Orient (43 page)

“I would invite your young friend to dinner, but it’s art people only,” Luz said. “Don’t tell him I said so, but I think Gavril’s a little jealous of Mills.”

Beth turned. Luz was grinding her cigarette into the dirt with her shoe.

“If he is, I wouldn’t know. These days he’s barely even living in the house.”

“Give him a break,” she wheezed. “He’s under huge pressure. Gavril talks a good game, but he’s like the rest of us. A slave to his reputation. You’ve got family here. You’ve got history. You’ve got that baby you two have been planning. What does he have out here but his work?”

Did Luz know she was pregnant, or was she just fishing? Beth couldn’t tell. Luz hated babies, but Beth suspected that she would secretly enjoy seeing Beth strapped to one—a fresh target of antagonism, a perfect object lesson in Luz’s own superiority over the sins of fertility. Luz chewed on the seam of her glove.

“‘An ambitious effort.’ That’s what
Newsday
called my last
show. You spill your blood on the wall and that’s all they have to say about it. You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it.”

“We’ll come by for dinner tomorrow,” Beth said and left her to walk across the grass. She caught sight of Mills and Paul, marooned on the lawn in Paul’s suits, the white spike of the UCC steeple behind them. Mills nodded gratefully when he saw her, as if she could break the spell of emptiness that surrounded them. She noticed eyes—Karen Norgen’s under light-blue eye shadow, Helen Floyd’s tinted by red sunglasses—staring at Mills, talking in hushed tones, watching him the way deer watched a still intruder, uncertain whether it might attack. She was about to head over and rescue him when a hand gripped her arm.

It was Sarakit, with her tense, thin-lipped smile. She was an attractive woman, with smooth, marmoreal skin despite her middle age, though her taste for the Long Island camouflage of catalog fleeces and pilled crewneck sweaters robbed her beauty of its force.

“Hello, Beth,” she said. A clipboard was wedged against her ribs.

“I told Mr. Cleaver already. I don’t own the house. My mother does. If you want to talk about development rights, you’ll have to speak with Gail. She’s around here somewhere.” Beth scanned the lawn for a woman in burgundy.

“It isn’t about that,” Sarakit blurted. A few tears clouded her eyes. “I want to hear from your mouth what that fight was about.”

“What fight?”

Sarakit glared at her like she was being purposefully uncooperative.

“You know what fight,” she said more loudly. “And on this day of all days, you should respect the question.” The eyes of the year-rounders, once fixed on Mills, had turned to her. “I want to know what that young man over there was arguing with Pam about days before the fire.”

“I don’t know what you—”

“Yes you do.” Sarakit’s voice was burning. Her breath smoked. Ted got up from the table with the weary resignation of a Calvary
bystander in one of the church’s copper Stations of the Cross reliefs. “You were there. I saw you. Pam was angry about something that kid did, that foster kid of Paul’s, and I want to know what it was.” Paul heard his name and headed toward them; Mills stayed behind on the lawn, rubbing his legs.

“What’s going on?” Paul asked.

“Sarakit is just upset,” Ted said. In response, Sarakit slapped her husband in the stomach, dropping the clipboard on the ground.

“I
am
upset,” she moaned in defense. “My friends were murdered, and no one has been arrested. I’m not saying he did it. All I’m asking for is an honest answer. What did that young man do to the Muldoons to make Pam so upset? Will someone please tell me? Why is no one speaking up? It happened just days before the fire. We’re a community, aren’t we?” Realizing she was making a scene, Sarakit pulled her wool collar to her neck. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said toward the young man alone on the lawn. “They weren’t your friends.”

Paul tried to apologize. “The police have already—” he whispered. Beth left Sarakit midhysteria and walked over to Mills, standing frozen in the Orient chill like a foam core target. In front of the remaining mourners of the UCC congregation, she took his hand. The mourners looked on, eyeing her cautiously. Their houses were not as safe as they had been a week ago. There was a murderer among them who hadn’t been caught. After the quiet solemnity of the funeral, they spoke in clipped suspicions. “The arsonist wasn’t a complete stranger to the family. Whoever it was had keys.” “They were all alive when the fire started. The coroner found soot in their throats.” “The motive wasn’t robbery. Who brings gasoline to rob a house?”

Beth felt the neighbors’ stares on her. Maybe taking Mills’s hand wasn’t as supportive as she had intended it to be. After all, she’d been the first one to cry murder, long before the Muldoons were killed, and now murder had come. Off in the distance, she saw Mike Gilburn leaning against his sedan in the parking lot. He nodded. She walked off with Mills in the direction of her house.

“I didn’t want to come,” Mills mumbled on the sidewalk. “I knew people would look at me weird. But Paul said I should for Tommy.”

“I know,” she said. “It will blow over. Sarakit’s lost her mind.”

The limousine carrying Lisa, the only surviving Muldoon, passed them by en route to the graveyard.

When they got to Beth’s house, she opened the back door to the kitchen. Gavril had already eaten lunch; his plate was in the sink.

“I found the secrets in the journal,” she told Mills as she poured him a glass of water.

“I found out something too,” Mills said, removing his suit coat. “Well, I didn’t find out, exactly. I remembered.” The daylight silvered his face, and as he gazed at her with eyes eased by her company, she felt again the instinct to paint him. Maybe that had been the lesson of the morning: there was no more time to wait for approval from others—not strangers, nor Gavril, not even herself. A mark on the world was made that way, by pushing into it, by digging as deep as she could go.

“What did you remember?” Beth asked. She opened the refrigerator to search out the ingredients of a sandwich for him.

“Lisa Muldoon,” he said, gripping the table. “She’s the girl we saw that day we drove to Jeff Trader’s place. The one leaving that red bungalow. She hasn’t been away at college. She’s been in Orient all along.”

CHAPTER
24

B
eth and Mills sat in the car, surveying the bungalow from which Lisa Muldoon had stumbled in her hooded sweatshirt only a few weeks ago, attempting to hide as they drove past. Plant leaves stuck against the frosted window. The lights inside were off, and the driveway was empty. Two Pruitt Securities badges marked the bungalow as protected. When Mills asked her who the place belonged to, she shrugged.

“The question is, why would she be here and not at her own house?” Beth tapped the steering wheel, her fingers turning white with cold.

“The Muldoons thought she was at college,” Mills said. “Tommy did. He admired her so much for getting out of Orient. Lisa obviously didn’t want her family to know she was back.”

“Maybe it was just a weekend visit,” Beth suggested, as if out of respect for the young woman she had watched bury her family that morning. “We don’t know that she’s been in Orient the whole time.”

Mills grunted and turned to her. “What if she’s been staying at the Seaview all these weeks? She’s the
her
that Tommy discovered at the motel, the one he wondered if he should turn in to his parents. He must have caught her there when she was supposed to be away at college and he felt like she’d betrayed him by coming back.”

Beth glanced down the block for oncoming cars. The bungalow was still quiet and empty. “Let’s take a look,” she said. “It’s too cold to sit here all day.”

She unhooked the chain-link gate, opening it for Mills and letting it swing in case they needed a quick retreat. In the shadows of the porch, it was even colder. She tapped her knuckles on the door.

“No one’s home.”

She opened the metal mailbox on the door but found only coupons and Pearl Farms flyers addressed to “resident.” Mills cupped his hands against the window and peered in, and she copied him. Beyond the leaves of a few ferns, a mattress in the center of the room was strewn with blankets and sheets. On a plywood table, papers and hand tools suggested a squabble of white- and blue-collar work. A sailor’s map of Orient, marking its precise tides and coves, lay unfolded on the floor.

“A man lives here,” she said.

“Did you try the doorknob?” Mills asked.

“It’s got an alarm,” she said, pointing to the Pruitt signs in the yard. “And I think we should stop breaking into homes on Beach Lane.”

“Look on the doorknob to the bathroom,” he muttered into his palms. A white bra hung there by its strap. “Could be Lisa’s. The man could be her boyfriend. But why wouldn’t she just stay with him here? Why would she take a room at a motel?”

“Because the Seaview isn’t in Orient,” Beth said. “There’s less of a chance of running into someone she knew. Unless she ran into her father there during one of his visits.” In her mind, Muldoons suddenly swarmed the old motel like termites.

“The
L
,” Mills said. “From the necklace.”

Beth stepped back from the window. “I don’t know Lisa. She was a little girl when I lived out here. But I will say she did look genuinely upset at the funeral. Would she murder her family just to prevent them from knowing that she dropped out of college? Or just because she caught her father having an affair? Maybe we should tell Detective Gilburn and let the police handle it.”

Mills warmed his fists with his breath. Beth had lent him one of Gavril’s down coats, and she grabbed its tails to zipper him into it.

“She lied about being away,” Mills said. “Not just to her parents. To the police. Why?” Before she could stop him, he jumped from the porch and started walking around the house. She followed. The side of the house was dotted with plastic buckets full of rocks; the owner seemed to collect them the way others collect spare change in jars. The aluminum siding was sun-warped and encrusted in ice. The guts of a lawn mower lay in the grass, its motor sprouting dead summer weeds. An old bee box was similarly autopsied, its racks thrown in the dirt. The bungalow’s back door had long since rusted shut, and there were no back windows, nothing to look through for a clue to the owner’s identity. Beth noticed a woodshed half-hidden behind two overgrown spirea bushes and walked toward it as Mills circled the house. Five feet from its padlocked door, the odor of rot filled her nose. She gagged as she covered her mouth. Beyond the backyard fencing, she saw Jeff Trader’s property, cleared of its mobile unit, dragged away by some machine that had left deep grooves in the mud. Beyond the barren field, the Sound sparkled its colorless mercury.

“Hey,” screamed a voice behind her. “Get the fuck away from—”

She spun around: it was Adam Pruitt, storming toward her, his right hand brandishing a hammer.

They recognized each other simultaneously. Adam’s scowl softened, though his grip didn’t ease on the hammer. “Well, well,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to show up. What do I owe this privilege?” He stopped midlawn, forcing her to step away from the shed. He was still wearing his suit from the funeral. Behind him, the red fire department truck was parked in the drive.

“Is this your place?” she asked. “I mean, I was hoping it was.”

“Yeah. I live here now. I sold my dad’s house months ago.” He sniffled and wiped snot on his sleeve. The hammer pivoted in his fingers. He licked his front teeth, as if grooming them for a smile. The smile didn’t come. “Why are you here?”

“I tried to call first.” She laughed dumbly, like the girl she’d been in high school, the one who went along with Adam and his
friends when they stole motorboats and loaded them with beer and built bonfires on outlying islands. The guys got in trouble but never named her as a participant to the cops. Adam Pruitt was always in trouble; if he’d implicated her in half the mischief they’d gotten into, she might not have escaped Orient with an NYU scholarship and a sterling reputation. The mass inside her might have been a Pruitt instead of a Catargi.

“It’s a start-up,” he said.

“What is?”

“My company.” The smile, when it arrived, was proud. She had seen arrogance in Adam’s face before, and drunkenness and delinquency, but pride recast him as a more vulnerable man. “I don’t have a secretary yet, but I need to hire one
a-sap
. As you probably know, business is booming. I tell you, if the government had respected the land, we wouldn’t be in such a mess. Think of what we were exposed to as children out here, getting zapped by those poisons and microbes from Plum. We’re lucky we turned out so good-looking, huh?”

“Congratulations,” she said, her body in clumsy contrapposto. She allowed Adam to follow the curves of her hips and breasts, waiting for him to let go of the hammer.

“When do you want me to come over?” he asked. She stared at him, trying to imagine Lisa Muldoon in his bungalow, letting his hands root across her teenage body. Adam caught the uncertainty on her face. “To do an inspection. You’re here for a security system, right?”

“We need one,” she agreed, recovering quickly. “And for the garage. It’s Gavril’s studio now, my husband’s. Lots of expensive artworks.”

“Art works,” he repeated, turning the second word into a verb. “I remember that your mom put in a pool. She might have been the first to go with that organic saltwater variety, with no chlorine to kill the bacteria. We can test the water. And I recommend a soil graph. I wouldn’t eat a tomato in Orient without running a toxic spec. You’re friends with that artist couple who bought the old
farmhouse inn, right? I was over there yesterday. Man, they’ve got their work cut out for them.”

“Yeah. Luz and Nathan.”

“They’re digging holes out there like mad. You fuck with the land that much, the house is going to slide right onto the beach. Everyone from around here knows that. I’d appreciate you putting a word in with them about running some environmental checks.”

“I saw you at the funeral today,” Beth said, pushing him toward the reason for her visit. “I feel so bad about what Lisa is going through.”

Adam’s mouth shifted, its hinges crooked like a broken suitcase. He reached his free hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out for her, but she shook her head. He dropped the hammer and lit one for himself.

“Yeah, for that to happen to such a sweet girl,” he said. “Can’t say I know her that well, but when I lost my parents it’s like a chunk of my past went with them. When I cleaned the house out, I didn’t know what the fuck to do with my old childhood drawings. I thought about keeping them, but why? I burned them in the fireplace. All those houses we painted in Mrs. Jenkins’s class went up like we never should have bothered.” He sighed. “But Dad would have been proud to know that his name was meaning something to the people in Orient. Security. Protection. Fighting those environmental cancers, the kind that ripped through his lungs like paint thinner. That’s what you’re here for, right? A system? You want you and your husband to be safe?” His eyes flitted between her and the shed. A doubt stumbled through him, she could tell, stumbled and fell and smacked its chin on the ground. She felt blood rushing to her tongue, but before she could say a word, Adam spotted another figure in the backyard, prompting him to lean down and reclaim the hammer.

“I’m coming,” she called. She touched Adam’s arm as she passed him. “I’ll call you about an inspection,” she said. “Maybe next week if you aren’t too booked?”

Adam studied the young man trespassing on his property.

“Hey, kid,” he yelled, pointing his cigarette at him. “You better think twice before walking around a stranger’s house. I don’t mind Beth, but you’re not known to me. If you don’t respect a fence, you’re likely to be stopped by something worse.”

“I’m sorry, Adam, we’re leaving,” she said over her shoulder. Mills did his best to appear unfazed. They jogged to the car, and she started the ignition.

“So Lisa Muldoon was with Adam Pruitt,” Beth said. “He always did like them young.”

“Wasn’t Adam her father’s main competitor?” Mills asked, buckling his seat belt. “Maybe they were in it together. She killed the family she hated and he killed the man whose business he wanted. Jeff Trader could have found out what they were planning. He might have seen Lisa. He lived next door.”

Beth remembered something Paul had said to her the first day she had gone over to pick Mills up, when the air was still warm with autumn and Jeff Trader was still the only dead body in Orient. Jeff had told Paul that there were some people in Orient who shouldn’t be there. He could have been referring to Lisa.

As she drove, Mills stoked the fire of his new theory. “Don’t you see? It fits. Jeff Trader knew she was here, not away at college. They had to get rid of him before they went ahead with their plan. Maybe Jeff told Magdalena about Lisa being back. So she also had to be taken care of. Then it was only her family that was keeping them apart. No way they would have approved of Adam.”

“So they did it for love?” she said skeptically. Was there some romantic failing inside of Beth that prevented her from seeing love as a motivation for murder?

“Haven’t you ever heard of a kid killing her parents? And guess who knows how to set a fire that can’t be extinguished?” Mills said. “A firefighter.”

They trailed behind a mud-splattered Chevy on Main Road until it turned north up a dirt road. Beth followed the pickup as it rumbled up an incline, setting their teeth on edge.

“Where are you going?” Mills asked, steadying his hand on the dashboard as farmland slid past the windows, hot hay yellow in a frost-blistered field.

“I want to ask Roe diCorcia a question. Maybe this time, you wait in the car.”

Half a mile
off Main Road, past a miracle of farmland that grew soil-depleting corn one year and soil-replenishing soybeans the next, bordered by razor wire and patrolled by Rottweilers that gleamed yellow or green for most of their starving summers, stood a white pine farmhouse that belonged to the diCorcia family. Beth had grown up frightened of the diCorcias, as all good children were taught to be. The family was the marrow of Orient legend: bitter and creepy and proud owners of an arsenal of shotguns that made no exception for the local field stray. The diCorcias, when spotted around the village, seemed happy to confirm their own mystique with gruff words and tightly squeezed faces—as if they were forever stepping on a blister—and with the
rat-a-tat
backfire of their truck.

If reputations in Orient were built on a series of isolated social contests, the diCorcias had dropped out of the tournament altogether, preferring certain infamy to the constant scramble for status. Refusing to play, they opened themselves up to rumor. The note Jeff Trader had written in his journal—“possible incest”—had already circulated among Orient children for decades. Who did the diCorcias mate with if not each other? What self-respecting person would have them?
Them
, for the past twenty years, had meant Roe; his wife and adult daughter rarely stepped foot off their acres of cropland. DiCorcia females were as hard to spot as bobwhite quails, and a rare sighting was regarded with vituperative awe:
Did you see what they were wearing? Dresses right out of the ’70s—the 1870s. Do they even have running water? I’m not sure they ever learned to read
.

These memories came back to Beth as she bounced the Nissan toward an oasis of hilltop spruces. Under their branches, the
farmhouse magnified. It was as big as the Benchley mansion and just as decrepit, not from lack of use but through the unbroken inhabitance of diCorcias dating back a hundred years. Roe’s grandfather must have been more ostentatious—it was he who must have added the glint of colored Victorian glass to the diamond windows along the second floor, and planted grapevines that still climbed a wagon-wheel trellis—but such indulgences had since been bred out of the bloodline. The widow’s walk crowning the roof and the chains on the porch for a phantom swing were reminders of a time when independent corn farmers were viewed as more than soil grunts. Now their kind of poverty made for stunning scenery, the very sort of landscape the historical board hoped frantically to preserve. Roe diCorcia’s only adornment to the house was a large satellite dish clamped to the widow’s walk. The diCorcias were clinging to the twentieth century, not the nineteenth.