Orient (24 page)

Holly led Beth into a room outfitted in rugs and gold-leaf textiles, FedEx boxes and packing material. The bulk of Holly’s business was mail order, and a humming desktop computer displayed a slide show of draped fabrics that were shot on the window seat on the opposite side of the room. The sound of televised crowds and sports announcers echoed from the darkness of the den. Holly pushed the sliding doors open, cautioning Beth to be careful of the sunken step. Cole was slumped on the couch, staring at the flat screen. He pulled a remote control from between his legs and pressed the mute button as Beth took a chair across from him.

“It’s an antique,” Holly warned her. “I wouldn’t move around
too much. But you’re so light.” Where was Holly from originally? Chicago? Sarasota? Swampscott? Beth couldn’t remember. Her accent seemed sculpted by cable news executives.

Cole looked at his wife with a blank expression, and Holly excused herself to finish changing.

Beth had known Cole Drake most of her life. He’d been two years ahead of her in high school, and his presence was like a long list of negatives: too lean and injury-prone for organized sports, too morose and handsome for marching band. Cole was never friendly; Beth, quite popular at Sycamore, always thought he looked like the kind of kid who should grow up in one of the huge western states where land put a natural barrier between people. Even now, he eyed Beth like he was still hostile toward her likeable teenage self. Beth could have done without visiting Cole altogether, but he’d been the only other visitor to Magdalena’s house she’d seen in the days before her death.

“I spoke with Arthur Cleaver today,” Beth said. “I asked who handled Magdalena’s will. He said you did.” Cole glanced at the television for a moment, waiting for the score, then brought his brown eyes silently back and waited for her to continue. “I’m not sure I’m even allowed to ask this, but I was her friend, so I wondered what you two talked about when you visited her the day before she died. I saw you out my window.”

“Come to collect, huh?” If he had punctuated that sentence with a laugh it might have broken the tension.

“No, of course not,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect to receive anything. It’s more—well, I also spoke with Magdalena a few days before she died, and she seemed worried about something. She was really broken up about Jeff Trader’s death. Did she mention him to you?”

“He died
intestate
. No will and no inheritors. His property will go to the state to settle.” Cole checked the score and scowled. Whatever vague clue Beth had been hoping to glean, this trip hardly seemed worth the gas it took to drive here. What would Cole know
about a woman like Magdalena Kiefer, anyway? The only virtue she probably appreciated in him was his efficiency.

Beth narrowed her approach. “She didn’t say anything strange to you on that visit? Maybe she mentioned someone she distrusted? Or anyone she was worried about?”

Cole crossed his arms over his lap and wedged his tongue against his cheek. He held his emotions the way men were forced to hold their wife’s purse: close to the chest with their jaw muscles clenched in embarrassment. Gavril never minded holding Beth’s purse.

“Magdalena distrusted a lot of people,” he said. “For good reasons or for no reasons at all. She distrusted me, for one. Your mother, for another. I never cared for her in particular.” Beth assumed Cole was still referring to Magdalena, not Gail. “But, no, she didn’t say anything to me that day. And if she had, I would have assumed it was a symptom of her age. Those hippie types get a little lost in the head when the years start adding up. She wanted to leave everything to her nurse. Not the house, but all of the stuff in it. Most of her money will go to that woman’s son, although it’s going to be a headache for me to send her small savings to some kid’s address in Mexico when he actually lives ten miles down the interstate.”

Holly tiptoed through the room in a yellow velour tracksuit, her curly red hair falling over her shoulders. “Don’t mind me, don’t mind me,” she whispered as she passed the couch and opened the glass door to escape into the backyard. Beth shifted on the wobbly chair and leaned in to focus Cole’s attention.

“So that’s why you went over to her house. She wanted you to change her will.”

Cole had the lawyer’s trait of speaking each sentence in the same dreary monotone.

“That’s right. And you’ll be happy to know that she left you a few things. An armoire and a grandfather clock.” Beth remembered admiring those pieces on her visit. “You clean up pretty well, actually. Not that a couple of beat-up antiques really amount
to a motive for killing her, do they?” Cole smiled, at last, though without a hint of warmth.

“So you also think Magdalena was murdered?”

“Did I say that?” He grunted. A last-minute field goal leveled the score. Beth was competing with a stadium of twenty thousand. “It’s no secret you think she was. I’ve heard more than one person tell me you’ve been swearing murder up and down. I’d be careful if I were you. Holly’s been locking all our windows at night. She’s hounding me about getting an alarm put in.”

“I
have not
been saying that.”

Cole didn’t like loud noises. The fluctuation in her voice unnerved him. He propped the pillows against his ribs.

“But I’ll tell you something, since you’ve come all this way. There
was
something peculiar. You may know that I’m not fond of the board and all their benevolent plans to save us, so you can take what I say or don’t. But Magdalena demanded that I come see her that day so she could alter the key beneficiary in her will. She was going to leave her house and acreage to OHB, but out of nowhere she wanted that struck. Had me run over to sign a new will without that condition. You can say, as some do, that she was waiting for the trust to be set up, shifting around her assets before the big announcement, but that’s not what it seemed like to me. Seemed to me like she changed her mind altogether. She wouldn’t tell me why, and it wasn’t my place to ask. But my guess is, she didn’t want the historical board to have it. Didn’t want to put it all in Bryan Muldoon’s pocket. Problem is, without any relatives, the land goes to the state to settle. Same as Jeff Trader, in case you’re in the market.”

“Does the historical board know she changed her will?”

“Bryan, George, and Sarakit all phoned me separately the day after she died. They weren’t exactly pleased by the news.”

Cole leaned back on his sofa, unmuted the game with his remote, and called an end to the conversation. Beth stood up and thanked him. As she began to leave she heard his voice through the televised screams.

“Funny, you moving back here.”

She turned. His attention was on the screen.

“Excuse me?”

“You moving back here. In high school, you were always going on about New York and all the fancy things you were going to do out there. And now you’re back here with the rest of us. Just funny, that’s all. How it ends up.”

Beth struggled to take the insult up the sunken stair, one foot in front of the other. She could not remember a single incident involving Cole Drake that would have caused him to resent her for fifteen years. Was he alone in his view of her, or were there others—adults now, stretched and swollen versions of the kids she’d known—watching her from their windows with the kind of raw hate that only comes from youthful resentment? She passed through the makeshift showroom and opened the front door with unsteady hands.

Beth was halfway toward the gate when Holly rounded the house, wearing gardening gloves with her yellow tracksuit, a pair of pruning shears in her gloved fingers.

“Did you get what you came for?” she asked, using the glove to shade her eyes. She read Beth’s puzzled expression. “Don’t mind Cole. You know husbands. Never interrupt them during a game.” Holly squinted as she smiled. Beth felt another flash of déjà vu, not for a moment lived twice, but for a moment repeated from a photograph—the one she’d found in Jeff Trader’s journal. Holly’s red hair was bright against the lawn of dead Bermuda grass, which would grow alien green in summer. Behind her, thorny bushes would blossom with summer rosebuds.

CHAPTER
14

A
t the Floyd Organic Farm Stand, on a gravel crescent off Main Road, Paul selected autumn vegetables. Even in the rain he was fastidious, palming Jerusalem artichokes, squeezing zucchinis, inspecting kale for wilted leaves. August Floyd, manning the family-owned stand, watched with the bleary enthusiasm of a farmer who had survived a decade of near-death alcoholism and another decade of near-death redundancy, thanks to competition from the Greenport supermarkets. His slackened face only blinked when the wind swept the rain against his broken nose.

If darker times had left their scars, his customers’ more recent prosperity cushioned them. August Floyd was zippered into a brand-name fleece jacket. His hands guarded a money box teeming with tens and twenties. The stand promised vegetables grown from something called heritage seeds, and this promise brought cars to idle on the gravel as shoppers from as far away as Mattituck pilfered the once-cheap, now high-priced inventory. The shoppers were young and assertive, their hair cropped and disheveled by Manhattan salons, their cars new and gleaming against the downpour. Their bumpers were decorated in Obama stickers. August Floyd’s mud-caked Chevy still preferred Romney. The shoppers tried to barter. August tapped the price signs. The shoppers relented. They wanted lavender. August told them it was out of season.

A few Orient natives burrowed through the vegetable bins, feeling no need to step aside for the over-the-causeway customers. Karen
Norgen, her skin as gray-green as algae, her hair still whipped into silver curls from the funeral, was midway through a rant aimed at August’s ears. “I’ve been picking blackberries from those bushes ever since I was a child. I always used the Tabor lawn to access the beach. My parents used that lawn. And this woman who calls herself an
art advisor
—god knows what that means—moves in last year, shows up one time all season, and now she tells me I’m trespassing! On a lawn my parents have been crossing since they were children. Art advisor. You can make money saying shit is gold, and I can’t walk across a lawn. . . .”

A German shepherd and a scrawny collie mix sniffed the car grilles for bird carcasses. Mills watched the German shepherd mount the smaller dog, humping her as he glanced dully around. After a few too many nervous giggles from shoppers, August clapped his hands. “Spark, get off her.” He hurled an apple, hitting the dog on its side. The shepherd climbed off its mate, his purple tongue lolling, but when he tried to trot away, the collie was pulled behind him. They were still joined, hind to hind, the shepherd’s penis stuck in the collie’s opening.

“She was eating a canapé,” Karen wailed. “On a Tuesday afternoon. By herself! While she was telling me I was no longer allowed to pick blackberries!”

Paul asked for a dozen oysters from one of the Igloo ice coolers.

“Have you ever tried an oyster?” he asked Mills. “It’s like eating the sneeze of the sea. I mean that in a good way.”

Mills couldn’t take his eyes off the dogs. They were scampering around the cars, stuck together, trying to run in opposite directions like conjoined twins desperate to separate. They looked embarrassed, as if confused by an instinct that had betrayed them.

“I think they’re in pain,” Mills said.

“Just came out of the bay this morning,” August told Paul as he scooped twelve oysters into a plastic bag and double-knotted the end.

“Do you think that blackberry bush will be there next spring? I don’t. That woman is building a Japanese rock garden.” Karen
shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t know what we’re in for with these new people,” she huffed. “I was thinking I’d throw in my name to fill Magdalena’s seat on the board. Just to help out where I can. August, Paul, what do you think?” Karen only glanced at Mills when she thought he wasn’t looking.

Paul smiled at Karen and nodded. He quickly turned to Mills. “I’ve got to find my steel shucking gloves. Have you seen those gloves in the kitchen? They look like Michael Jackson gloves. Opens them right up.”

The dogs whined as they ran diagonally, trying to break apart, and whined viciously when they couldn’t. They spun in circles, slamming against the fender of a Jeep, then running back to back in a yanking sidestep toward Main Road. The shepherd’s eyes were white with fear, his penis bent painfully back, causing a twinge of sympathy in Mills’s groin. The collie swiveled around to bite her mate. She yelped and tried to roll on the ground to dislodge him. The shepherd dug his paws in the gravel and dragged her up. He sniffed the thrown apple, as if a second of distraction would clear up the crisis.

“They’re getting too close to the road,” Mills said to August Floyd.

“They’re animals. They know what they’re doing.” But August noticed his dogs were indeed a few feet from the whipping traffic. “It’s forty total,” he told Paul, then jogged over to the dogs. August kicked them back with his boot and kept kicking until they drifted over the gravel, not as two dogs but as a single flinching, double-headed organism. They disappeared into the thick marsh grasses, growling and snapping but still fused end to end. The grass shook as shoppers continued their excavation of the vegetable bins. When Mills looked up, Karen was studying him, her mouth forming a reluctant smile. August counted his money.

Paul and Mills returned to the Mercedes, loading six pumpkins onto the backseat.

“I wish we could make sure those dogs got free okay,” Mills said as he climbed into the car. He watched the grass, hoping to see one of the dogs lope out alone.

“I’m sure they’ll work it out.” Paul pressed his foot on the clutch and let out a moan. He rubbed his knee. “It flares up when it rains,” he said through his teeth, as if tasting sour meat.

“We can go home,” Mills said. “We don’t need to go to the tip today.”

Paul waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be fine.”

Yesterday, Mills had found an old sign in one of the back rooms, tucked between a carton of empty bicentennial 7-Up cans and a bundle of synthetic neckties. At first he’d mistaken it for a flag, covered in twenty years of velvet dust. As his fingers wiped the dirt from the surface, red letters appeared:
TERPO
. He rubbed until O
YSTERPONDS
I
NN
ran across the wooden board. He carried it into the dining room, and Paul held it up admiringly as if it were a family photograph.

The sign had belonged to Paul’s mother. It had hung on the porch of the inn her family had owned for three generations. Paul decided he would pick Mills up after Magdalena’s funeral and they could drive to the inn to deliver it as a gift to the young couple who’d recently bought the place. “Beth told me they were artists. They can put it in their kitchen,” Paul said, “or maybe hang it right on the porch if the hooks are still there. People like that, a touch of history.” Mills decided not to destroy the neighborly fantasy by voicing his own opinion:
People don’t like that. People don’t enjoy former owners showing up at their houses, inviting themselves in, and turning their rooms into photo albums in which their own faces do not appear
. But, behind the gesture, Mills sensed a secret motivation at work. Paul was curious to see what the new residents had done to his mother’s farmhouse. Scrubbed and de-splintered, the sign was now lying in Paul’s backseat with the pumpkins.

As they drove east, Paul shook his sore leg to improve his circulation.

“How did you hurt it?” Mills asked. He knew the answer, but he decided not to mention the car accident Tommy had told him
about. Paul had made it clear how much he abhorred Orient gossip, and Mills understood why: it seemed like every house in Orient had an electric fan of gossip blowing the curtains in their windows. Paul preferred the stagnant air of his own separate world.

“I had an accident last June. Wasn’t watching the road as I was coming in from the causeway and hit a tree.” He pulled at his tie with two fingers. “No big deal. But every so often my knee shoots with needles. My doctor says I need physical therapy, but do I really want to pay someone to watch me bend my leg for an hour? It’s getting better, little by little.” He patted his left knee through his black wool pants.

At least Mills wasn’t also wearing a black suit. His jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt would prevent them from being mistaken for a pair of father-son Christian missionaries when they showed up at the old inn. Mills stared at the water-flecked fields they passed, remembering the scenery from his drive with Beth to Jeff Trader’s house. He almost asked Paul if they could check on the cats and sheep, but that would have been another admission of sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong. How could Mills explain rummaging around the home of a dead man?

Every so often, pictures of the Plum monster appeared on passing lawns—
PROTECT YOUR HOME FROM CONTAGIONS. PROTECT YOUR FUTURE WITH THE STATE-OF-THE-ART. CALL
P
RUITT
S
ECURITIES
—mixed in among the P
EARL
F
ARMS
D
REAM
H
OME
for-sale signs. It wasn’t much of a leap to make a connection between the monster’s decaying shape and the real estate markers in close proximity, linking them together by cause and effect. “Adam’s signs aren’t doing wonders for property values, I’ll tell you that much,” Paul said.

Mills pitied the creature. Even if it was a mutant, designed in a lab in some twisted experiment to merge the ugliest features of the animal kingdom, it had still been alive at one point, and somewhere in its brain pan had possessed the desire to live. Mills imagined it escaping from its cage in the night, clawing its way through barbed wire, its paws touching earth for the first time in the short history of
its species, and diving into the water, thinking it could swim. It must have enjoyed that minute before drowning, snorting the clean night air, contemplating the comfort of heat and blood and the rough tug of jimsonweed on its skin.

“If it were cute it wouldn’t look like such a threat,” Mills said.

“A panda crossed with a Yorkshire terrier and the slightest dose of sloth?”

Mills had relied on adorability for much of his childhood. He fixed his eyes on the clouds that stretched skeletally over the bay.

“Well, even if it started out under a microscope, it should have some rights, shouldn’t it?”

“If you say so,” Paul said, nodding. He steered the car around the deeper puddles, his knee stronger. “We have rights too, if you say so. That’s all rights are—just values that enough people agree that they share.”

“I am saying so,” Mills replied. He wasn’t in the mood for one of Paul’s fatherly lessons on relativism.
Fine
, he thought,
bring it into existence, stick needles into it, and exterminate it as soon as it gets out of hand
. Welcome to the life cycle of the twenty-first century. The dogs at the farm stand combined in his mind with the creature on Adam Pruitt’s ads until it all felt slightly sickening, like the earth itself was a giant petri dish for the growth of horrible organisms. He tried to picture the creature in its cage in a basement laboratory at Plum, prodded and tortured by white-suited needle-wielders with sharp, lucid eyes. Often, Mills found himself despising the human species, praying for its inevitable extinction, even as he was enjoying a slice of pizza or taking the bus. He had come to view hating human beings abstractly as the most convenient way of living with a conscience in the world.

Paul glanced over at him, gauging his agitation, and dropped his smile. “I’m not trying to argue with you,” he said. “I think this whole mutant thing is a bunch of bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit,” Mills snapped. “If it’s the future, it’s something to consider.”

Paul rubbed his mustache, his eyes shifting from amused to meditative. The tires of approaching cars created small tidal bores that crashed against the side of the Mercedes.

“Here’s what I think,” Paul said after a minute. “Pruitt’s signs don’t mean
protect your future
. They mean
protect yourself from it
. Why is it that when everyone thinks of the future these days they’re always bringing up visions of the apocalypse? It’s a fear that anything new must signal the end of days. I find it pretty sad that a whole generation has become terrified of what’s to come. When I was a kid, we were so optimistic. We were cheering for more men on the moon.”

“You can’t be that old,” he replied. For Mills, dreams of traveling to the moon appeared in the same grainy, black-and-white footage as the first televised landing—a program that had already been canceled before he had been born. The dream could barely withstand the advancement of color. “And you don’t even own a television set.”

Paul straightened his glasses.

“I’m afraid I am old now.” He laughed, as if his birth year were a punch line that kept getting funnier every time he remembered it. “How long before kids look at me the way I once looked at people born in the nineteenth century?”

Mills rested his temple against the window. He couldn’t imagine anyone born in the nineteenth century.

“Do you think one day those kinds of mutant creatures will be normal?” he asked. The car slowed, waiting for a clear turn onto a dirt road. “Like a regular feature in zoos?”

Paul thought about it. “Probably.” He rotated the wheel. “Can you think of one scientific breakthrough that was ever stopped? It all becomes a reality eventually. Best not to waste your strength trying to fight the future. It’s like trying to punch the Internet. But if you’re asking about that Plum monster, I doubt it was real.”

Oak branches tangled above them, a canopy of wicker. Whatever Paul had imagined by way of renovations to his mother’s farmhouse
inn did not prepare him for what he found crowning the bluff a mile north of Main Road. As the car approached the house, air leaked from his lips. “At least it’s the same shape,” he rasped.

The main floor of the house was grand, almost as large as the Benchley mansion, with a smaller second story stacked like a captain’s cabin at its peak, an elevated roost to watch storms rolling on the sea. They pulled into the driveway, parking behind a black sports coupe. Even from this distance, the house had a blurry patina, an out-of-focus sea mirage that gleamed with leathery plastic. Mills couldn’t blink it clear. Twenty feet to the side, a backhoe leaned its yellow claw into the dirt. Mud mounds made a maze on the lawn. Paul lugged the wooden sign from the backseat, staring piteously at the mud trenches.