The East End

by Jason Allen

  Angelique pulled herself up and over the low bulkhead wall, sank down on one knee and looked to Corey for confirmation that spying on the injured Mr. Sheffield was indeed the most responsible plan. Rather than saying anything, he simply hopped up from the muck to join her, and then the two of them hurried along the bushes and the tall hedgerow at the property line, then cut over to the porch, where they crept past the steps and cherub statues and tulip beds until they reached the corner post. There they knelt behind a cluster of rhododendrons covered in magenta blooms, perfectly hidden and yet with a good view of the pool.

  Corey felt Angelique fumble for his hand while they watched Mr. Sheffield and his young friend in the shallow end, wisps of steam hovering and swirling along the surface of the water, the lunar light saturating both the living and the dead man’s skin with an ethereal shade of white. Corey held her hand tighter, thinking of Gina for the first time since all the craziness had begun, worried now that if Mr. Sheffield could snap like that on Angelique, he could just as easily snap on his mom.

  * * *

  Nothing made sense anymore. Angelique had known Leo Sheffield since before she and Tiffany had even started grade school, and for years had considered him a second father, a surrogate anyway, the only father figure who’d stuck around. But now that she’d seen him in those awful primal moments when he’d chased her and slammed her to the ground, she doubted she’d ever truly known him at all. For all she knew, he’d murdered a man tonight. Holy shit, she thought, what if he really is a killer? She hadn’t let herself follow that line of thinking since he tackled her—that he’d actually killed the guy out there with the soggy bandages draped from his arms. She knew she should get away, but this bizarre water funeral or whatever the hell this was with Mr. Sheffield leaning over the dead man held her in place, too curious to leave.

  After staring through the bushes for another minute or two, she glanced over at Corey crouched beside her. He lived in the Hamptons, she knew that much, but undoubtedly somewhere altogether different than this multimillion-dollar estate beside Agawam Lake. His mother would be working here tomorrow, and he probably would be, too. She’d talked with him often enough during the past couple summers that she looked forward to seeing him, and around Labor Day last year had even considered answering yes when he asked her out. He liked her; that much had always been obvious. But why was he next to her now? Why had he been here in the middle of the night, right when she needed him? She couldn’t imagine why, but whatever his reasons, he’d saved her, and without question his presence was the only thing keeping her from losing her mind.

  Leaning closer to him while they both kept their eyes on Mr. Sheffield and the dead man in the pool, Angelique thought back to her view from the balcony and the fact that she hadn’t seen how the man had died. As messed up as the view had been when she looked down at them, she’d made a quick assumption that Tiff’s father had killed him, but what if he hadn’t?

  He must have, she decided. If he didn’t kill him, then why chase me? And would he have killed me, too, if Corey hadn’t hit him? But if he did kill the guy, why is he so distraught now, like he’s in mourning?

  Just then Corey tapped her arm, which made her flinch so intensely she had to plant her palms on the ground to keep from pitching forward into the bushes.

  He didn’t make a sound as he mouthed the words Can we go now?

  She turned and looked through the branches at Mr. Sheffield leaning over the floating body, his head lowering even more, those small noises either muttered words that she couldn’t quite hear or the sound of him sobbing. Mesmerized all over again, she shook her head and whispered, “No, we should wait a little longer. I need to be sure.”

  * * *

  Corey continued looking at Mr. Sheffield with his head lowered over the dead man in the pool. He had leaned closer to Henry’s face while pulling the body just above the steaming water, and Corey was suddenly riveted by the weirdness of it all, now just as interested as Angelique was to see what the drunk billionaire would do next.

  Mr. Sheffield said something to his friend, as if whispering a secret to him. Then he eased closer and pressed his lips to the dead man’s mouth. Angelique clutched Corey’s sweatshirt in her fist, and without looking at him exclaimed in the quietest whisper, “What—in the—fuck?”

  TEN

  Leo cradled Henry in his arms, half expecting him to magically awaken when he leaned down and kissed his lips. It felt so wrong not to feel a response, wrong as well to taste chlorine and something more metallic, which he realized a moment later had been blood.

  After dragging Henry by the wrists from the pool stairs to the lawn, Leo stared at the peaceful face of his lover for some time, silent, his mind blank until he finally registered that the sun would be rising in a few hours. He drank a long pull from the bottle of Glenlivet that lay beside the silver serving tray on the ground, and knelt next to Henry, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over, until he nearly choked. He tried to rise from his knees, but fell, and then fell again. On the third try, he did manage to stand, though he teetered like a toddler as he took half steps, continuously slugging from the bottle. He headed toward the house with his belly sloshing like the sea in a storm, but also feeling as though he’d been hollowed out, his legs barely functioning. Seeing double, he gulped down more Scotch and nearly fell to the ground several times.

  Ten or twenty feet from the kitchen door, he paused to bend over at the waist with sour saliva stretching from his open mouth and a river of poison threatening to rush out, while the mob of chanting crickets quickly morphed into a chorus of whispers, rising in force like a series of storm-swept waves, echoing toward him from every direction. With everything spinning, Leo dropped the bottle and pressed his palms to the sides of his head, but to no avail. The white noise swelled louder and louder inside his ear canals until finally it closed in on him and coalesced into one deeply personal command, spoken with the same baritone voice he still heard in his most unsettling dreams—the voice of his dead father, Leonard Sr., bellowing: Don’t be such a fucking girl... Be a man...

  In his drunken sway, he held his arms out like an agitated ape and considered shouting back, “Go fuck yourself!” though he knew shouting at a voice in his head made no sense. It had to be in his head. Right? The dead don’t speak. And Leonard Sr. had been dead for more than forty years. No god would ever send that voice to him, especially not now, a voice meant only to crucify him with the words his father had uttered so many times with his belt in hand. And yet the words repeated as though lodged in his head, with a sick, throaty resonance: Don’t be such a fucking girl... Be a man... Leo took a couple hesitant steps toward the kitchen entrance and closed his eyes. He swayed some more, and then suddenly the old man’s phantom voice instructed him to snap to it and dispose of Henry’s body.

  Staggering inside the house, Leo found the mess he’d made, though he had almost no memory of making it. The refrigerator door hung open, pieces of a broken dinner plate lay in the sink, a jar of blue-cheese-stuffed olives had spilled out over an array of cold cuts and soggy scraps of baguette and marble rye. Through blinding flashes of pain from his head wound, he began scooping the ruined food into the trash can with both hands, making note to take the bag out when he’d finished cleaning. Then he ran through all the other details he’d need to address—the champagne glasses and the empty bottle upstairs, Henry’s clothing beside the pool, the possibility of blood to clean from the pool’s granite coping.

  Fuck me, he thought. The blood. What can I clean it with? Where does Gina even keep the cleaning supplies? He gripped the top edges of the trash can and doubled over. An invisible fist hammered his stomach and it emptied like a levee during a breach, a flood entering the trash bag, grotesque sounds eking from his throat.

  Angelique’s face appeared in his mind, looking down at him from the balcony. He swiped the water from his eyes and the spittle from his mouth wit
h the back of his hand and steadied himself against the marble countertop. Should he search the house for her? After the way he’d scared her, surely she was gone by now. But someone else had knocked him over the head, someone he’d never seen. Another awful thought set in. His head turned and tilted toward the ceiling, in the direction of his only daughter’s bedroom. Angelique had been there, which meant she must have come out early with Tiffany... Where had she been when her friend mistook him for a killer from the balcony? What if she’d heard Angelique screaming? What if she’d seen? Where was she now?

  The silence began suffocating him. He pressed his palms to his temples, fearing he was going mad. Even if his little girl had witnessed it all and fled the estate believing that he was a monster, what mattered most now was the much more pressing problem, the much more urgent thought: They’ll all think you killed him.

  With a new surge of energy, he dropped the plate shards into the trash bag and wiped down the countertop in wild patterns, imagining the headline and the photo of him being perp-walked down courthouse steps in cuffs, his company’s stock plummeting even before a prison guard led him to his cell. The champagne glasses and the bottle—he had to get those before he forgot. He couldn’t forget anything. He had to eliminate every trace of Henry’s presence in the house and on the property, and as much as possible, erase him from his life.

  Gnat-like spots flitted all around him as he hustled up the stairs and thought about the text messages to and from Henry on his phone, the call history, Pete driving them around the city—and tonight, the extra-loud final hour during the drive out here to the estate. He could talk to Tiffany at some point and coax her back to her daddy’s side, convince her that everything about tonight had been the result of an awful accident, nothing sinister, nothing malicious; but the rapidly growing list of complications plagued him even as a new voice broke through and spurred him on, speaking either from a great distance or from deep within: Get it together, Leo. Or you’re going to burn.

  He stomped into the bedroom, collected the glasses and bottle and his scattered clothes, and stepped through the balcony doors, pausing there to look out at the pool, and then the trees, and then over at the lake. None of the homeowners surrounding the lake had boats, at least not motorized ones, not since an ordinance passed in the eighties outlawing them for their noise and disruption to wildlife. Goddammit, if he only had a fucking rowboat. All the details mattered, but most of all he had to find a safe place to hide Henry. He looked once more from side to side, scanning the blurred property. His eyes lingered on the pine trees. He squinted, gripping the balcony rail, contemplating whether he could actually do it—whether he could dig a deep enough hole.

  * * *

  Sometime later, with one eye closed to keep his balance, he exited the house and staggered over to Henry’s body beside the pool. Once there, he unfolded an afghan from the master bedroom trunk and laid it out flat, turned Henry by the wrists and wrapped him like a mummy. He kept going back and forth, one moment thinking, I should call the police, tell them it was an accident, only to clench up, deciding once more, No, no one can know.

  This inner conversation played on a loop as he took his first step and began dragging the body away from the pool and across the north lawn. Henry only weighed a hundred and forty, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, max; but it seemed now that his weight had doubled since he’d died, or that the wrapped body actively resisted Leo’s efforts, dragging like an old-fashioned plow tilling the lawn behind. Foot by foot, grunt by grunt, eventually Leo pulled him past the garden, then past the bronze chess piece sculptures, then past the tennis court fence, locked in a mechanical rhythm—step, heave, step, heave...

  Though his legs shook and his back had begun to spasm, he finally arrived at a secluded spot in the shadows of thick pines. The same moment he dropped Henry’s body, he fell to his hands and knees. He couldn’t stand for a while, no matter how hard he tried, and in that helpless physical state the argument in his mind broke down. He abandoned the idea of calling the police.

  Still dangerously dizzy from the head wound and all the substances in his system, he assessed the time he’d just spent cleaning the house, the entire process in hindsight now seeming so programmed, as if his father’s voice or some other quasi-fascist force had moved his arms and legs like a puppeteer. He knelt beside Henry’s wrapped body and apologized, slurring the same words so many times that his rambling resembled the recitation of a prayer. No matter how temporary the disposal, he had to do it. You know you won’t survive prison, not even the white-collar kind. One mistake now and it’s all over. He continued on like this while bulling around inside the landscaping shed and searching for tools, and while he carried the shovel over his shoulder, still under the belief that the safest course of action would be to bury Henry—bury him along with the suit he’d had on when they arrived from the city. Oh Jesus, Leo thought, what happened to my gold watch? Henry may have taken it off beside the pool, but he may have still had it on when Leo wrapped him in the blanket.

  Leo crept back under the boughs beside the lawn and quickly unwound the afghan from Henry’s body, only to find both his thin wrists bare. He emptied the garbage bag and sifted through the pieces of clothing, scrounging until he found the gold Rolex in a jacket pocket. He stared at it, a slight gleam from the moon striking the clock hands where they split across the diamond at the three o’clock line. He sighed, slid the band around his own wrist and clasped it in place. The watch felt foreign against his skin. As soon as he returned to the master bedroom, he’d put it in his safe. He never wanted to see this damned watch again.

  The spaded shovel plunged into the layer of pine needles and topsoil next to the body, but immediately hit something hard, and when Leo tried again his hands seized up, filled with vibrations. He dropped the shovel and ran his fingers over the ground. He’d hit a series of thick roots from the neighboring pines. After a few attempts in other spots and the shovel hitting only roots, he was sweating and out of breath, and suddenly the facts of the moment struck him as absurd. What the hell was he thinking? Why had he thought burying him made any sense? Wishing he could lie down next to Henry and sleep before figuring out what to do, he gazed back across his acres of property toward the lake. Even at such a great distance he could see that on the other side of the water the dot-size picture windows of the Millman estate glowed with honey-colored light. Someone may have been looking out in the middle of the night when Angelique screamed. Someone may have seen him dragging a body from the pool.

  But then the possibility of a faraway witness gave way to the hazy recollection of chasing his daughter’s friend, and then the lack of memory where it had been cut short—someone had hit him from behind, someone he hadn’t seen. He let the shovel rest and stood up straight to look around. So many places where a person could be hiding, watching him from the shadows. A sound like the snap of a twig jerked his head to the side.

  He squinted at the darkness beyond the pines bordering the lawn, and whispered, “Is someone there?” so softly that he barely heard his own words. The pine boughs swayed in response to the breeze, but otherwise he heard no sound, saw no movement. He kept staring, though his thoughts drifted back to when he’d discovered Henry in the pool. What if his accident hadn’t been an accident? Was it possible that the man who’d knocked Leo over the head had first attacked Henry? Was some maniac crouched over there in the woods? He stared awhile longer, squinting harder at the general section of darkness where he’d heard the snap. Nothing moved aside from the breeze-blown branches and the pine needles softly swirling along the ground.

  I’m losing it, Leo thought. No one’s out there. But the police are probably already on their way.

  It would be light soon, and while he still needed to check the house to see if Tiffany had somehow slept through it all and was still in her bed, Sheila and the boys would be on their way within a matter of hours. Their friends and his yes-men and business associat
es would also be stopping by randomly throughout the weekend. He would have to act normal, put on a happy face while suffering through lightning bolts of pain from his head wound and the mother of all hangovers that awaited him—and all the while, somehow suppress the urge to scream.

  He leaned with all his weight and pulled Henry into the pines, thinking back to some of the cold words his father had shouted more than half a century ago after catching Leo playing with his sister’s dolls. In tandem with the emotional beatings, as a sort of daily ritual, his giant palm smacked five-year-old Leo’s naked backside, while the little boy, between shrieks and sobs, promised to be a good boy, and on some days promised never to act like a girl again. The miserable old bastard’s words and all those spankings and belt lashings had set down roots deep within him all those years ago, and now he sensed his father hovering in the boughs just above his shoulders, judging him, his eyes set upon him like blazing orbs, his ghost-hand controlling the breeze.

  From his deathbed, when Leo was seventeen years old, Leonard Sr. had instilled in him the formula for success—marry well, work hard, invest, reinvest, never show weakness, always put family first. Leo had failed to live up to most of those expectations. He’d failed to keep his promises, or so he thought as he forged ahead, dragging Henry’s body over gnarls and knuckles of surface-level roots and rocks and a bed of pine needles, disappearing a bit himself as he did, drifting back decades into the memory of his father picking him up at Penn Station, after the headmaster had informed Leonard that his one and only son had been disciplined at his boarding school for indulging his desires with another teenaged boy. Then their arrival home, Leo cornered in his bedroom, the old man’s razor strop dangling like a boa constrictor, the cracks across Leo’s bare legs, Leo staring at the family photo on his bureau while his dying father hauled off on him and shouted... No son of mine... No son of mine... No son of mine...