Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Mills looked up at her and smiled. “Guess what?” he said, pulling a brown leather book from the bag. It was dusted in kibble. COORDINATES was embossed on the cover.

  “No way. In the cat food. Not his cereal.”

  “See,” Mills replied, “and you thought I wasn’t being helpful.”

  She reached across the table to take the journal. As Mills passed it to her, a piece of paper fell from the pages and landed faceup on the linoleum. It was a snapshot of a woman, her face vandalized by black ink, with devil horns drawn on her forehead and a beard on her chin. Her eyes were scratched out.

  “One more thing,” Beth said over the hood of her car. “The keys. They’re in a jar in his truck. We’re supposed to take those too.” Mills hurried to the truck, opened the driver-side door, and crawled across the cushions. She watched him search the cabin, tossing newspapers and shirts. He ducked his head out.

  “Not here. No jar. No keys.”

  “Are you sure?” she called.

  “There’s nowhere for a jar of keys to hide.”

  He shut the truck and jogged back to her car. At least they had the book. She would not return to Magdalena entirely empty-handed. But Beth wondered if the same person who ransacked the trailer had also made off with the keys to so many Orient houses. She backed out of the driveway, thankful to have Jeff Trader’s mobile home in her rearview mirror. She remembered the advice of her doctor: relax, take it easy, just rest.

  She drove west on Main Road, passing the expansive estate that belonged to Arthur Cleaver—a grandiose monument to Greco-Roman architecture circa 1983, one of the few atrocious luxury mansions that had been built in Orient before the historical board cracked down on such extravagances. Its pink stucco façade glimmered between a militant file of sapling sugar maples, their skinny trunks painted white like the legs of racehorses. She passed cornfields, barren but for a few patches of fall flowers, that were still owned and farmed by Orient’s oldest families. A mile of deer forest blurred by them, yellow but for the occasional black real estate sign—FOR SALE, FOR LEASE, FOR FARMING ONLY. Trees the shape and color of fireworks hung over the road. She passed Sycamore High School and Old Oysterponds Cemetery and Orient’s single gas station, now shuttered for winter. The farther she drove from the tip, the saner she felt.

  “What’s so special about this book anyway?” Mills asked, flipping through its coffee-stained pages.

  “I’m not sure. What does it say?”

  She looked across the front seat at the pages. Each one listed a local address, and divided into columns marked LATITUDE and LONGITUDE, printed tightly in black pen, were records of duties Jeff Trader had performed. Mills read aloud from a few random entries: “mow lawn,” “drain pipes,” “two tabs disinfectant in water well,” “scrub boiler,” “reboot alarm.” A dull inventory of caretaker tasks: it hardly seemed worth the trouble. Mills closed the book and concentrated on the snapshot, defaced with such force that Beth could see score marks on the other side of the paper.

  “Do you know her?” he asked as he held the photo up.

  Beth took the snapshot and tried to study it as she stole glances at the road. The woman’s face was too obscured, though a sweep of red hair showed between the devil horns.

  “It could be anyone. It could be my mother,” she said with a laugh and studied it more carefully. “It really could be my mother.” The hair was similar to her mother’s before she began dyeing it. The woman wore a yellow tracksuit and stood in front of a yard of shorn Bermuda grass and out-of-focus rosebushes. The Shepherds had never grown roses in their yard, and Beth was relieved by the discrepancy. “What did this woman do to piss Jeff Trader off so much?”

  “Maybe she was his girlfriend,” Mills said. Beth wasn’t sure Jeff even had teeth under his rat mustache. “She dumped him, and he spent his nights haunted by her. Maybe that’s why he killed himself.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Beth asked, concentrating on the road. “Have you ever done that to the picture of a girl who dumped you?”

  Mills rubbed his thighs and stared out the window. He seemed to be examining his face in the side mirror.

  “Do you think I’d have a girlfriend?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  “Sure. You’re a handsome guy.”

  He swiveled his neck and brought his cheek against the headrest.

  “You really think I’m handsome?”

  She stopped for a red light and took the opportunity to study his face. His jawline dipped faintly and disappeared into his neck as if it had not yet decided how sharp his chin would split. His lips were smooth and pinkish brown, like the wet undersides of shoreline pebbles. Maybe on their next outing she would find the courage to ask him if she could paint him.

  “Yes,” she said. She had no way of evaluating the beauty of someone so young. All young people looked beautiful to her now. “But what are you, nineteen? Wait a few more years. When you’re twenty-two or twenty-three, you’ll be at peak handsomeness. Then no girl will be able to resist you.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. He scooped hair into a knot above his forehead. “People have always said that to me. ‘Oh, when you were younger you must have been so cute.’ Or, ‘In a few years, you’ll really be good-looking.’ But I wasn’t cute when I was younger, and I won’t be more anything in a few years. I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves?”

  She turned onto Browns Hill and headed toward the Kiefer house.

  “Magdalena will be able to tell us who the woman is,” she said, setting the photo on the dash.

  As they drove down Beth’s street, flashing red lights swept through the trees and across the windows of the houses. She slowed down. Two patrol cars were parked in front of Magdalena’s house. In the driveway, an ambulance sat with its back doors open, serving as a makeshift bench for a few EMT workers. Hope was an ambulance in transit—not a parked ambulance serving as a communal bench. As they drove closer, Beth saw Magdalena’s garage door raised and fragments of gold littered across the blacktop.

  “What’s going on?” Mills leaned forward against the strap of his seat belt.

  Beth drove past the patrol cars and parked in her driveway. Unhooking her belt, she wrestled out of the car. Mills was already scurrying around the hood with the book in his hand, and together they proceeded through the melee of concerned neighbors and EMT personnel. Beth waited for someone to stop her—a police officer gathering her in his chest for consolation or crowd control—but no one did. Her feet crunched the golden specks on the driveway. She entered the garage and was blinded with flashes by a man squatting with a camera over his face. Beyond a barricade of buckets, two coarse, rash-purple legs lay on the ground, outstretched, as if running sideways. A light-blue housedress was lifted to her thighs. The rest of the body was hidden behind three white bee boxes.

  “Ma’am,” the photographer yelled. A police officer tried to grab her arm, but she pushed his hand away. She stepped forward to glance over the boxes and saw Magdalena’s face, red and bloated, her cheek resting near a drain, her ruined blue eyes staring at nothing, her hands knotted at her breasts. Her whole body was nothing, a hunk of fat and tissue dressed in clothes. The drain had more air moving in and out of it than her open mouth.

  Now it was the police officer’s turn to call her ma’am. “Ma’am, please step back. Are you a relative?” He touched her arm firmly, and when she turned around, she recognized him: Mike Gilburn. She hadn’t seen him since high school. She’d gone on a few dates with Mike junior year—mostly out of guilt, since Mike Gilburn was ruthlessly nice, even when she threw him over. She heard he’d become a detective with the Southold Township Police Department, had married and divorced. In the last fifteen years, he had grown old and bearded, with wrinkles like withered rose petals around his eyes.

  “Beth?” Mike said in disbelief. “My god, it’s you.”

  Her hands were shaking. They shook at her chest as he le
d her out of the garage. Her voice shook as well. “Mike, I’m her neighbor.” But there were other worried neighbors there too, lingering at a respectful distance on the curb. “And her friend.”

  “I’m sorry about that. It’s probably best you return to your house and let us finish up in here.” He tapped the Southold Township badge pinned to his shirt pocket. “I didn’t know you were back on the North Fork.”

  “What happened?” she demanded. She looked up at him, and he glanced down at his notebook, as if he’d already written down the answer to her question. The page was blank.

  “She’s dead,” he said. “Her nurse found her about an hour ago. She must have been tending to her bees and suffered some kind of attack.”

  “Attack?” She was having trouble processing simple words.

  “Heart seems likely. There are bee stings down her arms. Looks like she got stung pretty badly and suffered some sort of cardiac event. We don’t know exactly, but she had heart problems. She was old. Are you staying at your mother’s place? I haven’t seen you since—”

  Beth stared at him in confusion. Mike noticed her distorted face, and his smile became a seagull slowly shrinking into the distance. She started to ramble, trying to explain that it might not be an accident, that Magdalena believed in murderers, as if believing in murderers could somehow make you more likely to become a murder victim.

  “Murder?” Mike repeated. His neck shot back and his voice tightened. “There’s no indication that this is a murder scene. Wait a minute, Beth. Why would you suspect foul play?”

  “Because, Mike, Magdalena told me just the other day that she thought someone had murdered her friend.”

  “What friend?” Mike was holding her by her elbows.

  “Jeff Trader.”

  The young officer who Beth had seen on the beach stepped forward.

  “The old man who drowned himself out in Gardiners,” he informed the detective.

  “I know who Jeff Trader is,” Mike said gruffly. He looked at Beth. “You mean, Jeff’s suicide.”

  “No, Mike,” she screamed. She kept repeating Mike’s name to remind him that she wasn’t crazy, that they’d been friends once, that he owed it to her to hear her out. But all the Mikeing wasn’t helping. “Not a suicide. He was murdered too. Someone knotted the rope around his legs.”

  “Beth.” He moaned. “What are you talking about? Are you all right?”

  “It was murder. Jeff was murdered and now maybe Magdalena was. Please just listen.”

  Mike winced—as if he was recalling those five dates they’d had almost two decades ago, as if he’d been the one to break it off because of some disturbing character trait that was now revealing itself at full force. He let go of her elbows and reached into his pocket. Beth looked around. The neighbors were staring at her now, people she’d known since she was a toddler, who had bought Girl Scout cookies from her, who’d complained to her parents about her reckless driving and sent her congratulatory cards with five or ten dollars on her graduation day. Neighbors she’d hardly spoken to since she’d returned to Orient. They watched her now with stunned expressions. Choking back her tears, she chose the off-ramp to self-preservation and said no more.

  Mike handed her his business card.

  “You’re upset and you need to go home and calm down,” he leaned in and whispered. “You’re creating a scene. When you calm down and your thinking is clearer, you can call me. But your friend was eighty, and there are no signs of a break-in. No signs of suspicious death. Beth, think carefully before you start making accusations. You know what people out here are like. You know how that kind of talk can work everyone into a panic.” Mike clapped her shoulder. “Kurt,” he told the young officer, “can you escort—”

  “I can make it home on my own.”

  Beth ignored the stares of neighbors as she headed down the driveway. The golden specks sprinkled on the asphalt, she saw now, were the carcasses of honeybees, killed by the cold as they fled the garage. As she passed the ambulance, she heard a voice call her name.

  “Lizbeth.” Magdalena’s nurse, Alvara, was sitting on the truck’s bumper, a police blanket draped over her shoulders. Beth hugged her, and the nurse cupped her hands. “She dead when I come. She just lie there. Stung. Poor Messus Kiefer.” Alvara crossed herself.

  “What was she doing in the garage alone?” Beth asked quietly.

  Alvara shrugged. “She never go to the hives without wearing protection. She was too smart for that.” Alvara’s eyes fidgeted nervously, and her fingers gripped Beth’s hands. “Lizbeth,” the nurse murmured. “It is a crime.”

  “I know it is,” Beth said. She was thankful that someone else had reached the same conclusion. “I think you’re right.”

  “It is a crime for me to be here. I not legal. I afraid I be deported. And my family, all of us, sent back. They tell me stay for more questions. I must walk off now. Please do not tell them my real name.”

  Beth stared at Alvara in devastation. But out of duty she brought her arm around the nurse’s shoulder.

  “Let’s walk off together,” she said. “It will look okay if you’re with me.” Beth collected Alvara against her chest. The young police officer trailed behind them.

  “Ma’am, she needs to stay in case we have more questions.”

  “This woman is cold,” she snapped. “I’m taking her where it’s warm, if you don’t mind.” Without a superior to guide him, the officer stepped back, looking in vain to Mike Gilburn for instruction. Beth led Alvara onto the Shepherd lawn. She glanced back to make sure Mike and Kurt weren’t running to detain them and saw Mills standing across the street. He waved the journal in his hand. “Ma’am, ma’am,” Kurt called. Adding Mills to the situation would only complicate matters. Beth gestured toward Paul’s house, signaling for him to go.

  “Ma’am.” They kept walking, shoulders huddled in the wind. Gavril stood on the front porch with his arms folded, watching their progress through the bed of ivy. The police lights stained Gavril’s face. He held the front door open for the two women and, ten minutes later, held the back door open for Alvara as she escaped into the safety of Long Island.

  CHAPTER 10

  Paul said it was disrespectful, in light of Magdalena’s passing, to order pizza. “I don’t want to spend the night a friend died waiting for Domino’s to pull into my driveway.” He leveled his eyes at Mills, then let out a subdued laugh. It was the first time Paul had laughed since Mills had brought him the news.

  What was appropriate to eat on the night one of Orient’s local stalwarts took her last breath? The homemade honey Magdalena had given the Benchleys each Christmas—ten years of unopened amber jars, taking up an entire shelf in the kitchen? Frozen pizzas, or peanut-butter sandwiches, or the locally caught oysters Paul had forgotten to buy at the farm stand for lunch? What do the living eat on a day of death?

  Paul’s refrigerator contained scant provisions: a sliced loaf of whole wheat bread, a carton of eggs, a frosted jar of peanut butter, ten potatoes sprouting floral outgrowths. The Domino’s Pizza in Greenport, its building shaped like a pizza box exploding with astral light, as if heaven itself were among the twenty-three menu toppings, was the only restaurant willing to deliver beyond the causeway. Mills wanted pizza—Magdalena would have wanted them to eat, wouldn’t she, not starve?—but as a newcomer he had no standing to argue, and besides Paul had spent the majority of the afternoon in the cellar, preferring to be alone.

  Mills had walked the two miles home from Beth’s house. He watched the news of Magdalena’s death travel through the village, almost as if his own presence carried the message. Front doors opened and residents stumbled down their walks with their hands on their hips, staring toward the house they couldn’t see, staring at him because they could. As he approached Paul’s steps, he caught a shadow moving behind the glass in the front door.

  “Paul?” he called, climbing to the porch. The door flew wide and a thin black woman stepped onto the welcome mat, the sm
oke from a cigarette circling the diamonds on her fingers. Her short hair was slippery and knotted close to the scalp. Her eyes were long and heavy-lidded; though she wore an ordinary black polo, its collar flipped up around her jaw, he smelled the expensive, churchlike scent of her perfume. She stood so confidently on the welcome mat, this strange young black woman in the middle of whitewashed Long Island, that for a moment Mills wondered if he’d wandered back to the wrong address. Mills hadn’t seen a single black person during his stay in Orient. He thought of the slaves buried in the Tuthill cemetery; maybe they too had descendants in the area.

  “Yo,” she said, waving her cigarette.

  “Can I help you?” He hid Jeff Trader’s book in his back pocket.

  “Doubtful,” she replied. “I’m looking for Paul Benchley. He seems to be out.” She didn’t mention the fact that she had already invited herself in.

  “He’s painting,” Mills said. “This is his house.”

  She nodded to express, Yeah, dumbass, I already know that. “Which is why I’m here.” She tapped ash on the porch. “I’m a painter too. Well, not Benchley’s kind.” She grunted like she found the comparison amusing. “He does seascapes, right? Anyway, I have a house out here now and I’m doing a series of portraits of some of the locals. I heard Paul’s family has been out here forever, so I thought he might be willing to sit for me.” She took a drag and waited, as if she expected him to hurry up with her lunch order. “I’m Luz,” she said with a smile. Luz like fuzz, buzz. She took so long to bestow a smile that when it arrived it felt like a reward.