Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  He crept down the steps and into the living room. He swept his fingers across the armoire, the piece of furniture that Beth had left behind. Opening its doors, he found the cupboard empty except for a thin piece of cardboard wedged in the joint. He pulled it out. It was an old postcard of Bug Lighthouse—not the bland reconstruction sitting a hundred yards into the sea but the original, a herd of waves ringing the crumbling rocks. Bug Light had been destroyed by arsonists decades ago, but Magdalena had stored this faded image of it in the same place where she’d once hid her jewelry. A lighthouse was a light and a house, two entities that made no sense in the sea. But together they formed a marker, guiding the lost home or warning strangers to keep away.

  He noticed a blue pen scribble on the postcard, next to the lighthouse’s rocky base. It could have been a stray mark, an accidental curve, but it looked like a question mark. He held the postcard up to the window, trying to find the punctuating dot. He didn’t see one, just the shape of a question without a point.

  On the third night, hungry, fearful that the next morning would bring a routine visit by a Pearl Farms agent, he put on an old coat he found in Magdalena’s closet. It was navy blue and patched with electrical tape, but warm enough to protect him from the cold. He was hungry for word from outside, for any news, so he risked doing what he’d told himself he should never do: he walked into the kitchen and picked up the landline phone. The dial tone hummed like the last living thing, as if he were tapping into a flowing vein. He dialed *67 to hide his location. Then he punched in Paul’s cell number. It rang twice before connecting with a scuffling sound.

  “Hello?” Paul’s voice, familiar, strained but warm.

  “It’s me,” he said. There was no point in whispering, but he did.

  “Oh my God. Mills?” Paul whispered too.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you? What are you doing?” Paul sounded confused, like a man on too many pills, trying to snatch at the tails of reason. “My God, they’re looking all over for you. Are you still in Orient?”

  He couldn’t be certain that Paul was still on his side. The call could be traced, Paul’s cell phone tapped. Paul could be at the police station, pointing to the phone and mouthing to Gilburn, It’s him. Even the temperature of Paul’s voice seemed to cool when he heard Mills’s voice. Maybe he had come to see him as everyone else had.

  “I’m in the city,” he lied. “Or pretty near to it.”

  “So you’re not out there.” He sighed. “That’s good, because something worse has happened. Much worse. And they’re looking for you. Every car on the causeway is being searched.”

  “I want you to know that I didn’t do any of it. I didn’t kill anyone.” Just saying it brought tears to his eyes.

  “I know you didn’t,” Paul whispered, but the old compassion in his voice was missing. Mills fought the urge to hang up. “Look, I think it may be past the point of straightening this mess out. But if you’re in the city, I guess we could try to meet somewhere.”

  “You’re not in Orient?”

  “No,” he said at a normal volume. “I left today. I’m back at my apartment in Chinatown. I couldn’t stay out there any longer. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back. Not after what happened. They took me in for questioning. They got a warrant to search the house. They found . . . well, I don’t know what they found exactly. Proof, I guess. Mills, did you . . .” He dropped the question.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Mills said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

  “Me too.” A long rasp of dead air followed, a sound like falling snow. “It will never be the place it was for me. I don’t think it will ever be like it was for anyone. It was my home.”

  “I wish I’d never gone out there.”

  More silence, enough for Paul to supply him with words of comfort, some crumb of fatherly advice that no one would ever live by but that Mills would welcome because of its source. Instead there was only electronic silence.

  “Do you want to come around to the apartment?” Paul asked without enthusiasm. He clearly hoped Mills would say no, either because that would mean seeing Mills again or because he would be obliged to notify the police. Perhaps he had already learned that a kid named Mills Chevern had never been inside his home.

  “I just wanted to call to hear your voice,” he said. “And now I’ve heard it. I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for me.”

  “Oh,” Paul said. “Okay.”

  Mills hung up. He stood in the doorway of the sunroom, where someone who claimed to be Jeff Trader had stood, ten feet from the empty chair. He lifted his bag strap to his shoulder. He unlocked the front door.

  There were still too many cars on Main Road. Mills tried to stay behind the tree line, but the trees were lean in winter, and unseen ice patches caused him to slip, waving his arms so frantically that a few cars slowed on the road, thinking he was waving for help. He retreated back into the dark. Most of the houses were black, but those still inhabited were as bright as stadiums, lights pouring from every window, spotlights on driveways and walks, lawn lights flooding circles across the snow. He couldn’t step onto those lawns without being exposed. He tried to move west, but he kept circling east to hide from cars, pushed ever deeper into backyards. When he finally got back to Main Road, he was farther from the causeway than where he’d begun.

  He was climbing through a thicket of evergreens near the road when a vehicle skidded onto the shoulder. The driver’s door opened. Mills raced up the hill of a private lawn, his breath trailing behind him. He needed to get back to Magdalena’s house. He’d try to leave again at two or three in the morning, which had once seemed a more dangerous time to be a lone figure walking through the snow, but now seemed his only choice.

  A second car slowed behind the first, and, twenty feet behind him, flashlights tunneled through the trees. He kept running, hurrying between empty houses, until he came upon a black stream of pavement not far from the Sound. Across the street, an English cottage sparkled, and he recognized the car parked in its driveway, the Saab that had taken him to the beach the day he found the second creature. Behind him, flashlights moved across the backyards. He sprinted across the road and opened the gate.

  The doorbell rang throughout the warm interior. When the door opened, it wasn’t Isaiah. It was his boyfriend, Vince, wearing a ski sweater and holding two dinner plates. Vince looked out into the night, staggered back at the sight of Mills, and reached to slam the door shut. “Isaiah!” he called. “Help me.”

  They had taken him in, or Isaiah had. Perhaps the three days without human contact had increased the desperation in his face. He lifted his chin and swore to the handsome couple in the doorway, “I didn’t do anything but they’re going to kill me if you don’t let me in I’m innocent I loved Beth I would never have done that and if you don’t let me in right now they’re going to catch me and because I’m not from here they’re going to hold me responsible so I came to you for help I’ll strip naked you can tie me to a chair I’m innocent please just let me into your house.” Whatever was left of Isaiah’s rebellion against the social order, or whatever compassion he felt for a young man branded the murderer of Orient, compelled him to pull Mills in by his coat collar.

  The warmth of the room prickled his body. A yellow fire swarmed in the hearth. The presence of men he didn’t fear overwhelmed him, so much so that he almost collapsed. Vince snatched his cell phone from his pocket, his finger on its button, as if the phone were the handle of a switchblade.

  “I can call 911 in a second,” Vince threatened, watching suspiciously as Mills took off his coat. “You make so much as one move . . .”

  “Stop it,” Isaiah snapped. He turned to Mills. “I know what they’re saying isn’t true. I know because I drove you to the beach that day. You couldn’t have murdered Adam Pruitt. I tried to tell the police that. How did a kid get his hands on a rifle when I drove him to the beach in my own car? They wouldn’t listen.”

&nbs
p; “He’s already gotten you in enough trouble,” Vince muttered, standing protectively behind a green leather sofa. “And even if we do sell, I don’t want to be remembered as the idiots who hid the kid everyone knew was—”

  “I didn’t do it! I didn’t kill anyone,” Mills wheezed, his shoes forming puddles on their terra-cotta tiles. He slipped out of his sneakers before Vince could protest. In his socks, he left webbed, fire-polished footprints on the tiles.

  “Is it true what happened to Beth?” Isaiah asked. He moved toward Vince and took the phone from his hand. Mills suddenly worried that Isaiah was going to call the police, that his tenderness had been a lure to trap him in the house. Isaiah dropped the phone on the sofa and, sitting down, tapped the cushion beside him. Mills stood still. “Is it true that her throat was cut? That she died like that in her childhood bedroom?” Isaiah shivered.

  Mills tried to dissolve that image, to leave Beth’s throat un-slit. He brought his palms to his eyes, but in the cupped darkness he saw the blood run down her neck, so he opened them, fleeing his brain, scanning the room, the paintings and silver antiques glinting in the fire, the mirror above the hearth with an etching in the shape of a bird—a map of Orient—and the reflection of three different men filling it from beak to claw. Mills struggled out of his sweater and piled it over his duffel bag, leaving it where he could grab it if he needed to run.

  “Poor Beth,” Isaiah whimpered, massaging his forehead. “I can’t stop thinking about her. None of the other deaths out here really hit us. But for that to happen to one of us. I can’t imagine what Gavril’s going through. What the hell is wrong with this place?”

  Mills knew everything was wrong with this place. As if still being chased by flashlights, he quickly crossed the living room and sat on the couch.

  “I’d be out for blood if anything like that happened to Vince,” Isaiah continued.

  “He can’t stay here,” Vince said. He stared directly at Mills. “I’m sorry, but you can’t. We shouldn’t have let you in. There are posters of you on every telephone pole. I don’t want to get caught up in this.” Even infuriated, Vince looked like a catalog model. The perfect symmetry of his face, his dirty-blond bangs rolling over a slightly sun-damaged forehead, made his hands-on-hips posture seem rehearsed, as if he were advertising his ski sweater. Mills turned to the fire, trying to store its warmth.

  “Why are you acting like this?” Isaiah yelled. “This poor kid didn’t do anything. Just because he’s an outsider, everyone’s convinced he’s guilty.”

  “You don’t know he’s not guil—” Vince tried to interject.

  “He needs our help. Don’t you want to be on the right side of this situation?”

  Vince stared at Isaiah like he was in immediate need of a psychologist.

  “Isaiah, your neighbors are being murdered. We’re talking about an insane person on the loose. People are being killed out here. That’s not a situation.”

  “Fine,” Isaiah replied. “But unlike you, I can still decide what’s right without consulting my neighbors first. You talk on and on about protecting the oceans and saving the soil, but when you actually have the chance to help a human being . . .” Whatever Isaiah and Vince were going on about, the conversation was thankfully leaving Mills miles behind.

  Vince was apoplectic. “Multiple murders,” he shouted. “Do you get that? This isn’t about you sitting at the front of a bus.”

  “Isn’t it? When will it be about that? When it isn’t his head but ours?”

  Vince gave up. He stormed into the kitchen, which was clearly his ninth-inning, two-strike dugout.

  Isaiah sighed, rubbing his temples. “He’s right,” he whispered wearily. “You probably can’t stay for more than a few hours. I can’t hold Vince off from his good-citizen mentality for long. But I know you didn’t do it.” His palm gently stroked Mills’s knee. Even the slightest shared body contact reminded him that he wasn’t alone. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll get past the causeway and back to New York. I figure from there I can go west where they won’t find me.”

  “That’s good,” Isaiah said, nodding. “As far away as you can. Rest here for a few hours and then take off.”

  Vince returned from the kitchen, carrying a bottle of whiskey topped with three shot glasses and a plate of half-eaten chicken, its wings tied to its ankles. Mills moved his knee away from Isaiah’s hand. He didn’t want to give Vince another reason to demand his ejection from the house.

  Isaiah stacked the papers on the coffee table: Pearl Farms flyers, Pruitt Securities brochures, a handful of clippings on the Orient monster. Vince set the plate down. “Eat,” he said, less harshly than before. “You must be hungry.” He poured three shots. “This should help you get warm.”

  The sight of the chicken carcass made him queasy, but out of politeness he picked off a piece and ate it. He helped it down with gulps of whiskey. The alcohol burned his gums and warmed his blood. He placed the empty glass on the table, and when Isaiah poured him another shot he drank it fast.

  His panic receded with the whiskey, then returned heavier and abstract, like a wave at high tide pulling away softly before racing back to shore.

  “I talked to Luz today,” Isaiah said. Vince sat stonily in the armchair, staring at Mills as if he was still trying to picture him as the killer, as the face on the telephone poles. Mills listened through the gaps in Isaiah’s conversation for the sound of approaching feet or unfamiliar cars. “Gavril is staying at their place for the next few days. They’ll wait until the funeral before going back to the city, maybe forever. We are too. But from what I hear, Gavril wants to go back to Europe. I guess even New York is bound to remind him of her.”

  “I don’t want to wait for the funeral,” Vince grumbled.

  Isaiah ignored him. “It’s awful to say this, but I keep hoping Beth’s murder had something to do with her being from Orient. I need for this to be about the year-rounders, not just a random killer who’d murder anyone he happened to come across. Murder like that, the insanity of it . . . oh, Christ, but what else could it be?”

  “Well, everyone’s going to want out of Orient now,” Vince replied. “There’s no way it’s going to be the sweet community we all thought it was, with Karen Norgen and her brownies showing up on our doorstep. That’s gone. Instead it’s him on our doorstep.” Mills remembered what Isaiah had told him—that Vince had taken out loans to buy the cottage, not because he thought Orient was a sweet community, but because it had resisted him.

  “After all the work we put into this place.” Isaiah’s eyes swam. “All those months scraping wallpaper.” Even the memory of his exertion exhausted him, and he leaned against Mills for support, clasping his shoulder and groping his knee. “You know, Beth really cared about you,” he said. “She asked me to look out for you. I think she was training for her own kid one day.”

  Mills didn’t tell them that Beth was already pregnant. He didn’t have the heart to say that out loud. He slipped out of Isaiah’s embrace.

  Isaiah stretched his arms. “We should get some sleep,” he said. “Maybe before dawn, if the roads are clear, I can try to drive you over the causeway.”

  Vince shook his head.

  “You can take the couch. I’ll get you a blanket.” Isaiah disappeared into the darkness of the bedroom. Vince stiffened, left by his boyfriend to keep company with a fugitive.

  “Isaiah’s drunk,” Vince murmured. “He was drunk before you arrived, which is probably why he let you in. I’m sorry if it seems like he’s hitting on you. He has zero tact, no sense of what’s appropriate. None of the artists out here do. They live like nothing ever fazes them.”

  “It didn’t bother me,” Mills assured him. “I wouldn’t do anything to come between you.” Vince grunted, as if that was never a concern. The alcohol was blurring the lamp shades now, dragging solid objects around in soft circles. It had been months since he’d had a drink and he remembered its warm dissolution. If he stood up
, his feet would track a curving world.

  “Isaiah sees people as trees to climb,” Vince said, taking a sip of whiskey. “When he gets to the top, he jumps. I guess he’s stayed with me because I went higher than he expected, and he worried if he jumped he’d hurt himself.”

  Mills thought of the postcard of the lighthouse at Magdalena’s place and the question mark floating near its base. “Can I ask you something?” Mills said. Vince nodded distrustfully, as if waiting for him to demand money or his car. He glanced at his phone on the sofa, as if to reassure himself that it was still within reach. “Isaiah told me you planted a maple seed in the soil at Bug Light.” Vince smirked at the distant memory. “He said you buried something else there too. I wondered what.”

  Vince paled, his suntan sickly. He leaned forward in the chair. “A picture of us. I put in a picture of us from when we first met. I wanted the tree to grow over it. I wanted it stored in the roots.”

  “Is that all it was?” Isaiah asked, emerging with a blanket slung over his shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Vince got up from the chair. He walked toward the bedroom, pulling his sweater over his head. He had a strong swimmer’s back, with deep crenulated folds. There were so many words to describe the front of a person, but too few for the back, which seemed to Mills at that moment a particular injustice to Vince Donnelly.

  Isaiah threw the blanket on the couch and sat down next to him. “I heard what you said before,” Isaiah whispered. “But you should know that nothing you can do could come between me and Vince. When no one tells you how to live, you get to invent the rules for yourself.” Isaiah touched his knee again, not flirtatiously, but as if he were trying to ground it. “I hope you remember that. The world can be any way you want. You’re one of the free ones, freer than you think.”

  “I’m not free at all right now,” Mills groused. Isaiah nodded in drunken apology, and Mills tried to lighten his tone. “Are you going to stay out here? I mean, after all the murders.”