Orient (23 page)

“It’s called a footprint, not a fingerprint,” Beth corrected. But her mother was right: the house was one big open door. Beth had been breaking into the Shepherd house since she’d started dating as a teenager, and now her distant memories of jiggling open windows or climbing up the trestle at 2:00
A.M
. came back as frightening reminders of the defenselessness of its current occupants.

“If you’re thinking about getting an alarm system,” Gail said, “I hear Adam Pruitt has started his own security company. Do me the courtesy of not going with Bryan.” Beth looked at her mother. Her hair was in need of a touch-up; a thin, gray cloud bank was showing beneath the chemical copper. Beth thought of the photograph of the red-haired woman found in Jeff’s book.

“Did you and Jeff Trader get along? Was there ever a fight between you two?”

Gail looked taken aback.

“Why are you asking me so many questions? What you should be asking me is how I can help with your project.” She eyed the area
of the table that hid Beth’s stomach. “How’s it going? Don’t tell Gavril, but I was talking to him the other day and he—”

“Mother, did you and Jeff Trader not get along?”

“What?” A housefly landed on the lip of Gail’s mug and she shooed it away. Her fingernails were chipped. Beth had never questioned her mother’s finances, but she wondered if this evident cosmetic decline meant that Gail was hurting for money. “I never really thought of Jeff as someone to get along with. So I guess that means we did. We certainly never fought. Why are you constantly changing the subject?”

Beth got up, opened the back door, and walked around the house to her car. The mailman was in the driveway, shielded from the rain in a layer of transparent plastic, like a newspaper. He waved at her and said, “Congratulations.”

Confused, she ignored him and glanced at the windshield of her car. The snapshot of the woman was visible on the dashboard for anyone to see. Beth opened the car door and grabbed it. She carried it back into the kitchen and held it up in front of her mother, who was downing the dregs in her mug.

“Is this you?” Beth pointed to the red-haired woman with horns, a goatee, and scratched-out eyes standing by a rosebush. Gail looked up at her, horrified. Did her mother think she was making a joke about her plastic surgery? Did she think Beth had drawn the horns herself?

“No, that’s not me. What an insensitive thing to say. After how giving I’ve been.”

“I didn’t mean—”

Her mother stood up to reclaim her shoes.

“I’m not interested in being insulted.”

“Mom.”

“Something’s come over you lately. And I don’t like it. You’ve become a different person. You’re selfish. And you’re mean.” Gail brought her arms out for balance as she shoved each foot into its appropriate heel.

Gavril stumbled into the kitchen, one hand scratching his facial hair, the other holding a pile of mail he’d collected from the floor of the foyer. He tossed the mail on the table and smiled at his mother-in-law.

“Rough night?” he asked.

“Rough morning,” she replied. “Your wife is becoming intolerable. She needs to be reminded of the importance of the family she has left.”

Gavril was used to humoring the long-standing feud of the Shepherd women, trying as much as possible not to take either side. Suddenly, his smile morphed into a grimace. “That fly,” he said. “Do you hear it? That buzz.” The housefly zigzagged through the air, its drone increasing and falling away, cruising slowly then speeding up for turns. “That awful sound. It’s exactly like the bugs back in Bucharest.” Gavril picked up a flyer from the mail and chased the insect around the kitchen. “Those little black listening devices,” he said. “In my childhood we called them bugs, just as you do. The Securitate put them in the walls of our homes. When they went bad, they sounded just like a bug, like a fly.” He swatted and missed. “For days we would hear it buzzing. ‘The flies are back,’ we would say, because that is all we could say. If we wanted to talk we would say, ‘Dad wants to go outside for a smoke.’ Then the police would come, pretending to be janitors, and it would be fixed, silent again. The bug, an insect listening.” The fly froze on the wall, and Gavril swung and smashed it. He threw the flyer on the table, the juicy insect smeared across its postage square. “They killed thousands of my people with their little bugs. To this day, when I see an insect, I think it is spying on me.”

“See,” Gail said, gathering her purse as she looked at her daughter. “Your life could be a lot worse. You should be thankful for how easy you have it.”

“Oh, she’s not so bad.” Gavril pinched Beth’s waist and commandeered her coffee cup. “This weekend we’re throwing a party.”

“A party?” Beth hadn’t agreed to that. She had a moment of déjà
vu.
Haven’t I been here before? Haven’t I had this exact conversation in the kitchen with Gavril and Gail? Haven’t I already lived this once?
To live in a small town was to accept déjà vu as a daily sensation. “I’m not sure it’s the right time for a party.”

“Too late.” Gavril smiled. “I already invited the friends we have out here. You know, Gail, the North Fork has become very
chic
for artists. And my gallerist is coming from the city. And Luz and Nathan, and Isaiah. A last party before I finish the work for my next show.”

“Look at her. She’s worried I’ll come,” Gail said coldly. “She’s really awful to me. I’m sure she’ll yell at you the minute I leave for mentioning the party in front of me. Beth, I’m not going to come, for God’s sake.”

But it wasn’t the prospect of her mother’s attendance that caused Beth to turn pale. It was the dead-insect flyer, and three others in the stack of mail Gavril had brought from the foyer.
Now that you’re pregnant, the real sales begin
, read one in bloated marshmallow letters.
Baby cribs! Baby mobiles! Baby blankets! Baby everything!!!
Demanding, jubilant, openmouthed infants infested the flyers, promising freebies, discounts, and a dancing chorus of pink-and-blue dollar signs. Each one was addressed in computer type to Elizabeth Shepherd. How did they find her? Just because she’d spent a few hours searching baby sites on her computer? She’d been careful not to fill out a single form. Had her gynecologist sold her address?

As nonchalantly as possible, Beth gathered up the flyers before her husband or mother could notice their common theme. “I have to get ready,” she said as she left the kitchen. She had saved herself for today, but there would be mail tomorrow, and the day after, endless opportunities for an onslaught of baby announcements to fall into the hands of those she wanted to keep her secret from the most. Who could she call to stop the delivery? Ripping the flyers to pieces, Beth hurried upstairs to dress for a funeral.

CHAPTER
13

M
ost of Orient braved the rain to bid good-bye to Magdalena. Beth arrived at the church late and had to settle for a seat in the last pew, far from the altar decorated in white roses and yellow four-o’clocks. It hardly mattered. All funerals followed the same sluggish formula. The same prayers, from the Twenty-third Psalm; the same lumbering notes of the organ; the same wallet-size cards listing the vital stats of the deceased; the same poly-blend black blazers and black knit sweaters and midnight-blue stockings; the same coughers coughing; the same loving words recited about the dead.

Beth had no objection: funerals had been spared the culture’s otherwise relentless carnival need to entertain. Still, sitting in the last pew of the Orient United Church of Christ, Beth thought back to how practically everyone with whom she’d smoked pot pledged that they wanted their ashes sprinkled on Mount Kilimanjaro, or wanted the guests to wear leis and build a bonfire on the beach, or wanted a giant party thrown at Dizmo’s Tavern in their honor. Surely her generation wasn’t the first to hope for some touch of the personal to dignify their commemorations. Surely, this braying organ solo and rote floral spray wasn’t what Magdalena Kiefer would have wanted. Even in the age of individuality, death remained on the side of the masses. Perhaps dependability was the chief comfort of a funeral, as dependable as banisters for mourners to lean on. Who can lean on Kilimanjaro?

Beth watched her neighbors concentrate on sitting still. They sat quietly, pained but not crying, for an old woman who had lingered in death’s sunroom for years. The organist sang “Here I Am Lord,” off-key and distractedly, as if she were singing to herself. “
Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night
.” Karen Norgen turned in her pew to glance at Beth while placing a chalky tablet on her tongue, a mint or an aspirin. Four high school students, released from third period, carried the casket to the hearse.

On the church’s rain-soaked steps, black umbrellas bloomed. Beth declined Arthur Cleaver’s offer to share his umbrella. He held it over her anyway, and she was forced to lean into him, smelling chemical gardenias.

“I’m not going to the cemetery,” she told him. “I’m just walking to my car.”

“Yes,” he said, drawing out the word. “I wanted to ask you a question. I noticed your mother at the town meeting last night. I hope this doesn’t sound inappropriate, but do you own your house now, or does it still belong to your mother?”

“She owns it,” Beth replied. She was walking quickly up the sidewalk, and either out of courtesy or the need to glean more information, the thin, older man in gray cashmere kept pace with her.

“I only asked because OHB wanted to know who to speak to about selling the development rights. Your property is a sizeable lot on the Sound, and they’re hoping to ensure its protection.” He held up his hand. “I’m merely an ambassador here. As you know, your mother doesn’t get along with certain members of the board. They were wary of approaching her directly.”

“She doesn’t have plans to turn it into an art gallery, if that’s what the board is afraid of.”

Cleaver smiled. “They feel they never know with your mother. It would be money up front for her, and, of course, she’d still own the land.” He cleared his throat. “Personally, it doesn’t matter to me. I only serve as their counsel, and they asked me to approach you about it.”

Beth smirked. Orient’s entire population counted somewhere in the seven hundreds, and yet her neighbors were trying to negotiate with her through an attorney.

“I have an inappropriate question for you, then,” Beth said, jumping a puddle, which Arthur took the time to sidestep. “Did Magdalena leave her land to OHB? I mean, since she didn’t have any relatives.”

“Unfortunate thing, that,” he said, stopping. They had bypassed his red Lexus. Cleaver’s courtesy extended only as far as his car. “She was going to wait until the board set itself up as a trust. She wanted to guarantee that her property would be preserved as part of the conservancy. I guess we all thought she’d live a few more years. Who could have expected a heart attack over bees?”

“I see,” Beth said. The rain slicked her cheeks. She thought of Jeff Trader’s warning that something wasn’t right with OHB. “You don’t know of any reason Magdalena might have grown doubtful of the board, do you? That maybe there was some cause for her to second-guess its motives?”

Cleaver shook his head. “Magdalena’s name is on the conservancy initiative. She was a highly dedicated member of OHB.”

“So what happens to her estate?”

“Estate,” he repeated drolly. “You’d have to ask Cole Drake. He’s that kind of local lawyer. I wouldn’t know what to advise a woman like Ms. Kiefer. I deal in corporations, not individuals. I try to steer clear of messy emotional decisions. And that’s how most people make decisions, isn’t it? Emotionally.” Cleaver took a step back, the umbrella no longer even pretending to shelter her.

Beth wondered if Arthur Cleaver ever cried. His face was perfectly engineered for it, with carved aqueducts from eyes to jaw to dispense tears efficiently. The only real passion she knew Cleaver to possess was for paddle wheel steamboats, the kind that used to travel from Manhattan to Orient a hundred years ago to transport vacationers to the beaches and hunting fields. For the past five years, he had been building an exact replica of a wrecked 1902 Baltimore
steamer on the lawn behind his neoclassical mansion, importing tropical hardwoods to reconstruct the antique vessel right on his rolling escarpment above the Sound. Most Orient residents had never actually seen the boat up close. It was referred to locally as Arthur’s Ark, and some joked that the first sign of the end of the world would be Cleaver’s steamer floating off to sea, loaded with his treasures and none of his neighbors.

“How’s the steamboat going?” she asked him.

Cleaver sighed. His right eye twitched. “It’s nearly complete. To be honest, I’m thinking of moving to another part of Long Island. Somewhere quieter. With so many of you young people moving here lately, I’m not certain the peace will continue. Perhaps my ark, as they call it, will be seaworthy after all.”

Beth remembered what Paul had told her about Cleaver donating money for the preservation of Bug Light. “That would be a shame. I hear you’re the man responsible for keeping the lighthouse up.”

“That’s an idea,” Cleaver said with brightening eyes. “Maybe I’ll just buy that and make my home on an island, out in the blue and away from all encroachment.”

Arthur shut his umbrella and climbed into his car, the gray suede upholstery hyena-spotted with flecks of rain. He waited for the hearse to pass on Main Road before heading off in the direction of the causeway.

Beth hurried along the sidewalk, passing the fire department and its open garage doors. She decided to try calling the post office on her cell, but the automated prompts only led her in a circle back to the introductory main menu. She tried one of the 800 numbers she remembered from the flyers and entered a similar labyrinth: “Press one for cribs, two for clothing, three for . . .” She pressed zero. Another option menu. Zero. Another. Zero. Zero. Zero. Main menu.

Finally, she found Mike Gilburn’s card in her purse and dialed his number. His live, hoarse voice grumbled “Gilburn” on the other end. How satisfying to call a number and find a human being on the other end.

“Hi, Mike, it’s Beth.” The silence of incomprehension followed. “Beth Shepherd. From high school. From Magdalena Kiefer’s driveway.”

“Oh, Beth,” he said in a lighter tone. “Sorry. I’m drowning in paperwork here. Hey, I heard you’ve moved back to the old neighborhood. Have you seen your friend, Alison—what’s her married name now, Eschmeyer?”

“No, I haven’t,” she said quickly. “Look, I wanted to apologize for my behavior the other day. I know I probably seemed a little unhinged.”

“No need to apologize. Don’t wor—” She didn’t let Mike get too far in his pardon. She was calling to reset the alarm.

“You told me to call if I still believed her death wasn’t an accident. I mean”—what was the correct term for a normal death?—“natural.” She tried again. “You told me to call you if I still had doubts.”

“Yes, I guess I did,” he said slowly, his sinuses thick with disappointment. He sounded younger over the phone. If she didn’t know him, she’d think Detective Gilburn was in his twenties. “I thought I made it clear that we weren’t treating this case as a homicide.”

“That’s why I’m calling. I wanted to follow up. I wondered if any further evidence came to light. For instance, an autopsy.”

“We’d have to exhume her in order to perform one. The coroner consulted with her physician. Beth, she was eighty-three.”

“I’m aware of that. But, Mike, Magdalena invited me to her house a few days before she died for the sole purpose of telling me that she suspected someone had killed Jeff Trader. She was certain of it. And she was frightened.”

“And all I can say, again, is that she was eighty-three. Old people suffer delusions. I wouldn’t be surprised if that stress contributed to her heart attack, or at least her decision to play around with her beehives.” Mike exhaled into the receiver. She knew he was trying to summon his patience for a woman he’d known since puberty. She heard him shuffling papers on his desk and wondered if Mike had
a special app on his phone that produced the sound, just to help shorten irritating calls. “I’ll be blunt with you. We have no reason, none at all, to assume there was any foul play. And the Southold Police Department doesn’t have the manpower to follow up on every suspicious whim of a neighbor, even if that neighbor is a friend of mine. We don’t have a special homicide unit. I’m homicide. I’m felonies. I’m fender benders. Hell, I’m lost pets.” He laughed in frustration. “I’ve had all of that under my jurisdiction for a year now. And I’m afraid I have you to thank for the six other phone calls I’ve gotten about the Kiefer case.”

“So others have called?” Beth stopped in front of the Tabachs’ white Cape Cod. The brown heads of hydrangeas were bobbing like workhorses in the rain.

“Yes, and two of them mentioned you as the reason they were concerned.”

“I haven’t said a thing.”

“They must have heard you screaming at the scene. Six calls about an elderly woman’s death. And more than thirty calls related to that creature that washed to shore. My phone’s been ringing around the clock. ‘Test my water, it doesn’t look right.’ ‘Is it safe to eat local produce?’ Don’t be offended, but maybe being isolated out in Orient has gotten to you a little bit. All this quiet after you’ve been in the city for so long.”

Beth offered no defense.

“And now I’m getting calls about suspicious persons in the vicinity. Outsiders with criminal backgrounds. It’s not the job of the police to vet every character that passes through the North Fork.” Mike eased out of his tirade, as if he’d worn himself out. “Give me your number. If anything does turn up I’ll contact you.”

She recited ten digits, wondering whether he was even writing them down.

“If I happen to get my hands on proof, will you listen then?” she asked. Did Jeff Trader’s journal actually count as proof? At least it
was something she could hold in her hand, something that couldn’t be dismissed as a hysterical invention.

“It would be a pleasure to see you if you have anything tangible to show to me. But, Beth, I’m going to be straight with you. It didn’t do either of us any favors that the single witness to Magdalena Kiefer’s death, one Stephanie Smith, was seen leaving the scene under your supervision. I’ll bet her name was Stephanie. She sure looked like a Stephanie. Stephanies are known for their Mexican accents. It’s a good thing we aren’t investigating because my superiors would drill me for not charging you with hampering a police investigation. Just so we’re clear.”

Again she offered no defense.

Mike paused. When she heard his voice again it sounded more weathered, as if it had aged ten years.

“I guess you heard about my divorce.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Jill’s gone. Been gone a few months, and I don’t blame her. After three years, we couldn’t wear down the parts of each other that didn’t fit. I’m just thankful we didn’t have children. Although maybe kids would have been one way to wear us down.” He went silent, expecting Beth to fill the dead space. Mike was a guard dog that was suddenly rolling over to expose his vulnerable underside. She didn’t pet him. She needed him to stay on the job, a guard dog with a nose and teeth. “All right,” he said with a sigh. “You tell your neighbors to check the paper this week. There’s an official report on the Plum creature coming out. That should put an end to some of these calls.”

Beth unlocked her car and wiped her face with a tissue. She turned the windshield wipers to high as she drove east on Main Road, slowing them as the downpour receded. Beth tried turning them off altogether, but they continued to whisk across the glass in skidding bursts. By the time she pulled into the Drakes’ driveway on Little Bay Road, a cold sun simmered in the sky and the wipers still wouldn’t shut off.

The Drakes’ house was surrounded by a white picket fence, suggesting not so much exclusion as invitation. O
RIENT
T
APESTRIES, BY APPOINTMENT
read the sign that hung from a chain on the porch below a sweep of floral woodwork. A glance through the window revealed a motley of batiks, saris, woven rugs, and embroidered linens artfully arranged on the window seat, advertising Holly Drake’s incongruously down-home far-east imported textile business. Beth rang the bell. When Holly answered, her freckled skin looked dewy from the shower, her hair wrapped in a yellow towel.

“What a surprise,” Holly said. “I just saw you at the funeral. Are you here to look at some fabrics?”

“I was actually hoping for a word with your husband,” Beth replied.

“Oh, Cole’s in the den watching the game. I was just changing. Come in.” Holly opened the door wider, and Beth noticed Holly’s fingernails, chewed down to the cuticles. Like any house accustomed to hosting strangers, the front rooms were organized to emphasize routine happiness. A photo of the young couple hung above a vase of orchids. A shot from their wedding leaned on a polished table, with Holly guiding her husband’s cake-clenched fingers toward her open mouth. One of Holly’s saris was tacked like a gigantic butterfly on the wall. The lacquered pinewood floorboards allowed no dust to rupture their oily crescents and hand-carved pegs.