’re back here with the rest of us. Just funny, that’s all. How it ends up.”

  Beth struggled to take the insult up the sunken stair, one foot in front of the other. She could not remember a single incident involving Cole Drake that would have caused him to resent her for fifteen years. Was he alone in his view of her, or were there others—adults now, stretched and swollen versions of the kids she’d known—watching her from their windows with the kind of raw hate that only comes from youthful resentment? She passed through the ma
keshift showroom and opened the front door with unsteady hands.

  Beth was halfway toward the gate when Holly rounded the house, wearing gardening gloves with her yellow tracksuit, a pair of pruning shears in her gloved fingers.

  “Did you get what you came for?” she asked, using the glove to shade her eyes. She read Beth’s puzzled expression. “Don’t mind Cole. You know husbands. Never interrupt them during a game.” Holly squinted as she smiled. Beth felt another flash of déjà vu, not for a moment lived twice, but for a moment repeated from a photograph—the one she’d found in Jeff Trader’s journal. Holly’s red hair was bright against the lawn of dead Bermuda grass, which would grow alien green in summer. Behind her, thorny bushes would blossom with summer rosebuds.

  CHAPTER 14

  At the Floyd Organic Farm Stand, on a gravel crescent off Main Road, Paul selected autumn vegetables. Even in the rain he was fastidious, palming Jerusalem artichokes, squeezing zucchinis, inspecting kale for wilted leaves. August Floyd, manning the family-owned stand, watched with the bleary enthusiasm of a farmer who had survived a decade of near-death alcoholism and another decade of near-death redundancy, thanks to competition from the Greenport supermarkets. His slackened face only blinked when the wind swept the rain against his broken nose.

  If darker times had left their scars, his customers’ more recent prosperity cushioned them. August Floyd was zippered into a brand-name fleece jacket. His hands guarded a money box teeming with tens and twenties. The stand promised vegetables grown from something called heritage seeds, and this promise brought cars to idle on the gravel as shoppers from as far away as Mattituck pilfered the once-cheap, now high-priced inventory. The shoppers were young and assertive, their hair cropped and disheveled by Manhattan salons, their cars new and gleaming against the downpour. Their bumpers were decorated in Obama stickers. August Floyd’s mud-caked Chevy still preferred Romney. The shoppers tried to barter. August tapped the price signs. The shoppers relented. They wanted lavender. August told them it was out of season.