Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Gavril?” she called. “Are you there?”

  She walked into the hallway and went down the steps. “Gavril?” No voice broke the silence. The sun was setting, and lurid pinks reflected on the painted walls. She reached the foyer and turned down the hall. “Is anyone there? Hello?”

  The living room was a bruising blue as night began to settle. Its lingering smells of dead flowers and dried whiskey were more potent in the darkness. Then she noticed that the two armchairs in the living room had traded places, the leather low-back switched with the recliner, both pointing in an awkward formation away from the couch. She couldn’t remember if they’d been that way fifteen minutes ago when she’d passed through the room to go upstairs. She blinked, as if her brain were suffering a bout of dyslexia that could be fixed by closing her eyes. She glanced at the front door and saw her purse hanging from the hall closet doorknob. “Gavril?” she called again. She headed down the foyer. Cold light bled from the bottom of the front door, meaning it was still ajar. She pushed her hand against it, and the bolt slipped into its lock.

  Out the front window, the lawn was empty.

  She grabbed her purse and looked through it as she stepped back into the living room. Nothing was missing, but she had left her purse in the kitchen. Beth stared at the chairs again, now certain that they hadn’t been arranged that way when she went upstairs. Nothing was actually wrong—the room was almost normal—but in that sliver of difference, that clock tick away from the correct time, panic started building in her hands and throat. Someone had been in here. Just a few minutes ago, while she was upstairs. Someone had broken into the house. She ran through the kitchen, certain that someone would reach out and grab her before she made it to the back door, to stab her or break her neck. She crossed the lawn, her arms thrashing, and opened the garage to a blast of rock music. Gavril was on his knees, a torch in his hand.

  “Gavril,” she said, panting. “Were you just in the house?”

  “What?” He turned off the music. “In the house? No, I have been working. I’m very busy, Beth. The collectors are coming tomorrow for Luz’s dinner.”

  “You weren’t just in the house?”

  “I told you I wasn’t.” He stretched the band of his mask around his neck.

  “Someone was just in the house,” she screamed. She stepped toward him on the plastic, and he put his hands out to catch her—no, not to catch her, to prevent her from coming any closer.

  “Stop. The tar is not dry. You will ruin it.”

  The urgency of running had been replaced with the affront of being stopped in place.

  “Gavril, someone was just in the house. You didn’t move the chairs in the living room?” Her heart pulsed, and her mouth was dry. She wanted to step toward him, to take his hands in hers, but the barricade of glistening tar mounds separated them. “I’m telling you, someone moved the furniture around.”

  Gavril tried to process the information. “Someone broke into the house when you were home to move the chairs in the living room?”

  Her fear was not so complete that there wasn’t room for spite. “Don’t make me sound crazy,” she snapped. “Someone was in our house, changing things.”

  He stared at her with concern. Hawaii lost three islands.

  “Beth, what you say makes no sense.”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense. I’m telling you what happened. The chairs are in different positions. Someone broke in and moved them. And put my purse in the hall. Someone has keys that they got from Jeff Trader’s jar. The same jar that held the keys to the Muldoons’ home.”

  Gavril stood up and wiped his fingers on a rag, just as Roe diCorcia had done.

  “What’s wrong with you? You are not acting like yourself. No one is out here to hurt you. Maybe you only think the furniture has changed. Are you sure you didn’t move them and forgot?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Why would someone break into a house to redecorate?” He waited for her answer with tolerant eyes, so patient that she wanted to punch them shut. “What do you tell police? Man redid my living room and left?”

  She realized, right then, that in a span of two months they had lost each other. It should have come as a harder blow than it did, simple and clear and sad. Maybe Gavril had already detected it. Maybe it had happened so slowly, like age, that she hadn’t noticed the damage. The changes had been so minor from day to day. How many moments could be removed from a marriage before it was no longer a marriage? How many nights could they spend apart until they were no longer a couple who shared the same bed? All she knew was that when she looked at her husband’s unshaven face, with its scalding birthmark and heavy eyelids, she no longer felt drawn to come any closer.

  “Did Luz tell you about her dinner tomorrow night with the collectors? She said you agreed to come at the funeral today. You cannot back out.”

  The lumps of tar, she saw now, had expanded into walls. Gavril’s work was a dead house, blackened and scorched, and it was in this dead house that he’d chosen to live day and night away from her. This was his own landscape of Orient, and he had placed himself happily in its frame. Maybe their marriage was reparable. Maybe they would save it after Gavril’s show when he had time to inspect the rubble. But right now Beth recognized that Gavril was not a person she could run to for support. One step forward and she would ruin what he had made.

  “I’m going to have the locks changed,” she said coldly. “Let me know if you want a set.”

  He called after her but she left the garage, slamming the door behind her. She returned to the living room and moved the chairs back to their correct positions. The house looked like it had never been touched. The intrusion had been so invasive it left no visible scar, only the subtlest readjustment, and because the house was peaceful, perfect, with not a single object broken, there was no use in calling the police. That was what frightened her most—the peace that the house took on, the violence of its many quiet rooms, darkening one by one as she went upstairs and pushed the dresser against the bedroom door.

  CHAPTER 25

  Mills’s body rebelled the way most teenage bodies do right before an important day: two huge pimples lined his upper lip, bright as LED lights, as if a plane might pass safely between their craters. They sprouted in the night amid his soft whiskers. Like most teens, Mills saw nothing but TWO PIMPLES when he studied himself in the mirror. He went to work applying finger pressure to their fractious borders, compressing the sides until white oil erupted from their centers. Afterward, he bathed his face in hot water and took a razor to his chin to scrape the black moss. He was still a terrible shaver three years into the ritual, which was less an art than a form of flagellation: Ouch, oww, Christ.

  Paul knocked on the bathroom door. “You all right in there?” Mills opened it, revealing a face full of gashes that seemed almost emergency room–worthy.

  Paul tried to teach him the art of shaving. “Run against the grain of the hair,” he said, mimicking a smooth arc with his finger up his neck. “It’s more about the motion. The smoother and quicker, the less chance of getting cut.” Mills tried for grace, but he caught the razor on his chin, sending a dribble of blood down his neck. Paul ripped bits of tissue to stanch it. He showed him how to pinch his nose to manage the hairs under the nostrils—another cut—and how to balance out the shaving cream at each sideburn to preserve their symmetry. When he was through, Mills’s right sideburn was two centimeters shorter than the left. But the worst was shaving over the zits: the razor dragged the broken skin, sending small shocks around his mouth.

  “I can’t do it,” he said, dropping the razor in the sink. “It fucking hurts.”

  Paul picked up the razor and returned it to his hands. “You have to finish. It’s going to look worse if you don’t.”

  Mills took a breath—he’d survived a month on the open road but could barely withstand a few seconds of grooming—and whisked the razor once, then twice, over the sores. He splashed water to remove the cream
, and the face in the mirror looked like it had been tagged by subway vandals. Below the sores, his gray front tooth appeared particularly nefarious. When he closed his mouth, he hid the tooth but emphasized the sores. Paul handed him a towel. “Take a shower, and then we’ll put a Band-Aid over it. We’ll give it time to heal.”

  “I can’t have a Band-Aid. Beth is painting my portrait today. I’m supposed to look like myself.”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  Paul clapped his shoulders, and they stood at the mirror, as if practicing for their own family portrait—two men of different ages with no physical likeness, yet bonded by a close, invisible connection. That was the beauty of America, Mills thought: everyone looked like they were from a different home planet.

  Mills had finally grown accustomed to Paul’s face without his mustache. Men had facial hair and women had makeup, which seemed a fair rationing of disguises. Mills had neither to hide the wounds on his face.

  “I’m taking the day off to paint too,” Paul said, stepping out of the bathroom when Mills took off his T-shirt. “I’m doing a winter scene of the Sound. Maybe Beth and I can put on an art show at Poquatuck together. Although I’m sure she’d never forgive me for suggesting that.”

  “She might.”

  “What? Forgive me? I’m afraid my idea of what constitutes art went out of style a few decades ago. What do they call the paintings I do? Craft? Therapy? A crime against good taste?”

  “They’ll look nice in the Seaview’s hotel rooms,” Mills said.

  Paul glanced at him. “Motel art.”

  Mills considered telling Paul what he and Beth had learned the day before, about Lisa and Adam and the possibility that they might be responsible for the fire. But Mills knew that neither he nor Paul could deliver that news to the police. It would look too much like an attempt to deflect blame. Detective Gilburn would be more inclined to listen if the information came from an objective source. Nevertheless, after he showered, he went down to the kitchen and told Paul that Beth had discovered a lead.

  “She thinks she’s found a connection in all of the deaths,” he said. “You know, the Muldoons and Magdalena and Jeff Trader.” Paul was buttoning himself into Mills’s favorite blue winter coat, one of several items he’d borrowed from Paul’s closet and had begun to consider his. Paul gathered his canvas and paint box, standing with the stooped posture of a man embarking on a fishing trip. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Mills said. “That all those deaths are related?”

  Paul tapped the refrigerator with his boot, staring down. “It might not be my place to say, but Beth should be careful about what she says out loud. Especially if it turns out those deaths are related.” He looked at Mills. “But what is my place is your involvement. I don’t want you getting more mixed up in this. You get caught digging around for suspects, asking a bunch of questions, it’s going to look like you’re hunting for trouble. You saw what happened with Sarakit at the church yesterday. It’s always too easy to blame the stranger. So for my sake, let’s just leave it to the police.”

  Mills nodded, and Paul covered his bald spot with a cap. He noticed Mills’s eyes on his coat. “We should get you a good winter coat like this, shouldn’t we? I’m sure you’re sick of wearing my hand-me-downs.” Paul lumbered down the hall and headed out the back door.

  When the morning light struck the parlor window, a yellow stain appeared on the glass. It was thicker and milkier than frost. Mills suspected a bird had flown into the glass in the night. When he opened the front door, he found broken shells sprinkled on the porch and another yellow splotch on the railing. He jumped down the steps and turned to the house. Six yellow yolk smears dotted the peeling façade. Paul’s house had been egged in the night—a sure sign of unwelcome, doubtless meant for him, confirmation that others besides the police and Sarakit Herrig suspected him of the crimes. Mills quickly filled a bucket with water and began to wash the egg splatters. Paul must not have noticed the vandalism, and Mills didn’t want him to find out, in case he withdrew his offer to let him stay indefinitely.

  He scoured the yolk on the ground floor, frozen in its runny descent, then carted out a ladder to reach the highest stain, just to the right of Paul’s bedroom window. Through the window, he saw the photographs he’d found in the box—Paul at prom; Paul and his dead brother, Patrick—stacked under the mug on the bureau, as if to flatten their curls. He wished he’d asked Beth to buy a picture frame to give as a birthday present. Mills glanced down the street, hoping the neighbors hadn’t noticed the stains. One open display of hostility could be all it took to prod others to add their voices, a chorus running down Youngs Road toward Main and from there spreading throughout the entire village.

  As he was returning the ladder to its storage space by the cellar doors, he heard a branch snap several yards away. When he looked up, he saw Lisa Muldoon stumbling across her lawn with a bag of birdseed at her chest. He watched as she filled the feeder and sat down on the single picnic bench that had been spared in the fire. Tomorrow the county demolition team would knock down the remains of her house.

  He slipped quietly toward her, studying the plain origami of her face. Grief had dissolved her youth, hollowing her cheeks and sharpening her features. He could see Tommy in her eyes, their sockets deep enough to hold dollar coins. When her cell phone rang, Mills was only ten feet away from her, stepping lightly to prevent the frozen grass from crunching underfoot. She checked the number and put the phone to her ear.

  “Why haven’t you been calling me back?” Belligerence mixed with anguish, the lowest tremors of a violin. “Can we meet right now? . . . Tell them to meet you later. . . . You’re just going to have to find the time. You don’t think I’m busy? You don’t think I’m worth a little rearrangement after what I’ve rearranged? . . . Fine, in an hour then. Noon . . . No, not your house. Somewhere easier. At the beach, right by the view of Bug Light . . . Why would that be an inconvenient spot? That’s our place. . . . No, you don’t be late. I don’t want to be treated this way. I used to accept it but I don’t anymore. . . . Say it. I want to hear you say it.” She hung up.

  Mills tried to reach the final oak tree on Paul’s lawn, six feet from where she sat, but his shoe caught a stick and she turned around at the noise. She eyed him darkly and sniffled. He raised his hand and said, so quietly it sounded exactly like what it was, a testing call between two strangers, hello.

  Lisa coughed. “The kid next door,” she murmured. The kid. They were roughly the same age; he might even be a little older, and he was years beyond Lisa Muldoon in life experience, or had been until the fire.

  “I’m Mills,” he said, standing still. He was surprised by how childish the sentence sounded. No one gave their own name voluntarily. Lisa Muldoon, potential killer, fought long strands of hair blowing against her cheeks. A mole dotted her temple like a fly frozen on her skin. She sat staring across the invisible property line that separated her land from Paul’s.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said. “You’re staying in Paul Benchley’s house. I heard you were here on the night of the fire.” Fire brought water, her blue eyes running, which she wiped with her sweatshirt sleeve. A cardinal pecked at the feeder, then flew off.

  “I was here that night,” he said, stepping toward her. She slid over so he could share the bench. He sat down, close to the edge so they wouldn’t touch. Lisa bundled her baggy sweatshirt against her stomach and slid her knees away from him, public bench style. “By the time we saw the flames there was nothing we could do.” He thought it smart to bury himself in we.

  She nodded and raised her hand, flattening it in the air, opening her fingers to filter her view of the house. “They were in their bedrooms. Except for Tommy. The police said they found him on the landing. I keep thinking of him there. That’s where he always stood. Yelling at Dad. Unwilling to go to bed or down for dinner. Listening when I was on the phone in my room. He stood on that landing the day I left for college, asking me with his eyes not to leave
him. Even before it happened, I always pictured him standing there.” Her chin quivered. “I’ve come here every day since I’ve been back. I try to think what the fire must have looked like from a distance. But I always end up seeing Tommy, standing on the landing, making his usual stance of protest. He was too young to know what he was even mad about.”

  She pushed her palm against her eyes and cried into it. The four members of her family were still real to her, so fresh they were not yet given to the ground. Mills realized he was having doubts about his own suspicions. There was no question that Lisa had lied to the police about being away at college, but did that necessarily mean she had murdered her entire family? He’d been so sure yesterday in Beth’s car, in the adrenaline of fitting the pieces together. But right now on the bench, a ruler’s worth of space between them, he worried that he’d jammed those pieces into place.

  “I didn’t know Tommy well,” Mills said, “but we were friendly. He was funny. And quick. And he talked a lot about you.” She wiped her nose and swayed like she had heard this song too many times.

  “People always tell you that when your family dies. They talked about you so much. They were so proud of you. Like it’s a consolation.”

  “But I mean it,” he said gently. “I remember he kept a picture of you on the desk in his bedroom. He really loved you. Kind of idolized you, in fact.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance, her brown hair spilling around her mouth like rivulets of syrup.

  “You were in his room?” she asked. “You went upstairs to his room?”

  Mills tucked his lips against his teeth, a contrite sting of culpability. She wasn’t asking that question lightly. But then he remembered: he’d already told the police he’d been in the house. He wasn’t admitting to anything he hadn’t already confessed.