Orient (67 page)

The gun lost its power, turning into a hunk of metal. Mills gripped it by the barrel and extended it, offering it to Paul in resignation.

“You’re right,” Mills said tiredly. “It’s empty. It belongs to you.”

Paul retracted his hands.

“Nice try,” he said. “But I won’t get my prints on it. Your fingerprints are where they should be, and they prove you killed her. Which is fine, because Pearl Farms is a shared enterprise. And another murder only increases the fear. Another body just licks the seal on the envelope.” He rubbed his arms through his coat and exhaled. “Aren’t you cold? I’m cold. I can’t go inside, though, and enjoy the fire you set. Mills, it’s time for you to go. Come with me on the boat and I’ll make sure you get to the other side.”

Mills stammered, caught—worse than caught. He could run, but that was precisely what Paul wanted him to do. He stood three feet from the man he had treated as a father, unwilling to leave with him, because leaving with him was helping him.

“I could go to the police,” Mills stuttered.

Patient white contrails drifted from Paul’s nostrils.

“And tell them what? Where’s your proof? You don’t have any, except for the gun you used to shoot Sarakit. Do you think they’ll believe you? Mills, I only told you all this so you’d see you have no option but to run. If you’re caught, you’re the one they’ll blame. You need to leave, and it’s in my interest that you make it. Get in the boat. I promise I’ll get you across.”

“I’ll say we were in it together,” Mills sputtered. “I’ll tell them I was just following orders from you. I’ll say we were lovers.” Mills could reinvent him, too.

Paul stared at him, dimples denting his cheeks. “So you could go to jail forever? When I deny it, you’ll still be caught. There’s one thing I know about you. You don’t have the discipline for permanent confinement. It was sad to watch you trying to make this place your home. It never would have been, even if things had been different. I don’t think that restlessness will serve you well in prison.” Paul’s eyes blinked behind his glasses. “I offered you a ladder once. I’m offering you that again. Like I said, I’ve really come to be fond of you. So let’s make this a painless good-bye. You still have a chance at a future. Either you get on the boat, or I’m going to have to kill you with the knife in my pocket and dump you out at sea. I’d rather not think of you out there in the water. I’d rather think of you someplace warm.”

Mills dropped the gun. Paul started to walk toward the Sound but turned to find Mills standing in place. Paul’s grin faded by degrees, and when his lips finally leveled, he sighed and grabbed the switchblade from his coat pocket.

Mills glanced at the houses behind him, none of which would take him in. They’d call the police as soon as he appeared at their
door. In all of Orient, Beth was the only one he had loved. The rest of the village had put their faith in their own. Paul flipped the blade, a three-inch razor. He shook it as if it were wet. He actually looked saddened by his need to use it. “Damn it, Mills, now you’re going to make me bury you too.”

“Bury me too?”

Mills thought of the Bug Light poster above the birthing-room bowl and the question mark at the base of the lighthouse on Magdalena’s postcard. Paul had taken him to his mother’s farmhouse inn, to the bluff where Paul and his father had built their miniature model of Bug Light. His mother missed her favorite lighthouse, so they built a scale model for her, so she could look out and see it on the horizon—the first building he ever made. His dead mother on the video:
And if you don’t, you’re in a world of trouble. . . . Because they’ll find him, and how will you explain?
Magdalena must have paid a visit to Paul’s mother during a dementia spell, raving on about a secret buried long ago below Bug Light.

“That’s where your brother is buried, isn’t it? ” Mills said. “At your mother’s farmhouse, under that slab where your model of Bug Light was. It
is
personal, Paul. You’ve been killing since you were a kid.”

Paul didn’t stumble. He tightened his foothold in the snow. But his eyes stumbled, shot with light, trying to steady themselves behind his glasses.“You murdered your brother,” Mills said. “He never died of that sickness—you never gave him the chance. You killed him first, so you’d be all your parents had left. I bet they were never going to adopt you. They wanted you to be their workhorse while they took care of their son.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered. “It was an accident. There’s no—” Silence blocked his throat.

“That’s what you owed your mother—not the whole coast, but the property on the tip where her real son is buried. All of the rest is greed. Your mother didn’t want his grave disturbed. Only Pearl Farms couldn’t outbid Nathan and Luz to buy it back. Now, if Luz Wilson decides to dig her pool under that slab in the spring, they’ll
find the skeleton of a boy. And if the police learn the identity of that boy, even the Benchley house won’t belong to you.”

Paul let out a tuneless wail, which the wind stripped into quiet. He stood shaking with his eyes on his target. “You think you have all the answers?” Paul murmured, his strength broken and voice trembling. “It was an accident.” He stepped forward and reached a hand out to clasp Mills’s shoulder for support. “They would have taken me away. My parents understood that, and they needed me, so we dug—” Paul was trying to lull him with this sad confession, but Mills saw the glint of the switchblade coming alive in his other hand. Before he could thrust it, Mills lunged, knocking his arm aside, and buried his fingernails into Paul’s dark face.

Paul stumbled back, pitching the knife skyward. They dropped together onto the snow, Mills’s stomach pressed against Paul’s chest, his knees scrambling on the island Paul’s body made. The air left their lungs. Mills gouged his fingers into fat and tissue until he felt warm liquid. Paul was stronger, writhing under him with compact arms and legs. From a distance, for a millisecond, they could have looked like two creatures mating on ice.

Paul groaned in pain, his teeth stained in blood. He gathered his fist. Mills took a blow to the jaw that sent him rolling. Blue amoebas filled his vision, and when he opened his eyes they dissolved into clouds, the moon searching through them like a flashlight. His breath was short, and his jaw throbbed. Paul launched another fist, but Mills continued to roll, and snow scattered in the cold. Mills found his legs, wobbly, and held onto the ground to steady them. Paul crawled away in search of the knife, his feet trailing through blood-spotted white. His glasses had fallen off behind him in the snow. Mills rushed toward the frames and broke them in his fist. He tossed them as far as he could. Paul pivoted on a knee and rose. He had the knife in his hand, but blood poured from his forehead and cheeks. His eyes were potholed, empty craters he was struggling to see out of. Paul sliced the air with the blade, stepping forward, slashing at the blurry figure in front of him. Neither of them cried
for help, each for his own reasons. Each had his own need to escape unseen and alone.

Mills drifted back to the log pile and picked up a split of wood. Paul must have heard him, because he started running toward the water. He disappeared through the grasses, which sucked him up like food. Mills followed, fighting through the blades. He heard Paul’s heavy breath hurtling down the slope, releasing a trail of weeds that slapped Mills’s chest and face. He would kill him if he could, he would drag Paul’s body into the backyard and shove the pages from Jeff Trader’s journal in his mouth, one by one, till he choked. Paul clamored on the rocks, swatting the frost winds as if they too needed killing, and Mills swung, cracking the log on Paul’s shoulder. Mills grabbed for him but pulled his arm back to avoid the gashing motion of the knife.

Paul dropped into the Sound, breaking through the thin ice, and climbed frantically onto his wooden boat. The skiff strained in the water under his weight. Mills tried to grab the mooring hook, but Paul thrust a pole against the rocks, leaking the boat backward between the ice sheets.

“You little shit,” he called, wiping the blood from his eyes.
You little shit
, a Benchley pet name. Mills heard him whimper followed by the whipping of the engine cord. Paul fell twice before he got the motor started. It hacked sickly diesel; then, ten feet out, the bow light came on, yellowing the ice and half the shore. “Where are you? I can’t see. How am I supposed to explain?” The shore didn’t answer. Nothing in the landscape did.

Mills stood just beyond the light. By the time Sarakit’s body was found, he knew Paul would find his explanation. Paul might even accuse Mills Chevern of attacking him, but by then Mills Chevern would cease to exist.

Paul’s light grew small as the boat reversed into the Sound. When it was safely out of range, Mills raced into the backyard to retrieve his duffel bag. Even if the truth about Paul’s identity came out, Mills knew that he would still be blamed for the murders. Paul would
see to that. And if they did find that murdered boy on the tip, how could they prove who he was? Paul had already cremated his mother and father. The boy would probably be left unclaimed, a nameless victim of an unknown crime. Mills knew he had no choice.

He returned to the rocks, following the shoreline west. The coast swerved past the black, defeated houses of weekenders and year-rounders, asleep or exiled to safer ground. As he ran, he stared out at the water and found the frail yellow light of Paul’s boat. It was zipping the wrong way across the Sound, east instead of west, its captain disoriented without his glasses, his eyelids drowsy with blood. The marsh waters thickened with ice as the coast arced toward the causeway. Stalks of phragmites trembled through the water’s surface. The invasive weeds survived in the worst conditions.

In front of him, the causeway was lit by red-and-blue strobes, but few cars passed through the police barricade so late. The officers dozed in their heated cabs, boots crossed on their dashboards. Far off, the light on Paul’s boat pinpricked, blinked, and grew stronger. He must have realized he was headed the wrong way, toward ocean instead of land, that where he wanted to go had been behind him. The tiny molecule of light shot west across the Sound before suddenly its drone went quiet. The boat light froze in the center of the water. When Mills concentrated, he heard a pull cord thrashing a choking motor, but the hum didn’t return and the bright molecule remained in place.

Mills couldn’t walk on the land that led to Long Island and the city beyond. The shore snaked too near to the patrol cars. He’d have to try his weight on the ice. He pressed his foot on the shallow, frozen inlet. It cracked delicately, and veins grew from his shoe, but it held. He trusted his other foot one step beyond his first. The ice crumpled but didn’t split. He slid over the water, skating without blades, and when he looked behind him the boat was still stuck out at sea. He pictured Paul there, marooned in the Sound, too far from dry land to swim, his adopted home so close that, if he still had his glasses, he could make out his distant roof and the dying fire
in his windows. He was a man trapped on a boat half a mile from his house, and Mills was running across the water toward nowhere as fast as he could. The western lights flickered, the trees reached out from shore, his homeland beckoned somewhere in front of him, alive in the darkness beyond his arms. It had no choice but to take him back.

He ran.

Acknowledgments

W
hile this novel is entirely fictional and I’ve made a beautiful village on the North Fork far darker than its reality, I want to thank the residents of Orient—weekenders and year-rounders alike—for their kindness and patience during my years of research and writing. Any adverse reaction to the license I’ve taken in re-inventing Orient should not be directed toward those who helped along the way (they are innocent, I swear). I also want to thank the following for their time, generosity, question fielding, or occasional use of a spare bedroom: Wade Guyton, Thomas Alexander, Joseph Logan, T. J. Wilcox, Todd Huckleberry, Kelley Walker, Elizabeth Peyton, Rob Pruitt, Jonathan Horowitz, Ted Webb, A. M. Homes, Jill Dunbar, Steven Shareshian, Leo Bersani, James Oakley, Cathryn Summerhayes, and the Orient Country Store for their egg sandwiches.

My writing doesn’t always feel like much until I get it into the hands of my friend and agent Bill Clegg, who guided me through every tangle and dead end. I’m forever grateful for his support. I want to thank the team at Harper for their enthusiasm and eagle eyes, particularly my editor Calvert Morgan who basically played co-detective in smoothing out the tosses and turns of the mystery and the prose. Also thanks to Kathleen Baumer for her crucial input. The team at Simon & Schuster U.K., Jo Dickinson, Rowan Cope, and Jessica Leeke, were essential flashlights in helping this
book find its footing. Thanks again to Thomas Alexander for his notes along the way.

Finally, thanks to my mother and sister, George Miscamble, Ana and Danko Steiner, David Armstrong,
Interview
magazine, my grandmother, to whom I trace the familial interest in mysteries, and everyone who had to listen to me talk endlessly about Orient over the years.

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN
is the author of the novel
Lightning People
and editor at large at
Interview
magazine. His work has appeared in
GQ
, the
New York Times
,
The Believer
, and
Artforum
. He lives in New York.

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