Orient (44 page)

Roe got out of his Chevy. Beth lowered her window as she slowed behind it, raising her hand through the crack, palm open, a white flag of peace. Roe slammed his door and glared as he wiped his fingers on a rag.

“Stay put,” she said to Mills. She climbed out, struck by a hilltop view of flat yellow fields so bountiful she could hardly believe such undeveloped acreage still existed in Orient. Behind the house, the Sound foamed and the distant ferry to Connecticut was a flyspeck on raw, blue meat. Deer fled into the fields, frightened by the cars, their white hinds dirtied with manure and leaves.

“What do you want?” Roe yelled. A denim coat hung over his camel hair jacket. A smear of dirt from the steering wheel striped his pants. Roe scooped up his hair and tied it back. “If you had something to say to me, you should have spoke your piece at the church. I don’t like people coming up here uninvited.” A stray lock of hair swayed between his eyes.

“I know,” Beth replied. A gratuitous smile would have insulted him. If years of overgracious suburbanites hadn’t tamed Roe’s heart, her smile wasn’t likely to convert him. She stared again at the
view. The hay covering the soil winked with icicles. If she owned this much land, she thought, she might keep people off it too. Roe snapped his fingers to bring her attention back to him. An old Rottweiler with hair-patched skin lay near the porch, its whole body panting in dehydration. Roe followed her eyes to the dog.

“Been sick. Ate or drank something awful. All the dogs been sick lately. Could have been poisoned for all I know, by one of our upstanding neighbors.”

“I just have a question for you, and then I’ll go.” This seemed to soften Roe a bit, enough that he leaned against the truck, chewing on his cheek.

“I’m listening. Elizabeth, right? You’re Anthony’s daughter. He wasn’t a bad man. Not saying we was friends, but he knew how to keep to his business. He knew where everyone’s lines were.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about Magdalena Kiefer.”

Roe’s face pitched back. A gulp traveled down his throat.

“I thought you were here about OHB.” He laughed. “You eastern city people have your heads screwed on wrong. You keep walking forward but your eyes are facing back.” His fingers braced the tailgate. “Eastern people talk about saving this place. They’ll ruin it by trying to save it.” Roe kept saying
eastern people
like he lived in the west, like the city was somewhere beyond his view of the Atlantic.

“Magdalena was part of OHB too.”

“Yeah, she was,” Roe admitted. “And Lena was the only decent thing about it. She didn’t think helping preserve the land had anything to do with taking away my rights. I got a right to say what gets built on my property. I got a right to water my crops from the county grid. I pay my taxes. You eastern people and your postcard reality. It ain’t a place if it’s frozen in time. Well, you’ll see. You’ll see just what you get for stealing me of my means.”

“Mr. diCorcia,” Beth said pleasantly. “I was born here too. We aren’t from different places. I’m not trying to steal anything from you.”

Roe leaned farther back, his entire body weight held by his grip on the truck.

“You
used to
be from around here. You ain’t no more. You left. And when you come back from a place like that, you’re changed. That city over there is where you belong.” He pointed his chin toward the Sound, another wrong direction. “I know what kind of friends you brought back with you. I see ’em, clear as day. They think because they have money they can turn Orient into a resort. But I live out here, at least, I do today. Maybe not much longer. I might have to parcel out a few of these prize acres you and your friends drive past like you’re on vacation. Like I grow these crops for scenery so you can gaze at them from your speedboats and sports cars. No, young lady, you ain’t from here. You may live here, and you may own it all soon. But this ain’t your place.”

“I get why you don’t like OHB,” she sputtered. “I get why you were angry at Bryan Muldoon for blocking the water main—”

“Angry?” Roe found her choice of words humorous. “That man ruined me for the past two seasons of corn. All I could grow was sorghum because I couldn’t irrigate enough with my wells, even with the pumpers I had to pay out of my own pocket to haul in. Angry at Bryan? No, I wasn’t angry. I was almost bankrupt. Angry doesn’t begin to fix how I felt about that arrogant coward who blocked my lifeline.”

“What about Miss Kiefer? Was she angry? You told my mother the night of the town meeting that Magdalena would have been upset to have her name on that new initiative. I was hoping you could tell me why.”

“Lena understood that I work the land for a living. She valued those of us who are fighting to make ends meet. She would never have backed an initiative that offered a few farmers down on their luck some hush money to sell off their development rights just so they could eat for another year and the whole time be robbed of what their land is worth. First Bryan took away our water, and, when that broke us, he tried to give us money for our development
rights. You take that away too, you’re basically putting us out of business. You’re saying no to infrastructure we need to stay afloat. Without that, all these fields will have to be broken up into little plots so you eastern city people can come in and build your dream chalets.”

Roe let go of the truck and threw his hands up, as if he were lecturing an inner-city student. “You don’t get it. Lena did. She would have fought that piece of shit scam, not put her name on it. Seems maybe someone got rid of her before she could. It embarrasses me that other farmers, like the Floyds, are sitting ducks on that board, blinded by a second in the spotlight. They ought to know better than to listen to Bryan. Guess who makes money if the land gets carved up and more rich folks like your friends move here? Small home owners like Bryan, that’s who, ’cause their property value increases. A security company like Muldoon. It gets a wave of new business. Real estate agencies, like the one owned by that Oriental woman. She gets a commission on every sale. I tell you, OHB stinks like manure, ’cause that’s what it is.”

Jeff Trader had tried to warn Magdalena about OHB on his last visit. And now Roe was pointing blame at OHB too, hinting that the board had led to her death. Had Jeff Trader known that OHB was going to go behind Magdalena’s back on the initiative? Was Jeff silenced before he could speak? If that’s what happened, why kill Bryan? He was the initiative’s main proponent. It occurred to Beth that there might be more than one murderer. Jeff and Magdalena might have been killed by someone connected to OHB, and Bryan might have been killed by a desperate farmer who needed to stop him before the trust got under way.

“Who do you think killed the Muldoons?” she asked bluntly.

Roe looked around, at the white-scabbed spruces, at the wagon-wheel trellis, at the brown American flag blowing over the porch steps and his dying dog.

“Could have been anyone with a conscience. You? Me? The land?” Roe’s eyes were wide, his forehead a Sahara of rolling dunes.
“The land he thought he was saving? Maybe the community killed him before he could destroy it. Sometimes God works in not-so-mysterious ways, young lady. And remember, you reap what you sow. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which sown, grows up and becomes greater than all of the herbs, and puts out its branches, and is bigger than the man who planted it. And it will kill that man who is nothing but a speck under its shade if he don’t respect it. You want to know who killed Bryan? Look around you. A man who is a thief in the night will be burnt by the sun come morning. Until then, I’ve got work to do—”

The farm door burst open, and a lean, big-boned woman ran from the darkness toward the cars. Her loose cornflower dress was splattered in grease, her bare feet red with rashes. Her eyes were set close at the bridge of her nose, like a pair of tightly wrapped cocoons, and her open mouth was a pink bucket of gums. It hung open naturally, as if in constant pain or joy. She ran in a distracted, faraway manner, a pair of binoculars swinging against her chest.

“Daddy,” the woman screamed. Her hair was as blond as corn silk. An old woman with pinned silver hair, Roe’s wife, peered out from the doorframe.

“Ray Ann,” Roe drawled. “You get back inside. You need to put your shoes on. Shoes on.” Ray Ann launched herself into her father’s chest, and he put his arm around her to hold her in his warmth. The young woman was clearly disabled; Beth couldn’t name the syndrome, but it seemed chromosomal, some genetic defect. Ray Ann might be Beth’s age, born in Orient around the same time, and her disability was the reason she rarely left the farm in childhood—not because she couldn’t make the trip, but because Beth and her friends would have shown her no mercy. Roe stared at Beth as he removed the binoculars from around his daughter’s neck.

“Let me show you what you have brought me,” he said. Roe tested the binoculars and rotated their lenses until they caught a vision to the east. He handed them to Beth and pointed. “Look over there. Right beyond that sap maple.”

She took the binoculars. Through them, she saw a large farmhouse covered in plastic tarps. Its lawn was trenched in giant mud holes, and through a clear sheet of plastic she saw Nathan Crimp in the nude, gyrating on a Persian rug, a bowl of red berries in his hands. An imported white man, with an impressive lack of body hair, eating imported fruit on an imported rug.

“Those are my new neighbors to the left. On the right I’ve got Arthur Cleaver and his Greek temple of sin, with a giant flat screen of stocks and a paddle wheel boat that don’t do nothing but serve as a party favor. I’m being squeezed on both sides by people who can sell their development rights because they can move whenever they feel like it. What’s it to them? There’s a blight on this land, but it ain’t from Plum. It’s from a different island altogether, and I bet you lived there high and pretty. Now if you don’t mind.”

Beth returned to her car. Mills had been listening through a crack in the window. She put the Nissan in reverse and headed down the thin dirt trail. The white farmhouse disappeared in her rearview mirror, replaced by a wash of hay fields.

“Did you catch all that?” she asked.

“Most of it,” Mills said. “But I still think we’re right about Lisa and Adam. Why did you bother drilling him like that?”

“Because of what Jeff told Magdalena about OHB. Adam and Lisa aren’t on the board. That part doesn’t fit your theory. Jeff warned her for a reason. I wanted to see if Roe knew what that reason was.”

“Jeff was a drunk,” he replied. “Roe diCorcia has a motive to kill the Muldoons, and clearly it wouldn’t be a strain on his conscience. But it doesn’t change the fact that Lisa lied about being at college.”

“I know it doesn’t.”

“So you’re going to tell the detective?” Mills stared at her for a minute, as if he could override her brain with sheer hope. When had Mills decided that the police were a force of good, to be apprised at every turn?

“Why does it make such a difference to you?” she asked.

He rubbed his palms on his thighs. “I might stay here for a while,” he said. “And it’s best if the murders get cleared up quickly. So you’ll tell the detective?”

“Yes,” she promised. “But I’ll respect Lisa enough not to make accusations on the day she buried her family. We can talk it over tomorrow when you come to my house.”

His lips bent. “I’m coming over tomorrow?”

“I want to paint your portrait,” she said.

Mills checked his face in the side mirror, as if to see how it would appear on a flat surface. “Okay. But I have a favor to ask in return.”

“Name it.”

“I need you to get that cake for me for Paul’s birthday. I want to surprise him. Would you get one for me from the bakery in Greenport? If you pick it up tomorrow, I’ll hide it in the back of our refrigerator.”

“
Our
refrigerator?”

“Paul’s.” Mills blushed, and Beth was sorry that she had corrected him. “
His
refrigerator.”

After Beth dropped
Mills off, she allowed her mind to run with color, with oil paints that had long gone dry in her studio yet wettened instantly when she imagined the blank canvas. The thought of painting eased her fears, and the excitement of her one small decision emboldened her about other uncertainties: the mass inside her, her growing disconnection from Gavril. She had buried herself too long in the comfort of indecision. As she pulled into her driveway, she felt for the first time in many months like a woman with a direction. Standing still meant going nowhere. A place was made by moving toward it.

The lights were on in the garage, and the house itself was empty. She dropped her purse on the kitchen table and hurried up to the spare bedroom to open the boxes and set a fresh canvas on the easel.
As she dug through the dusty tins of paint tubes, a light pain shot through her stomach. Beth froze in place. Another tremor came, hot and thin as a wire. She waited for further activity. One final needle passed through her and sunk back into her organs like an unsuccessful mutiny. There was no more. Tomorrow she would call the doctor in Greenport, or maybe Planned Parenthood on Bleecker Street. She would make an appointment and keep to her decision, just as she would paint Mills tomorrow and see the work to completion, whether it was any good or not. As she stood there, she heard footsteps downstairs in the living room, then the hushed, cushioned sound of objects being moved. A door slammed.

“Gavril?” she called. “Are you there?”

She walked into the hallway and went down the steps. “Gavril?” No voice broke the silence. The sun was setting, and lurid pinks reflected on the painted walls. She reached the foyer and turned down the hall. “Is anyone there? Hello?”

The living room was a bruising blue as night began to settle. Its lingering smells of dead flowers and dried whiskey were more potent in the darkness. Then she noticed that the two armchairs in the living room had traded places, the leather low-back switched with the recliner, both pointing in an awkward formation away from the couch. She couldn’t remember if they’d been that way fifteen minutes ago when she’d passed through the room to go upstairs. She blinked, as if her brain were suffering a bout of dyslexia that could be fixed by closing her eyes. She glanced at the front door and saw her purse hanging from the hall closet doorknob. “Gavril?” she called again. She headed down the foyer. Cold light bled from the bottom of the front door, meaning it was still ajar. She pushed her hand against it, and the bolt slipped into its lock.