Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “I’ve got to get out,” he cried. “They’ll arrest me. They’ll press charges and keep me in jail until they gather more evidence. They probably think I shot Adam Pruitt.”

  “Where did they find Adam’s body?”

  “I don’t know.” He leaned back, gathering air in his throat. “And this house isn’t safe either, because they’ll know I’d come running to you. They’re probably already on their way here.”

  Beth took his empty cup from the table. She turned on the faucet and looked out the back window. Her left foot, covered in a wool sock, rubbed the back of her calf. The police were hovering like an eagle on mice, darting for him, and Beth had warm wool socks and running water and a dependable heating system, all the comforts he’d just lost. He couldn’t even ask to sleep on her floor. Beth sponged the cup, as if to wipe his fingerprints from the handle, his lip prints from the rim. She opened a drawer, took out the photocopies of Jeff Trader’s journal, and slapped them on the kitchen table.

  “We’ve overlooked something. I know there’s something in here that Magdalena wanted to find. Something that explains the murders. We’ve got to think it through from the beginning.”

  Mills knocked the papers away, several pages falling to the floor.

  “I don’t care about that anymore,” he spat. “I don’t care who killed any of them. And I don’t have time to start from the beginning. It’s over for me here. What I need to do is leave.”

  A car roared up the street, louder as it advanced. They both froze until the sound peaked and diminished into the quiet of a neighbor’s driveway.

  Beth turned to him. “You can sleep in Gavril’s studio,” she said. “There’s a cot in there, and we’ll keep all the lights off and lock it from the outside. If they come, they won’t find you. And even if they beam their flashlights into the windows, they won’t see anything but walls of tar. You stay there for a day or two until they open the causeway and then I’ll drive you into the city. I’ll put you in the trunk if I have to. We can cover you.”

  Without waiting for him to agree, she went upstairs to retrieve the keys from her husband. Mills washed his hands and face at the sink and picked up the papers from the floor. He heard arguing above him: Beth fighting on his behalf, Gavril resisting on his own behalf and hers. Five minutes later she returned, keys in hand.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, touching his neck. “I promise you it will all be okay.”

  He almost cried at the risk of believing her.

  They crossed the lawn, Beth holding a brown quilt and pillows and a pair of her husband’s pants. He had the copy of Jeff’s journal in his hands. She unlocked the door. His eyes watered from the fumes. Mills reached for the light switch, but Beth caught his wrist. “Don’t turn it on,” she warned him. She waved her hand at the cold, prehistoric lumps towering up around them, reeking of tar pits. “It looks like a burned house,” she said. “Don’t be scared when you wake up tomorrow.” She spread the quilt over the cot in the corner, plumping the pillows, laying the pants across the bed like a mother on a child’s first day of school. She handed him a small bedside flashlight and kissed his forehead as if steadying him with her lips. “Reread the journal, okay? See if there’s anything in there that we missed. Humor me. I’m going to lock the door from the outside, so if you need to pee, use one of the empty buckets.” She stopped at the door. “We’ll figure it out. Trust me and try to get some sleep.” He saw the whites of her teeth before she closed the door behind her. Through a jingle of keys, he heard her lock the dead bolt.

  Mills sat on the cot and pointed the flashlight along the sweep of tar and plastic. The beam only glimmered against blackness, a wet surface of damaged and bagged remains. It did look like a house, ravaged, burned, sloppily bundled together on its way to a landfill. He was sleeping in the guts of an incinerated shell, built to appear destroyed, a place not even a homeless man would enter. The flashlight glinted against tools, wire cutters, clippers, wrenches, buckets—like the inside of a bomb-maker’s lair. A car pulled into the driveway, and Mills switched off the flashlight. He ripped the quilt from the mattress and climbed on the floor under its wire-netted frame, cocooning himself in the fabric until every inch of him was covered.

  After ten long minutes, or sixty short minutes, a thousand breaths, he heard feet moving around the perimeter of the garage, the clink of a flashlight lens on the windows, the wobble of the doorknob testing its lock. And then for the next hour everything was silent. He remained under the bed until he forced himself to sleep as if he were holding his own head underwater, trying to drown.

  CHAPTER 32

  They found Adam Pruitt’s body under an upside-down rowboat on the wingtip of Orient Beach State Park, where a crest of beach beat back toward the mainland like a wave crashing into itself. The boat had been abandoned two decades ago on a grass embankment behind a thicket of trees. Moss had infiltrated its slats, a furred algae hide that ran from bow to rudder, and seasons of teenagers had engraved messages in the boat’s knotted hull: “Tyler Bettina,” “no future,” “TJ –L–TH 4EVR.” Beth could remember sitting on its keel as a high school student on summer nights, sometimes with Adam, often with her friend Alison, drinking and smoking and tossing the cans and butts into the black, sloshy liquid of the bay.

  Had it not been for George Morgensen, on a late-morning walk, kneeling down to adjust the Velcro strap on his five-pound leg weight and noticing a boot poking from under the stern, Adam Pruitt’s body might have gone undiscovered, might have remained there unnoticed until after the next snowfall. When George flipped the boat from its dirt bed, a blue head with motionless eyes stared up at him. A brown fiddler crab crawled out of the mouth, climbing down the mealy chin with the careful footing of an elderly woman descending a garden ladder. George sprinted half a mile to the vacant ranger shack to call 911, stripping off both leg weights along the way. Word of the body began making its way through Orient even before police cars entered the park grounds.

  Everyone was sure Adam Pruitt was The Perpetrator: the supplier of the two gruesome Plum monsters, the instigator of the Muldoon fire. It was he who had set the blaze, to extinguish his rival, and had swept in like a hero with his department to quell it. But George was convinced that the syrupy gunshot wound on his chest wasn’t self-inflicted. Adam’s hands were empty, George told the police through wheezing breaths; his arms were locked at his sides. In a matter of one phone call, one text, one race between connecting lawns, Adam Pruitt was transformed in death from a person of interest to a hero who had bravely doused the Muldoon fire; who was trying to warn his village with those mutant hybrids (Plum was on their horizon, a biohazard waiting to happen); who had been murdered just as the others had been murdered, by someone else, someone still among them.

  There was no time to mourn Adam, even if they cared to. Many were busy packing suitcases, packing children, calling relatives to ask for the sudden hospitality of their guest bedrooms or sleeper sofas, getting out of the death trap before it snared them too. Others were looking for the instruction booklets to their Pruitt alarm systems, once distrusted, now the only protection they had. A few took time out to honor Lisa—poor Lisa, not an accomplice but a two-time victim.

  After the discovery of Adam Pruitt’s body, the shift in blame happened fast. By nightfall, police cruisers had assembled in front of the Benchley mansion, looking for a new person of interest. After two hours, neighbors watched as the police took Paul Benchley away; they didn’t bring him back until nearly one in the morning. Even with his glasses, Paul seemed to be suffering unbearable eyestrain as he walked toward his house, leaning forward, stumbling up the steps with two officers. The officers lingered inside for another forty minutes, and everyone knew who they were looking for. It was obvious all along who was responsible. After all, the murders had begun only after he arrived. And it was Paul Benchley who had brought him here. Even if Paul had taken him in out of charity, he had ignored the warnings of concerned neighbors like Pam Muldoon a
nd allowed him to stay on.

  Many felt Paul Benchley was getting exactly what he deserved.

  At eleven-thirty that night, Beth opened her front door to Mike Gilburn. Gavril had gone to bed, shoving pillows over his head, as if sleep could absolve him of any complicity. Gavril wasn’t pleased about hiding Mills in his studio, not even for a night. “I don’t trust him,” he groused. “Maybe he did do it. Maybe he is guilty. If he gets you into one ounce of trouble, I swear I’ll kill him myself.” Gavril’s ethical stand did not prevent him from lying to the police, which he regarded as the right of a free citizen, but nevertheless Beth relied on emotional blackmail to ensure his cooperation. (“You do this for me. You do this or I’ll never forgive you,” she said, holding her stomach.)

  Beth squinted from the doorway at Mike and his two officers, who stood in the lamplight of the porch. “What’s wrong? We were in bed.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Mike said mechanically. “We’re looking for your friend, Mills. It’s urgent. He’s not at Paul’s house.” He stared past her into the hallway. “I thought he might be here.”

  She placed her arm over her breasts. “No. He helped me move a piece of furniture this morning, but he left in the afternoon and I haven’t seen him since. He mentioned meeting some friend in Greenport. Why? Is he in any trouble?”

  She studied Mike’s expression with a painter’s concentration. At the lie about meeting a friend in Greenport, he scratched his beard and glanced at his partners. One of the officers backed up five feet and spoke into his collar radio.

  “He’s not in trouble, is he?” she asked again.

  “You might say that,” Mike replied, tilting his chin knowingly, as if he were calling her out on a lie. “Would you mind if we made a brief search of your house? It will take three minutes.”

  She held onto the door.

  “My husband’s asleep,” she said. Beth worried if she displayed too much resistance their curiosity would heighten and her performance would fall apart. “But I guess you can. You’re wasting your time, though. Mills isn’t here. I think he had some sort of date.”

  Mike grunted. He unleashed his two officers, who were quick to find the light switches in the hall. They moved into the living room, leaving her at the door with Mike.

  “You must have heard about Adam,” he said slowly. Beth shook her head. “Funny, you and Paul seem to be the only two out here who haven’t heard. We found his body earlier today. He was shot in the chest. You wouldn’t happen to know if your friend had access to a rifle, would you?”

  If Mike’s job weren’t at stake, if his badge weren’t riding on locating this feral foster kid, he might have smiled, knowing in advance how she’d answer. She didn’t bother to.

  “Is that why you’re here? You think Mills shot Adam? That’s not possible. Mike,” she entreated, “you’ve been on him since the beginning. You’ve got to start thinking about a different suspect.” She wondered if he had even bothered to read Jeff Trader’s journal. Why would he, when he had Mills to wave by the ankles?

  “I’m examining all leads. Right now we really need to speak with him.”

  “If I remember correctly, wasn’t Lisa Muldoon going to meet Adam Pruitt out on the beach by the lighthouse on the day that second creature was discovered?”

  “How did you hear that?” he asked. Beth just looked at him. “Lisa informed us that she did go there to meet Adam, but she says he never showed up. Apparently he told her over the phone that he was meeting someone else just before. It was right near the beach that we found Adam’s body, hidden under the old rowboat. It’s the kind of hiding spot a nonlocal might use.” Mike glared at her. “But you know who was spotted out there on that same afternoon, running away from the park just about the time that Adam was shot? We got a few of Adam’s buddies swearing they saw Mills sprinting like a maniac away from the scene. They even tried to stop him to see what the matter was. We have surveillance footage of him running across the ferry entrances. He looked frightened, like he was fleeing something as fast as he could.”

  Beth’s heart sank. There was no more hope of clearing Mills’s name. Even if they did find the real killer, he was tainted by so much circumstantial evidence that he’d never be free of suspicion.

  The officers came back to the hallway and started climbing the stairs.

  “My husband is in bed,” she said, but they ignored her.

  “Do you know if Mills has a cell phone?” Mike asked her.

  “No, I don’t. Paul would know. Did you ask him?”

  “Yeah, we currently have Paul down at the station. He’s been about as helpful as you’re being.” Now Mike did smile, coffee-toothed, spit-polished. She pictured Mills in the garage, lying on the cot, thirty feet from where they stood, thirty feet from a pair of handcuffs. “If he had a cell phone we could call him.”

  “Or track him,” she said. “Look, I know you think you’ve found your answer, but—” She heard the unmistakable sound of a camera shutter upstairs. “What are they doing?” Beth turned and ran up the steps, following the clicking sounds. One of the officers was in the nursery, standing in front of the grandfather clock, using his phone to snap photos of the canvas on the easel.

  “You can’t take pictures,” she screamed. “This is my work.”

  Mike entered the room. He slipped behind the officer and examined the painting, nodding approvingly at her technique, her impressive skills at rendering their suspect, as it were her unwitting debut as a police sketch artist. She snapped her fingers to deflect their eyes.

  “This room is off-limits.”

  “Go on,” Gilburn told the officer, holding his phone up to frame the shot.

  “He can’t do that,” she yelled. “You no longer have my permission.”

  From their bedroom came a shout of raw Romanian, then a cautionary response in English: “Relax.” Gavril’s feet boomed down the hall.

  “We don’t have a photo of your friend,” Mike explained. “We need your help on this, Beth.” Gavril reached the doorway, took one look at his wife trying to block the phone with her hand, and lurched forward. He yanked the officer’s arm, and the other cop came up from behind and restrained him. It was a scramble of black leather and blue nylon, a billy club, a gun handle, a can of pepper spray, leg hair, frayed yellow boxers, a T-shirt of holes exposing breakable ribs. Gavril swung around, his fists balling, and Beth was terrified that a single punch would land him in a holding cell, her husband who had done nothing wrong, who had only complied.

  “Please, Gavril, don’t,” she cried. He glanced at her with drained eyes, all of Hawaii folding on his face, as if she had never taken the time to understand where he came from, how much he had been abused as a boy under a regime that treated his family worse than thieves, a family inside cardboard walls that the police could tear apart whenever they felt like it.

  “Okay, enough,” Mike said. He tapped the officer on the shoulder. “We’ve got the shot. No damage was done.”

  “You cannot come into my home and go through our things,” Gavril roared, his mouth open like a mixing bowl. “This does not belong to you. It’s ours.” Ownership had never sounded less selfish or more desperate to her. She pulled at Gavril’s arm, hugging his muscle and the artery that strained his heart. “This is Beth’s private space, not your evidence room. You have no right to come in here without permission. Do you get that?” He marched forward, craning his neck into Mike’s personal breathing space, daring him to push back.

  “What about the garage in the backyard?” the officer in the doorway asked.

  “What garage?” Mike turned to Beth as he stepped away from the hysterical foreigner she had married.

  “No. No way you’re going in there,” Gavril howled. “That is my studio, a sacred space. My work is not part of your searches, understand? Show me a warrant. Get me your superior on the phone. If you enter my studio, I break your face.”

  “He’s not in there,” Beth said softly, sounding reas
onable only by comparison. “Gavril locks it behind him every night when he’s finished working.” She wasn’t crying for effect, but the tears seemed to produce a level of credibility.

  “I hope you find the kid,” Gavril grumbled. “He is trouble for my wife. But he is not here, and you have overstepped.”

  Mike nodded in defeat, worn out by the Shepherd-Catargi theatrics. He told the officers to do a sweep of the backyard. She followed Mike down the steps and held the door open for him as he retreated onto the porch.

  “Did you even bother to read that journal I gave you?” she asked as she leaned against the door. “Did it even occur to you that Jeff Trader might have been the first victim—that this whole thing started with something he found out about and was blackmailing someone over to keep secret?”

  “Yes, I did read it,” Mike said remorsefully. He seemed genuinely sorry for the episode upstairs. “And it has some damning stuff in it. You’re right about the Drakes. Neither of them has an alibi for the fire. I checked into it. And Roe diCorcia claims he doesn’t own any rifles. We’re getting a warrant to dig up the Rottweilers he put down, just to see if the bullets match the one that killed Adam. There are other suspects. I’m just doing my job, Beth, night and day. Following procedure.” He sighed out procedure, as if uttering the word depleted him. The two officers returned to the front lawn empty-handed, dragging no resistant teenager between them.