Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Okay,” Gilburn chirped. “Thank you for your cooperation.” He sighed like he hadn’t found what he was looking for, like the ten-minute interrogation had been a waste of precious police time. Gilburn and Parker headed to the door, and Paul followed behind, shepherding them with his arms. Halfway toward the foyer, the detective spun around. He pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and foisted it, along with his notebook, toward Mills.

  “If you could write down your full name and the city where you were born, it would be a big help in terms of background checks. Just procedure. Might not even need to bother.” The pen weighed in his hand, an unwieldy bayonet. Mills wrote “Millford Chevern, Fort Bragg, California,” on the pad, praying that the real Millford Chevern was still on the road, sending postcards to distant sisters, out of trouble and out of jail. He prayed that his driver’s license photo would be bad enough to render identification inconclusive. He prayed that Millford Chevern had lived a model life, that he’d never had his fingerprints memorialized in the ink-spotted paperwork of city records. To admit his real name, now, would be tantamount to confession.

  “Thanks,” Gilburn said. “Millford is a cool name. I had a cousin named Mildon.”

  The deputy stood on the porch, inspecting the charred remains of the house next door. Gilburn clapped Paul’s shoulder on their way to the door. “Thanks again, Paul. You both let me know if either of you plan on leaving Orient soon. Just in case we have follow-up.”

  “Yes, you can trust me,” Paul said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “I mean it. Promise me that.” Gilburn hesitated on the brass doorsill, hovering an inch before the welcome mat, letting a sweep of cold air blow in. “So you’ll be at the funeral tomorrow?”

  “They were my closest neighbors for more than thirty years,” Paul howled. At the last possible second, he had finally lost his composure. “Of course I’m going to their funeral. Mike, just ask me if Mills and I killed the Muldoons. Just ask and we’ll tell you. We didn’t.”

  “Oh, gosh, Paul, I never meant to imply that.”

  Gilburn stepped outside, his arms waving in apology. Paul shut the door and breathed against its frame. He returned to the parlor with a muddled head that no amount of shaking could fix. He waited until the sedan shot headlights through the windows and reversed into the street.

  “They think I did it?” Mills asked, looking up at him, worried he’d find even the slightest twitch of suspicion on Paul’s face. He considered confessing the truth about his name right then. What was left but confession—confess, confess, confess, until every stone inside of him had been turned over? He didn’t even know what was under half those stones anymore. He hadn’t uttered his real name in almost a year.

  “They’re desperate to catch whoever did, that’s all,” Paul said. “No, they don’t think you did it. They’re asking everybody, house to house. I watched them make the rounds all afternoon.” Paul squeezed Mills’s shoulder. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, okay?”

  He tried to believe Paul. He believed him so much he could almost will himself to believe that they’d been sitting in the living room together on the night of the fire, providing each other with alibis.

  “What about that lie you told them? That we were sitting here together that night?”

  Paul sat down next to him, as if they did actually sit side by side on the couch in the evening, staring emptily into the dining room.

  “I know,” Paul said tiredly. “But I had to.”

  “Why?”

  “I just did,” he spat, rubbing his head. “So what if we were sleeping? Every single person in Orient was asleep when that fire started. So what if you were on the sofa and I was upstairs? It’s just to clear you from their minds.”

  Mills realized what both Paul and Beth had recognized in the situation, that he was a likely suspect.

  “So we clear each other in case they suspect me.” Mills paused. “Or you.”

  Paul laughed. His eyes rolled behind his lids and he gave a pained smile. “Or me, right. Think of it as helping me out. Maybe they do think I did it. Angry that the Muldoons were using my backyard to access the Sound without my permission, I was provoked into a rage that caused me to pour gasoline around their house.” Under the glaze of his glasses, Paul’s eyes were like missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. It was a relief to see Paul scared, like Mills wasn’t alone in the fear. “Are you asking me if I did it?” Paul said. “Because you’re right. I guess I don’t have an alibi.”

  “No.”

  “We were lucky the fire didn’t spread to this house. In a way, we were spared. But maybe I am a suspect in Mike’s notebook. I do live next to them. We did have that fight. They drilled me with questions before you arrived. Mike had the audacity to ask if I had fire insurance, like I was hoping for the flames to spread just so I could cash in. Then he asked if I had any ambitions to fill Bryan’s seat on the historical board. I told him I wouldn’t do it if they paid me.” Paul’s voice drifted off. He pinched the back of his neck. “There’s got to be someone—a business associate, a jilted neighbor, someone with a motive. We just have to let the police find that person. Let them follow the lead to another door. They will eventually. There’s too much public outcry for them not to discover the truth.”

  “I could leave tonight,” Mills said quietly. “I could take the train in and disappear. Then you wouldn’t have to deal with it in case they suspect—”

  Paul swatted off his glasses and wiped his face. Mills knew how bad that would look, after Paul had given the detective his word. And there were plenty of other potential suspects: he and Beth had already uncovered a number of leads, almost without trying. Surely Gilburn had drummed up more suspects than they had.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Paul muttered. “It would draw attention to you if you tried to leave right now. It would look like guilt.” A thread of air escaped his lips. “Although I can’t force you to stay. I’m not your father. You need to do what’s best for you. If you think getting out—”

  “I won’t leave,” Mills interrupted. “But you know I didn’t do it, right? You know I had nothing to do with that fire. I want to make that clear. Because if you have any doubts—”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.” Paul collected Mills’s hands on the cushion, rubbing his knuckles with his thumbs. Paul looked tired without his glasses, like a man forced to row a boat at sea with a spoon. He picked his words carefully, moving his lips in halting jerks. “I want to tell you something. Maybe it’s a reason why I told the detective what I did. I lied to you when you found that picture of my brother. Patrick was my brother, but not by blood.”

  “He was adopted?”

  Paul shook his head. His skin was ashen.

  “No. My parents took him in as a foster kid when he was a toddler. His family had abandoned him right here on the North Fork—if a teen mother and a drunk dockworker who both hightailed it to Florida count as family. Patrick drifted around in temporary homes for a while, but no one kept him for long. He was already so sick by then. That’s when my mom and dad brought him to stay here. He could barely leave the house, with all his illnesses, so I did all the chores, so that my mother could take care of him. But I didn’t mind, because I wanted a brother, and Patrick was the sweetest kid I ever met. He loved lighthouses. That’s what he and my mother shared. That’s part of the reason my father and I built that little replica out at the inn—so my mom could see it and remember him after he died. He had operations that we paid for, because the state wouldn’t pay for his medical bills. Elective surgery,” Paul hissed. “It’s not elective if it saves your life. But they had already given him up as lost. We used to tell him he was a descendent of the Gardiners, just so he felt valuable. But Patrick was valuable, to us.”

  Mills sat so close to Paul that he could smell him, earthy as mulch turned over in a garden. The veins in his wrists pulsed. Paul’s voice was a drone of water in a pipe or rain behind a curtained window.
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  “My parents were working to adopt him, but he died of the blockage in his intestines before the process was finalized. We couldn’t even bury Patrick ourselves, since he wasn’t technically part of our family. They didn’t allow us that last privilege. I’ll never forget how much that hurt my mother. To her he was just like a son. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t blood.”

  Mills tried to picture the dark-haired boy in the photograph, tried to imagine the disease in his stomach that was already consuming him from the inside out when he sat for the camera with Paul on the porch. He tried to picture the homes the boy must have gone through before finding one that would take in a sick child. Most families would rather take in a sick dog than a sick kid. Paul squeezed his fingers. “I went away to boarding school right after he died. I think my mom couldn’t handle the grief of losing him after she tried so hard. Our lives would have been so different if he had lived. When I came home in the summers, we never spoke about him, but something had changed. We became the kind of family that talks about nothing but work.”

  Paul waved his hand to clear away the memory.

  “What I’m trying to say,” he said, sputtering, “is that a part of me saw Patrick in you. And I’ve wanted you to feel at home here because you deserve that. To have some kind of base where you’re more than a guest. Maybe that was stupid of me. You’re an adult. You don’t need to be adopted. But I thought, with all these extra rooms, that Orient would be a good place.”

  “I do like it here,” Mills swore. He didn’t dare make eye contact, as if his eyes would expose some failure in him, the larvae scored in the meat. “It’s my fault that I got mixed up with the Muldoons.” He wished he could take back his infatuation with Tommy. Or rather, he wished Tommy had protected his own secrets as carefully as the ones he kept hidden in his safe. He understood Tommy’s need for a small black space he could lock at his command. What was the name Mills Chevern but a door that only he could access, as if the most honest things about a person were those kept out of sight?

  “I guess I’ve been pretty lonely,” Paul said, nodding along to his own diagnosis. “I guess I just thought this house was big enough.”

  The house was big enough. It accommodated possibilities that had seemed out of reach to Mills: future Thanksgivings, future Christmases, future boyfriends following him up the steps to meet a middle-aged man with a tender lion’s head. Those were the possibilities being offered to him on the couch as evening darkened, a spare set of keys, and part of him did want that, vaguely, like wanting spring.

  “I’d like to stay for a while,” he said, his eyes trained on the cushion. “No promises for how long.”

  “As long as you want.” Paul returned his glasses to his nose.

  Mills pulled his knuckles from Paul’s fingers. He didn’t want Paul to be the first to break away. But, as he returned his hand to his lap, a switch flipped in his head, a doubt that undermined Paul’s kindness just as it was being expressed. It was Mills’s way of staving off future disappointment. Turn the kindness against itself, distrust it until it died. Without Mills, Paul had no alibi for the fire. Paul could have brought him out here and given him free run of his house simply to establish one. The entire last month might have been engineered for the meeting they just had with the police, Mills nodding along to Paul’s lie, providing him with a cover story he would never have had if he lived alone.

  It took imagination to superimpose a killer on the man hunched beside him, his eyes still shiny from his sad generosity, but it wasn’t entirely impossible. Paul could be bribing him now with the promise of a home to prevent Mills from speaking the truth to the police. The idea ran through him hot and cold, like a fever changing direction. He remembered Eleanor’s name on the Seaview matchbook hidden behind the frame.

  “You know, Beth and I went to the Seaview today,” Mills said, trying to gut-check Paul with his suspicions.

  “The Seaview?” Paul cocked his head. He too seemed in need of a lighter subject, a man who had just offered his house and was met with a teenager’s shrugging maybe. “Why would you two go there?”

  “Oh, not like that.” Mills blushed. “Beth had it in her mind that the motel had something to do with the Muldoons. We met Eleanor, the woman who runs the place.”

  Paul fell back on the sofa. “Oh, she’s a beast!” he said, laughing. “The true North Fork monster. I’ve been dealing with her a bit recently.” Paul looked over at the fireplace, a neutral zone. “I can trust you, right?” Paul didn’t wait for him to confirm it. “I have a secret project that I work on when things are slow at the firm. An idea to buy that dumpy motel from Eleanor and rebuild it as a modern bed-and-breakfast. Like the one my mom ran at the farmhouse I took you to.”

  “A hotel?” Mills whispered, caught off guard. “You never told me you wanted to do that.” He was surprised to hear a hint of betrayal in his own voice.

  “It was a secret,” Paul said, smiling. “I guess it’s in the blood. Just a little place for visitors to the North Fork. Not as grand as Oysterponds Inn but also not a money trap.”

  “Why didn’t you just buy back the farmhouse when it was up for sale last spring?”

  “I said a little place,” Paul stammered, getting to his feet. “That house was priced at several million even before the bidding started. We almost went bankrupt once over that place. I’m not interested in trying it again.” Paul went to pick up his laptop from the dining room table and brought it back to the couch, typing in his password and clicking on a file titled SEA.pdf. “You’ve got to promise to keep it a secret. At least until it happens.”

  Mills nodded, and an architectural rendering of a building filled the screen. The bones of the current Seaview were hardly visible through its cosmetic upgrade: huge picture windows framing the blue waters, dining rooms and decks jutting above the rocks, a canopy of willows shading the long sweep of guest doors, a shell replacing a swordfish on a sign above the entrance. It looked as beautiful as any dream could that was rendered in straight lines. “Eleanor’s got to give it up sometime, and if I don’t get it before she dies, her grandchildren will sell it to the highest bidder. It’ll end up as a strip mall if I can’t convince her that I want to respect the history of the place. Getting her to sign, though, is like trying to marry the devil. As soon as you agree on a price, she thinks you’re trying to steal from her.”

  Mills had never seen Paul so animated. In all his agonizing over his own future, he had never once asked Paul what he wanted out of his. It had been easier for him to imagine Paul as an a possible murderer than as a middle-aged man with a modest dream.

  “It’s a great idea,” Mills said encouragingly. “You already know how to build.”

  “Not just build, but conserve. Keep the history and the beauty of the view. It’s not in Orient, but it’s close enough, and it’s a lot easier than getting around all of the zoning laws and squabbling neighbors out here. That’s why I like it—because it’s in-between.”

  “You should have kept the old Oysterponds sign.”

  “It’s best to start fresh. This is my chance to break free from all those corporate parks and do something that’s mine. No more onyx ogres with tinted conference-room windows. I hate that my biggest contribution to date has been perfecting the parking-lot grid.”

  “I hope you keep the bar inside. I could bartend.” Paul’s dream was contagious. “We could hang your landscapes in the guest rooms. And you could build another miniature Bug lighthouse on the rocks.”

  “Maybe.” Paul snorted. “It’s just a little dream for now.” Paul closed the computer in embarrassment. His dream, once exposed, faced its own potential failure. “So what did you find there?” Paul asked. “What about the Muldoons?”

  “Nothing,” Mills said. “I guess we just went to stretch our legs.”

  They ate mackerel for dinner, scooping up pieces of fish around its open eye. Their conversation drifted away from the Muldoons and the police. But Mills prayed that the detective would
solve the case, that the perpetrator would be a stranger, a luckless pyromaniac who happened through town. If Mills adopted Orient as his home, he’d need to have his name removed from Gilburn’s list of suspects. Mills wondered if he was contracting the disease of the suburbs: the desire to be liked. After all, the Muldoons were the only ones who hadn’t welcomed him.

  When he went upstairs, he realized that he no longer felt afraid of the birthing room or the scraping oak branches in the wind. He’d been in Orient for almost two months, and maybe that was enough to claim it as his. My bedroom. My dresser. My toothbrush, laid out on a green towel of the very same quality as the man who owns the house—no cheaper and no finer. He went to bed thinking of Lisa Muldoon, who had lost a family in nearly the same instant that Mills had been offered one. He thought of her crying in the parking lot of the Seaview, shivering with small, lost steps. And he thought of himself, with each step more firmly planted in the Orient soil.

  It was deep into the night when a bolt shot through him like a cramp of stomach sickness. He woke, reaching his arms out over the blanket, remembering something that had been bothering him earlier in the day. It was a revelation that caused him to think of the Muldoons as strangers, to each other and to the rest.

  CHAPTER 22

  A nerve pinched in Adam Pruitt’s shoulder, trembling his hand whenever he grabbed a pen to write down a customer order. Now his hand shook as he tried to knot his tie in the mirror, dressing for a funeral he didn’t have the time or interest to attend. He would be expected to pay his respects at the service for the Muldoons at the United Church of Christ, even though Bryan Muldoon had been his main business competitor, even though Adam had never darkened United Church of Christ with his prayers, even though Pruitt Securities was now trying to keep up with an influx of work that his five-man outfit could barely handle. He had the Muldoons to thank for the sudden windfall; that was one prayer that had been answered. Everyone on the North Fork suddenly wanted a security system, and no one wanted to hire Muldoon Security, since it was an intruder who’d apparently killed Bryan Muldoon and his family in their home. On paper, Pruitt Securities was thriving—more contracts in the last two weeks than he’d imagined possible for his first year in business. But Adam had not anticipated the immense amount of effort it would take to keep up with demand. If he faltered in accepting a single job, a bigger security company from Long Island would swoop in to plant its badge on an Orient lawn—and he knew how quickly weeds could spread on local soil.