Orient (56 page)

“I remember Mrs. Benchley,” Beth said quickly, hoping to change the subject.

“What a tyrant around the village she was,” Karen rasped. She broke off a bit of brownie from one of the Ziploc bags and helped herself to it, chewing leisurely. “Something switched in her brain when she couldn’t save that foster boy they took in when Paul was a kid. It was like she gave up on humanity. But I tell you, the saddest part about Paul’s accident wasn’t that he was hurt, or that he’d been drinking. It was that he drove right into that tree without braking. Like he almost meant to hit it, like he wanted to crash. There’s a difference between swerving into a tree and driving directly into one. In daylight there is. Who knows what his mind was going through? Paul’s always been so lonely. I’m glad you’re here to keep him company. Will you give him this little bag for me?”

Mills stiffened, not breathing, then released a white pulse of air and nodded.

Karen turned to Beth. “Did you hear the news? I’ve been asked to fill one of the empty seats on the historical board. I tried to turn it down, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Magdalena always called me Orient’s most dependable lighthouse because I keep watch for everyone.”
For
or
on
? Beth thought. “Oh,” she moaned. “I’m not sure Orient will ever be the same. Not what it was—not without the Muldoons.” She glanced over at her car and eased off of the porch. “Anyway, I just wanted to say that we have to rally around that poor girl, who’s lost her entire life. Who can she count on now, if not her neighbors? It could have been any of us, asleep in our beds.” It was as if Karen Norgen wanted to think of herself as a potential murder victim, someone important enough to kill.

They watched her climb into her tan Toyota. The muffler exhaled smoke. Beth rested her forehead on Mills’s shoulder.

“That’s what life is like when you live out here for too long,” she said. “Every birth and separation and death becomes prime-time entertainment.”

“I’m just glad they’re looking for Adam,” Mills said. “I was scared that people like her would decide that Paul did it, just because of those prints on the gas can.”

“Come on,” she said. “I want to catch the real estate agent before she leaves.”

Beth rang the cottage bell. The woman in an ecru pantsuit opened the door. She introduced herself as Donna from Pearl Farms, waving them inside with her clipboard. The Kiefer residence had not yet been cleared of Magdalena Kiefer. Her dusty blue furniture still sat in the front room on her blue carpeting; her beige-framed photographs stood watch on the mantel. “It’s not on the market,” Donna warned them. “I’m just doing my inventory for our property profile. But no harm in your looking.”

“I’m actually here to take the grandfather clock and the armoire,” Beth said. “Magdalena left them to me. I live next door. Sarakit
knows about it. And you can call Cole Drake, who was Ms. Kiefer’s lawyer.”

Donna glanced at the clipboard, then reached for her cell phone. She watched Mills tour the living room as if he were not a prospective buyer but a prospective thief. “I’m not from Orient, so I don’t know Cole Drake,” she insisted. “I live in Mattituck. This is highly unusual.”

Beth shrugged. “Call Sarakit.”

Now Donna was frowning. “Highly unusual,” she repeated, taking her phone into the kitchen for privacy. Beth and Mills exchanged smiles. The grandfather clock stood next to the fireplace, a tall, lean mahogany column with scrolling woodwork and a shiny brass face whose spade-shaped hands had frozen at ten-fifteen. Within the face, a painted circular dial stopped midway between a golden ball and a ship crashing through waves, telling the phases of the moon.

Beth had no idea how time worked, not old time, by pulley and anchor. She stood before the clock and stared at its metallic face. “Do I want this in my house?” she asked.

“I think it’s cool,” Mills said, eating his second Ziploc brownie. He opened the clock’s stomach and pushed the pendulum with his finger. It began to tick.

“We’ll have to carry it,” Beth said.

Donna peered into the room, pointed her finger as if to say
Not so fast
, and disappeared.

Beth swept her fingers across the rosewood armoire. Its doors were scored with nicks and scratches, and it pitched backward when she pressed against the wood, thanks to a missing leg. It was a cheap piece, stained and polished into the appearance of antiquity. Beth couldn’t think of a corner in her house that would accommodate such a bulky item, especially when Gail was on a rampage about tossing out all unnecessary household junk.

“Check this out,” Mills said. “I found it in the base of the clock.” It was a photo of Magdalena and Jeff Trader in the backyard near
her beehives, undated but recent. They were squinting through an unusually bright summer afternoon, but their matching white protective gloves were the only element they shared. Even their smiles were incompatible: Magdalena had the friendly, self-satisfied pride of an elderly woman enjoying the fruits of a spring season. Jeff Trader’s grin lurked behind a dark mustache and his eyes looked thirsty. Mills traced his finger over Jeff Trader’s face.

“He doesn’t look that old, really,” he said. “His hair isn’t even gray.”

“I think he dyed it. You must have seen him that day lying on the beach.”

“I tried not to look. But I thought he was older. This guy had muscle left. It might have been hard for a woman to tie him up in the harbor.”

“It’d be a lot easier if he had been drunk or passed out.”

“So it could have been Adam
or
Lisa.”

She turned to him. “But don’t you remember, after they pulled Jeff from the water, how surprised Adam looked when he saw the body? It didn’t look like he was expecting to find a body there.”

Mills didn’t respond. Beth got the sense that he was determined to hold Adam and Lisa responsible, no matter what. He placed the photograph on the mantel, against a framed shot of Magdalena in her pudgy middle age. She stood next to a squat, pretty young woman that must have been her girlfriend, Molly. A faint lighthouse drifted behind their shoulders, too faded to identify as either Coffeepot or Bug, though Bug Light wasn’t rebuilt until 1990, when she was already deep in age. It was not a particularly complimentary photograph, but perhaps Magdalena had found it later, after Molly died, and seen it as a high water mark. Rarely does a photograph look exactly like a person when it’s taken. But, by some law of reverse memory, it becomes more and more accurate as the years pass—it becomes you whether it was right or not.

“If only Magdalena had told me exactly what Jeff said to her on his last visit. He stood there—” Beth pointed toward the sunroom
and walked through the kitchen—past Donna, still whispering into her phone—and stood in the sunroom door, where Jeff must have stood on his final visit. Magdalena’s wicker throne was still wedged in the corner, newspapers stacked by her footstool. The terrarium on her side table was full of dead male bees, curled into balls. Beth closed her eyes, trying to imagine Jeff at the doorway, frightened, possessed of some secret that would spell his own end within a week, too scared even to sit down. What was it that he had learned? “The historical board is up to something, disguising itself as good,” he had told her. What was it about OHB that had frightened him? If only Alvara had been there to eavesdrop. If only Beth had pressed Magdalena for clearer answers.

“Sarakit says okay,” Donna said, slapping her clipboard on the counter. “You can take the clock and the armoire but nothing else.”

Beth spun around. “I just want the clock. You can keep the armoire.” Donna nodded happily and pulled a flyer off the corkboard on the kitchen wall. She handed Beth the glossy Pearl Farms flyer. It bore a photo of Donna, “certified residential and acquisition agent,” in the top right corner where a stamp would be. Beth stared at the corkboard. Thumbtacked to it was a piece of familiar stationery, with the drawing of an oyster shell in profile under the name L
UZ
W
ILSON
, and a handwritten note: “
Please call me. I would like to speak with you before you say anything. –L
.”

Luz had been to Magdalena’s house. On the night of Gavril’s party, she had pretended that she’d never noticed the cottage before. But she
had
been here, and had left Magdalena a note concerning something urgent. When Donna stepped out of the kitchen, Beth pulled the note off the board and stuffed it in her pocket.

Back in the living room, Beth found Mills hugging the clock, his arms around its tower, slow dancing with an ancient, unwilling grandfather. “Some help,” he panted. Beth hurried to tip it upright on its base. They each took an end and carried it sideways, the weights and pendulum clanging as they walked. Donna held the front door open for them. As they crossed the driveway, Mills
slipped on a pocket of ice, nearly dropping the clock on the concrete. “Fuck,” he said laughing. “It’s like a coffin.” They made it to Gail’s back door, scraping the tower against the frame, but finally got it standing in the kitchen. Mills checked the clock on the microwave, moved the hands to 1:37, and swung the pendulum. It still ticked.

Through the window, she saw Gavril standing at the door of the garage. He must have heard them. His hands were smeared in tar, his clothes rumpled from two days without showering or changing. The dial turned, the golden ball setting and the ship rising. The long hand moved toward the shorter one.

“Where are you going to put it?” Mills asked.

“Upstairs,” she said. “In the nursery for now.” She smiled at him. “Why don’t you go up there and wait for me? We still have a few hours of work to do on the painting if you can spare it. But first I need to talk to Gavril.”

Gavril was still standing by the garage as she walked outside, his face frozen, full Hawaii, his eyes staring at the ground. A younger Beth Shepherd would have been nervous, fearful that he had come to some decision that didn’t include her. But she wasn’t nervous. She was walking toward the man who had moved out to Orient to be with her, and she had given Gavril a place to live and work in peace. How lucky they’d been to have this, for as long as it lasted. A younger Beth might have felt a twinge of pity for both of them, the exhausting situation, the shyness of apologies, the silent opportunism that came between every couple when faced with each other’s bad choices. She felt only love.

As she drew closer, Gavril stepped into the studio. It was dark inside, with only scant daylight held captive in the window gratings. A few of the tar walls glimmered with bones and glowing, beelike orbs. Several mounds had been wrapped in black bags and bound in orange nylon cords, as if they were packaged for a cargo ship. The plastic improved the tar sculptures, lent them the mystery of hidden bodies. The less you could see them, the more alive they
were, wrapped with wonder in their sleek industrial shells. It looked like a house in transit.

“I sold it all to Dombrovski,” Gavril said. “Every piece of my Orient landscape. We did the deal today when he visited.”

“Why?” she asked. “I thought you wanted to wait until your show. I thought you didn’t want to cave to a billionaire.”

“It’s not my job to say what happens,” he said. “It’s not my responsibility to refuse the world we live in. And we need the money. I don’t want you to ask later why I made us poor on pride.”

“That’s your decision.” She paused. “You didn’t do it for me.”

“Yes, I did.”

His hand scooped around her waist. She hadn’t let him touch her in months. The stink of sage drifted from his arms, and she pushed her nose into his neck to gather as much of it as she could. “I’m sorry,” he said, like a man responsible for a small unpleasant act in a larger, more brutal conflict. When she pulled back, he pushed his forehead into her breasts, as if fending off a blow.

They twisted down onto the crinkling tarp. Gavril lifted her sweater and kissed her from bra hook to stomach. “Should I not?” Like a kid asking to go on a ride at a carnival, like the kid who thought his parents had taken him to the carnival to keep him from the rides. Or maybe he was worried about hurting the baby. It was just like Gavril to make the wrong request. On his first flight to America, he later told her, he awoke from a nightmare and screamed toward the cockpit “
Slow down!
”

“Mills is in the house,” she said but didn’t stop his hands as he unsnapped her pant buttons.

“I don’t care,” he said. “It’s been too long.” Too long, but not too late. If this were a search-and-rescue mission, Gavril was whirling above her, having found her in the water. Pant legs were stripped off one by one, underwear pulled down to lace her ankles. Gavril unbuckled his belt. She considered asking if they could redeploy to the cot in the corner, where Gavril had been sleeping, but he was already on top of her. “Should I use a condom?”

“A condom? I’m already pregnant.”

They should have spoken about their doubts, traded doubt stories, but there were other means of reparation. Her shoulders rocked against the dry, tar-smeared plastic. Gavril made his customary someone-dying-in-the-next-room moans, like an English word he’d lost control of. The walls of the ruined tar house shook, and the industrial, ninety-watt bulbs in the rafters diamonded her eyes, and his weight was making it hard for her to breathe, pregnant woman dead of erotic asphyxiation in her mother’s renovated garage, but the lack of oxygen blended with the red of her eyelids, and she came before he did, which admittedly had been one of her complaints about their entire baby-making process, she came in her fingers, which is how she experienced an orgasm, but Gavril followed closely behind, hand squeezing the tarp, sweat dripping from his nose.

“I love you,” he said with struggling breaths as he lay next to her. “I’m sorry. I should have tried to understand you like you have understood me.”

She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t understood him, not for the past month, that leaving him alone in the garage had not been an act of understanding but of not wanting to be understood.

“Let’s start over from today,” he said. “I’ve decided, if it’s a girl we can name her Gail. And if it’s a boy we can name him Yakov. Very American names.”