Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “It’s too late. I saw the plans for Orient on your computer. But I knew it was you even before that. I figured it out from Jeff’s journal.”

  Paul’s mouth tightened. Mills could see his teeth moving behind his lips.

  “There’s something about me in there?”

  “No,” Mills said. “There’s no listing for you in that book. But Jeff Trader was your caretaker, wasn’t he? Jesus, Paul, you’re an ideal candidate for what Jeff was recording in those pages with all of his yeses and maybes and nos. It was speculation on who in Orient was likely to sell their homes because of personal or financial problems. You’re the only one who lives on the Sound who isn’t in his book. And yet you’ve got so many problems. Everyone saw you crash your car in that phony suicide attempt.” Paul flinched, drawing his hands into his coat pockets. “Why wasn’t that in the book? Or the fact that this is only your summer home. Or that you have no love life.”

  “Mills, I—” Paul said, struggling. He kicked the rock across the yard.

  “You’re not in that book because you were paying Jeff Trader to find out who was likely to sell. That’s what those notes about money were on the last page. He wasn’t blackmailing anyone. Jeff was gathering information, snooping through houses for signs of divorce or debt or unhappiness, so that you and Sarakit could swoop in and buy them before they hit the market. They would never get on the market because Pearl Farms had already found an interested buyer. Pearl Farms was the buyer. You and Sarakit, your own secret land trust.”

  “I really wish you’d made it to the city,” Paul said. His eyes were no longer sympathetic. His hair whipped in the wind; his hands balled in his coat pockets. Paul hardly seemed to notice the gun trained on him. It was empty, but holding it between them made Mills feel like he had some last hope of remaining alive. The possibility of one bullet in its chamber, one he’d found amid the boxes and junk, was the one thing Paul hadn’t counted on.

  He had planned everything else so carefully. The day he shaved his mustache, Mills should have realized that he’d only grown it to pass for Jeff Trader. If Mills squinted, he could see the man in front of him standing in the doorway of Magdalena’s sunroom, ranting about a wrongdoer on the board, frightening Magdalena into changing her will. He and Beth had gotten it wrong. They’d assumed that Magdalena was murdered for what she knew about Jeff, but it was the other way around: Paul had to kill Jeff so he could get away with murdering Magdalena. As soon as Pearl Farms bought Magdalena’s property, Jeff Trader would have known that Paul was behind her death—would have known it because of the information he was paying him to collect.

  “It must have taken courage for you to drown Jeff in the harbor,” Mills said. Paul shivered, from the cold or the memory. “Just like it takes courage to drive into a tree.”

  “I was depressed,” Paul snapped, clinging to his broken story.

  “You weren’t trying to kill yourself. You needed to get your fingerprints on record. You had to do something just on the wrong side of the law so they’d book you. That way the police could identify your prints on the gas can right away. You couldn’t run the risk of relying on my prints, because you didn’t know if they were on record, or if I might leave before they got to me. You knew that any detective would be able to link your gas can to the delinquent staying in your home, especially after you hid the can in Beth’s closet. You already had Jeff’s jar of keys. You had access to every house.”

  Paul stood there unmoving, blinking behind his glasses. Mills had been duped just as all of Paul’s neighbors had been duped, convinced he was a sad, lonely man, lost without his family, the kind of person who might take in an orphan against all reason and complaint.

  Mills raised the gun. “Did you see Tommy on the landing after you started the fire?”

  “You can’t blame me for your mistakes with Tommy,” Paul said. “You got mixed up with the Muldoons on your own.”

  “Can I blame you for Beth? She was pregnant, you know.”

  “That’s horrible,” Paul said somberly. “Look, Mills, I don’t know why you think—” He took a step back.

  “Don’t move,” he yelled. “And don’t lie to me. I’ve already spoken to Sarakit. I know you did it. I see you now.”

  Paul smiled thinly. He didn’t look caught. He looked like a man who had destroyed a house and was left with a splinter to pry from his thumb. He took a long breath, which whitened before the wind swept it away.

  “What do you want? Want me to tell you that I’m greedy?” His hands moved in his coat pockets. “You were greedy too. I could see the greed brewing in you each day, right behind those sad little eyes. You were practically redecorating the house, waiting for me to write you into my will. We’re not that different. I grew up here. Orient’s my home. All this land was ours for a century along the Sound before my grandfather broke it up.”

  “We’re different, Paul. We’re nothing alike.”

  “I want you to know that none of this was personal,” Paul said. He spoke like he was still trying to teach Mills a lesson, like it was another fireside talk on the meaning of land and local values. Maybe it was. “There’s nothing personal about it except for you. Believe me, I tried to figure out another way. I spent nights going over it, undoing the plans so you could stay. But it all came together against you too well. I was stuck with my original blueprint. You can’t change the footprint after the foundation is laid.”

  Mills had wanted a confession, but once it arrived, smoothly and without regret, it frightened him.

  “You could have stopped.”

  “Stopped?” Paul repeated caustically. “There was no stopping. Time mattered. Even with dementia, my mother understood that. The board was already forming their conservancy trust, and all those rich artists were snapping up the waterfront houses. I knew they’d sell their rights and more would come. It was now or never. Any later would have been too late.”

  “First Magdalena, then Bryan,” Mills said. “With them out of the way and Sarakit on your side, you knew the conservancy trust was as good as dead.”

  Paul smiled, like just hearing someone else explain it confirmed its demise.

  “It makes me sick to think about that trust. How can you buy a piece of land one day, land that’s been here forever, and decide that no one can ever build anything on it for all of eternity? Why should some outsider who just got here dictate what happens decades after they’re gone? The Sound was our property. And it’s my family, not the Muldoons, that should decide what happens here. I was just following my family’s wishes. I owed it to them.”

  “So you murdered your way along the Sound, consolidating properties with each death. Sarakit said that Bryan was the only one who was supposed to die, but you knew the whole family had to go to be sure that Lisa would sell.”

  Paul shook his head, as if the complication didn’t belong to him but to the world.

  “Mills, it wasn’t personal. It pained me to have to do that. But that kind of fire was the only way to bring fear to Orient. Don’t you see? Fear was the motive. That was the whole point of funding Adam Pruitt’s mutants on the beach. It got people frightened of the place. Who’s going to buy in Orient when biological waste from Plum Island is washing up in their backyards? Who’s going to live in a village where people are being murdered? I would have loved to pin the blame on Adam, but he had an alibi for the fire. And if word got out that Pearl Farms had already bought his father’s property from him, those fingerprints on the gas can would have taken on a different light. You see? Even in death Adam did what he was good at. He put the fear in people.”

  “Patrick,” Mills screamed. “This isn’t your land. Those parents weren’t your parents. You’re a foster kid that some misguided family decided to take in. I should have realized you weren’t their son when you didn’t remember your own fucking birthday.”

  Paul removed his glasses and wiped his face. The flare was dying, sputtering out its chalky remainder, and Paul squinted through the shine, b
linded like an animal caught by flashlight.

  “I am their son,” he shouted, for the first time losing his composure. “The Benchleys took me in as an infant because they couldn’t have more children after Paul. I was only a few months younger than he was, except I wasn’t sickly and deformed.” Paul shrugged. “Who knows, maybe Plum did mess him up. I was the healthy one, the one they could count on to do their work. Paul was hidden in the house most of the time. The neighbors confused us, and my parents were proud people, maybe too proud to admit that their own child was so broken and sick. When Paul died, I replaced him. I was all they had left to depend on.”

  “That’s why your mother was so broken up when he died,” Mills said. “Because he was her natural son.”

  “Natural,” Paul said, grimacing. “You must hate that word as much as I do. They loved me enough to send me off to boarding school, and they kept me out of sight working on the boats at sea in the summer. After a few years, I was Paul. And I never took for granted the world that came to be mine. I loved it more deeply because I knew it was hard work and not birth that had brought me this inheritance.” He waved his arm as if the whole seascape belonged to him. “The Benchleys could have been given any foster kid, but they got me. I was the one.”

  Mills remembered the day that Paul found him on the floor of his apartment building, how kindly he had taken him in. He imagined Paul walking the streets of Lower Manhattan, cruising the fugitive teenage bodies huddled under blankets, their smells and accents mixing in the late summer lagoon of trash and smog, searching for the weakest and easiest. Paul had so many candidates to choose from, and he found one right outside his door.

  “Just like if I hadn’t been the one, you would have found another kid in New York to frame.” Mills hoped Paul could see the hatred in his eyes.

  Paul fidgeted with the cuff of his yellow slicker. “Mills, you are special. You work hard, and I respect that. You’re self-made too, although I had to reinvent you a little bit. I like to think we’ve developed a special bond. Why don’t you put the gun down? I can still get you out of here on the boat. I’m giving you a choice. If we trust each other one last time, it doesn’t have to end in the worst way.”

  Paul’s talk of the future unsettled him, as if he assumed they could both leave the backyard alive. A different fear braced Mills, colder and less concrete, the fear that this wasn’t an ending but a bridge.

  Paul held out his hand, his fingers mimicking the shape of the gun. The flare died, its last sparks shooting onto the snow. The darkness diluted Paul, made him limitless, part of the air and the beating grass. The gun was almost invisible between them.

  “There’s no bond between us,” Mills spit, lifting the gun higher. “You used me, and you killed Beth.”

  A faint yellow motion. Paul dropped his hand in his pocket.

  “You’re not listening,” Paul snarled. His glasses silvered liked the leaves, like the flecks of cresting water driven over the ice. “You ask for the truth, but you don’t listen. Killing Beth wasn’t just about getting my hands on her mother’s property. Her death was necessary because it spread the fear beyond the year-rounders. I need the rich artists and trust-fund brats to be scared. I need the city people so frightened that they’ll leave Orient, or never come here at all—at least for the next few years, while I buy up as much property as I can. Christ, Mills, don’t be stupid. I told you the murders weren’t personal.” Paul kept repeating that word, as if an impersonal murder cleared him of blame.

  “You can save your confession for the police,” Mills said. He dropped the flare and wiped his mouth. The wind lashed his outstretched arm as he steadied the gun.

  Paul’s face crumpled in disappointment. “Do you think this is a confession? I’m trying to get you to understand your part in it. I told you, fear is the gas that runs the whole operation. I’m happy you haven’t been caught. I did everything I could so you wouldn’t be arrested. I begged and stammered and wrung my heart out in front of the police for one reason: because you being out here, on the loose indefinitely, fuels the fear that the land is still unsafe. Mills, I need you to do what you’re good at. I need your face out there on the wanted posters. I need the fear of you circulating in everyone’s mind until they decide it’s better to sell than risk exposure. I need you to run.”

  Mills’s stomach fluttered. The wind off the Sound rocked him. His mind scrambled for some way to unravel Paul’s plan. He had been woven into it so tightly, even disappearing couldn’t free him. Disappearing would only complete Paul’s picture of Orient.

  Paul eyed the weapon. He did what a man faced with a gun was not supposed to do. He smiled.

  “There’s nothing so dangerous as an unloaded gun,” Paul said. “I know about the bullet. And I heard the shot from the Sound. Sarakit called me to say you were demanding to meet her. I’ve been staying at the Seaview in case you turned up. I told her you were harmless—just greedy, like she was. But I figured either you or Sarakit was going to end up dead. I had to come, in case Sarakit needed help hiding your body. I couldn’t be seen driving anywhere near my house, but Eleanor was kind enough to lend me her boat. Now put the gun down.”

  The gun lost its power, turning into a hunk of metal. Mills gripped it by the barrel and extended it, offering it to Paul in resignation.

  “You’re right,” Mills said tiredly. “It’s empty. It belongs to you.”

  Paul retracted his hands.

  “Nice try,” he said. “But I won’t get my prints on it. Your fingerprints are where they should be, and they prove you killed her. Which is fine, because Pearl Farms is a shared enterprise. And another murder only increases the fear. Another body just licks the seal on the envelope.” He rubbed his arms through his coat and exhaled. “Aren’t you cold? I’m cold. I can’t go inside, though, and enjoy the fire you set. Mills, it’s time for you to go. Come with me on the boat and I’ll make sure you get to the other side.”

  Mills stammered, caught—worse than caught. He could run, but that was precisely what Paul wanted him to do. He stood three feet from the man he had treated as a father, unwilling to leave with him, because leaving with him was helping him.

  “I could go to the police,” Mills stuttered.

  Patient white contrails drifted from Paul’s nostrils.

  “And tell them what? Where’s your proof? You don’t have any, except for the gun you used to shoot Sarakit. Do you think they’ll believe you? Mills, I only told you all this so you’d see you have no option but to run. If you’re caught, you’re the one they’ll blame. You need to leave, and it’s in my interest that you make it. Get in the boat. I promise I’ll get you across.”

  “I’ll say we were in it together,” Mills sputtered. “I’ll tell them I was just following orders from you. I’ll say we were lovers.” Mills could reinvent him, too.

  Paul stared at him, dimples denting his cheeks. “So you could go to jail forever? When I deny it, you’ll still be caught. There’s one thing I know about you. You don’t have the discipline for permanent confinement. It was sad to watch you trying to make this place your home. It never would have been, even if things had been different. I don’t think that restlessness will serve you well in prison.” Paul’s eyes blinked behind his glasses. “I offered you a ladder once. I’m offering you that again. Like I said, I’ve really come to be fond of you. So let’s make this a painless good-bye. You still have a chance at a future. Either you get on the boat, or I’m going to have to kill you with the knife in my pocket and dump you out at sea. I’d rather not think of you out there in the water. I’d rather think of you someplace warm.”

  Mills dropped the gun. Paul started to walk toward the Sound but turned to find Mills standing in place. Paul’s grin faded by degrees, and when his lips finally leveled, he sighed and grabbed the switchblade from his coat pocket.

  Mills glanced at the houses behind him, none of which would take him in. They’d call the police as soon as he appeared at their door. In all of Orient
, Beth was the only one he had loved. The rest of the village had put their faith in their own. Paul flipped the blade, a three-inch razor. He shook it as if it were wet. He actually looked saddened by his need to use it. “Damn it, Mills, now you’re going to make me bury you too.”

  “Bury me too?”

  Mills thought of the Bug Light poster above the birthing-room bowl and the question mark at the base of the lighthouse on Magdalena’s postcard. Paul had taken him to his mother’s farmhouse inn, to the bluff where Paul and his father had built their miniature model of Bug Light. His mother missed her favorite lighthouse, so they built a scale model for her, so she could look out and see it on the horizon—the first building he ever made. His dead mother on the video: And if you don’t, you’re in a world of trouble. . . . Because they’ll find him, and how will you explain? Magdalena must have paid a visit to Paul’s mother during a dementia spell, raving on about a secret buried long ago below Bug Light.

  “That’s where your brother is buried, isn’t it? ” Mills said. “At your mother’s farmhouse, under that slab where your model of Bug Light was. It is personal, Paul. You’ve been killing since you were a kid.”

  Paul didn’t stumble. He tightened his foothold in the snow. But his eyes stumbled, shot with light, trying to steady themselves behind his glasses.“You murdered your brother,” Mills said. “He never died of that sickness—you never gave him the chance. You killed him first, so you’d be all your parents had left. I bet they were never going to adopt you. They wanted you to be their workhorse while they took care of their son.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered. “It was an accident. There’s no—” Silence blocked his throat.

  “That’s what you owed your mother—not the whole coast, but the property on the tip where her real son is buried. All of the rest is greed. Your mother didn’t want his grave disturbed. Only Pearl Farms couldn’t outbid Nathan and Luz to buy it back. Now, if Luz Wilson decides to dig her pool under that slab in the spring, they’ll find the skeleton of a boy. And if the police learn the identity of that boy, even the Benchley house won’t belong to you.”