Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Isaiah inhaled tightly. “I don’t know. Vince really liked it here. I guess I was getting to like it too. I was beginning to think he was right about this house being a good investment and that we’d be sitting on our retirement fund when Plum and Gardiners Island got bought up by billionaires. Only right now, with all the murders, we’d be lucky to get half of what we paid. I wish we’d let those other bidders buy it. I wish we’d never come out here.”

  Isaiah grabbed the Pearl Farms flyer from the coffee table. He flicked it in defeat and traced his finger over the logo. Mills watched Isaiah’s finger follow the outline of the oyster shell, a line curving down, rotating in a circle, and running out in a liquid line. Isaiah repeated it, and the sight took Mills’s breath away.

  “It’s not an L,” he said, choking. “It’s an oyster shell.”

  “It’s a hate sign is what it is,” Isaiah said with a smile. “That stupid pearl logo hanging on every real estate marker.”

  “Pearl Farms,” Mills said. “They were the ones that sold you this house.”

  “Sold us?” Isaiah laughed. “No. They were the ones bidding against us. They were the group I told you about who was trying to buy this place from the owner at a bargain rate. They tried to buy Nathan and Luz’s farmhouse too but couldn’t match Nathan’s endless family money. That horrible woman who runs Pearl Farms, she’s the reason we had to clean out our savings and go so high. And she’s on the historical board, so Vince has no chance of getting his precious seat. Don’t the locals realize, the more we fix up these moldy old homes, the more their own properties are going to be worth? I don’t blame Luz and Nathan for trying to figure out a way to buy more land out here behind her back.”

  “I need a glass of water,” Mills said, standing up. Isaiah got up too, smiling sadly.

  “I’m going to get some sleep. If you need that ride before dawn, just wake me. And if you don’t, well, I’m wishing you luck.”

  After Isaiah went into the bedroom, Mills unhooked the mirrored map of Orient from the wall above the hearth. He found a marker in the kitchen and unzipped his duffel bag to remove the photocopies of Jeff Trader’s journal. In the dying firelight, he drew an X over every property that appeared with a “no” or a “maybe” at the bottom of each page. Then he put an X on the yeses. The bird was feathered up its back, crosshatched in a line along the Sound from tail to crown, until there was only one empty space.

  The clock by the phone read 12:04. He called information. He had the information. He saw so clearly why and how it was done.

  “Hello?” a voice drenched in sleep mumbled through the receiver.

  “This is Mills Chevern. I know what happened and how you did it. I’ll be at Paul Benchley’s house in forty minutes. I have the proof with me. If you aren’t there, I’ll take it to the police.”

  CHAPTER 35

  The Benchley mansion glowed palely in the moonlight. No lights shined inside. When the storm clouds covered the moon, the house disappeared into darkness, and all Mills heard was the shifting of ice. Paul’s Mercedes was absent from the driveway. The frosted tire tracks traced his departure into the street, reverse, forward, and gone. Mills hurried to the back of the house, passing the empty lot where the Muldoons had lived.

  He expected to find the back door locked, but it wasn’t. No alarm, either. In the back room, a collection of junk piled in a corner: fishing rods, canoe paddles, items not yet dragged to the curb for garbage day. Mills dropped his duffel bag and walked through the rooms leading to the parlor. He unlocked the front door for the visitor and gathered a few logs in the fireplace, lighting them with a match. The fire glinted the marble of the dining room table and silvered the whitewashed floor. What a home this could have been, what a laboratory for age and distortions. He returned to the back rooms and found the box of flares, jamming one in his back pocket. He pulled out the old service revolver and loaded the single bullet in its rusted chamber. The front door clicked in its latch, ten minutes early, and the fire welcomed the visitor. Footsteps traveled through the rooms Mills had cleared. It was all navigable now. He had been brought to Orient to make things navigable.

  A figure appeared in the doorway, a black shape vibrating in the shadows, a bulky coat and cap, and only when she unwound her scarf did the bones of her face converge into a frame for almond eyes and sharp, moist lips, a hothouse flower wilted by too many winters in the West. She had come farther than Mills had to make her home on the North Fork. He had come east, she west.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Sarakit Herrig said, keeping her distance by the door. “You aren’t supposed to be here anymore. It was my understanding you’d be gone.”

  “That’s not—” he began to say as he stepped forward.

  “Don’t move,” she shouted. “You move another foot and the phone I hold in my pocket calls the police. I’m not the one who should be worried about the police. I’m not the one they’re looking for.” He remained in place, ten feet from her. “So what is this about? Extortion? You think you can get some money from me? If that’s what you’re after, I want to know what proof you claim to have.”

  “You really believe you can just give me money and walk away? After you murdered my friend?”

  Sarakit’s laugh was harsh with sickness, the hacking of a winter cough. But it was still confident, mocking the naïveté of the young man in front of her.

  “I don’t think you’re in a position to make demands. As far as everyone knows, you’re guilty. You should count your blessings that you aren’t already rotting in a prison cell. That will be my gift to you, that I don’t turn you over to the police.”

  “They might want to know what I think.”

  “They don’t care what you think. You’re just a body they can lock away. And I could have made sure you were caught earlier, but I didn’t.” He heard the thud of metal striking the floor by her feet.

  “No,” Mills said, “because it’s better for you that I don’t get caught. But that was a nice performance you gave outside the church at the Muldoons’ funeral, accusing me in front of everyone, breaking down as you pointed the blame.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” Sarakit said sharply. “I didn’t kill a single person, so as far as I see it there’s no blood on my hands. You forget, Mills Chevern or whatever your real name is, that I have an alibi for every death. So stop wasting my time. What proof do you have? Tell me now, or I call the police and we’ll see how fast you can run.”

  Mills let a moment of silence pass. He controlled the time now between them. He could make this moment last an hour or a night. The fire in the parlor could die and dawn could eat into the room and still she would wait to hear the evidence against her.

  “I have Jeff Trader’s journal, with all the notes he made.”

  Her eyes disappeared in the darkness.

  “That’s all?” She seemed almost joyous in her disappointment, rolling her head back. She had left her home and sleeping children in the middle of the night over nothing.

  “He was keeping a record of every house Pearl Farms is hoping to buy, one by one, so that they can be consolidated into larger tracts of land. That’s what you’ve been promised, isn’t it? That’s what you’re getting out of the deal you made.”

  She blinked. “You think that holds up as evidence? Pearl Farms is a legitimate real estate agency. We have every right to purchase any property we choose and repurpose it—” but Sarakit flagged halfway through her speech, exhaling a slow, phlegmy breath. Her voice rose, the coppery tang of her Thai inflection slapping against her Long Island vowels. “Do you know what it’s like to come from where I came from? Can you possibly understand the poverty I grew up in?” She waited two breaths for him to answer. “The whole family is sick, no doctor. The whole village starves, no food. Oh, there’s a world of opportunity, but it’s over there in the West, and all we can do is watch it on TV. Sometimes we even see ourselves on your news, but only for a minute.”

  She paused. The Long Island was
coming back into her tone, angry, demanding, the grind of boats on a dock. “Of all the people in Orient, you might understand the squalor I came from. But I wasn’t lucky like you to be born here. I had to fight just to get to this country, had to marry a Peace Corps volunteer passing through Bangkok so I could get to this side of the world. All that fight and sacrifice just to move to this hateful little town, because Ted insisted on it.” The whites of her eyes shrunk. “And what do I find when I get here but looks? Decades of looks, like I didn’t work harder to be here than any of them. But I put up with it, and we made a comfortable life, surviving on what money we earned, clipping coupons, getting by. Then what happens? The rich suddenly decide to move out to Orient in droves, to this nothing of seaside, to this place where I’ve built a life and a safe nest for my children. Am I supposed to sit by and watch as these artists and bankers glide in on their money and steal the land out from under me? Oh, no. I fought for my piece of it. I got here first. I’m owed something for that.” She balled her hand to her mouth as her cough returned, her eyes closing and brightening with each blink.

  “This deal you talk about,” she said. “It is only what I deserve. I promised myself a long time ago that I was not going to be poor again, squeezed out, forgotten. I haven’t killed one person. Do you hear me? All I did was let it happen. How does that make me guilty? I’ve never blamed anyone for watching when bad things happened to me.”

  Sarakit absolved herself in the darkness, just as she must have absolved herself after every death. “Five hundred dollars for the journal,” she said. “Five hundred dollars and I don’t call the police.”

  “But Bryan’s murder—that was personal,” he said.

  “Bryan,” she whispered in disgust.

  “You two were having an affair.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You left your necklace in the Seaview, room thirty-one. A silver pendant of an oyster shell.” Almost involuntarily, Sarakit grabbed at her chest. “I got it from the old woman who runs the place. She must have pried out the pearl and left the silver clasp.” Mills remembered Eleanor swearing she’d once returned a ruby ring, or at least the setting, and the piano player singing, sure you did.

  She dropped her hand from her neck.

  “Maybe,” she said. Her voice softened, folding in on its grief. “Maybe Bryan was going to be another way out for a while. But he lied to me and took up with Holly Drake. Maybe I didn’t mind what he was going to get. But it was only supposed to be him.” She began to choke on an obstruction far more obstinate than phlegm. “It wasn’t supposed to be the whole family.”

  “Just enough to destroy the board. Just enough to break the conservancy trust before the development rights were sold, because that would have ruined the value of the land you were hoping to develop.” Orient’s real threat was its trust, or the one person left to oversee it.

  Sarakit stepped forward. She cleared her throat. Absolution took only a few seconds. “You have the necklace?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Five hundred dollars. And I get the journal and the necklace and I’ll even drive you over the causeway. You’re right. It would be better if you aren’t caught.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come here,” she said. “The money’s in my hand.” It was too dark to see what she was holding. He moved toward her. Her skin was purple and wet, her eyelids the soft undersides of beetles. As he stepped closer, he saw her gritted teeth, and as she raised the metal poker above her head, he pulled the trigger. A spark of yellow and a boom that swept like moths around his ears. The bullet entered her chest and bit into the wall behind her. Her body dropped. Sarakit tried to speak, but whatever she was trying to say, through spit and blood, he didn’t bother to hear. He bent over to search her pockets, pulling out a roll of hundreds. Black liquid flowed around his feet. He tucked the gun in the waistline of his pants and tracked the liquid behind him. Lifting his bag onto his shoulder, he went out the back door.

  The wind blew in circles off the Sound. He worried that a neighbor might have heard the shot, although few neighbors were still around to hear anything. He sprinted to the bulkhead doors, wrenched them open, and climbed into the hole. His last task was down there.

  In the cellar was Paul’s museum of landscapes, his private shrine of seas and yellow autumn bluffs. Orient’s rustic, lighthouse-dotted coast hung there, dry and cracked as old mosquito bites. On the wall was the ancient map of the village, and on the desk the silver slab of his laptop. Next to it sat the box of heirlooms marked FAMILY. Mills could smell the earth through the walls.

  When Mills climbed out of the cellar, he heard the motor in the water. He walked into the darkness and looked over the silver-tipped grasses at the scaly, ice-white surface of the Sound. A motorboat lumbered through the ice into the rocky shallows. The engine died, and a man crawled onto the beach. He climbed through the weeds that sloped up toward the lawn, using his hands as he ascended. Mills pulled the flare from his pocket and twisted the cap. It sparked like a summer firework. Through the fizzy, red halo of light he watched the man scuttle through the tall grass and find the open trail. The man walked toward him, the killer, his friend, wearing a yellow boating jacket, his hands empty at his sides.

  “I figured you might come,” Mills said.

  Paul stopped a few feet from him in the backyard. The flare light flushed his face. His smile looked pained. Mills yanked the gun from his waist and pointed it.

  “You’ve gotten to know me pretty well,” Paul replied. “After all, we’ve been living side by side, like any family.”

  “Should I call you Patrick?” Mills asked.

  Paul’s tongue moved behind his cheek. “If you want. But what do I call you?”

  “Mills is fine.”

  “Okay, then,” Paul said. He squinted at Mills like they shared a similar burden. Everything about Paul was a lie.

  Mills knew why he had done it. He’d seen the motive firsthand. Ten minutes ago, in the cellar, he had turned on Paul’s laptop. As he stood at the desk waiting for the machine to power on, his fingers fumbled across the spines of magazines on the shelf. At his touch, they toppled limply to the ground. Shaved vaginas, hairy bushes, headless women spread-eagled with seed-bag breasts: a glossy oil slick of flesh leaking across the floor. Paul Benchley’s orientation was a secret no more.

  While the laptop was booting up, Mills took the digital camera from the box marked FAMILY and pressed play on the last video recorded. A dying old bald woman appeared in the arsenic sunlight of what was now the guest bedroom, Mills’s room. At the edges of the frame he could see the poster of Bug Light and the indent of the birthing bowl. Her tongue licked through crusted lips.

  Mills placed the camera where he could see the screen, then sat down at the laptop. It asked for a password. Below it was an unchecked box marked REMEMBER ME.

  “Patrick,” the dying old bald woman wheezed as she stared into the camera. Her face was a china plate of hairline cracks. “Patrick, turn that damn thing off. I don’t want you filming me.”

  Patrick he typed into the password box. The laptop brightened. He found the file marked “OrientReal.” Real for real estate. Real for reality in the making.

  “Patrick, stop it, you little shit,” the dead woman argued. Her arms swung helplessly. There was nothing else her arms could do. “Shut off that camera. We need to talk about what we’re going to do when I get better. You gotten the inn back yet? And I don’t mean that whorehouse that Eleanor runs. Don’t you dare think you’re buying that place as a consolation. I want my inn, where I can sit and watch the birds and greet the guests on the porch.”

  The voice that answered was loud in the microphone, warm and familiar.

  “Mom, what if you don’t get better? The doctor says it’s likely you won’t.”

  The old woman lay back on her pillow, as if rehearsing for her coffin. She was cremated, Mills remembered. No DNA left to test against Paul’s own. “Then you get it done without me,” she sa
id. “Because it’s our land, the family that saved you. Without us, you’d be nothing. It’s sacred land, you hear me?” She smiled skeptically, as if she didn’t trust him to carry out her wishes. “And if you don’t, you’re in a world of trouble. Because they’ll find him, they’ll find him, and what are you going to do then? How will you explain? You owe us that. Now get that thing out of my face.”

  “Mom, you aren’t thinking straight. Will you tell me some stories of your early days in Orient.”

  “Don’t Mom me, you little shit.”

  On the laptop screen, the OrientReal file opened into a series of gridded renderings: golf-green swaths of land with warbler-blue views of the Sound. Imperial condominiums multiplied along the shore, hotels shooting skyward, all of it crawling with the tiny black ants of future Orient settlers. The architecture was global, interchangeable, and accommodating. These were the buildings that Paul had been designing all those weeks he sat at his computer: a new Orient landscape, reset with soulless fitness centers and parking lots. Each building was emblazoned with an oyster shell. Paul was an architect. He dreamed as he was trained.

  Now, in the cold, 2:00-A.M. backyard, Paul stood glazed in torchlight. His boot toyed with a rock in the mud.

  “Why don’t you drop the gun?” Paul said calmly. He still had the voice of a father in him. “You can still make it out.”

  “You brought me here to be your scapegoat,” Mills shouted. If the gun contained a bullet, just one inch of copper, he might have fired it. A part of him would have enjoyed watching Paul’s body accept the bullet and the ground accept him, one orphan killing another. “You found a homeless kid in the city who no one would miss and everyone could blame.”

  “Come on,” Paul rasped, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It isn’t like that. You’re confused. Why don’t I take you out on the boat and get you past the causeway—” The last person who trusted Paul on a boat was Jeff Trader. Mills shook the gun to shut him up.