Orient (35 page)

She bent down to put her arms around him, ignoring the tar from his overalls that smeared across her sweatshirt, trying to bring her lips to his. He heaved a sigh and slowly pushed her away. She fought him, digging her fingers into his back, trying to wear him down with affection. She slipped her hand toward his crotch, but he grabbed her wrist. She stopped.

“Why don’t we take a vacation?” she said. “Why don’t we leave for a week or two? Somewhere romantic. That fire scared me, Gavril. Couldn’t we?” She begged him again. “Just the two of us. Only a week or two. Maybe it will give you some distance to think. You’ll still have the rest of the winter to finish the work.”

Gavril stood up, stepping over the wet vats of tar heated by small blue flames. Animal bones that Gavril must have bought from the butcher sat in a queasy pile, rib cages and humerus bones, some with their blue meat still attached. She thought she saw a sheep’s skull under a hoof. Bags of oyster shells and animal fur spilled across the tarp. These were the materials her chosen mate preferred. Gavril placed the white mask over his mouth and pointed at it. “
Ou houldn’t ee in here, reathing the umes
.”

Beth pulled the mask from his mouth. His lips were tight beneath it.

“We could buy tickets online and leave tonight,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Just us. To get out of Orient for a while. To forget what’s happening out here.”

His eyes hollowed.

“How do we pay for a trip?” he said angrily. “I work. This is what I do for money. And now that I need to work, you want to run off and spend what we don’t have. This is all we have, Beth. I have not asked you to contribute. I know you’ve had a hard time and I know you needed to take a break. But don’t ask me to throw away my career because you’re tired or bored or scared of your own house that I agreed to live in because that is what you wanted. To come here. To give up New York to be with you. You asked for this, remember?” He stared at her with his dirty teeth moving, his brown eyes staring directly into hers. “What more do you want from me?”

She snapped the mask against his mouth and walked toward the door. Gavril didn’t run after her. He must have pulled the mask down because she heard him say “I love you,” clearly. Then he said, “But you need to leave me alone.”

On her way
back to the house, Beth saw a gray sedan parked in the driveway, its metal doors corroded by snow and salt. As she opened the back door, she heard the doorbell ring. She hurried through the house and unlocked the dead bolts on the front door. By the time she got it open, Mike Gilburn was already retreating down the walk.

He turned in surprise and headed back toward her, scratching his beard. Even though they were about the same age, gray strands had already woven their way through his patchy brown hair. “The last time I came to your door like this I was picking you up,” he said, smiling. “Did I bring roses?”

“Carnations, I think,” Beth said, although she couldn’t remember any flowers, couldn’t remember one solid detail in the mental photo album of teenage dates that hadn’t resulted in heartbreak or sex. She thought she recalled a horror movie, maybe a few beers over a pinball machine.

“I wish I could say that’s why I’m here.” His sentence brought him to shuffle his heels. His face reddened. “Not to take you out. I hear you’re married. What I meant was, I wish this was a social call.”

When she’d called the detective on the day of Magdalena’s funeral, he had made her feel like the local busybody. How old did you have to be before you qualified for that title? At thirty-two, Beth might be the youngest busybody ever.

“It’s funny,” Mike said, tipping back on his heels. “Just last month I was thinking about giving up my place in Southold and moving back out here to a little Orient fixer-upper. I found one for sale not far from here. Sarakit Herrig was the agent for the house and she told me not to even bother bidding. Too many interested parties willing to go sky-high for a property on the Sound, she said. She told me I ought to hold on to what I have.” Mike seemed proud of his meager paycheck, buoyant in his hybrid sneaker/dress shoes. “That’s quite a business strategy Sarakit’s got going. Cut everyone out but the rich. I wanted to remind her that her husband taught me geography in school.”

“Things have changed out here,” Beth replied.

“Well, I just drove by it and it’s still sitting vacant. Maybe those sky-highers had second thoughts. Maybe now she’d accept money from a guy like me.”

Beth smiled impatiently. She was still bruised by the fact that he hadn’t listened to her. “What can I do for you, Mike?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t take your call as seriously as I should have.” His voice was the Long Island-ese of her childhood, clipped consonants, a saxophone of vowels. Bad for apologies. “You can’t blame me. The deceased you were worried about was very old, and we still have no reason to assume her death was suspicious.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said slowly, intentionally unhysterical. “I just wish you had listened. I think of you as a friend.”

“Of course,” Mike said in relief. He scratched his beard again. His white shirt was stained yellow under the armpits, hardened by washing and dark with fresh sweat. She wondered if he’d decided not to wear a coat so she’d be more likely to invite him in. Or maybe he simply wanted to appear less official, an acquaintance instead of a police detective. He kept looking over her shoulder, as if to catch
sight of her phantom husband in the hallway. His left hand gripped a notebook ceremonially. He had no pen. “I’m glad you think of me as a friend. I was hoping you would.” He paused. “You heard about the fire.” He cast his eyes past Magdalena’s lawn, toward the Muldoons’ home farther west along the Sound.

“It was arson, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “We detected an accelerant poured through the ground floor.”

“Who would do that?”

Mike scratched his beard again, a tic so persistent she wanted to suggest he shave it off. “That’s what we’re trying to determine. We don’t have any strong leads yet. It’s a fresh case. Seems everyone in Orient has their own opinions about who could have been responsible. And then there’s the insurance company’s opinion. They’d like to pin it on the eldest son. He seemed to have some problems with his family—normal teenage stuff, but he wasn’t found in his room like the rest of them. If a family member started the fire, the insurance company could fight the claim.”

Beth didn’t know much about Tommy Muldoon other than what she’d gleaned seeing him walking down Main Road after school. He was the sort of remote, maladjusted kid who would have attracted her in high school. She didn’t know much about his personality other than the fact that he and Mills had been friends, or more than friends—a more-ness that had sent Pam out on her motherly warpath the last time Beth saw her alive.

“I can’t believe a kid would turn on his family like that,” she said. Mike nodded, scratched.

“Yeah, have you been watching the local news? All those pictures of the Muldoons they keep showing, like the perfect family, arms around each other, so many picnics. I didn’t know a family could throw so many picnics. It would be hard, in that light, to press a case for the fire being started by the son. These cases get played out in the court of public opinion too. Of course, we want to solve the case whether the community’s bringing any pressure or not.”

“I haven’t been watching the news,” she told him as she leaned against the doorframe. “And, to be honest, I haven’t left my house in days, so I don’t know what’s going on.”

“I’m not solving this alone,” Mike said, jerking the conversation forward, impatiently guiding it toward his purpose. “The fire marshal’s involved too, and he’s threatening to bring in some bigwigs from the city to take over. I’ve only had this position for a year, and they keep trying to back burner me. They don’t think a Southold detective has the experience to investigate such a vicious case. I keep telling them that a local detective’s going to know the people who can help get to the bottom of it.” He tapped his notebook. “I came here because I remembered what you said about Magdalena. I know you’ve only been back for a few months, but I got the feeling you’ve been paying attention to things. So I just stopped by to ask you, as a friend, if you had any observations that might help me. Anything strange or connected.”

“Connected?”

“Just anything that could shed some light.” Mike Gilburn’s lips twitched. For Beth, it was a glimpse of how desperate he was. Mike was still trying to get a cat out of a tree, and there were four bodies in the Southold morgue that, for once, he couldn’t dismiss as natural deaths. “People out here are scared. And more than one of them has brought up your name, because they’ve heard you believe Magdalena Kiefer was murdered.”

Beth closed her eyes. She had meant to come back to Orient to start a new life. Now death was greeting her on the front porch.

“Tell me again why you thought your neighbor was killed.”

“First of all, I’m not involved with any of this. I don’t really enjoy being thought of as the woman in Orient brewing crazy stories about murder. Six months ago, I was living in Manhattan.” She tossed her fingers, a cultivated gesture of urban anomie. “I pretty much keep to myself.”

“I understand that.”

“Just so you do,” she said. “As for Magdalena, it all goes back
to Jeff Trader. Magdalena thought he knew something, something bad happening out here—and before you ask, I don’t know what it was. She told me that Jeff had changed in recent months, gotten nervous and fearful. Apparently he came to see her right before he died, drunk and rambling on about the historical board. Magdalena was convinced he was killed out in the harbor. Not suicide or an accident, but murdered over something he had found out. Maybe it involved the historical board, or maybe it was unrelated, a secret someone else didn’t want discovered. All I know is, a few days later, Magdalena was also dead. That’s what I was trying to tell you in her driveway.” Mike raised a defensive hand, but Beth kept talking. “Maybe Magdalena was killed because of what she suspected. Maybe someone silenced her before she could speak.”

Mike looked down at his blank notebook in frustration. “You said on the phone that you might have evidence.”

Beth didn’t know whether Mills had managed to retrieve Jeff’s journal before the fire. It might already be destroyed, lying amid the char of Tommy’s former bedroom. But a whimper escaped her throat as she realized that Tommy had been the last person to have the book. Now Tommy was dead, as if the book itself had brought on each crime.

“Are you okay?” Mike asked, cocking his head.

“I had a journal that belonged to Jeff Trader. Magdalena gave it to me to hold on to.” She wasn’t going to admit to trespassing.

“Can I see it?”

“I’m not sure where it is,” she stalled. “I’ll have to look for it.” Mike’s expression quickly changed, and he grunted almost skeptically. He didn’t believe her. But she refused to implicate Mills, not until she had spoken with him. “I’ve been having a hard time lately,” she improvised. “I’m sorry. My husband and I, we’ve been trying to have a baby, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.”

Mike nodded apologetically. She remembered his recent divorce and the loneliness in his voice when he talked about the children he and his wife didn’t get around to having. “When you find the
book, can you please call me?” He slipped a business card from his shirt pocket.

“I already have your number.”

He gave it to her anyway. “Right now I’m not treating either of those deaths as related. But I’d like to see that book. I’d consider it a favor if you took the time to look for it. One last question, Beth, and then I promise I’ll let you get back to your day.” He touched his fingers to her arm. He had small, sensitive hands, un-cop-like hands, better for consoling victims than for cuffing perpetrators. “Do you know anyone who had a problem with the Muldoons? Anyone who was in a fight with them? Any reason at all that someone might wish them harm?”

She was glad she hadn’t mentioned Mills. Even a small-time cop like Mike Gilburn was bound to learn of the argument between Mills and Pam before long. She wanted desperately to protect him, to fake an alibi if he needed one, to cast suspicion anywhere but in the direction of Paul’s unknown foster kid. There was no stopping suspicion once it settled on a person. When one bird found a boulder rising from the water, other birds followed until they built a colony, squabbling over every inch.

“No,” she said. “I mean, I know there was a lot of disagreement about Bryan’s plans for conservancy, but nothing that would lead to murder.”

“I thought you said the historical board might have been the reason that Jeff Trader was killed.”

“He warned Magdalena about the board. But she sat on that board too. She did change her will just before she died. She decided not to leave her house to OHB, so that could be important.”

Mike smiled at his first moment of insight. “Then they wouldn’t have had much to gain by killing her, would they?”

“God, I don’t know.” She groaned. “Are you sure the fire wasn’t accidental? How do you know that an accelerant was poured intentionally through the house? Couldn’t there be other explanations? Who knows what happens behind closed doors?”

Mike scratched his beard. She noticed that he still wore his wedding ring. Why would a man keep wearing his wedding ring months after signing his divorce papers? It was like chastening the hand for what it could no longer reach for in support.

“There’s a reason we can’t pin it on Tommy,” he said. “The front door of the Muldoons’ house had been opened. Not broken in by the firefighters, but opened. The alarm system had gone off. Why would a kid who meant to burn his house down allow the alarm system to go off before he lit the match? And where did he put the canister? Tommy died in the upstairs hallway. We didn’t find any sort of gas can at the scene. Whoever started the fire must have taken the canister with him. Out the front door, the same way he came in.”

She closed her eyes and gripped the doorknob. Mike thanked her. “Call me when you find the book. Or if anything else occurs to you. Even if you just want to talk.”