Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Adam studied the young man trespassing on his property.

  “Hey, kid,” he yelled, pointing his cigarette at him. “You better think twice before walking around a stranger’s house. I don’t mind Beth, but you’re not known to me. If you don’t respect a fence, you’re likely to be stopped by something worse.”

  “I’m sorry, Adam, we’re leaving,” she said over her shoulder. Mills did his best to appear unfazed. They jogged to the car, and she started the ignition.

  “So Lisa Muldoon was with Adam Pruitt,” Beth said. “He always did like them young.”

  “Wasn’t Adam her father’s main competitor?” Mills asked, buckling his seat belt. “Maybe they were in it together. She killed the family she hated and he killed the man whose business he wanted. Jeff Trader could have found out what they were planning. He might have seen Lisa. He lived next door.”

  Beth remembered something Paul had said to her the first day she had gone over to pick Mills up, when the air was still warm with autumn and Jeff Trader was still the only dead body in Orient. Jeff had told Paul that there were some people in Orient who shouldn’t be there. He could have been referring to Lisa.

  As she drove, Mills stoked the fire of his new theory. “Don’t you see? It fits. Jeff Trader knew she was here, not away at college. They had to get rid of him before they went ahead with their plan. Maybe Jeff told Magdalena about Lisa being back. So she also had to be taken care of. Then it was only her family that was keeping them apart. No way they would have approved of Adam.”

  “So they did it for love?” she said skeptically. Was there some romantic failing inside of Beth that prevented her from seeing love as a motivation for murder?

  “Haven’t you ever heard of a kid killing her parents? And guess who knows how to set a fire that can’t be extinguished?” Mills said. “A firefighter.”

  They trailed behind a mud-splattered Chevy on Main Road until it turned north up a dirt road. Beth followed the pickup as it rumbled up an incline, setting their teeth on edge.

  “Where are you going?” Mills asked, steadying his hand on the dashboard as farmland slid past the windows, hot hay yellow in a frost-blistered field.

  “I want to ask Roe diCorcia a question. Maybe this time, you wait in the car.”

  Half a mile off Main Road, past a miracle of farmland that grew soil-depleting corn one year and soil-replenishing soybeans the next, bordered by razor wire and patrolled by Rottweilers that gleamed yellow or green for most of their starving summers, stood a white pine farmhouse that belonged to the diCorcia family. Beth had grown up frightened of the diCorcias, as all good children were taught to be. The family was the marrow of Orient legend: bitter and creepy and proud owners of an arsenal of shotguns that made no exception for the local field stray. The diCorcias, when spotted around the village, seemed happy to confirm their own mystique with gruff words and tightly squeezed faces—as if they were forever stepping on a blister—and with the rat-a-tat backfire of their truck.

  If reputations in Orient were built on a series of isolated social contests, the diCorcias had dropped out of the tournament altogether, preferring certain infamy to the constant scramble for status. Refusing to play, they opened themselves up to rumor. The note Jeff Trader had written in his journal—“possible incest”—had already circulated among Orient children for decades. Who did the diCorcias mate with if not each other? What self-respecting person would have them? Them, for the past twenty years, had meant Roe; his wife and adult daughter rarely stepped foot off their acres of cropland. DiCorcia females were as hard to spot as bobwhite quails, and a rare sighting was regarded with vituperative awe: Did you see what they were wearing? Dresses right out of the ’70s—the 1870s. Do they even have running water? I’m not sure they ever learned to read.

  These memories came back to Beth as she bounced the Nissan toward an oasis of hilltop spruces. Under their branches, the farmhouse magnified. It was as big as the Benchley mansion and just as decrepit, not from lack of use but through the unbroken inhabitance of diCorcias dating back a hundred years. Roe’s grandfather must have been more ostentatious—it was he who must have added the glint of colored Victorian glass to the diamond windows along the second floor, and planted grapevines that still climbed a wagon-wheel trellis—but such indulgences had since been bred out of the bloodline. The widow’s walk crowning the roof and the chains on the porch for a phantom swing were reminders of a time when independent corn farmers were viewed as more than soil grunts. Now their kind of poverty made for stunning scenery, the very sort of landscape the historical board hoped frantically to preserve. Roe diCorcia’s only adornment to the house was a large satellite dish clamped to the widow’s walk. The diCorcias were clinging to the twentieth century, not the nineteenth.

  Roe got out of his Chevy. Beth lowered her window as she slowed behind it, raising her hand through the crack, palm open, a white flag of peace. Roe slammed his door and glared as he wiped his fingers on a rag.

  “Stay put,” she said to Mills. She climbed out, struck by a hilltop view of flat yellow fields so bountiful she could hardly believe such undeveloped acreage still existed in Orient. Behind the house, the Sound foamed and the distant ferry to Connecticut was a flyspeck on raw, blue meat. Deer fled into the fields, frightened by the cars, their white hinds dirtied with manure and leaves.

  “What do you want?” Roe yelled. A denim coat hung over his camel hair jacket. A smear of dirt from the steering wheel striped his pants. Roe scooped up his hair and tied it back. “If you had something to say to me, you should have spoke your piece at the church. I don’t like people coming up here uninvited.” A stray lock of hair swayed between his eyes.

  “I know,” Beth replied. A gratuitous smile would have insulted him. If years of overgracious suburbanites hadn’t tamed Roe’s heart, her smile wasn’t likely to convert him. She stared again at the view. The hay covering the soil winked with icicles. If she owned this much land, she thought, she might keep people off it too. Roe snapped his fingers to bring her attention back to him. An old Rottweiler with hair-patched skin lay near the porch, its whole body panting in dehydration. Roe followed her eyes to the dog.

  “Been sick. Ate or drank something awful. All the dogs been sick lately. Could have been poisoned for all I know, by one of our upstanding neighbors.”

  “I just have a question for you, and then I’ll go.” This seemed to soften Roe a bit, enough that he leaned against the truck, chewing on his cheek.

  “I’m listening. Elizabeth, right? You’re Anthony’s daughter. He wasn’t a bad man. Not saying we was friends, but he knew how to keep to his business. He knew where everyone’s lines were.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about Magdalena Kiefer.”

  Roe’s face pitched back. A gulp traveled down his throat.

  “I thought you were here about OHB.” He laughed. “You eastern city people have your heads screwed on wrong. You keep walking forward but your eyes are facing back.” His fingers braced the tailgate. “Eastern people talk about saving this place. They’ll ruin it by trying to save it.” Roe kept saying eastern people like he lived in the west, like the city was somewhere beyond his view of the Atlantic.

  “Magdalena was part of OHB too.”

  “Yeah, she was,” Roe admitted. “And Lena was the only decent thing about it. She didn’t think helping preserve the land had anything to do with taking away my rights. I got a right to say what gets built on my property. I got a right to water my crops from the county grid. I pay my taxes. You eastern people and your postcard reality. It ain’t a place if it’s frozen in time. Well, you’ll see. You’ll see just what you get for stealing me of my means.”

  “Mr. diCorcia,” Beth said pleasantly. “I was born here too. We aren’t from different places. I’m not trying to steal anything from you.”

  Roe leaned farther back, his entire body weight held by his grip on the truck.

  “You used to be from around here. You ain
’t no more. You left. And when you come back from a place like that, you’re changed. That city over there is where you belong.” He pointed his chin toward the Sound, another wrong direction. “I know what kind of friends you brought back with you. I see ’em, clear as day. They think because they have money they can turn Orient into a resort. But I live out here, at least, I do today. Maybe not much longer. I might have to parcel out a few of these prize acres you and your friends drive past like you’re on vacation. Like I grow these crops for scenery so you can gaze at them from your speedboats and sports cars. No, young lady, you ain’t from here. You may live here, and you may own it all soon. But this ain’t your place.”

  “I get why you don’t like OHB,” she sputtered. “I get why you were angry at Bryan Muldoon for blocking the water main—”

  “Angry?” Roe found her choice of words humorous. “That man ruined me for the past two seasons of corn. All I could grow was sorghum because I couldn’t irrigate enough with my wells, even with the pumpers I had to pay out of my own pocket to haul in. Angry at Bryan? No, I wasn’t angry. I was almost bankrupt. Angry doesn’t begin to fix how I felt about that arrogant coward who blocked my lifeline.”

  “What about Miss Kiefer? Was she angry? You told my mother the night of the town meeting that Magdalena would have been upset to have her name on that new initiative. I was hoping you could tell me why.”

  “Lena understood that I work the land for a living. She valued those of us who are fighting to make ends meet. She would never have backed an initiative that offered a few farmers down on their luck some hush money to sell off their development rights just so they could eat for another year and the whole time be robbed of what their land is worth. First Bryan took away our water, and, when that broke us, he tried to give us money for our development rights. You take that away too, you’re basically putting us out of business. You’re saying no to infrastructure we need to stay afloat. Without that, all these fields will have to be broken up into little plots so you eastern city people can come in and build your dream chalets.”

  Roe let go of the truck and threw his hands up, as if he were lecturing an inner-city student. “You don’t get it. Lena did. She would have fought that piece of shit scam, not put her name on it. Seems maybe someone got rid of her before she could. It embarrasses me that other farmers, like the Floyds, are sitting ducks on that board, blinded by a second in the spotlight. They ought to know better than to listen to Bryan. Guess who makes money if the land gets carved up and more rich folks like your friends move here? Small home owners like Bryan, that’s who, ’cause their property value increases. A security company like Muldoon. It gets a wave of new business. Real estate agencies, like the one owned by that Oriental woman. She gets a commission on every sale. I tell you, OHB stinks like manure, ’cause that’s what it is.”

  Jeff Trader had tried to warn Magdalena about OHB on his last visit. And now Roe was pointing blame at OHB too, hinting that the board had led to her death. Had Jeff Trader known that OHB was going to go behind Magdalena’s back on the initiative? Was Jeff silenced before he could speak? If that’s what happened, why kill Bryan? He was the initiative’s main proponent. It occurred to Beth that there might be more than one murderer. Jeff and Magdalena might have been killed by someone connected to OHB, and Bryan might have been killed by a desperate farmer who needed to stop him before the trust got under way.

  “Who do you think killed the Muldoons?” she asked bluntly.

  Roe looked around, at the white-scabbed spruces, at the wagon-wheel trellis, at the brown American flag blowing over the porch steps and his dying dog.

  “Could have been anyone with a conscience. You? Me? The land?” Roe’s eyes were wide, his forehead a Sahara of rolling dunes. “The land he thought he was saving? Maybe the community killed him before he could destroy it. Sometimes God works in not-so-mysterious ways, young lady. And remember, you reap what you sow. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which sown, grows up and becomes greater than all of the herbs, and puts out its branches, and is bigger than the man who planted it. And it will kill that man who is nothing but a speck under its shade if he don’t respect it. You want to know who killed Bryan? Look around you. A man who is a thief in the night will be burnt by the sun come morning. Until then, I’ve got work to do—”

  The farm door burst open, and a lean, big-boned woman ran from the darkness toward the cars. Her loose cornflower dress was splattered in grease, her bare feet red with rashes. Her eyes were set close at the bridge of her nose, like a pair of tightly wrapped cocoons, and her open mouth was a pink bucket of gums. It hung open naturally, as if in constant pain or joy. She ran in a distracted, faraway manner, a pair of binoculars swinging against her chest.

  “Daddy,” the woman screamed. Her hair was as blond as corn silk. An old woman with pinned silver hair, Roe’s wife, peered out from the doorframe.

  “Ray Ann,” Roe drawled. “You get back inside. You need to put your shoes on. Shoes on.” Ray Ann launched herself into her father’s chest, and he put his arm around her to hold her in his warmth. The young woman was clearly disabled; Beth couldn’t name the syndrome, but it seemed chromosomal, some genetic defect. Ray Ann might be Beth’s age, born in Orient around the same time, and her disability was the reason she rarely left the farm in childhood—not because she couldn’t make the trip, but because Beth and her friends would have shown her no mercy. Roe stared at Beth as he removed the binoculars from around his daughter’s neck.

  “Let me show you what you have brought me,” he said. Roe tested the binoculars and rotated their lenses until they caught a vision to the east. He handed them to Beth and pointed. “Look over there. Right beyond that sap maple.”

  She took the binoculars. Through them, she saw a large farmhouse covered in plastic tarps. Its lawn was trenched in giant mud holes, and through a clear sheet of plastic she saw Nathan Crimp in the nude, gyrating on a Persian rug, a bowl of red berries in his hands. An imported white man, with an impressive lack of body hair, eating imported fruit on an imported rug.

  “Those are my new neighbors to the left. On the right I’ve got Arthur Cleaver and his Greek temple of sin, with a giant flat screen of stocks and a paddle wheel boat that don’t do nothing but serve as a party favor. I’m being squeezed on both sides by people who can sell their development rights because they can move whenever they feel like it. What’s it to them? There’s a blight on this land, but it ain’t from Plum. It’s from a different island altogether, and I bet you lived there high and pretty. Now if you don’t mind.”

  Beth returned to her car. Mills had been listening through a crack in the window. She put the Nissan in reverse and headed down the thin dirt trail. The white farmhouse disappeared in her rearview mirror, replaced by a wash of hay fields.

  “Did you catch all that?” she asked.

  “Most of it,” Mills said. “But I still think we’re right about Lisa and Adam. Why did you bother drilling him like that?”

  “Because of what Jeff told Magdalena about OHB. Adam and Lisa aren’t on the board. That part doesn’t fit your theory. Jeff warned her for a reason. I wanted to see if Roe knew what that reason was.”

  “Jeff was a drunk,” he replied. “Roe diCorcia has a motive to kill the Muldoons, and clearly it wouldn’t be a strain on his conscience. But it doesn’t change the fact that Lisa lied about being at college.”

  “I know it doesn’t.”

  “So you’re going to tell the detective?” Mills stared at her for a minute, as if he could override her brain with sheer hope. When had Mills decided that the police were a force of good, to be apprised at every turn?

  “Why does it make such a difference to you?” she asked.

  He rubbed his palms on his thighs. “I might stay here for a while,” he said. “And it’s best if the murders get cleared up quickly. So you’ll tell the detective?”

  “Yes,” she promised. “But I’ll respect Lisa enough not to make accusations on the
day she buried her family. We can talk it over tomorrow when you come to my house.”

  His lips bent. “I’m coming over tomorrow?”

  “I want to paint your portrait,” she said.

  Mills checked his face in the side mirror, as if to see how it would appear on a flat surface. “Okay. But I have a favor to ask in return.”

  “Name it.”

  “I need you to get that cake for me for Paul’s birthday. I want to surprise him. Would you get one for me from the bakery in Greenport? If you pick it up tomorrow, I’ll hide it in the back of our refrigerator.”

  “Our refrigerator?”

  “Paul’s.” Mills blushed, and Beth was sorry that she had corrected him. “His refrigerator.”

  After Beth dropped Mills off, she allowed her mind to run with color, with oil paints that had long gone dry in her studio yet wettened instantly when she imagined the blank canvas. The thought of painting eased her fears, and the excitement of her one small decision emboldened her about other uncertainties: the mass inside her, her growing disconnection from Gavril. She had buried herself too long in the comfort of indecision. As she pulled into her driveway, she felt for the first time in many months like a woman with a direction. Standing still meant going nowhere. A place was made by moving toward it.

  The lights were on in the garage, and the house itself was empty. She dropped her purse on the kitchen table and hurried up to the spare bedroom to open the boxes and set a fresh canvas on the easel. As she dug through the dusty tins of paint tubes, a light pain shot through her stomach. Beth froze in place. Another tremor came, hot and thin as a wire. She waited for further activity. One final needle passed through her and sunk back into her organs like an unsuccessful mutiny. There was no more. Tomorrow she would call the doctor in Greenport, or maybe Planned Parenthood on Bleecker Street. She would make an appointment and keep to her decision, just as she would paint Mills tomorrow and see the work to completion, whether it was any good or not. As she stood there, she heard footsteps downstairs in the living room, then the hushed, cushioned sound of objects being moved. A door slammed.