“I hope so,” she said. “Could you come over today and help me lug some furniture over from Magdalena’s? It’s the pieces she left me in her will.”
“Sure,” he said. “I feel like I can go outside again. I feel like I’m finally not the one.” He paused before he asked his question. “Did you tell Gavril about the baby?”
Gavril was a light in the garage, a faint yellow smudge in the backyard. The Russians had arrived and departed that morning in their SUV, avoiding the house in their passage to and from the studio, the white shine of their faces as cold and guarded as winter metal. Throughout the forty-minute visit, the bodyguards had stood by the pool, smoking. No one had asked to see the two eyes, a mouth, and a forehead she’d left drying on the canvas in her upstairs bedroom. Beth felt, not for the first time, that she was always gestating, always in between, unfinished. She had phoned her gynecologist that morning to schedule a second appointment.
“Gavril and I are having problems.”
“I’m sorry,” Mills said. “Maybe you just need time together. When they catch Adam, everything will calm down. Do you think they’ll find him soon?”
She thought of Jeff Trader warning Magdalena about OHB, about his fear that something horrible might happen to him. And something horrible had happened to him. She remembered his body splayed across the beach by the harbor, and Adam driving his truck to the scene, and the shock on his face as he watched Jeff covered by a police blanket.
“I hope so,” she replied. All day she had been saying that—I hope so—like an automatic reply to anyone who sent her a message.
The police found Adam’s truck parked in the ferry lot. The ferry’s grainy surveillance video didn’t extend to the edge of the lot where the truck was parked, but the tollbooth operator thought she remembered the truck in the corner for at least a day. Adam could have purchased a passenger ticket to Connecticut, or he could have jumped the fence and scurried onto the restricted ferry to Plum, but further surveillance checks didn’t pick up anyone matching his description on either boat. Adam Pruitt was a person of interest. But Orient homeowners who had relied on Pruitt Securities to guard their homes were left to wonder whether those alarms provided protection or were as fraudulent as the man they had led through their homes, pointing out their most vulnerable spots.
Gunshots rang out from the diCorcia farm that morning. Roe diCorcia put a bullet in the brain of four of his six Rottweilers, relieving them of the sickness that had left them paralyzed in the frost. He buried them in his backyard field, and it was rumored that Adam Pruitt might have poisoned them, had put toxic chemicals in the wells he was hoping to test. No one dared to drink from their taps, and many wished they had never supported Bryan Muldoon’s outrageous campaign to cut Orient off from the safety of the county water main. The green ice on the road glowed with chemical seepage, and children ran across it into their parents’ idling minivans: Hurry, run, get in. The sound of house beams resettling in the late afternoon could be Adam, breaking in, waiting behind the sour darkness of a door. A flash in the trees could be Adam, who knew the woods better than anyone. Where was Adam Pruitt to confess to the crimes against his neighbors? They saw him in the deer that ran along the road, their eyes marble-red in the winter sunlight; in the hands plucking Pruitt Securities signs from lawns; in the Dumpsters containing the remains of the Muldoon house, carted across the causeway to the dump. Only Lisa Muldoon could provide clues to the whereabouts of her boyfriend. A few of Adam’s hunting buddies stepped forward to confirm that Adam and Lisa had been secretly dating. To some, the question wasn’t whether Adam Pruitt was guilty, it was whether Lisa had been complicit in the murder of her family. Many residents felt she should sit in a Southold jail cell until she confessed.
Beth’s doorbell rang. An insistent knocking followed. It couldn’t be Mills; he would have come around back. Perhaps it was Yakov Dombrovski, deciding to take a tour of her studio after all. Beth turned the locks and opened the door to find Karen Norgen standing on the porch, her lantern-shaped face rising in buttery swells, as if her soft, padded cheeks were protection for the sharpness of her eyes. In her hand was a Ziploc bag of brownies, and from her shoulder hung a shopping bag with more.
“Hello,” Karen said meekly. She gazed past Beth, as if inspecting the interior for evidence of recent renovations that hadn’t been approved by the historical board. She handed Beth the bag of brownies, her smile frozen, as if by a pause button.
“I wanted to apologize,” Karen finally said. “I haven’t meant to give you the cold shoulder lately.” Beth wasn’t aware that Karen had been giving her the cold shoulder. “It’s just that with everything that’s gone on, with those rumors about Magdalena’s death you started, and then with news of that awful fight with Pam just before the fire, not to mention the troubles the village has had with your mother over the years . . . well, I guess I was a bit angry at you.” Karen glanced at Beth and mistook her baffled expression for understanding. “And the way you’ve been carrying on with that young man staying at Paul’s place. I’m not too proud to say I might have been wrong about him. I was sure he was responsible, as many of us were. I mean, all the trouble started right when he showed up. How were we to know that Adam was behind it all?” Karen peered across the street, as if to make sure Adam Pruitt wasn’t standing in the driveway aiming his crossbow at her. She shivered. “Every time I leave my house I’m frightened I’ll see him. Why can’t the police just find him, so we can all breathe easier?”
Beth nodded. She thought of Jeff’s notes on Karen: bitter about the artists moving into Orient, low on money, passed over for a seat on the board. How would those problems be fixed with Adam’s arrest?
“Pam was one of my nearest-and-dearests,” Karen said. “She was the one woman in Orient who brought everyone together, with her picnics and volunteer work. Without her, we’ve all been a bit”—she searched for the word—“estranged. But I know the best way to pay tribute to Pam is to bring the community back together. So, these brownies.” Karen nodded toward the bag. “A small token from me, to try to heal what’s kept everyone apart.”
Beth mustered the smile that Karen seemed hungry for. “Thank you,” she said.
“I’ve been taking goodies around to all the houses. Everyone’s so shaken up. I was just at the Drakes’ and, you know, they had a Pruitt alarm installed and they’re terrified that Adam knows the pass code.”
Beth thought of Holly and how this new worry might distract her from her sorrow in losing Bryan—or in the fact that neither she nor her husband had an alibi for the fire. There was comfort all around in Adam’s guilt.
“Your friend was there,” Karen said. “Your pretty black friend, talking to Cole.”
“Luz?”
Karen smiled. “Oh, it’s none of my business.”
“Why would she be at Cole’s house?”
“I shouldn’t say. They were in the den. I shouldn’t have been listening.” Karen Norgen was a life-form that survived on gossip. To ask Karen not to repeat what she had heard was like asking a dog not to eat. Her resistance lasted all of twenty seconds. “I might have caught the word divorce. But you didn’t hear that from me.” She blushed, enjoying the fleeting warmth it brought her.
“That can’t be right,” Beth said. She couldn’t imagine Luz and Nathan separating. They depended upon each other. They were happy—selfish and impetuous, but happy. They were the kind of couple who saved each other from incalculable pools of self-doubt. Did Gavril save her that way? Having a partner was supposed to offer some kind of assurance that one met the basest criteria of a human being. To completely undress in front of another person was to expose oneself as a creature not so different from the Orient Monster, a thing of patchy hair and yellowing teeth, asking “Do you love me? Can you look at this animal and see something to love?” Beth felt sorry for Karen Norgen. Maybe she was a closeted lesbian, as Tommy had written. She had no one who would pull the shower curtain aside to watch her bathe and not tu
rn away.
“How sad to move out here and buy such a huge house only to find yourself miserable in it,” Karen said gloomily. “The real world outside the city will do that. Out here will make you see what you really are. But that isn’t why I’ve come.” She wiped her coat, as if she were wiping away a broken marriage. “It’s because of Lisa.” Karen stared at her, as if expecting the name to induce facial tics. “I know you and that boy told the police you saw her out here in the weeks before the fire.”
“How do you know that?”
Karen shrugged. She had her ways. “And you might be right. But that doesn’t mean she had anything to do with the fire. I babysat that girl for fifteen years. I was her confirmation sponsor at UCC. Lisa was loyal to her family. She worshipped Bryan and doted on Tommy. She would never do one thing against them.” Karen shook her head. “If Adam is to blame, that’s one thing. You remember what he was like as a teenager. But not Lisa. It breaks my heart the way some of our neighbors are ganging up on her. She’s got nothing to do with what happened to her family.” Karen sounded exactly like Beth defending Mills. How deluded Beth must have seemed to Mike Gilburn, insisting on the boy’s innocence, as weepily faithful as Karen was to Lisa Muldoon. “She’s in a state of grief, and as a community, I think we’ve got to be on her side.”
Karen spoke as if innocence was purely a matter of consensus, and perhaps it was. Over Karen’s shoulder came a figure walking down the street: Mills, in jeans and a flannel shirt, once again feeling safe enough to stroll through the village, now that the collective finger was pointing toward Adam. Karen bowed her head when she saw him approach.
“You’re Mills,” she said, as if she were naming him. He said hello, looking at Beth for guidance on how to handle her. Karen dug through her shopping bag and produced a bag of brownies.
“How is Paul?” Karen asked him, a pink wash of concern on her face. “He must be suffering. He’s had such a hard time. First his mother dying and now his neighbors.” Karen tightened the bag strap on her shoulder. “I’ll never forget the accident.” Beth recognized it as one of Karen’s signature tactics: drop a scandalous topic into conversation and wait for others to beg her to continue.
“Last June, Paul hit a tree just off Main Road,” she went on. “It was about seven at night. You might not remember, Beth, you had just moved back. We were finishing up our outdoor jumble sale for the historical museum. Pam was there, and Ina Jenkins, and Magdalena and maybe Sarakit. At any rate, he was driving his mother’s old Plymouth, and it was such a loud guzzler, the kind that rattles when you take it above twenty. I looked up and there it went, east from the causeway, a white dart directly into a tree.” Karen closed her eyes to cull the memory. She placed a cautionary finger on Mills’s arm. “Now, don’t think badly of him. He had been under so much stress with his mother’s cancer. Inoperable. Terminal. We all visited her as much as we could. She had dementia. It couldn’t have been easy for Paul to take care of her in those last days. He was so good to her, after all those years she treated him like nothing but a workhorse.”
“I remember Mrs. Benchley,” Beth said quickly, hoping to change the subject.
“What a tyrant around the village she was,” Karen rasped. She broke off a bit of brownie from one of the Ziploc bags and helped herself to it, chewing leisurely. “Something switched in her brain when she couldn’t save that foster boy they took in when Paul was a kid. It was like she gave up on humanity. But I tell you, the saddest part about Paul’s accident wasn’t that he was hurt, or that he’d been drinking. It was that he drove right into that tree without braking. Like he almost meant to hit it, like he wanted to crash. There’s a difference between swerving into a tree and driving directly into one. In daylight there is. Who knows what his mind was going through? Paul’s always been so lonely. I’m glad you’re here to keep him company. Will you give him this little bag for me?”
Mills stiffened, not breathing, then released a white pulse of air and nodded.
Karen turned to Beth. “Did you hear the news? I’ve been asked to fill one of the empty seats on the historical board. I tried to turn it down, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Magdalena always called me Orient’s most dependable lighthouse because I keep watch for everyone.” For or on? Beth thought. “Oh,” she moaned. “I’m not sure Orient will ever be the same. Not what it was—not without the Muldoons.” She glanced over at her car and eased off of the porch. “Anyway, I just wanted to say that we have to rally around that poor girl, who’s lost her entire life. Who can she count on now, if not her neighbors? It could have been any of us, asleep in our beds.” It was as if Karen Norgen wanted to think of herself as a potential murder victim, someone important enough to kill.
They watched her climb into her tan Toyota. The muffler exhaled smoke. Beth rested her forehead on Mills’s shoulder.
“That’s what life is like when you live out here for too long,” she said. “Every birth and separation and death becomes prime-time entertainment.”
“I’m just glad they’re looking for Adam,” Mills said. “I was scared that people like her would decide that Paul did it, just because of those prints on the gas can.”
“Come on,” she said. “I want to catch the real estate agent before she leaves.”
Beth rang the cottage bell. The woman in an ecru pantsuit opened the door. She introduced herself as Donna from Pearl Farms, waving them inside with her clipboard. The Kiefer residence had not yet been cleared of Magdalena Kiefer. Her dusty blue furniture still sat in the front room on her blue carpeting; her beige-framed photographs stood watch on the mantel. “It’s not on the market,” Donna warned them. “I’m just doing my inventory for our property profile. But no harm in your looking.”
“I’m actually here to take the grandfather clock and the armoire,” Beth said. “Magdalena left them to me. I live next door. Sarakit knows about it. And you can call Cole Drake, who was Ms. Kiefer’s lawyer.”
Donna glanced at the clipboard, then reached for her cell phone. She watched Mills tour the living room as if he were not a prospective buyer but a prospective thief. “I’m not from Orient, so I don’t know Cole Drake,” she insisted. “I live in Mattituck. This is highly unusual.”
Beth shrugged. “Call Sarakit.”
Now Donna was frowning. “Highly unusual,” she repeated, taking her phone into the kitchen for privacy. Beth and Mills exchanged smiles. The grandfather clock stood next to the fireplace, a tall, lean mahogany column with scrolling woodwork and a shiny brass face whose spade-shaped hands had frozen at ten-fifteen. Within the face, a painted circular dial stopped midway between a golden ball and a ship crashing through waves, telling the phases of the moon.
Beth had no idea how time worked, not old time, by pulley and anchor. She stood before the clock and stared at its metallic face. “Do I want this in my house?” she asked.
“I think it’s cool,” Mills said, eating his second Ziploc brownie. He opened the clock’s stomach and pushed the pendulum with his finger. It began to tick.
“We’ll have to carry it,” Beth said.
Donna peered into the room, pointed her finger as if to say Not so fast, and disappeared.
Beth swept her fingers across the rosewood armoire. Its doors were scored with nicks and scratches, and it pitched backward when she pressed against the wood, thanks to a missing leg. It was a cheap piece, stained and polished into the appearance of antiquity. Beth couldn’t think of a corner in her house that would accommodate such a bulky item, especially when Gail was on a rampage about tossing out all unnecessary household junk.
“Check this out,” Mills said. “I found it in the base of the clock.” It was a photo of Magdalena and Jeff Trader in the backyard near her beehives, undated but recent. They were squinting through an unusually bright summer afternoon, but their matching white protective gloves were the only element they shared. Even their smiles were incompatible: Magdalena had the friendly, self-satisfied pride of an elderly woman enjo
ying the fruits of a spring season. Jeff Trader’s grin lurked behind a dark mustache and his eyes looked thirsty. Mills traced his finger over Jeff Trader’s face.
“He doesn’t look that old, really,” he said. “His hair isn’t even gray.”
“I think he dyed it. You must have seen him that day lying on the beach.”
“I tried not to look. But I thought he was older. This guy had muscle left. It might have been hard for a woman to tie him up in the harbor.”
“It’d be a lot easier if he had been drunk or passed out.”
“So it could have been Adam or Lisa.”
She turned to him. “But don’t you remember, after they pulled Jeff from the water, how surprised Adam looked when he saw the body? It didn’t look like he was expecting to find a body there.”
Mills didn’t respond. Beth got the sense that he was determined to hold Adam and Lisa responsible, no matter what. He placed the photograph on the mantel, against a framed shot of Magdalena in her pudgy middle age. She stood next to a squat, pretty young woman that must have been her girlfriend, Molly. A faint lighthouse drifted behind their shoulders, too faded to identify as either Coffeepot or Bug, though Bug Light wasn’t rebuilt until 1990, when she was already deep in age. It was not a particularly complimentary photograph, but perhaps Magdalena had found it later, after Molly died, and seen it as a high water mark. Rarely does a photograph look exactly like a person when it’s taken. But, by some law of reverse memory, it becomes more and more accurate as the years pass—it becomes you whether it was right or not.
“If only Magdalena had told me exactly what Jeff said to her on his last visit. He stood there—” Beth pointed toward the sunroom and walked through the kitchen—past Donna, still whispering into her phone—and stood in the sunroom door, where Jeff must have stood on his final visit. Magdalena’s wicker throne was still wedged in the corner, newspapers stacked by her footstool. The terrarium on her side table was full of dead male bees, curled into balls. Beth closed her eyes, trying to imagine Jeff at the doorway, frightened, possessed of some secret that would spell his own end within a week, too scared even to sit down. What was it that he had learned? “The historical board is up to something, disguising itself as good,” he had told her. What was it about OHB that had frightened him? If only Alvara had been there to eavesdrop. If only Beth had pressed Magdalena for clearer answers.
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