Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “But it’s her closet, isn’t it? She’s the owner of this house. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to think she might put it there, unaware that you were regularly hiding mail behind her old winter coats.”

  Beth smirked. And to think Mike had come to her door only a week ago in the guise of friendship asking for her help. Maybe Roe diCorcia was right—once she moved away, she was no longer a local, no longer someone to be trusted.

  “Do we even know if that was the gas can used in the fire?” she asked. “Maybe it’s unrelated. It’s not like it’s covered in blood.”

  “Who else visited you in the last thirty-seven hours?”

  “Luz Wilson,” she said. She recalled the black gloves Luz wore to the funeral and the L of her diamond earring.

  Gavril tapped his finger on the coffee table. “Luz was here two days ago. She wasn’t here yesterday or today. But that boy was.”

  “Which boy?” Mike’s eyes brightened.

  “No,” Beth droned. “He didn’t have a gas can either. I saw him when he came in. He’d just come from the beach, and he doesn’t drive a car, so there’s no way he could have hidden it.”

  “Which boy?” Mike asked again.

  Gavril continued tapping. “That foster kid who’s staying in the house next to the Muldoons.”

  “Would you be quiet?” she snapped. Gavril had never liked Mills, but she couldn’t believe he would sacrifice the boy to the police just to spite her. Or could Gavril actually believe that he was saving her? After all, he thought Mills was the one poisoning her mind. Whatever his reasoning, she was stung.

  “Mills Chevern was in your home?” It worried her that Mike didn’t bother to write down his name.

  “I asked him to come over so I could paint him. He was doing me a favor. But he didn’t have a gas can. He had nothing to do with the fire, and he was never near that closet.”

  “He could have hidden it outside and taken the opportunity to stash it there when you left the room,” Mike said. “Or, like you said, he might have had Jeff’s keys.”

  It suddenly struck Beth: she was betraying her only friend, had betrayed him already. Without meaning to, she had connected him to the fire. She closed her eyes and clutched the fabric of the couch. There was no way to prevent an entire village from blaming the scapegoat it had already selected. All she could do was watch the evidence mount.

  “He was with me the day Magdalena died. And I’m guessing he has an alibi for Jeff Trader’s death as well.”

  “Presuming those are related.”

  “And wasn’t he with Paul Benchley when the fire started? He didn’t do it, Mike. Although that would make your job easy, wouldn’t it? Blame the one kid that everyone out here can afford to lose.”

  Mike watched her with an expired smile.

  “Why do you defend him?” Gavril snarled. “Even before you defend me.”

  She ignored her husband, leaning over her knees.

  “I found that journal I told you about. Jeff Trader was keeping notes on the secrets of the people he worked for. There’s more than enough in there to give one of them a motive. I don’t think Jeff was above blackmail. And you should know that Bryan Muldoon had a number of affairs, including one with Holly Drake.” She was betraying Holly now too, but she was doing it to save Mills. “They used to meet at the Seaview.”

  Mike hummed. “I’ll take that into consideration. You can produce this journal tonight?”

  She nodded. “You should also know that Lisa Muldoon wasn’t away at college when her family died. I saw her in Orient two weeks before the fire. She’s been here the whole time, not up in Buffalo in her dorm room. I think she might have been seeing Adam Pruitt. Have you even bothered to check her alibi?”

  Mike crossed his legs. His cheeks blushed at the oversight. Gavril glared at her in disbelief. She hadn’t spent the past weeks deliberating whether to have their child. She’d been snooping through the personal affairs of her neighbors. Confusion was no longer an excuse for the distance between them.

  “There are a lot of people out here who had a better motive to kill any of these people than a boy who happened to come to Orient to help out a friend. Why aren’t you thinking about that? You asked me to help you because you couldn’t figure these things out on your own. So there you go. I’m helping you.”

  “And you?” Mike asked, his patience with her finally breaking. “Did you have a motive? It seems awfully convenient that you’ve acquired all this evidence against everyone else in town. I worry about a witness who points in every direction except one.”

  “Are you serious?” she asked, laughing angrily. “Gavril and I were together in bed on the night of the fire.” She was lying. They hadn’t been together. They’d been sleeping in separate beds, under separate roofs. Beth opened her hand on the cushion for Gavril to hold. He didn’t take it.

  “That is right,” Gavril said. “We were together all night.”

  “And you, Mr. Catargi? You don’t have any reason for ill will toward the Muldoons? Just out of curiosity.”

  Gavril glanced at Beth, openmouthed, as if she had brought this accuser to sit across from him in their living room.

  “You ask me this in my home?” he balked. “I don’t know the people out here. I don’t want to know them. I am a peaceful citizen, Detective, and I have as much right to be here as you do. You think because you are born here you have a right to ask me who I like and don’t like, and call my wife by her first name but me by my second?”

  Mike slipped his notebook in his shirt pocket.

  “It’s late. Thank you for your cooperation. We’ve detected fingerprints on the canister, so we’re hoping we can trace them to their owner. If, as you say, it was the can used at the fire.” Mike stood. “We may need to take both of your prints if we don’t get a hit in the system. Of course, that’s just procedure. And I might have a few follow-up questions on your theories, Beth. In the meantime, I’ll take that journal.”

  Beth went upstairs and retrieved it from her drawer. She handed it to Mike in the foyer, expecting an apology, but he only thanked her in a distant voice, refusing to meet her eyes. He carried it out along with the bag of mail, as if he were doing her the favor of tossing it in the trash.

  She locked the front door and returned to the living room. Wind blew across her arms, and she knew that the draft ran from the back door, which had been left open. Gavril had gone out to the garage and had taken the printout of their baby with him. Beth was left alone with her decisions.

  CHAPTER 28

  The bullet that killed him was manufactured on his birthday. Not his most recent one, but three years before, in an ammunition factory in Sedalia, Missouri. The bullet was one of five thousand .35 Rem round-nosed slugs to roll off the assembly line that day, at the very moment he was racing to celebrate with a twelve-pack of Miller in his arms and his head stinging in the cold from a fresh haircut. The bullet was lead-bellied and dipped in a coat of polished Utah copper. His friends surprised him with a barbecue even though the temperature neared freezing after sunset, and he danced to the radio just to keep his feet from going numb. The bullet was boxed alongside nineteen other duplicate .35 Rem round-nose slugs and plastic-wrapped on a pallet in a bulk shipment of five hundred boxes. He spent the next two days trying to shake his birthday hangover, or maybe it was the side effects of Toby’s special burger recipe. As he was between jobs, he decided to wash his car. The sun camouflaged the day’s brutal cold, and his hands practically icicled when he went to scrub the hood with soap. He called his girlfriend to warm his hands on her, and the first thing she told him when she came over was that a bird had taken a giant crap on his car. He told her he was going to save up for a Maserati when he got a decent job. The bullet remained in warehouse storage for ten days, before being placed on a flatbed semi headed for an ammunition wholesaler in Chattanooga. It sat in storage for another ten months, in which time he found a job as an assistant manager at a gas station that doubled as a convenien
ce store. As gas prices rose, his salary kept sinking, like the counter on one of the pumps going in reverse, so he padded his income by taking a second job fixing televisions and stereo equipment at a family-run repair shop. He broke up with his girlfriend, and screwed around with a waitress at Dizmo’s Tavern, and if it was late he’d stop by his ex-girlfriend’s apartment but was careful to leave before breakfast. The bullet was sent in a shipment to a store in Mobile, Alabama, but by the time the pallet arrived, the store had been taken over by a conglomerate that had its own long-contract vendors, and the entire shipment was returned to the wholesaler in Chattanooga. It lingered in the warehouse for another seven months. He couldn’t stand his conversations with the old man. That’s what it came down to. He liked the work, liked wiring and troubleshooting and watching a machine that did nothing when you pressed its buttons suddenly come alive and accept DVDs after a few jiggers with a screwdriver. But the old man WOULD NOT SHUT UP about finding Jesus. The old man had already found Jesus, but he kept refinding him. He saw Jesus everywhere. In the glass of a television set. In the eyes of children who came into the shop with their VCR-despairing parents. And—this was the clincher—in the marble rye of his sandwich. Not a bad man. He gave him a decent Christmas bonus and Thursday afternoons off, but he just couldn’t take another word about Jesus. Those were the unemployed, bowls-of-change months, but they were lively, slow-smoking months, and he came alive in the Orient woods and volunteered for the local fire department and helped his neighbors, especially after one of them had hip-replacement surgery and needed to be carried twice a day down and up her steps. When his father died, he buried him, actually asked the gravedigger if he could help shovel the plot. The shipment was reduced in price, slashed as back stock, but the copper prevented rust. In a managerial barter for a cache of semiautomatics, it was traded to a small regional wholesaler in Wheeling, West Virginia, where it sat for another year and a half in a warehouse. He needed money and sold his father’s house and three acres to a neighbor, probably for less than it was worth, but it was cash up front, more than he’d ever touched, and he could use the revenue to start his own business. He had a new girlfriend, whom he might decide to stick with. She pissed him off sometimes with her neediness, but that was just the result of letting someone take up space in your brain. The wholesaler divided up the shipment and sent eighty boxes to a gun store in Riverhead, Long Island. The bullet that killed him sat in a locked cabinet for two weeks under the display case. It seemed to him as if the spaces in his life were finally filling with glue. It had been hard, striking out alone, learning the trade and faking what he hadn’t yet learned, drumming up clients, and he had to do a few things that he wasn’t proud of, to take and make money by suspect means, but that was the price of getting older. It was worth it to pick up a six-pack of Miller Lite and drink with his friends around their basement pool tables. They sharpened their arrows and greased their crossbows and hunted deer in the woods. Still he did wonder about his luck. If he caught himself on a good day, right after a shave or a haircut, he could seduce himself in the bathroom mirror. And only a few times did he look in the mirror and think he might be evil. Seventeen boxes of .35 Rem bullets had been sold before the box containing the bullet was added to the discount rack at the gun store in Riverhead. It remained on the shelf for two days before the box was purchased for $6.99 and driven in the trunk of a car to Orient. He knew he had to wait out the heat just a bit longer and then he’d be set. Just a little while longer, and then the heat would give way to ice, easy gliding. The glue around the pieces of his life was hardening, becoming a solid wall, and he broke other walls by putting bad things in deliberate spots. He made his way to the time and place of his secret meeting. The waves crashed, and when he heard the sound of feet approaching, he stepped from behind an oak tree and said, “What took you so long?” The rifle blocked the face, and he only had time to lift his hands before the blast, like the entire world was hitting turbulence, his throat a cockpit of pilots trying to radio distress, his life two plane wings breaking off and falling into the ocean. The bullet found him and, as it made its way through his chest, the sound brought gulls to scatter, echoing out until they separated and became part of the reverberation in the sky. This is how easily Adam went.

  CHAPTER 29

  Mills placed seven candles in the cake around the frosted lighthouse, one candle for each year after forty. He lit the wicks. Seven reedy streams of smoke rose from the cake, and he hurried to the doorway of the dining room, checking to make sure that Paul was still working on his laptop at the table. They hadn’t said a word to each other all morning. He flicked the light switch on the wall, heard Paul mutter “What the?” into the darkness, and returned to the counter, gathering the cake in his hands. He walked slowly through the rooms, allowing the glow to jaundice the woodwork and announce his entrance. He started to sing.

  Mills rounded the doorway, his eyes temporarily blinded by the conflation of sugar and fire. Dear Pa-aul . . . Paul sprung from his chair, standing behind the table, his face eradicated by the bobbing flames, but Mills imagined a smile there, fingers spread against his chest, a wish forming behind his lips, lungs preparing supplemental storage facilities to blow at their full capacity. He set the cake on the table, one of the candles leaning into the lighthouse and pouring wax on its beacon . . . to you. Mills put a fist to his mouth and faked a muffled stadium roar.

  Paul looked at him, lips worming, his eyes squinting in the light. It wasn’t exactly a stellar reaction, the usual oohing at the sight of his own name in cursive icing, emphasized by an exclamation point (that mark seemed so unlike Beth, making “Happy birthday Paul” read like a hysterical demand: you will be happy!). Paul missed all his cues: the flurried attempt to hug the deliverer, the disbelief that someone actually remembered the date, the admiration in the choice of the lighthouse as a decorative element on the frosting. Perhaps he was distracted by the sound of bulldozers backing up next door, the pulverized hash of metal and wood being consumed by a shovel and disgorged into a Dumpster. The Muldoon house was being demolished. The county team had been at it all morning.

  “But—” Paul started. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his shirt.

  “Go on,” Mills said. “Make a wish and blow them out.”

  “But what is this?”

  What part of Happy birthday Paul! was confusing him?

  “Uh . . . it’s a cake. For your birthday. November 3, 1966. It’s chocolate mud.”

  Paul leaned over his computer to check the date. “Is that today?” he said. “I thought we were still in October.” He laughed at his own confusion. Glassware and china clinked from the reverberation of the backhoe scooping up a nest of iron plumbing next door.

  “It became November three days ago. I guess you didn’t notice because we had no Halloween.” The holiday had been canceled after the fire, postponed until a year when it was safe to allow children dressed as monsters to travel to once-familiar doors.

  “Oh, God, you’re right. But how did you know it was my birthday?” Paul seemed to turn pale over the throbbing candles, as if the frosting spelled out another year of loneliness and occupational frustration to add to all the others in his life.

  “I found your birth certificate.”

  Paul fit his glasses on his nose. “Ah, the junk in the back ratted me out. I haven’t celebrated my birthday in so long. It’s something I usually avoid and only remember after it’s passed. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble. Is that a lighthouse?” Paul examined the red-and-white pole rising from the chocolate. His name swirled under it.

  Mills nodded. “I wanted to. I wish I could have gotten you a gift—a case of brushes for your landscapes or a frame for the picture of you and your brother. Maybe even one of those brass desk bells for Seaview.” Mills whipped a knife from his back pocket. He held it out, its corrugated blade gathering small spikes of birthday fire.

  “Patrick,” Paul said quietly. “How did you manage to get one
with a lighthouse?” He looked up at him worryingly. Mills knew he must be wondering where he’d gotten the money for the cake.

  “Beth picked it up for me, in exchange for posing for her yesterday. The lighthouse is perfect, right? Aren’t you going to blow?”

  “Thank you,” he said, blushing. “That was very kind. I really didn’t expect it.” He held his sweater against his chest as he bent forward. “Christ, how old does this make me?”

  “You’re forty-seven.”

  “That might be the saddest number on earth.”

  Paul took a last gasp of air, his lips contorted, his eyes wide like a deer’s on the road, as if the weight of something awful were speeding toward him. Mills suddenly wondered if he’d done the right thing. As a young person he had assumed birthdays to be universally positive occasions. He hadn’t taken into account that older men might prefer to close the windows and let them blow by, checking for damage only in their aftermath.

  “I’m sorry. I thought it would make you happy.”

  Paul’s mouth fidgeted. He was not a successful liar. Whatever had been bothering him continued its affliction, and the flames remained on their wicks.

  “I am happy,” he stammered. “It’s just . . . I was going to bring something up, but it doesn’t seem like the right time anymore, so—”

  “What is it? Just tell me.” A lump grew in Mills’s throat. Paul pulled the blue winter coat off the back of his chair, the one Mills liked to borrow. Paul shoved his hand in its front pocket and withdrew a rolled-up plastic Baggie, which Mills immediately recognized as the pot he’d removed from Tommy’s safe. The pebble in his throat swelled to a tennis ball. In his excitement over finding the journal, he’d forgotten to dispose of Tommy’s stash. Paul watched his response with dark eyes.

  “Paul,” he said, begging, “it isn’t mine.” The same words every human being since the creation of recreational drugs has uttered whenever illegal substances were found in their possession. The ring of implausibility wasn’t diminished by the fact that the pot actually wasn’t his, and certainly not by the fact that Mills couldn’t reveal how he’d acquired it—stealing it from a broken safe at a crime scene. He queasily felt the guilt of Tommy’s drug use slide onto him, like a hitchhiker on a road near a state prison.