Orient (37 page)

But both women froze at the oncoming roar of a motor. They watched through the glass as a green Subaru pulled into the driveway. Cole climbed out, carrying his briefcase, warped and embryonic through each adjoining pane. Holly blew deep breaths, warning Beth with her eyes. She picked up a batik swirling with peacocks and jagged striations, stretching the fabric between her arms, and started extolling its virtues before the key turned in the lock.

“It’s block printed by little girls in Malaysia with natural inks. The peacock is a common symbol in the east for holiness and purity and the virtue of friendship because it shows its true colors.” The front door opened, and a shadow passed into the foyer. “Not to mention the eye of the feather, always watching. The silver unblinking eye of god. If you look closely, the background pattern is fire. When you move the fabric, it looks like it’s burning. And the eyes are all over it, watching, resistant to flames.”

Cole stepped into the room, his skinny body barely filling his suit. The sharp folds of his necktie matched the sharp side part in his hair. He glanced at the two women entranced by the batik under the showroom lights. When Beth looked over her shoulder,
he fixed his stare on her and passed through the parlor toward the den.

“Sweetie, you’re back early. It’s only two o’clock.” Cole clenched and unclenched his hand like it had been wounded. “Beth’s just buying a birthday present. Your friend is going to love this. And what a steal, just two hundred dollars. Cash only. A percentage goes to the Malaysian orphan fund. Shall I wrap it in tissue?” Beth had only $130 in her wallet, but Holly took it without counting. She bagged the batik without wrapping it in tissue.

“That armoire and grandfather clock are sitting in Magdalena’s house waiting for you to collect them,” Cole said, almost numb, as he set his briefcase down by the step. There were certain houses where the air was so crowded with disappointments they were as claustrophobic as an elevator between floors. “I can’t promise they’ll be there after her house gets sold. You can take them whenever you want. Your choice.”

Beth wanted to ask if the Kiefer property was for sale, but Cole vanished into the den. Holly led her to the door. The marbled cat tried to flee the house, making a desperate low-crawling dash at freedom, but Holly stopped it with her slipper.

“Don’t come back,” Holly said as she waved.

CHAPTER
20

M
ills sat on his bed, scrolling through Tommy’s computer watch. Besides a clock, a compass, a weather forecast, and a game devoted to brick building, the only other feature on the high-tech watch was a file reserved for notes. Tommy recorded his secrets in a jumpy list, interspersed with rambling cultural observations time-stamped over the course of the past year. “What would 9/11 have been like if the people trapped in the towers had Facebook and Instagram and smartphones? The world would have tracked the fall of the towers through constant Twitter updates.” “Wilt Chamberlain slept with 20,000 women; Fidel Castro 35,000. Communists and basketball players believe in quantity. But wouldn’t better sex dudes have their scores handicapped by repeats?” “SAT vocab reminder: Even using the word grandiloquent is grandiloquent.” “Jack Kerouac slept with men. Jesse Arnez keeps wearing a Jack Kerouac T-shirt to school. Jesse Arnez must be willing to try things.” “Where does all our garbage go? Our world would be a moonscape of trash without garbage men. Why is there no national garbage men day? Because we’d have to treat them like men and not like garbage.”

Mills was impressed with Tommy’s private thoughts. Mills had an airtight room in his mind for his own desires, but Tommy had built this room in his phone for his musings, never meant for outside eyes, and in reading them Mills found the sorrow for the young man’s death that he hadn’t managed to summon while standing in
the burned remains on the lawn. You can’t will ghosts to haunt you. They elude when prompted; like weather, they must come on their own. One entry, from August, even included a salacious personal entry: “7.25 inches, ¼ inch bigger than last year.” Women had cup sizes to track their development. Men had a ruler and hope.

But there were other entries on the watch, less personal, that suggested why Tommy felt he needed to hide it in a locked safe. “Dad loaned 10k to Ted Herrig; can’t pay it back? Mom doesn’t know.” “Parties on Arthur’s Ark always include Gardiner descendants. WTF? Island?” “Rm. 31 Seaview motel. 3 dif women, all married!” “Karen N. closeted lesbian.” “Rev. Whitlen, 2013 C-Class Mercedes. Church funds?” “Roe diC, three screaming messages on dad’s answering machine.” “Why is old Raleigh house so hard to buy?” “Orient Monster, bodies of animals: raccoon, dog, pig, deer, badger, sheep. All local wildlife.” “Big artist = total fraud.”

The parade of local gossip went on in digital type. Mills recalled Tommy standing in his boy-smelling bedroom, bragging about how he’d escape Orient once he found the money to get away. Mills wondered if he’d been saving up these Orient secrets in hopes of one day using them as blackmail. And he also wondered if the darker secrets in Jeff Trader’s journal had sped that plan along, spurring Tommy to blackmail someone. Could that someone have resorted to arson to keep him silent? Fire was a good way to destroy both the evidence and the kid who clumsily wielded it.

The last entry was written on the day Mills had found Tommy walking up the street in a rage. “She’s a liar. Seaview room for one. Should I turn her in?”
Her
not
him
—not Bryan Muldoon, but a woman. What could Tommy have turned her in for? Had he found a woman’s name in Jeff Trader’s book and matched it to one of his father’s affairs? Along with Jeff’s journal, Mills had found a piece of paper in the safe, engraved with a drawing of an oyster shell in profile, the circle of a pearl lodged in its crevice. On it Tommy had scrawled, “Orient’s real threat is its trust.” Mills didn’t know what to make of the note. As a sensationally normal seventeen-year-old,
Tommy was susceptible to sensationalism. By “trust,” did he mean the trust set up for the Kiefer Nondevelopment Initiative? Or was he warning against trust in general—the kind applied to neighbors that they’d always look out for one other?

The fire had spooked Mills, burning nightmares into his dreams. He had stayed indoors for the past two days. Paul was even more disturbed by his neighbors’ deaths. Mills heard him making choking sounds as he stared out of the parlor window, like a hand drill hushed by a bed pillow:
Umph, erg, oh, errr
—as if he were registering the fact of the fire over and over again.
They’re dead. The Muldoons are dead. The people next door are gone
. Paul set the alarm system every night and darted around the house placing fresh batteries in the smoke detectors. He even brought a rope ladder up from the cellar and told Mills, as casually as anyone could when discussing home-safety precautions, that he’d leave it in the upstairs closet in case they had to climb out of a second-floor window.

“Who do you think set the fire?” Mills had asked him bluntly.

“Let’s wait to hear the final verdict from the police before we start pointing fingers,” Paul said, feigning calm. To Mills he seemed New York naïve, suffering under the same delusional mentality he’d witnessed in every other affluent white resident of that metropolis. From the safe haven of their urban fortress of coffee shops and yoga studios and flower-lined delis, they had all convinced themselves that New York City was still the most dangerous city in America. New Yorkers should spend a week in Modesto, Mills thought, where carjackings and desert shotgun assaults were as constant as quinceañera parties in the public gardens.

The morning after the fire, three officers had knocked on Paul’s door. A bearded plainclothes detective and two uniformed cops stood on the porch and asked questions while Mills listened from the shadows of the foyer. Had Paul seen anyone suspicious the day of the fire, creeping around the Muldoons’ house? Had he noticed any erratic behavior in the family members? Had Paul been home all night? The questions were “just procedure,” Detective Gilburn
promised, scratching his beard as he flipped through his notebook, nodding along to Paul’s answers. “We’ll be coming back, if we need to, for a thorough statement,” the detective said as he shook Paul’s hand. “Again, just procedure. And it will give you a little time to remember if anything comes to mind.”

Erratic behavior. Creeping around the house
. Mills tried to let the questions pass through him without sharpening them into hooks.

Paul had asked him, over lunch that afternoon, if he had woken on the couch before or after the fire started. Mills told him after, that he had heard the noise of the blaze or the sirens or maybe the neighbors collecting on the sidewalk. What he recalled most vividly was the orange light spilling across the coffee table.

“I saw you asleep before I went upstairs to bed,” Paul said. “If the police come back, I just don’t want—” He stopped, his fists balled against his plate.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Paul’s foot stamped the floor, as if applying a car brake. A labored smile intercepted his thoughts. “It will be fine. It’s just that in all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never witnessed something like this. The whole village is going to be in hysterics. I pray they find a defective electrical socket before the funeral. It’s awful that every time I step outside, the remains of that house are right beside us.” There was a sharp tug in his voice, like Christmas lights yanked from a tree. “I was about thirteen when Bryan and Pam moved in. They were this young, happy couple. My mother took a liking to Pam. Helped her with her garden and when she was pregnant with Lisa.” Mills had a hard time imagining Pam and Bryan just starting out; they seemed to him as fixed and severe as military statues. “And they were so good to me when my mother was sick. I just can’t wrap my head around it. Theo was nine. Tommy, seventeen. Kids in their own home.” Paul shut all the curtains on the left side of the house to blind them from the rubble. Mills peered through them, watching a team of red-vested investigators sift through the debris. One of the pieces of evidence
they carted away was Tommy’s safe. It must have seemed more valuable once the bumper sticker was obliterated from its door.

Paul tried to get back to work on his laptop—“Just putting some finishing touches on this corporate headquarters my firm’s presenting for an international food distributor. It’ll never get built. All I do is design corporate buildings that never end up getting built.” Mills sat on the parlor floor, sorting ancient VHS tapes and a summer’s worth of news clippings from the rededication of Bug Light in 1990, when the ersatz lighthouse was feted with fireworks and a marching band. He blew the dust off of Paul’s digital video camera and added it to the keepsake box.

Neither of them made much headway with their work. Paul had hardly eaten, and he drank an entire bottle of a North Fork Cabernet, pacing nervously at the front windows, as if expecting the police to return, or some kind of village mob. The sidewalk slowly filled with bouquets, teddy bears, and farewell signs—“we will not forget you Tommy.
, Sycamore Senior Class”—before a series of rain squalls reduced them to mulch.

When Paul decided to hose the ash off the side of the house, he told Mills that he’d do it alone. “Just stay inside. You don’t need to do every repair,” he said while putting on his mud boots. Mills understood that Paul was trying to protect him by keeping him out of sight.

Mills could have left, but leaving now would look suspicious.
The kid next door, disappearing for no reason days after the fire
. But more than that, Mills felt like he possessed the keys to the crime—Tommy’s notes and Jeff’s journal, two pieces of evidence that must hold some answer. If the fire turned out to be connected to Jeff Trader and Magdalena Kiefer, Mills was already deep in the mix, standing on the median with cars speeding past him both ways. Just a little while longer, he thought, as he left his duffel bag unzipped and kept his clothes in the guest room’s dresser drawers. When a car pulled in the driveway and Paul knocked on his bedroom door, he yelled “Just a second” and hid Tommy’s watch and Jeff’s book in the birthing room bowl. “Come in.”

Paul smiled like a benign jailer. “Beth is here. She thought you might want to take a drive to Greenport.”

“Oh, thanks. Tell her I’ll be right down.” He shoved the book and the items from Tommy’s safe into a plastic bag and carried it downstairs. Beth stood in the foyer, her eyes following his descent. Outside, the air was cold with low, whipping winds. The sun was blocked by sea clouds, spilling light like a waterlogged dishrag.

“We’re going to Greenport?” he asked her.

“Maybe farther,” she said as she opened the car door. “Depends on what we’re looking for.”

In the cramped
cavern of the Nissan, over the five-years-out-of-date rock music that formed Beth’s five-years-out-of-date CD collection (CDs! ancient windmills of technology), they both agreed that it might be wise to drive to the Seaview Resorts Motel. Beth spent the drive recounting her semidisastrous visit to Holly Drake.

“If Jeff hated Holly because she fired him and threatened to tell his other customers that he was a thief, that might explain the devil horns,” Mills said. “Maybe he
was
a thief. And maybe he found something he wasn’t supposed to see.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Holly has no alibi for the night of the fire. Neither does her husband. He was supposedly in the city on business.”

Near the corner of Village Lane, they drove past a memorial portrait of the Muldoons taped to a telephone pole, amid the garage sale announcements and rain-faded
PROTECT YOUR FUTURE
Pruitt Securities ads.

“Is Cole Drake the kind of man who would burn down the house of the guy who was sleeping with his wife?”

Beth shrugged. “There’s a lot of pent-up anger in that man. He’s also Magdalena’s lawyer, however that fits in. Besides her nurse, he was the last person I know of to speak with her before she died.
Maybe Cole did find out about the affair. But Holly told me she wasn’t the first woman Bryan had snuck off to the Seaview with. So, if Cole’s not an option, another husband could be. Or another woman. I think we should just go down and look at the motel. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Bryan had at least three affairs,” Mills confirmed. He told Beth about the watch in Tommy’s safe, pulled it out of the bag, and started reading Tommy’s notes on local misconduct.

“Ted Herrig is so nice! He taught me geography.”

“Roe diCorcia is a tough farmer. I wouldn’t cross him. His family goes back at least a century. And when farming has been in your family for a hundred years you’re not exactly tolerant when it comes to threatening your crop yield.”

“Karen Norgen—gay? She used to put on these horrendous puppet shows at Poquatuck Hall when I was a kid. Every station of the cross was a felt marionette carrying a wood coffee stirrer on its shoulder. I wonder if Magdalena knew.”

Mills read the last entry, about a woman checking in alone at the Seaview.

“You didn’t see Tommy that day,” he said. “Something upset him. A
her
.”

Beth watched the road. “I don’t know if it was a good idea to tamper with that safe. What if someone saw you?”

“No one saw me.” He reached into the bag and pulled out Jeff Trader’s book. “And I got this back.”

Beth eyed it. “Thank god. I told the detective I had it. If he asks, you never saw it, okay?”