Orient (17 page)

They climbed the oak steps, eaten soft with mildew, and tested the locked doorknob.

“Let’s try around the back,” she said. The temperature had dipped, and their breaths left their mouths like smoke from separate campfires. The cement walkway, slippery with moss, disappeared into firmer grass patched with dandelions. The last monarchs, migrating south, clung to the trunks of cedar trees. Three cats, two gray and one marbled yellow, ran from a crevice under the mobile home and wove around their ankles. Mills squatted to pet the smallest one, but it deflected his hand, scurrying between Beth’s legs. It bowed its yellow back against her calves.

“They must be starving,” he said. “And there are more. Listen.”

Beth heard low groans that intensified as she and Mills rounded the unit, a chorus of neglect. A wooden barn had been built against the back of the house, reeking of hay and the sweat of livestock and manure. “Baap-
meh
,” “baap-
meh
,” came the moans as they entered the darkness of the barn. She could sense things moving in the blackness. She saw flashes of eyes as the animals drove their bodies against the stable gate.

“Have they even been fed?” Mills asked, leaning over the pen to see five bleating sheep, as dirty and thin as old pillows. “Jesus, has anyone bothered to feed them since he died? They don’t even have water.” Mills’s eyes adjusted to the darkness faster than Beth’s did. He located a garbage can full of feed and dispensed five shovel scoops into their trough. He filled a metal bucket with water from a spigot next to a lassoed hose.

“He didn’t have children,” Beth said, “or any other relatives. I don’t know who owns this place now. The village, maybe. There was no one to come.”

“No one to come?” Mills repeated. “
Someone
should have known to. You don’t just leave things to die if you don’t own them.”

Beth proceeded blindly toward the house, groping along the wall, her knuckles knocking against tools, until she found the back door and turned the knob. She entered the stale, dank camper. The windows were covered with shades that drew faint outlines of light. In that minute, there was only the ticking of clocks, out of sync, their heavy tin beats resonating against the thin metal walls. When her eyes acclimated, she found herself in a room that looked as if it had been picked up and shaken. Books were scattered on the floor, papers strewn across the table; a painting that must have hung over the sleeper couch had been slashed, its frame in splinters on the carpet. Jeff Trader’s home appeared to have been ransacked, by probing police detectives or by vandals who had heard of a local’s death or maybe by someone else. Beth stiffened. Was that person still here? There was no other car in the driveway.

“Hey,” she called. “Can you come in here with me?”

She tried to swallow her fear. The clocks weren’t helping—each stroke invading the room, each perfect tick out of place in the home of a dead man. Clocks needed people the way longitudinal lines needed latitudinal lines to cross them, or an hour hand needed a minute hand to counter it. Without Jeff Trader, the clocks weren’t calibrating anything but eternity. Beth felt sick in Jeff
Trader’s house the way she hadn’t in any of the graveyards they had visited, because here life had not been put to rest. It just continued on without the living, in credit card statements and phone numbers tacked to particleboard and a candy bar left half eaten on the coffee table.

Beth leaned against the grooved metal wall, where a row of clocks hung: a waxy grandfather etched with angels, an alpine cuckoo with a pinecone pendulum, two chrome-plated tide clocks reading the six and twelve of high and low water, a boat-wheel clock registering the phases of the moon. Sea people relied on these clocks. The sea was a clock too. Her father had always told her that. Just like the sun. And so was the fetus inside her, counting down or up. A thought that made no sense crept over her, and there was nothing she could do with it once it arrived:
I’m scared of what happens to me when I die
.

Mills touched her shoulder and must have noticed her seasick face. He stopped the grandfather and the cuckoo with a still finger.

“What went on in here?” he asked, taking in the mess. “Did the guy live like this, or was it searched?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Jajajajaja
. Beth heard the sound and clenched Mills’s arm. The door that led into a connecting room, shut tight, jittered against its lock. But it kept jittering, jostled by air traveling through the unit. Mills laughed as he unclamped her fingers.

“Stop it,” he said. “Are you trying to freak me out?”

“Sorry.” Beth hadn’t told Mills about Magdalena’s idea that Jeff Trader was murdered, for fear he would have refused to come. Gathering her courage, she crossed the room and quickly swept the door open. Gnats spiraled through the kitchen, following a congested flight path above a bowl of molding fruit. The cabinet doors hung open on their hinges. Her feet kicked cans of tuna fish as she moved around the kitchen table. The sweet odor of a dead mouse wafted from under the sink. A minifridge hummed in the corner,
its door open, watery ice trays on its racks. What would happen to all of this stuff without a relative to claim it? Beth wondered. Was there a special county task force allocated to clear out the homes of the unloved?

“Nice neighborhood,” Mills grumbled, picking up the lime green pamphlet from the table. “You’re all worried about some dead mutant animal that washes up, but no one cares about the animals dying of starvation out back.”

“It’s because of Plum,” she said as she glanced into the cabinets. “The animal disease lab. Orient has always been obsessed with the idea that the government is screwing with its wildlife. Or obsessed with not talking about it.” For a second time that day, Beth felt a wave of disorientation, not with space, not due to a lighthouse sketched in the wrong place in Paul’s painting. This was disorientation with time. It took her a moment to pinpoint the cause. She stared at the pamphlet in Mills’s hand.

“Jeff died on the morning they discovered that creature.”

“So?” Mills stepped into the pantry, pushing brooms and mops aside.

“So,” she said. “How did that pamphlet find its way into the kitchen? He’d already been dead by the time those were put on everyone’s door.”

“Oh,” Mills responded. “Someone must have taken it from the door and tossed it on the table.”

“Exactly. That means someone has been here. The same person who tore this place apart.” She sifted through the contents of the cabinets. Magdalena said that the book was hidden behind boxes of cereal. One shelf above the sink was devoted to cereal—expired granolas and sweeter, candied loops. She pushed the boxes aside and swept her hands into the depths of the cabinet, all the way to the wood, scooping at corners. She shook each box of cereal. “I can’t find it. Maybe someone else already found it. Shit. Magdalena will never forgive me.”

Mills crouched below the sink and rifled through the lower
cabinets of tools, extension cords, and fluorescent cleaning bottles. “It’s not here,” he said.

“It’s brown leather,” she explained. “Like a navigational book.”

He stared up at her quizzically. “I meant the cat food.” He slammed the doors and left her to look in the barn. Beth groped under the table in case Jeff taped the book to its base. She slid her fingers through the silverware. There was hardly any point in continuing her search. Whoever had been here before her had done an expert job ripping the kitchen apart. The book was gone, and she’d have to face Magdalena empty-handed three days after the old woman asked her to perform one simple favor.

Mills returned to the kitchen carrying a brown paper sack. “I found it out by the stable. Not your book. The food for the cats.” He knocked the bowl of fruit to the floor as he settled the bag on the table, then took three plastic dishes from the sink.

“I don’t think we should touch anything else,” she said. “I think we should leave.”

“I need to feed them,” he said, glancing up at her. “If we don’t . . .”

“Fine, all right.”

Beth was touched by his concern. Maybe he felt a special compassion for the orphaned animals. If her doubts about motherhood grew, if they became too hard and suicidal, maybe she could give the baby up for adoption and it would end up like the young man in front of her—not a victim of abandonment, not scarred by the mistakes of his parents, perhaps better off for not having grown up with such parents. But of course it was an absurd thought: Gavril would never let her give the child away. As soon as she told him about her pregnancy, there would be no way back.

Mills looked up at her and smiled. “Guess what?” he said, pulling a brown leather book from the bag. It was dusted in kibble. C
OORDINATES
was embossed on the cover.

“No way. In the cat food. Not
his
cereal.”

“See,” Mills replied, “and you thought I wasn’t being helpful.”

She reached across the table to take the journal. As Mills passed
it to her, a piece of paper fell from the pages and landed faceup on the linoleum. It was a snapshot of a woman, her face vandalized by black ink, with devil horns drawn on her forehead and a beard on her chin. Her eyes were scratched out.

“One more thing,”
Beth said over the hood of her car. “The keys. They’re in a jar in his truck. We’re supposed to take those too.” Mills hurried to the truck, opened the driver-side door, and crawled across the cushions. She watched him search the cabin, tossing newspapers and shirts. He ducked his head out.

“Not here. No jar. No keys.”

“Are you sure?” she called.

“There’s nowhere for a jar of keys to hide.”

He shut the truck and jogged back to her car. At least they had the book. She would not return to Magdalena entirely empty-handed. But Beth wondered if the same person who ransacked the trailer had also made off with the keys to so many Orient houses. She backed out of the driveway, thankful to have Jeff Trader’s mobile home in her rearview mirror. She remembered the advice of her doctor:
relax, take it easy, just rest
.

She drove west on Main Road, passing the expansive estate that belonged to Arthur Cleaver—a grandiose monument to Greco-Roman architecture circa 1983, one of the few atrocious luxury mansions that had been built in Orient before the historical board cracked down on such extravagances. Its pink stucco façade glimmered between a militant file of sapling sugar maples, their skinny trunks painted white like the legs of racehorses. She passed cornfields, barren but for a few patches of fall flowers, that were still owned and farmed by Orient’s oldest families. A mile of deer forest blurred by them, yellow but for the occasional black real estate sign—
FOR SALE, FOR LEASE, FOR FARMING ONLY
. Trees the shape and color of fireworks hung over the road. She passed Sycamore
High School and Old Oysterponds Cemetery and Orient’s single gas station, now shuttered for winter. The farther she drove from the tip, the saner she felt.

“What’s so special about this book anyway?” Mills asked, flipping through its coffee-stained pages.

“I’m not sure. What does it say?”

She looked across the front seat at the pages. Each one listed a local address, and divided into columns marked
LATITUDE
and
LONGITUDE
, printed tightly in black pen, were records of duties Jeff Trader had performed. Mills read aloud from a few random entries: “mow lawn,” “drain pipes,” “two tabs disinfectant in water well,” “scrub boiler,” “reboot alarm.” A dull inventory of caretaker tasks: it hardly seemed worth the trouble. Mills closed the book and concentrated on the snapshot, defaced with such force that Beth could see score marks on the other side of the paper.

“Do you know her?” he asked as he held the photo up.

Beth took the snapshot and tried to study it as she stole glances at the road. The woman’s face was too obscured, though a sweep of red hair showed between the devil horns.

“It could be anyone. It could be my mother,” she said with a laugh and studied it more carefully. “It really could be my mother.” The hair was similar to her mother’s before she began dyeing it. The woman wore a yellow tracksuit and stood in front of a yard of shorn Bermuda grass and out-of-focus rosebushes. The Shepherds had never grown roses in their yard, and Beth was relieved by the discrepancy. “What did this woman do to piss Jeff Trader off so much?”

“Maybe she was his girlfriend,” Mills said. Beth wasn’t sure Jeff even had teeth under his rat mustache. “She dumped him, and he spent his nights haunted by her. Maybe that’s why he killed himself.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Beth asked, concentrating on the road. “Have you ever done that to the picture of a girl who dumped you?”

Mills rubbed his thighs and stared out the window. He seemed to be examining his face in the side mirror.

“Do you think I’d have a girlfriend?” he asked matter-of-factly.

“Sure. You’re a handsome guy.”

He swiveled his neck and brought his cheek against the headrest.

“You really think I’m handsome?”

She stopped for a red light and took the opportunity to study his face. His jawline dipped faintly and disappeared into his neck as if it had not yet decided how sharp his chin would split. His lips were smooth and pinkish brown, like the wet undersides of shoreline pebbles. Maybe on their next outing she would find the courage to ask him if she could paint him.

“Yes,” she said. She had no way of evaluating the beauty of someone so young. All young people looked beautiful to her now. “But what are you, nineteen? Wait a few more years. When you’re twenty-two or twenty-three, you’ll be at peak handsomeness. Then no girl will be able to resist you.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. He scooped hair into a knot above his forehead. “People have always said that to me. ‘Oh, when you were younger you must have been so cute.’ Or, ‘In a few years, you’ll really be good-looking.’ But I wasn’t cute when I was younger, and I won’t be more anything in a few years. I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves?”