Orient (55 page)

“Easy,” Gilburn said, touching Paul’s knee. “Now, look, I’m in a predicament. I know you didn’t do it. There’s no reason you would have hidden a gas can with your own fingerprints in the house of a neighbor who could stumble upon it at any time.” Paul’s throat made a choking sound, as if he’d just inhaled a small bone. “I realize you could have driven that can to the dump or pitched it in the Sound. But I take this information to my superior, well, it doesn’t look so cut-and-dried. You lived next door. You were seen involved in a dispute with Pam Muldoon on the front lawn days before the fire.”

“I told you what that was about,” he rasped.

“Paul, listen. I’m not arresting you. It hasn’t come to that.”

“
Hasn’t come to that
,” he repeated. “Anyone could have taken that can from the curb. Someone must have known my prints would be on it. It’s my can!”

Gilburn nodded and collected the photographs on the coffee table. He slowly packed them into his briefcase.

“Mills had been visiting the Shepherd house,” Gilburn said. “He had access. Am I correct in saying he also had access to the gas can?”

“Mike, I told you. Mills had nothing to do with that fire.”

“Does Mills own a pair of gloves?”

Paul fell back on the cushion, flapping his shoulders, a fish trying to survive in an unforgiving element. “Every single person out here has gloves. Mills also owns shoes. You can try to pin this gas can on me, it’s my fingerprints, but I’m not about to let you pin it on an innocent kid.”

Gilburn waved his hands. “Okay, I get it. Anyone could have taken that can. It was on the curb next to the Muldoon house for anyone in Orient to pick up. But when I show this to my boss, he’s going to look at one thing: your fingerprints on a probable murder weapon that originated in this house. I’m going to tell him that’s ridiculous. But if it comes to that, since you and Mills both confirm each other’s alibis, my boss is going to wonder if you two did it together.”

Gilburn was fishing, and Mills prayed that Paul wouldn’t bite. But Paul seemed to have aged during the course of the detective’s visit, worn out from the labor of defending himself. When Paul glanced out the window, Mills saw a man losing his pleasure in the view of Orient, in the house he’d grown up in, in the street he’d known since he was a child. If word got out that his fingerprints had been found on the gas canister, he’d be the most hated man on the North Fork. Paul dipped his head and waited for another load of metal to hit the Dumpster before speaking again.

“Mills was asleep on this sofa. He was out like a light when I went upstairs to bed. If there’s anyone who doesn’t have an alibi, it’s me. I was awake in my room by myself. You can tell your superior that I’m the one whose whereabouts can’t be confirmed. If Beth Shepherd wants to charge me with breaking into her house, she’s welcome to do that. But this is nonsense. You’ve got a murderer on
the loose who could have taken that can from my curb at any time, and you’re wasting your time on me.”

“We’ve got other leads,” Gilburn said.

“Great,” Paul whimpered. “So I’m not your only suspect.”

Mills stepped from the shadows, hurrying into the living room. Paul smiled hollowly and the detective turned, closing his briefcase as he watched him advance.

“Paul didn’t do it,” Mills said. The detective stood up, smoothing a nonexistent tie down his chest. He reached out to shake Mills’s hand and, when he was rebuffed, clapped him on the shoulder. “Have you talked to Lisa Muldoon and Adam Pruitt?” he asked. “I saw her out here two weeks before the fire. They’re a couple.”

Paul tried to silence him with a sharp look.

“In fact we’re talking to her about that today,” Gilburn confided. “Paul, you haven’t seen Adam recently, have you? We’ve been trying to locate him. He’s got some explaining to do, and I don’t mean about the Muldoons. You heard about that second creature?”

Still dazed, Paul scarcely bothered to shake his head.

“Seems whoever fabricated the first Orient monster got greedy for a second round of panic. It’s a crime to induce public panic. If you do see him—” Detective Gilburn retreated to the foyer. Paul got to his feet and watched the detective open the door. “Just to be clear, we ask that neither one of you leaves Orient without checking in with us.” He glanced at Mills. “I know you’re only a visitor, but if you decide to run off without warning, it wouldn’t look so good for your friend here.”

Mills nodded. Paul grumbled, ushered Gilburn onto the porch, and shut the door behind him. He set the security alarm, then took a deep breath and rested his forehead on the wall.

“They think we killed them,” Mills said.

“They think I killed them,” Paul replied. “Me. Tell me you didn’t hide that canister at Beth’s house?” His eyes were shut, his wet forehead polishing the wood. “Even if you meant it as a precaution, as a way of trying to protect me, tell me you didn’t do that?”

It was the second time that morning Mills had been asked to swear his innocence. Paul was the man who had offered him a family, and his acceptance tied him to Paul. There was no longer any chance of a clean escape. They stood on the ground floor like two trees that had broken through the foundation, their branches growing and twisting together within the four walls. Mills might have clouded Paul’s reputation by coming here, but he’d ruin him if he left.

“I hit that tree when I was drunk,” Paul confessed, barely intelligible. “It was nothing. Just one drink too many and I was worn-out from how sick my mother had been. It was right after the funeral. The judge gave me a slap on the wrist. I’m careful now. For that to come back with my fingerprints . . .”

“I didn’t put the can in Beth’s house,” Mills promised. “Don’t worry. They’ll catch who did it.”

Orient was his home, more now than Modesto. Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay.

CHAPTER
30

T
here were reports that she had gone into custody in handcuffs, that she was crying hysterically and screaming for her boyfriend, “Adam, Adam,” as the officer cupped her head when placing her in the backseat of the cruiser. There were further reports from those who happened to be driving by the Seaview that she spat in the face of the arresting officer, that she dragged her feet on the gravel until the officer was forced to carry her, that she threatened a lawsuit against the township for false arrest. None of these reports was verified, and even those who spread them in the days that followed were half-certain of their falsehood. It was gossip that twisted and mutated as it dispersed, through the telephones of Holly Drake and Helen Floyd, on the bitter-cold corners near Poquatuck, in the abbreviated syntax of text messages.

But neighbors on Beach Lane could confirm that police had raided Adam Pruitt’s bungalow after receiving an anonymous tip about a foul odor, that they dredged his room and confiscated a box of lime green leaflets along with a rifle for which Adam did not have a permit. They checked his answering machine—a total of twenty-seven messages, mostly from increasingly irate Pruitt Securities customers demanding to know why he had missed his scheduled appointments. The police cut the lock on his backyard shed, and the putrid smell of animal carcasses plagued the air, causing one officer to puke in the bushes. Inside the shed they found a blood-soaked table with a handsaw, a scalpel, and absorbable
suture thread. In a sealed garbage bin, they uncovered the dissected remains of various mammals, like replacement parts for the herds and swarms that roamed the eastern fields. It all served as evidence against him. The police questioned Luz and Nathan, the owners of the land where the second creature was found. Yes, Adam Pruitt had visited their house for a consultation; yes, he had cased the property including the beach; yes, Luz had woken a few nights before the creature was discovered to the sound of someone moving in the weeds. Luz giddily texted the details of her police interview to Beth, but Beth didn’t respond. Instead, she spoke to Mills on the phone.

“Adam created the monsters himself and put them on the beach,” she said. “And he relied on that fear to bolster his security business. Make Plum into the ultimate horror, forcing neighbors to pay for a bunch of expensive environmental tests as well as alarms. Fuck,
I
almost considered having Gail’s soil and water tested.”

“That means he probably killed the Muldoons too,” Mills replied. “He got rid of his only competition, Muldoon Security, so he could have a monopoly on the market out here.” Mills’s voice full of hope, like hands trying to hold tight to a future nearly lost. “Is that what the police are thinking?”

Beth paused. “Maybe—hopefully. I don’t know. I guess they’ll know when they find him.” She glanced out the kitchen window as if expecting to see Adam Pruitt crouching in the reeds, in camouflage fatigues and black face paint. What she saw, instead, was the same pantsuited Pearl Farms agent unlocking Magdalena’s front door. “I’m sorry about the gas can. I never thought they’d find Paul’s fingerprints on it. Who would want to frame Paul?”

“But now they know about Lisa. And if Adam is the one, they won’t look any further. Either of them could have taken the can from the curb on trash day.” Mills sounded so optimistic that Beth wondered if her own doubts were the paranoid mathematics of catastrophe, like a New Year’s Eve guest who compares the countdown to the doomsday clock.

“I hope so,” she said. “Could you come over today and help me lug some furniture over from Magdalena’s? It’s the pieces she left me in her will.”

“Sure,” he said. “I feel like I can go outside again. I feel like I’m finally not the one.” He paused before he asked his question. “Did you tell Gavril about the baby?”

Gavril was a light in the garage, a faint yellow smudge in the backyard. The Russians had arrived and departed that morning in their SUV, avoiding the house in their passage to and from the studio, the white shine of their faces as cold and guarded as winter metal. Throughout the forty-minute visit, the bodyguards had stood by the pool, smoking. No one had asked to see the two eyes, a mouth, and a forehead she’d left drying on the canvas in her upstairs bedroom. Beth felt, not for the first time, that she was always gestating, always in between, unfinished. She had phoned her gynecologist that morning to schedule a second appointment.

“Gavril and I are having problems.”

“I’m sorry,” Mills said. “Maybe you just need time together. When they catch Adam, everything will calm down. Do you think they’ll find him soon?”

She thought of Jeff Trader warning Magdalena about OHB, about his fear that something horrible might happen to him. And something horrible
had
happened to him. She remembered his body splayed across the beach by the harbor, and Adam driving his truck to the scene, and the shock on his face as he watched Jeff covered by a police blanket.

“I hope so,” she replied. All day she had been saying that—
I hope so
—like an automatic reply to anyone who sent her a message.

The police found Adam’s truck parked in the ferry lot. The ferry’s grainy surveillance video didn’t extend to the edge of the lot where the truck was parked, but the tollbooth operator thought she remembered the truck in the corner for at least a day. Adam could have purchased a passenger ticket to Connecticut, or he could have jumped the fence and scurried onto the restricted ferry to Plum, but
further surveillance checks didn’t pick up anyone matching his description on either boat. Adam Pruitt was a person of interest. But Orient homeowners who had relied on Pruitt Securities to guard their homes were left to wonder whether those alarms provided protection or were as fraudulent as the man they had led through their homes, pointing out their most vulnerable spots.

Gunshots rang out from the diCorcia farm that morning. Roe diCorcia put a bullet in the brain of four of his six Rottweilers, relieving them of the sickness that had left them paralyzed in the frost. He buried them in his backyard field, and it was rumored that Adam Pruitt might have poisoned them, had put toxic chemicals in the wells he was hoping to test. No one dared to drink from their taps, and many wished they had never supported Bryan Muldoon’s outrageous campaign to cut Orient off from the safety of the county water main. The green ice on the road glowed with chemical seepage, and children ran across it into their parents’ idling minivans:
Hurry, run, get in
. The sound of house beams resettling in the late afternoon could be Adam, breaking in, waiting behind the sour darkness of a door. A flash in the trees could be Adam, who knew the woods better than anyone. Where was Adam Pruitt to confess to the crimes against his neighbors? They saw him in the deer that ran along the road, their eyes marble-red in the winter sunlight; in the hands plucking Pruitt Securities signs from lawns; in the Dumpsters containing the remains of the Muldoon house, carted across the causeway to the dump. Only Lisa Muldoon could provide clues to the whereabouts of her boyfriend. A few of Adam’s hunting buddies stepped forward to confirm that Adam and Lisa had been secretly dating. To some, the question wasn’t whether Adam Pruitt was guilty, it was whether Lisa had been complicit in the murder of her family. Many residents felt she should sit in a Southold jail cell until she confessed.

Beth’s doorbell rang. An insistent knocking followed. It couldn’t be Mills; he would have come around back. Perhaps it was Yakov Dombrovski, deciding to take a tour of her studio after all. Beth
turned the locks and opened the door to find Karen Norgen standing on the porch, her lantern-shaped face rising in buttery swells, as if her soft, padded cheeks were protection for the sharpness of her eyes. In her hand was a Ziploc bag of brownies, and from her shoulder hung a shopping bag with more.

“Hello,” Karen said meekly. She gazed past Beth, as if inspecting the interior for evidence of recent renovations that hadn’t been approved by the historical board. She handed Beth the bag of brownies, her smile frozen, as if by a pause button.

“I wanted to apologize,” Karen finally said. “I haven’t meant to give you the cold shoulder lately.” Beth wasn’t aware that Karen had been giving her the cold shoulder. “It’s just that with everything that’s gone on, with those rumors about Magdalena’s death you started, and then with news of that awful fight with Pam just before the fire, not to mention the troubles the village has had with your mother over the years . . . well, I guess I was a bit angry at you.” Karen glanced at Beth and mistook her baffled expression for understanding. “And the way you’ve been carrying on with that young man staying at Paul’s place. I’m not too proud to say I might have been wrong about him. I was sure he was responsible, as many of us were. I mean, all the trouble started right when he showed up. How were we to know that Adam was behind it all?” Karen peered across the street, as if to make sure Adam Pruitt wasn’t standing in the driveway aiming his crossbow at her. She shivered. “Every time I leave my house I’m frightened I’ll see him. Why can’t the police just find him, so we can all breathe easier?”

Beth nodded. She thought of Jeff’s notes on Karen: bitter about the artists moving into Orient, low on money, passed over for a seat on the board. How would those problems be fixed with Adam’s arrest?

“Pam was one of my nearest-and-dearests,” Karen said. “She was the one woman in Orient who brought everyone together, with her picnics and volunteer work. Without her, we’ve all been a bit”—she searched for the word—“
estranged
. But I know the best way
to pay tribute to Pam is to bring the community back together. So, these brownies.” Karen nodded toward the bag. “A small token from me, to try to heal what’s kept everyone apart.”

Beth mustered the smile that Karen seemed hungry for. “Thank you,” she said.

“I’ve been taking goodies around to all the houses. Everyone’s so shaken up. I was just at the Drakes’ and, you know, they had a Pruitt alarm installed and they’re terrified that Adam knows the pass code.”

Beth thought of Holly and how this new worry might distract her from her sorrow in losing Bryan—or in the fact that neither she nor her husband had an alibi for the fire. There was comfort all around in Adam’s guilt.

“Your friend was there,” Karen said. “Your pretty black friend, talking to Cole.”

“Luz?”

Karen smiled. “Oh, it’s none of my business.”

“Why would she be at Cole’s house?”

“I shouldn’t say. They were in the den. I shouldn’t have been listening.” Karen Norgen was a life-form that survived on gossip. To ask Karen not to repeat what she had heard was like asking a dog not to eat. Her resistance lasted all of twenty seconds. “I might have caught the word
divorce
. But you didn’t hear that from me.” She blushed, enjoying the fleeting warmth it brought her.

“That can’t be right,” Beth said. She couldn’t imagine Luz and Nathan separating. They depended upon each other. They were happy—selfish and impetuous, but happy. They were the kind of couple who saved each other from incalculable pools of self-doubt. Did Gavril save her that way? Having a partner was supposed to offer some kind of assurance that one met the basest criteria of a human being. To completely undress in front of another person was to expose oneself as a creature not so different from the Orient Monster, a thing of patchy hair and yellowing teeth, asking “Do you love me? Can you look at this animal and see something to
love?” Beth felt sorry for Karen Norgen. Maybe she was a closeted lesbian, as Tommy had written. She had no one who would pull the shower curtain aside to watch her bathe and not turn away.

“How sad to move out here and buy such a huge house only to find yourself miserable in it,” Karen said gloomily. “The real world outside the city will do that. Out here will make you see what you really are. But that isn’t why I’ve come.” She wiped her coat, as if she were wiping away a broken marriage. “It’s because of Lisa.” Karen stared at her, as if expecting the name to induce facial tics. “I know you and that boy told the police you saw her out here in the weeks before the fire.”

“How do you know that?”

Karen shrugged. She had her ways. “And you might be right. But that doesn’t mean she had anything to do with the fire. I babysat that girl for fifteen years. I was her confirmation sponsor at UCC. Lisa was loyal to her family. She worshipped Bryan and doted on Tommy. She would never do one thing against them.” Karen shook her head. “If Adam is to blame, that’s one thing. You remember what he was like as a teenager. But not Lisa. It breaks my heart the way some of our neighbors are ganging up on her. She’s got nothing to do with what happened to her family.” Karen sounded exactly like Beth defending Mills. How deluded Beth must have seemed to Mike Gilburn, insisting on the boy’s innocence, as weepily faithful as Karen was to Lisa Muldoon. “She’s in a state of grief, and as a community, I think we’ve got to be on her side.”

Karen spoke as if innocence was purely a matter of consensus, and perhaps it was. Over Karen’s shoulder came a figure walking down the street: Mills, in jeans and a flannel shirt, once again feeling safe enough to stroll through the village, now that the collective finger was pointing toward Adam. Karen bowed her head when she saw him approach.

“You’re Mills,” she said, as if she were naming him. He said hello, looking at Beth for guidance on how to handle her. Karen dug through her shopping bag and produced a bag of brownies.

“How is Paul?” Karen asked him, a pink wash of concern on her face. “He must be suffering. He’s had such a hard time. First his mother dying and now his neighbors.” Karen tightened the bag strap on her shoulder. “I’ll never forget the accident.” Beth recognized it as one of Karen’s signature tactics: drop a scandalous topic into conversation and wait for others to beg her to continue.

“Last June, Paul hit a tree just off Main Road,” she went on. “It was about seven at night. You might not remember, Beth, you had just moved back. We were finishing up our outdoor jumble sale for the historical museum. Pam was there, and Ina Jenkins, and Magdalena and maybe Sarakit. At any rate, he was driving his mother’s old Plymouth, and it was such a loud guzzler, the kind that rattles when you take it above twenty. I looked up and there it went, east from the causeway, a white dart directly into a tree.” Karen closed her eyes to cull the memory. She placed a cautionary finger on Mills’s arm. “Now, don’t think badly of him. He had been under so much stress with his mother’s cancer. Inoperable. Terminal. We all visited her as much as we could. She had dementia. It couldn’t have been easy for Paul to take care of her in those last days. He was so good to her, after all those years she treated him like nothing but a workhorse.”