Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Eleanor dug through her wicker basket. A pincushion, a child’s pacifier, spiderwebs of cell phone chargers, cuff links the shape of whales, an asthma inhaler, a scrunchie with black hairs still stuck to its elastic, an inside-out golf glove—an inventory of forgotten items, overlooked by harried, dressing lovers in midregret. Near the bottom, she finally discovered her prize: a silver pendant, its chain knotted up in a bundle of charger cords. She worked as patiently as a seamstress to undo the tangles.

  “Heyr it is.” She breathed in satisfaction, a triumph of memory over time. She dangled the pendant in front of their eyes. “The woman left this one tyme in rum thuty-one. The woman nevah came back for it.” The pendant consisted of two silver ligaments, the cursive shape of the letter L. She dropped it in the basket. “I don’t steal,” she spat as if they had accused her of it. “Lou, didn’t I return that mahvelous ten-carat ruby ring once.”

  “Sure you did. If you say so,” the piano player sang.

  “The setting at least.” She laughed.

  A light-skinned Mexican man carried a stack of plates through the bar, struggling as he slid open the mahogany door to the dining room. Light from the Sound-front windows invaded the bar, revealing the dust they’d been breathing. The dining room was surprisingly refined, with glass tabletops over salmon cloth and napkins shaped like nurse caps over spotless china settings. The water of the Sound danced in the gray sunlight, a hypnotic rocking that made the motel seem boatlike, lost at sea, far enough away from land to convince adulterers that they had escaped their juiceless lives. It was a stunning view, with a faint trail of Connecticut cutting through the haze; it must have been even more beautiful at sunset, filling the bar and its fifty rooms with otherworldly pinks. The Seaview earned the distinction of its name. When Eleanor died, Mills thought, maybe the ghosts of remorseful intercourse would leave with her, and the view of the Sound would remain. At the end of a long wood dock, a corroded green motorboat battled the waves, SEAVIEW painted across its side.

  The waiter tripped on a chair leg and the crash of dinner plates followed. “Chico!” Eleanor screamed. That was one potential advantage in working for a racist: Mills doubted she’d be able to identify the waiter, a navy of nicknamed Chicos fulfilling captain’s orders in a language she couldn’t comprehend. In the strong light, Eleanor seemed even blinder, using her arms to guide herself around the perimeter of the bar. Beth took the opportunity to grab the pendant from the wicker basket, bundling the necklace into her palm. She stood up and took her wallet, placing two twenties under her untouched scotch.

  Lou thundered out a chorus of “Smooth Operator” as they fled.

  “I feel like I just learned why old people need to die in order for the world to progress,” Mills said as they stepped into the parking lot. “Still, I kind of liked her.”

  “You don’t see that kind much anymore,” Beth said. “When I was little, you still came across a lot of old people like that out here. My mother always called them the Generation Before the Greatest Generation. I think she meant they weren’t prudes.”

  They both stopped halfway toward the car. In the parking lot, near the single-digit motel rooms, Lisa Muldoon stood sobbing. Her brown hair—the same chestnut as Pam’s—was twisted into a braid. A gray sweatshirt covered her chest and tight acid-wash jeans tapered down to a pair of pebble-dusted flats. An older couple was trying to leave her, putting car doors between them as emotional buffers. The grandmother weakened, slammed her door, and ran back to hug her. Lisa fell apart, succumbing to gravity, wiggling in the woman’s arms.

  “Poor girl,” Beth said. Lisa spotted them over her grandmother’s shoulder, stared, and then buried her eyes in her grandmother’s collarbone.

  They pulled out of the parking lot and headed east toward Orient. Beth tossed the necklace into Mills’s lap.

  “What is it? An L?” she asked.

  He held it carefully between his fingers.

  “Could be. Or a fancy C? No, it’s an L. But the clamp is weird, so it hangs like a crooked L. Yeah, an L. Unless it’s a crooked A, missing its crossbar.”

  “An L,” Beth said as she glanced at it. She repeated L five times, thinking of names in Orient that began with the initial. “Obviously, it can’t be Lisa.”

  “No. Eleanor said it came from Bryan’s room. Number thirty-one. Even if it was Lisa’s, Eleanor could have just given it back to her.”

  “Mills, the woman is clearly blind.”

  “So are you thinking it might have been some other woman who caused the fire? Or another woman’s jealous husband? That fits with Magdalena and Jeff Trader, if they happened to find out.”

  Beth swerved to avoid a squirrel that skittered across the road, its body a Morse code of long dashes and dots.

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Beth said. “It could have been someone who had nothing to do with Bryan’s love life. I don’t know what we expected to find there. It was your idea to visit the Seaview.” Mills didn’t remind her that they’d agreed on the Seaview together. “I just keep thinking about poor Lisa, crying her heart out back there. Can you imagine? If she’d been home visiting from college, or one year younger and still in high school, she might be dead too. I wouldn’t want to stay in Orient either. All the remainders. I mean, reminders.”

  The causeway wavered between two bodies of water. The shoreline bubbled with sand and weeds at low tide. Seagulls grazed on insects, burying their beaks in the sludge. An old abandoned rowboat was marooned in the mud on the bay side, awaiting the water’s return to lift it and give it purpose. A metal chain attached it to a wood post. Twice a day, Mills thought, that rowboat must float and beach. He looked out to where Jeff’s body had bobbed; the sun glinted there.

  “Did you ever notice the shape of Long Island?” Mills said, staring at the waves. “It looks like a woman.”

  “Yes!” Beth gasped, her voice nearly breaking. “I’ve always thought that. No one else sees it. With her head turned toward New Jersey and her hair streaming along the coast of Connecticut like a bride wearing a long veil.” Mills didn’t tell Beth that he saw the woman’s head as bashed in by the anvil of Manhattan, not a bride but a murder victim. “I’ve thought that since I was little,” she said as they sped across the causeway. “And no one understood what the hell I was talking about. I used to trace the outline of that woman on a map and fill her in with crayons. That might have been my first portrait. Virgin bride floating in the sea.”

  Mills pictured the map in Paul’s car with its foldout grid of New York. “Where did Lisa Muldoon go to college anyway?”

  “Upstate,” Beth replied. “SUNY Buffalo, I think. It’s about an eight-hour drive from here. She came down as soon as she heard. I guess she’ll stay at least until the funeral.” Mills tried not to think about Tommy’s uneven shoulders and wavy yellow hair under a sheet in the county morgue. He was probably already at the funeral home, stowed in tufted cotton. “I wonder what she’ll do now that her family’s gone,” she said. The causeway opened into trees. “There’s no reason for her to come back to Orient after the funeral except to visit the graves. And then one day you just stop visiting the cemetery altogether, like I did. There comes a point when they’re not there anymore. It’s just ground.”

  Mills watched the familiar Orient geography return, the homing device of the city no longer detectable. Beth eased onto Youngs Road. As they neared Paul’s house, they saw a dirty gray sedan blocking the driveway. Beth looked over at him.

  “That’s Mike Gilburn’s car,” she said. “The detective. Leave Jeff’s book with me. Don’t mention anything about it.”

  Mills nodded and handed her the bag. “Be careful,” she said. “Be careful, with what you tell the detective. And we’ll see each other tomorrow, okay?”

  Beth’s car disappeared down the street, and Mills was left there with no other ride in sight. In his hand he held the silver pendant, which he’d forgotten to give to Beth. He slipped it in his pocket with Tommy’s watch
and gazed straight ahead to prevent looking toward the Muldoons’ property. The reek of burning furniture was starting to fade.

  CHAPTER 21

  Paul was perched on the edge of the sofa, his left knee galloping. The two officers had moved Paul’s modernist chairs into a more convivial circle. One was wearing rumpled plainclothes, the other a uniform. Mills walked softly into the parlor, lifting his chin, offering his most innocent expression. Paul rose slightly when he saw him, extending his arm. “Here he is.” The two heads turned simultaneously. “Mills, this is Detective Michael Gilburn and, I’m sorry . . .”

  “Deputy Kurt Parker,” the younger officer stated. Gilburn stood and shook Mills’s hand. Paul sat down, his knee a racehorse on the final stretch. Then it stopped.

  “Paul was just filling us in on your stay in Orient,” Gilburn said, scratching his beard. He didn’t need to point to the unoccupied seat next to Paul on the sofa. It seemed apparent that Mills was expected to fill it. Mills tried to make the act of sitting so close to Paul a natural, daily event, as if they often shared the tweed sofa, sitting just inches apart, studying the marble dining table and the rack of wineglasses hanging upside down like luminous bats.

  “Yes, I’ve been out here for about month and a half,” Mills said cheerfully. “I love Orient, a really nice community. I mean, before the fire.”

  Deputy Parker watched his superior the way a new hire studied an experienced waiter. Mills found himself studying Parker’s boyish face for his candid reactions.

  “And Paul says you two are friends from New York.”

  “That’s right.” Mills nodded. “We met in his building. I knew someone who lives on his floor. We became friends, and when Paul offered to let me come out here and help with repairs to his house, I was eager to spend some time outside the city. I wanted to see the beautiful countryside.” As a foster kid, Mills had been schooled on hyperbolizing the truth—to authorities, to prospective parents, to caseworkers who’d heard every sad story before, and yet somehow yielded to each new troubled face. Mills knew how to repackage the darker details into a sympathetic account. At least he hoped still he did. Gilburn’s warm grin invited confidence. Gilburn was just doing his job. Gilburn had a few questions that his superiors were forcing him to ask. Gilburn happened to love strange, ear-pierced teenagers, recently relocated from the city, who lived forty feet from a crime scene.

  “I’m glad you like our neck of the sea. We’re pretty proud of it too. That fire must have been a shock to you. It was a shock to us. We don’t have incidents like that too often out here. So you can probably understand why this town isn’t sitting as pretty as it was last week.”

  “Awful,” Mills intoned. “Tragic. They were a nice family. Very kind to me.”

  Paul leaned forward. “Mills didn’t get to see much of the village. I’ve unfortunately had him cleaning out all the junk in here, thick as the walls. He hasn’t gotten to meet many of the neighbors. It’s my fault. I should learn to throw things away.”

  “Jill and I did a spring clean last April,” Gilburn confided. “We tossed three years in five days. And then Jill kept tossing. She tossed all her stuff into her car, and soon that left too. You pull out one brick and the rest start to fall.” Only Paul laughed. Gilburn looked out the front window, his face pale. Parker bit his lip. “But you did make a few friends out here.” Gilburn’s eyes strayed back to Mills. “Someone just dropped you off.”

  “Yeah, the few that I’ve met have been so friendly. They keep wanting to show me the beaches and lighthouses.”

  Gilburn cleared his throat. Deputy Parker finally brought his eyes to Mills.

  “Were you friendly with Thomas Muldoon?”

  Mills’s mouth went desert dry. He pushed his tongue against his bottom teeth. “Yeah. I liked Tommy. We were about the same age. We talked once or twice when we happened to catch each other out front. He was a senior in high school, wasn’t he?”

  “So you were friends,” Gilburn said.

  Mills half-nodded.

  “Close?”

  “No.”

  “But close enough?”

  Close enough for what? Mills decided to snip the hair that Gilburn was trying to split. “I wouldn’t say we knew each other very well. We were friendly. We talked about music and sports, the usual stuff.” Mills wondered if he could name a single athlete or rapper tacked to Tommy’s bedroom walls.

  “What about the mother, Pam?”

  “I didn’t really speak to her much.”

  Gilburn watched him carefully. His hand stiffened on his chin. “You never went into their home?”

  “Once. I cut my hand pulling garbage to the curb and Tommy let me use their first aid kit.” He opened his palm to reveal no lasting scar. “He bandaged it for me.”

  “Only once?” Now the memory of the blow job in Tommy’s bedroom started to seem like a perversion of the dead, the moans of a young man who couldn’t moan anymore. Mills couldn’t tell Gilburn what he and Tommy had been to each other. He didn’t even know himself. But he could see the detective looking at him through Pam’s eyes: a juvenile delinquent with an appetite for trouble, an outsider with a penchant for criminality, for stealing car stereos and maybe impressionable teenagers away from their families. Gilburn liked what he saw: a possibility. If Mills had been female, he would never have been asked such questions. If he had been a lot of things, he would never have been asked such questions.

  “I think I was in their house just once.”

  Gilburn pushed himself back in the leather recliner, demonstrating an innate discomfort with modern design. He sprung forward again, kicking his feet to regain a sense of the floor.

  “I’m sorry to ask you all these questions. I know it may seem invasive, but it’s just us following protocol. You see, we have reason to believe that the fire might have been arson, so you can understand that we have to rule out all options, even unlikely ones.” Mills nodded amicably and rubbed his legs. But Gilburn wasn’t finished. He examined his notebook. He passed time reading from its pages. “Someone mentioned that they saw you and Pam in a dispute a few days before the fire, right on the driveway. Do you mind telling me what that was about?”

  Mills gulped while trying not to show his throat muscles straining. Paul crouched so far forward he was no longer actually using the sofa as a seat.

  “Mike, I told you that was just a misunderstanding.” Gilburn’s hand silenced Paul. Mills noticed a small J tattooed on the detective’s palm. The J probably stood for the ex-wife he mentioned. The tattoo made him seem tougher and weaker at the same time.

  “Let the boy speak. I understand that neighbors have little fracases.”

  Who had told the detective about the argument? Sarakit Herrig, who’d come by with her two sons for a playdate that afternoon? A neighbor across the street who happened to glance out the window? If it was Sarakit, Pam might have told her all about their fight, might have confessed over coffee that she’d found Tommy and Mills in a semicompromising position in her house just hours before. But Mills doubted she would have confided that in a neighbor. It would have reflected badly on Tommy, which would have reflected badly on Pam—and Pam held herself out to Orient like a washed and polished mirror, bouncing sunlight back into their eyes. She would never have shared a story in which Tommy had a fondness for male strangers.

  “Mrs. Muldoon was worried about Tommy,” Mills said with his hand on his chest. “He wasn’t getting the grades he needed for college, so she didn’t want him spending time on anything that wasn’t homework.” He was hoping to make the whole episode sound as suburban as cutting the grass. Gilburn scratched his beard. “She didn’t seem to want me hanging around to distract him. I tried to tell her that was fine by me, but she kept arguing about it. I think Mrs. Muldoon was under a lot of stress. She didn’t seem happy. Honestly, I didn’t take the fight personally. As I told you, Tommy and I weren’t that close.”

  “Just as I said,” Paul drawled. “It was a stupid misunder
standing. The week before, Pam and I argued about garbage pickup. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  Gilburn nodded like he understood. He tapped Kurt Parker’s knee, as if he’d caught his deputy napping. “Yeah, we’ve determined there was some friction in the family. It might have been that. Thank you for answering my questions.” He slapped his notebook on his leg but didn’t quite stand up. “One more thing. Again, just procedure. Where were you on the night of the fire?”

  “Mills and I were sitting together, right here,” Paul said. “We were sitting in this room, just as we are now. I remember I had gone to the bathroom upstairs and heard Mills call up to me, saying he saw flames through the window. He went outside, and I ran to get my coat. We stood on the curb with the other neighbors, watching helplessly. I’m sure the neighbors told you we were there?”

  Mills nodded along with the lie. “That’s right. We were sitting right here.”

  “And you never heard or saw anything peculiar in the hour before the fire? A car drive up or a fight or footsteps? Anything, no matter how trivial?”

  “I wish I had,” Mills said. “I’d like to help you find the person responsible. If it turns out it was arson. I might not have been Pam Muldoon’s favorite human being, but no one should die like that. I just don’t know the people out here, so I can’t think who would want to do that.”