The East End

by Jason Allen

  But then they spoke for the next few minutes about...well, it didn’t matter what they spoke about... Leo quickly picked up on Henry’s signs, his light touches on Leo’s arm when he laughed, his prolonged eye contact and sustained smile, his charming compliments. And then, before Leo even realized what was happening, Henry dropped the volume of his voice, leaned in and said, “I’m free tonight, if you’d like to speak some more in private,” and without any hesitation Leo agreed that they should meet. And for all the months since then a blank space stood in his memory between that thrilling moment and the slow-motion sequence two hours later, when Leo opened the door of the presidential suite and slipped the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, the closing of the door, the dead bolt in place, the silence before their first kiss, and the lack of words during the dreamlike hours that followed. No man had ever felt as lucky as Leo had that night—or as unlucky when, hours later, they had to part ways.

  Leo leaned closer and slid the blanket back over Henry’s head, but then immediately jolted backward when a burst of electronic music sent him falling to his hip, the flashlight beam slashing wildly over the pine trunks and the ground as he crawled like a starving dog over to the bag of clothes and hurriedly emptied all the contents. The techno beat continued blaring from the pine needles beside him. Henry’s ring tone played for another few intense heartbeats while Leo searched the ground. Then, mercifully, it went silent just as he found the damned phone.

  Leo squinted and discovered the name Mom and the words Missed Call highlighted on the screen. He checked the phone’s menu bar and swallowed against the lump in his throat when he saw the litany of notifications—ten other missed calls, fourteen unread texts, nine unheard voice mails. Henry had been missed—missed by people who cared about him, the most frequent caller and texter being his mother. But Leo had called this week, too, and there were plenty of his old messages listed in the queue as well. He’d need to erase every one of them, starting with any voice mails Henry may have saved, then all his incriminating texts—and there would be tons of them—somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred sex texts, way too many playful phrases with words like kiss and suck and fuck, and hundreds more that at least implied a romantic relationship, hundreds of Henry and Leo’s private flirtations waiting like grenades without pins.

  I’m in hell, Leo thought, realizing he also needed to erase the same scroll of evidence from his own phone—the long, damning text thread, the voice mails, the explicit emails, every single photo, no matter how benign any may have seemed before. He decided to listen to Henry’s nine voice mails first, though, to know who’d called him and to see what they’d said, starting with the message Henry’s mother just left.

  “It’s me again,” the woman said, her voice shaky as she went on. “You said you’d check in at least once a day... Please, Henry. Call me... I need to know you’re okay.” Silence filled the recording for another few seconds, as if she’d waited for him to answer, before finally hanging up.

  Leo’s eyes watered as he scrolled through the other voice mails. Two of the messages had come from unknown numbers earlier that afternoon, the first of those from a solicitor, but the second one stunned him and sent an awful chill along the length of his spine. “Hello,” the recorded voice said. “This is Detective James Faraday, calling for Henry Beauchamp. We’ve received a missing person’s report from a Mrs. Lorraine Beauchamp—your mother—who informed us that you were recently admitted to Brooklyn Mount Sinai Hospital for psychiatric observation, and that during the past week since you were discharged she’s been unable to contact you. If you could please contact me at the following number when you get this message, that would be a great help.” The detective proceeded to leave his number, the same one Leo had seen listed next to the voice mail.

  The moment the recording ended he erased it. His throat felt swollen. He angled the flashlight toward the body. Henry’s mother must have reported him missing even before he came out here to the estate. Why hadn’t he just called her back? A new streak of pain penetrated Leo’s skull. He thought about calling a car to drive him to the airport. He thought of the gun in his safe upstairs. The energy drained from his limbs. His heartbeat seemed to slow, as if his life force were trickling out and seeping into the ground. He imagined himself a lost hiker on a frozen mountainside, laid out on ice, too tired to continue on, wanting only to sleep.

  Acceptance washed through. He wouldn’t be able to cover this up, not for long, and the idea of fleeing dissipated like smoke in a breeze. He hung his head. All along, the crude plan to disappear had been nothing more than a desperate dream. They would lock him up either way.

  With the flashlight aimed at the ground, he looked over at the vague lump in the darkness. The detective’s message meant someone would come here eventually. The missing person’s report made it official now. Leo crawled toward Henry’s body, weighted down by the same crushing sadness he’d felt when he dragged him out here, though now also feeling a surprising swell of anger. Kneeling next to the body, he leaned forward and groaned, doubting for the first time that Henry’s death had really been accidental. Perhaps he’d simply followed through with his suicide attempt that had landed him in the psych ward earlier in the week, though to do so here would amount to intentionally setting Leo up for a long, hard fall.

  A breath of wind permeated the woods as he leaned closer to the blanket covering Henry’s head and whispered, “Did you plan all this? Is this payback for me not returning your I love you?”

  He started sobbing, but then couldn’t breathe. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted to breathe anymore. No, he thought—no more self-pity! Man up! He returned to his feet, wobbly, dizzy. Only the weak-willed threw in the towel without first fighting with everything they had, and Leo was anything but weak. His father had made sure of that. He still had time. Suicide was not the only option. He wouldn’t just curl up and die, not yet, anyway. First things first; he had to focus on erasing every damning word he and Henry had ever said to each other that still remained on either of their phones.

  His thumbs worked frantically for a moment until the menu question on Henry’s screen arose: Erase entire conversation? Box checked. Yes. All texts erased. Alright, next—the six saved voice-mail messages from Leo, saved under the moniker Papa Sheff, all deleted. He needed to wipe away every electronic trace of his connection to Henry, then take out the battery and smash it with a hammer, along with the sim card and the rest of the phone—obliterate it before Detective Faraday pinpointed its signal here—

  Shit. They can track this thing with GPS. The phone felt radioactive in his hand as he flipped it over and clawed at it to remove it from its case.

  He paused, unsure if he’d heard something moving in the woods. Then he knew he hadn’t imagined it. Branches rustled behind him. His head turned sharply away from the sideways cone of light beaming at his feet. More rustling, followed by sounds like snapping twigs, like footsteps. He squeezed Henry’s phone tighter, squinting at the darkness.

  “Mr. Sheffield? What are you doing out here?”

  He fumbled with the flashlight and aimed it at the drag trail, saw nothing at first but then lengthened the beam. Her white sneakers, her legs and cargo shorts came into focus.

  She stepped closer, into the light.

  “Gina,” he said, turning quickly toward Henry and then back to face her. “Let me explain.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Gina had been sitting in the dark, nipping from a bottle of Grey Goose in one of the vacant third-floor bedrooms, too afraid of bumping into Sheila to journey out to her car and finally leave for the night. She’d been thinking the same thought for nearly an hour: Five more minutes, then I’ll make a run for the kitchen door. Though now, after drinking shot after shot of straight liquor and forcing her eyelids to remain open, she’d also become wary of driving at all.

  Mired down, feeling stuck in the dark bedroom thanks to her own drunken stupidity, she
happened to be looking out the window when Leo left the house from the kitchen door dressed in nothing but his red silk robe and slippers. She opened her eyes wider and watched him shuffle across the lawn until he reached the sculptures, leaning closer to the windowpane when he began jogging with an awkward gait away from the house.

  Drunk and high from too many pills, she imagined his reason for venturing so far from the house after dark—to meet up with Angelique, either to pay her off or to revisit their tense conversation in the garden earlier that afternoon. She slugged a much heftier gulp from the vodka bottle and stood up, intent on confronting him. If he tried to fire her, so be it. He’d done something terrible and she knew it. She was untouchable.

  She set the bottle on the windowsill, left the bedroom and staggered along the hall, then hurried down the two flights of stairs, pausing momentarily at the ground floor landing to listen to Sheila and her socialite friends babbling bullshit on the lake side of the house, their voices wafting in through the screen doors. After bumbling against the walls of the hallway, she entered the kitchen and immediately clattered into the copper cookware that Michael had left overturned on the center island, cursing under her breath as she stepped much more carefully the rest of the way to the door.

  Once outside, she paced next to the pine boughs, off-balance, wandering along the dark tree line, knowing he was out there somewhere but not yet seeing or hearing any trace of him. Then a glow of light winked and splintered through the branches deep in the woods and pulled her from the lawn.

  She followed a rough path between the trunks where the pine needles had been swept aside and soon spotted him about twenty yards ahead with his back to her. From there she crept toward him cautiously, expecting to find him with Angelique, maybe with a sack of cash passing between them. But instead, she found her long-time boss alone, hunched over in his robe. A liquor bottle lay beside him on the ground, along with some scattered clothes—a pair of pants and a crumpled white shirt, a jacket sleeve draped from a garbage bag—and a bit farther back, a shovel laid out beside some sort of mound—something oblong and lumpy wrapped in a blanket. She rubbed her eyes, confused by everything, the low light from his flashlight making it difficult to gauge the overall scene as she approached. With her next step, he turned. As if speaking inside a dream, she asked him what he was doing out there.

  “Gina,” he said, flashing the light at her feet and then raising it up, straight into her eyes. “Let me explain.”

  The dreaminess of the scene faded quickly and she snapped at him, “Where is she!”

  Tripping over a thick root as she stumbled closer, tempted to punch his face once she stood over him, she fought through her own slurring as all the pent-up anxiety came rushing out in anger.

  “You did something awful to Angelique. I know you did, so don’t even try to deny it. I thought I knew you, but you’re nothing more than a predator.” She paused, then shouted, “Say something, you two-faced piece of shit!”

  Leo stayed on his knees, his face shrouded in shadow. Gina hovered over him for a moment, swayed and then kicked his thigh. “Start talking!”

  “She isn’t here,” he said, his body shaking as though electrodes had begun zapping him from neck to knees. “There’s so much. I’m sorry... It’s just too much. I can’t even think anymore.”

  She kicked him again, harder, and he bent even closer to the ground. The vodka had loosened her, eroded her usual filter, empowering her now to speak to him as she’d never done before. She felt absolutely righteous in her indignation for this man who’d fooled her so completely for so many years, and had no desire to hold back anymore. “You said you’d tell me the whole story, so you’re going to fucking tell it all. Now!”

  With his head down, Leo answered meekly, “Just look around. Nothing matters anymore. I’m going to hell.” He dropped the flashlight at Gina’s feet and buckled at his waist. “I’m in hell already,” he said, and fell into an awful fit of sobbing, rocking forward and back and muttering pleas for forgiveness. Gina picked up the flashlight and directed the beam at the dirty bandage taped to the back of his head, and then his face, his red eyes, wet cheeks, snot running from his nose. He looks like shit, she thought, and then felt compelled to say so.

  “Leo,” she said, conscious of the fact that this was the first time in twelve years that she’d ever called him by his first name. “You should see yourself. Mr. Fortune-Five-Hundred CEO, Mr. I’ve got a mansion in the Hamptons and a ridiculous penthouse and everything else in the world a person could ever dream of having. You should really see yourself right now. You look like hammered shit.”

  He could fire her, sure, but at this point who the hell cared. She wouldn’t work for a predator, and if Angelique needed backup when she pressed charges, Gina would testify. She’d say whatever needed to be said. From now on, she decided, these abusers are all going to answer for their crimes.

  Leo kept sobbing while she swept the ground with the flashlight, shining it over the random things scattered about. Looking closer at the pieces of a suit, she felt goose bumps rise along her arms. And the shovel—why was there a shovel out here? She stepped a bit farther, straining her eyes as she approached the mound. It had an especially odd shape, elongated but also with strange curved sections. Something hidden, wrapped in a blanket. She moved closer. With each step she took, the shrinking cone of light clarified the shape more and more. The blanket itself, when she got a better look at it, was familiar—the afghan from Leo and Sheila’s master bedroom.

  Wait, she thought, what’s it wrapped around—is that—no—it can’t be—an ear, a hand? She gasped, too shocked to scream.

  “It was an accident,” Leo said directly behind her.

  She swiveled so quickly she dropped the flashlight, spiraled down and fell to her side. Before she could even get to her feet the adrenaline sent her scrambling away from both Leo and the body, moving into the darkness of the woods, struggling on all fours like a wounded fox being pursued by a vicious pack of hounds. She sensed Leo moving toward her, right behind her, heard his feet crunching over the dry needles a moment before he grabbed her by the arm.

  “Please wait,” he begged as she broke free. “It really was an accident.”

  She couldn’t see well enough to locate the path or even to know which direction to run. She felt him beside her and slapped at the darkness, connecting with nothing, still struggling to stand as she stumbled along on hands and knees. He grabbed her again and cinched his arms around her in a tight hug. She fell to her thigh, his hand clamped over her mouth as she just now thought to scream, the two of them flailing in the pine needles until he wrestled her to her side and pressed his weight down. She kept wailing into his hand, screaming for help from unknown depths, worked her jaw and managed to bite his finger, and yet still he kept his hand clamped there.

  “There’s more to it than you think,” he said, whispering intensely next to her ear. “Just let me explain.”

  With his hand pressed so tightly over her mouth, she could hardly breathe. She’d caught him with a dead body. She knew now that he needed to silence her, that he wasn’t simply trying to subdue her; he was trying to kill her. The most primal part of her, the survival instinct, kept her punching and clawing at him, while he struggled to keep her from screaming, wedged to the ground.

  “Please, let me say this,” he said more desperately. “Hold still for a second and listen!” She squirmed more but he kept her pinned. She had no leverage. Her only chance now was to wriggle her head until she could bite his finger again.

  “Stop! Just let me say what I have to say, and then I’ll let you up,” he wheezed, then went on in a softer tone, though at a much more frantic pace. “Do whatever you want after I let you go—just hear me out first. Henry, my friend over there, he came out here with me Thursday night. Pete drove us from the city. It was late when we arrived. We were doing drugs. We drank too much. When I was in the h
ouse and he was out by the pool, he had a terrible accident. I don’t even really know what happened, but he died, and I was so distraught, so drunk, I wasn’t in my right mind when I brought him out here.”

  Although Gina couldn’t muster another scream with his palm holding her mouth closed and partially covering her nose, the lack of oxygen panicked her even more and she tried to push him off her in a few quick moves, kicking, grasping at pine needles and throwing them where she guessed his face might be.

  “Please stop,” he said, breathing heavily, sounding exhausted. “Please just listen to me and then I’ll let go. I promise I won’t hurt you. And you need to believe me—I didn’t hurt Henry, either. He was a friend, a good friend. I may have even loved him. I don’t know anymore. But whether I loved him or not, I cared for him. We cared for one another. He’d had issues before we met, and this week he’d tried to kill himself. I brought him out here so we could have one good night together before I had to pretend to be someone I’m not for the rest of the summer. I was in the house getting us something to eat, then found him in the pool. He wasn’t breathing. I tried, I swear to you I did everything I could, but I was drunk, very drunk... I probably hadn’t even gotten to him in time for mouth-to-mouth to make any difference. He was dead. I was alone with him, and he was dead. I hid him out here in a moment of panic. That’s the truth. I didn’t know what else to do.”