Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Adam had hijacked Bryan’s own suppliers, offering the exact same security equipment at a slightly cheaper rate, relying on the same Riverhead telecom service to direct satellite calls to emergency responders and process forgotten codes to harried homeowners trying to remember the answer to their secret password questions while alarms wailed into the receiver.

  All of the special services Adam had promoted on their flyers had been put on hold. So far, his company wasn’t offering anything beyond what Muldoon Security provided, for less money. Adam was still in negotiations with a New York City–based environmental lab to supply the soil and water testing he had advertised. Not even the richest new residents would spend two thousand dollars to test their wells and garden when contamination seemed like a county responsibility. How had Bryan managed to run his business day after day, pulled on all sides by installation appointments, late payments, and nervous clients? For one thing, he hadn’t hired his out-of-work hunting buddies. Installations that should take one hour took four, when his so-called technicians showed up, if they showed up sober. Adam had leased a green van, but they forgot to lock its doors when they went crawling through bushes trying to secure wobbly Orient windows, leaving thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment exposed. He needed to fire Dennis, and Josh had to be warned about lighting up on porches, and Toby needed a refresher on the basics of using a screwdriver. How had Bryan managed to turn this kind of business into a profitable enterprise that paid for a house, three children, and time to hunt on weekends—and still left him time to volunteer on the historical board? If Adam hadn’t hated Bryan, he would have admired him. Now that he was dead, he did.

  Adam pawed at his tie, but the knot dissolved as he tried to tighten it. A wave of laziness overtook him, a warm laziness that Adam used to enjoy, like slipping into a heated pool in his underwear. It was the kind of laziness that turned the simplest tasks into a concentrated effort: a fifteen-minute drive to Greenport to park the car and walk to the back of the IGA for two pints of milk and up to the front of the IGA to buy the milk and drive fifteen minutes back to his bungalow just to pour the milk over granola for breakfast. As a child, Adam had been a workhorse for his father. Clean the gutters, mow the lawn, wax the deck, tar the leak in the roof. He had worked and worked, so hard that by the age of eighteen he had come to view adulthood as a form of retirement.

  Adam lit a cigarette, ignoring his ringing cell for fear that it was another customer or collection agency—or, worse, her. She wouldn’t stop calling, crying, demanding that he see her, that he come right now. He hadn’t seen her in days. The relationship he wanted with a woman was the kind he had with the four ferns he watered in his bungalow—the commitment of sticking his fingers in them once a week and giving them just enough to live on. But that wasn’t what she wanted, what she had been promised, what she had done to be with him. His bed was tangled in blankets; it would be so easy to crawl under them and sleep until noon. Some days, Adam seemed almost to stop existing for whole minutes, his brain gone blank like a computer in sleep mode. He used to love that gift of nothing, of not being someone for a stretch of time, but now he had to fight to stay centered. The business owned him, and she thought she did too.

  He hadn’t been an extraordinary child. He knew that. Mediocre grades, the normal interests in football and guns, talents designed for hobbies instead of ways out. He was prized in Orient as a teenager because he hadn’t been extraordinary. The extraordinary never stayed out here, they moved to the city as soon as they could, and so the year-rounders crowded around him and loved him with their hands and words, because they knew he would live here forever. They were patriotic about his disappointments. All he had done in the last few months was find a way to be extraordinary. Pruitt Securities was suddenly a booming business. Badge-shaped signs bearing his name were cropping up on every lawn. As the head of the Orient Volunteer Fire Department, he had bravely rushed to put out the biggest fire ever to scorch the village. But there were still steps to be taken, one this week when no one was looking. His cell phone rang again. Unidentified number. He let it go to voice mail and finished his cigarette.

  He needed to hire a secretary, someone to field the calls. But that meant more money that he didn’t have to spend, another employee who wanted five dollars more than minimum wage and health care and wasn’t there a union that stipulated holidays and a 401K? Dennis had asked for a 401K—Dennis, a man who could barely find his shower in the morning, but who knew what he stood for, and would stand for it until he was replaced by the cheaper labor of the illegal Mexicans in Greenport. Adam couldn’t hire a Mexican for a secretary. Security required an American accent.

  Instead, he was spending the money he’d saved up for the ’67 Maserati he already imagined rehabbing and driving around Orient to show off just how extraordinary he had become. But he froze in his cluttered bedroom, unable to move his hands to knot his tie. At his feet was a box of lime green flyers and another box of Pruitt Securities signs. He’d need to borrow more money. Maybe he could borrow money from her. There was so much money in Orient lately, green fields of it, guarded with security systems he’d installed but wasn’t allowed to touch.

  Yesterday he had gone to the old farmhouse inn to do a job estimate for an artist couple, a gorgeous black woman and her pale, whiny husband. They were bickering about furniture—eight thousand dollars for an anemic, understuffed couch, a couch the husband no longer deemed worthy to sit on. The husband sat in a leather chair with his shirt unbuttoned, holding a glass of whiskey, yelling about the couch and the bulldozed holes in the yard. The husband was the very sort of man Adam’s father had despised, the kind who made money just by sitting around and letting his investments do his work, the kind who had married a gorgeous black woman to prove a point.

  “I can’t secure the house until you’ve finished construction,” Adam tried explaining to her. “There’s no way to rig a system when you’ve got plastic-covered holes for walls. I can’t even install lasers in your yard because of all of the dirt mounds.”

  “We’re excavating,” the black woman replied. She stretched her arms over her head, cracked the bones in her back, and shut her eyes. “We may never finish construction,” she said with a restless smile. “We may just keep adding and changing. We’re like that.” He hated her but very much wanted to take her to bed, to show her that he could do things to her that her husband couldn’t.

  “You’ve got a great face,” she had told him. “I’d like to paint you if you’re ever up for it. I’ve been doing a series on people out here.” The husband winced and drank his whiskey. The husband tried to apologize with his eyes, but for what, a compliment? Because she was right, Adam did have a great face—muscular where the husband’s was bland and formless, like a coin in a washing machine. He laughed at the compliment and examined her small breasts, as if trying to figure out how an intruder might get at them. Behind their house, beyond the half-dug holes, he saw a speedboat tied to their private dock. They had the money to be lazy, and Adam had a laziness that money would have loved. What could this couple have accomplished in their short lives to make them so rich?

  He glanced around his cramped bungalow, its chipped wood and hairy corners. He had two Pruitt Securities signs in his front lawn—no security system yet, he’d been too busy, but the signs were what really mattered. He had that speech on repeat: “Intruders see this sign, they move on to the next house. This piece of metal is your best deterrent.” If he wasn’t in the security business, he realized, he might actually enjoy watching those rich weekenders, who were buying up Orient like it was one gigantic yard sale, get robbed of their obscenely expensive furniture, their ridiculous collections of art.

  His father had collected only one thing in his life, and that was rifles. Even when he was dying of lung cancer, leashed by a long thin tube to an oxygen tank, he carried two rifles around his property just waiting for a chance to use them. On those last days, as Adam held his father’s hand at his hospital bed, squee
zing it to distract him from the morbid ICU soundtrack of game-show applause and ventilating machines, his father had told him, “You keep my property and you keep those rifles. Don’t let anyone get to them.” Adam sold the property and every rifle but one. He needed the money a little more than he needed his dead father’s wishes met. But now he understood what his father had been trying to protect him from: when you let strangers in, Orient won’t be yours anymore, and where will you go with your slim talent and low ambition when the more extraordinary make your home into theirs?

  His cell phone rang. “Pruitt Securities, how can we protect you? . . . Yeah, I know. I know, don’t worry, I’m on it. I’ll be there. But we need to talk about money.” As he hung up, he fought through another wave of laziness and pulled his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. He opened the front door and walked around the bungalow. It was a cold, sunless day that brought out the blackness of the branches, a perfect day for a funeral, for sunglasses to hide dry eyes.

  Before he left, there was one more thing he had to do. He walked toward the shed in his backyard, catching the smell of the carcasses from the hunt even before he opened the padlocked door. His cell phone vibrated. It was her. The plant wanted water.

  The water might be toxic, you never knew, thanks to Bryan Muldoon’s success in blocking the county water main. Adam knew that, sooner or later, he would convince the wealthy, worried Orient homeowners to pay to have their wells and pools tested—the money that could make him extraordinary. He knew the one vulnerable spot in the fences of the rich: it was fear. Fear was viral, airborne, contagious. It opened doors for him. It allowed him to touch things that weren’t his.

  CHAPTER 23

  Before the eleven o’clock funeral mass, Lisa Muldoon performed a private ceremony on her family’s front lawn. Wearing a black wool dress and midnight blue stockings, she carried a bag of sunflower seeds up the driveway and stopped at a giant oak. The tree’s highest branches were gnarled by the fire, but its lowest branch still supported a Plexiglas bird feeder shaped like a translucent lighthouse. Lisa unhooked the feeder and poured in the seeds. She returned the feeder to its chain and stepped back to watch it buoy in the morning light. Her grandparents stood behind her, clutching a blanket.

  It didn’t take long for the birds to find the food. Perhaps they remembered it from past winters, when Theo kept it stocked as part of his chores. The finches were first, pecking down the oak and flitting on the feeder’s saucer perch. Female cardinals in their dreary roses and browns soon displaced them, until they too were frightened away by woodpeckers. On the ground, squirrels competed for fallen seeds, gnawing on the husks with their apelike fingers.

  Lisa watched for half an hour as the feeder became a cluster of whirling feathers, the same way that flies clustered on roadkill, the same way that, an hour from now, mourners would cluster around Lisa on the steps of the church, trying to hug her or whisper sympathies in her ear. She curled the top of the bag and turned, her lips quivering, her eyes purposely avoiding the blackened carcass of the house. Her grandmother wrapped the blanket around her, and they proceeded down the driveway past four piles of snow. The snowmen had dissolved from a spike in temperature. The Muldoon house was two days away from demolition.

  That morning, Beth sat at her kitchen table, performing her own remembrance of the dead. She flipped through Jeff Trader’s journal, trying to discern the reason Magdalena had been so adamant about getting it back. Most of the entries started out the same: “check boiler, pilot light, garbage lids, window locks, fire alarms, drainpipes, sterilize well with tablet, mow lawn, replace pool cover, install storm windows . . .” Variations depended upon the wealth of the tenant and the size of the house: “spray wasp nest in shed,” “let in Whirlpool repairman,” “sponge redwood dining room floor with Du Mur Lubricated Polish.” She scanned the first several lines and flicked to another page. Not for the first time, Beth missed the tenement apartments of Manhattan, how they crumbled around her in relentless decay, but as a renter it wasn’t her problem. In contrast, the houses of Orient were hungry, crib-sick babies in constant need of attention. How much effort went into maintaining those dilapidated shells.

  If Jeff had any dealings with the historical board, Beth couldn’t find them in the pages. Why had he warned Magdalena about OHB on his last visit? Was it that bleak warning alone that had caused her to change her will? Mike Gilburn was right. OHB lost more than it gained in Magdalena’s death. And now the head of that board was also dead, to be buried that afternoon under the eyes of its remaining members—Ted and Sarakit Herrig, George Morgensen, Max Griffin, Helen Floyd, Kelley Flanner, Archie Young. Since the death of the Muldoons, Beth had heard nothing further about the call for development rights. Talk of conservancy had disappeared like talk of mutant animals on Plum—a bigger storm had pushed those coastal clouds away.

  Beth found the page that listed her own address. She read the tasks that Jeff had done for her mother. “Rake leaves, clean pool filters, unclog gutters, change front door lock, sweep chimney and flue”—the list was instructive. No wonder the old creaker had been slowly falling apart in the six months she and Gavril had moved in: they had done none of these basic chores. But suddenly midparagraph, the list morphed into a different entry, the kind that spoke of human failings in need of very different repair. “$80,000 in savings, second divorce finalized, car insurance defaulted, condo brochures, hated by all, dependence on prescription painkillers, cosmetic-surgery costs on long-term payment plan, collection agency calls unreturned, sells Laurito’s sailboat.” At the bottom of the page, Jeff Trader had written a single word: yes.

  Beth jumped as she heard the mail drop through the slot and scatter in the hall. But her heart continued to skip as she reread the entry. Jeff Trader’s depiction of her mother was as accurate as it was unkind. She flipped through the book again, and in the middle of each list, the information mutated from odd jobs to secrets, just as Mills had said. The Drake home: “H unhappy, little revenue in home business, C doesn’t want children, C passed over as law partner, H + B affair, C football gambling addiction.” Jeff Trader hadn’t been snooping through Holly’s drawers for money. He had been snooping for secrets to record in his journal. At the bottom of the Drake page was the word yes.

  Beth located Magdalena’s page—“install grip bar in bathroom, restock firewood, order netting for hives, 83 with heart trouble, fight with B over initiative, concerned about price of farmhouse sale, hides jewelry in armoire from nurse’s son, suspicious of two city artists”—and at the bottom of her page was the damning word again: yes. She turned the pages haphazardly. She found the Floyds: “Five children, three live at home/help with farm work” and at the bottom no. The Muldoons: “B three affairs at Seaview, oldest son bad grades, daughter in college, paying full tuition, youngest takes pills for ADHD, P sees therapist, B’s security contracts flagging” and then no. The Herrigs: “S travel business near bankruptcy, second mortgage on home, T yearly earning $53,000, three adopted children, five credit cards at limit, T sells second car, divorce papers sent but shredded, PFarms targeting city buyers as last-ditch effort,” and at the bottom no. Luz Wilson and Nathan Crimp: “millionaires, pornography collection, no children, looking to buy more land, L writes $3000 checks to family in Trenton, N cashes $30,000 checks from family in Boston, no debt, drug problem, new speedboat,” and the word maybe. Arthur Cleaver was a blank page except for the word yes. Isaiah Goodman and Vince Donnelly: “openly gay, openly everything, I wants to move to Hamptons, V environmental fanatic, money troubles,” yes. Karen Norgen: “bitter about artists, low on money, cancerous lump benign, fight with Morgensen over bushes, passed over as board member,” maybe. Roe diCorcia: “corn crop failed, two seasons, gov farm subsidy denied, oldest child mental illness, possible incest, fight with B over water main, private meeting with superintendent,” and the word, as black as Jeff Trader’s laugh: yes.

  Beth went on reading, peering with Jeff through the doors of each home, whe
re owners’ secrets and sufferings were left out on counters or tucked quietly into drawers. Thanks to his pickle jar of keys, the caretaker had unlimited access to a world of hurt, and it would have hurt anyone he’d worked for if their secrets had been exposed. Beth felt certain that Jeff Trader had been killed over this cache of broken confidences. Had “yes” marked the people he had blackmailed? The people who could be blackmailed? The weakest and most desperate of Orient homeowners? Holly Drake had admitted having a final argument with Jeff Trader; perhaps he’d threatened her. How much had it been worth to Holly to keep her affair from her husband? And how many others had folded and given Jeff money in return for his silence? The last page of the book documented sums of money: $200, $150, $500, $2,000. Were those the prices of keeping quiet?

  She pictured Jeff Trader drowning, realizing as his mouth slipped under the water that he’d mistaken the trust of a man or woman who had mistaken his trust first. She thought of Tommy Muldoon, also being buried that afternoon. Mills had said that Tommy might have had the reckless intentions of a blackmailer. Had he too been murdered for trying to exploit the book’s contents? Or was his mere possession of the book a cause for arson? She pulled out a note tucked in the book, a piece of thick card stock decorated with a drawing of an oyster shell: “Orient’s real threat is its trust.”