Orient (40 page)

“I could leave tonight,” Mills said quietly. “I could take the train in and disappear. Then you wouldn’t have to deal with it in case they suspect—”

Paul swatted off his glasses and wiped his face. Mills knew how bad that would look, after Paul had given the detective his word. And there were plenty of other potential suspects: he and Beth had already uncovered a number of leads, almost without trying. Surely Gilburn had drummed up more suspects than they had.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Paul muttered. “It would draw attention to you if you tried to leave right now. It would look like guilt.” A thread of air escaped his lips. “Although I can’t force you to stay. I’m not your father. You need to do what’s best for you. If you think getting out—”

“I won’t leave,” Mills interrupted. “But you know I didn’t do it, right? You know I had nothing to do with that fire. I want to make that clear. Because if you have any doubts—”

“You don’t have to tell me that.” Paul collected Mills’s hands on the cushion, rubbing his knuckles with his thumbs. Paul looked tired without his glasses, like a man forced to row a boat at sea with a spoon. He picked his words carefully, moving his lips in halting jerks. “I want to tell you something. Maybe it’s a reason why I told the detective what I did. I lied to you when you found that picture of my brother. Patrick was my brother, but not by blood.”

“He was adopted?”

Paul shook his head. His skin was ashen.

“No. My parents took him in as a foster kid when he was a toddler. His family had abandoned him right here on the North Fork—if a teen mother and a drunk dockworker who both hightailed it to Florida count as family. Patrick drifted around in temporary homes for a while, but no one kept him for long. He was already so sick by then. That’s when my mom and dad brought him to stay here. He could barely leave the house, with all his illnesses, so I did all the chores, so that my mother could take care of him. But I didn’t mind, because I wanted a brother, and Patrick was the sweetest kid I ever met. He loved lighthouses. That’s what he and my mother shared. That’s part of the reason my father and I built that little replica out at the inn—so my mom could see it and remember him after he died. He had operations that we paid for, because the state wouldn’t pay for his medical bills. Elective surgery,” Paul hissed. “It’s not elective if it saves your life. But they had already given him up as lost. We used to tell him he was a descendent of the Gardiners, just so he felt valuable. But Patrick
was
valuable, to us.”

Mills sat so close to Paul that he could smell him, earthy as mulch turned over in a garden. The veins in his wrists pulsed. Paul’s voice was a drone of water in a pipe or rain behind a curtained window.

“My parents were working to adopt him, but he died of the blockage in his intestines before the process was finalized. We couldn’t even bury Patrick ourselves, since he wasn’t technically part of our family. They didn’t allow us that last privilege. I’ll never forget how much that hurt my mother. To her he was just like a son. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t blood.”

Mills tried to picture the dark-haired boy in the photograph, tried to imagine the disease in his stomach that was already consuming him from the inside out when he sat for the camera with Paul on the porch. He tried to picture the homes the boy must have gone through before finding one that would take in a sick child. Most families would rather take in a sick dog than a sick kid. Paul squeezed his fingers. “I went away to boarding school right after he died. I think my mom couldn’t handle the grief of losing him after she tried so hard. Our lives would have been so different if he had lived. When I came home in the summers, we never spoke about him, but something had changed. We became the kind of family that talks about nothing but work.”

Paul waved his hand to clear away the memory.

“What I’m trying to say,” he said, sputtering, “is that a part of me saw Patrick in you. And I’ve wanted you to feel at home here because you deserve that. To have some kind of base where you’re more than a guest. Maybe that was stupid of me. You’re an adult. You don’t need to be adopted. But I thought, with all these extra rooms, that Orient would be a good place.”

“I
do
like it here,” Mills swore. He didn’t dare make eye contact, as if his eyes would expose some failure in him, the larvae scored in the meat. “It’s my fault that I got mixed up with the Muldoons.” He wished he could take back his infatuation with Tommy. Or rather, he wished Tommy had protected his own secrets as carefully as the ones he kept hidden in his safe. He understood Tommy’s need for
a small black space he could lock at his command. What was the name Mills Chevern but a door that only he could access, as if the most honest things about a person were those kept out of sight?

“I guess I’ve been pretty lonely,” Paul said, nodding along to his own diagnosis. “I guess I just thought this house was big enough.”

The house was big enough. It accommodated possibilities that had seemed out of reach to Mills: future Thanksgivings, future Christmases, future boyfriends following him up the steps to meet a middle-aged man with a tender lion’s head. Those were the possibilities being offered to him on the couch as evening darkened, a spare set of keys, and part of him did want that, vaguely, like wanting spring.

“I’d like to stay for a while,” he said, his eyes trained on the cushion. “No promises for how long.”

“As long as you want.” Paul returned his glasses to his nose.

Mills pulled his knuckles from Paul’s fingers. He didn’t want Paul to be the first to break away. But, as he returned his hand to his lap, a switch flipped in his head, a doubt that undermined Paul’s kindness just as it was being expressed. It was Mills’s way of staving off future disappointment. Turn the kindness against itself, distrust it until it died. Without Mills, Paul had no alibi for the fire. Paul could have brought him out here and given him free run of his house simply to establish one. The entire last month might have been engineered for the meeting they just had with the police, Mills nodding along to Paul’s lie, providing him with a cover story he would never have had if he lived alone.

It took imagination to superimpose a killer on the man hunched beside him, his eyes still shiny from his sad generosity, but it wasn’t entirely impossible. Paul could be bribing him now with the promise of a home to prevent Mills from speaking the truth to the police. The idea ran through him hot and cold, like a fever changing direction. He remembered Eleanor’s name on the Seaview matchbook hidden behind the frame.

“You know, Beth and I went to the Seaview today,” Mills said, trying to gut-check Paul with his suspicions.

“The Seaview?” Paul cocked his head. He too seemed in need of a lighter subject, a man who had just offered his house and was met with a teenager’s shrugging
maybe
. “Why would you two go there?”

“Oh, not like that.” Mills blushed. “Beth had it in her mind that the motel had something to do with the Muldoons. We met Eleanor, the woman who runs the place.”

Paul fell back on the sofa. “Oh, she’s a beast!” he said, laughing. “The true North Fork monster. I’ve been dealing with her a bit recently.” Paul looked over at the fireplace, a neutral zone. “I can trust you, right?” Paul didn’t wait for him to confirm it. “I have a secret project that I work on when things are slow at the firm. An idea to buy that dumpy motel from Eleanor and rebuild it as a modern bed-and-breakfast. Like the one my mom ran at the farmhouse I took you to.”

“A hotel?” Mills whispered, caught off guard. “You never told me you wanted to do that.” He was surprised to hear a hint of betrayal in his own voice.

“It was a secret,” Paul said, smiling. “I guess it’s in the blood. Just a little place for visitors to the North Fork. Not as grand as Oysterponds Inn but also not a money trap.”

“Why didn’t you just buy back the farmhouse when it was up for sale last spring?”

“I said a
little
place,” Paul stammered, getting to his feet. “That house was priced at several million even before the bidding started. We almost went bankrupt once over that place. I’m not interested in trying it again.” Paul went to pick up his laptop from the dining room table and brought it back to the couch, typing in his password and clicking on a file titled SEA.pdf. “You’ve got to promise to keep it a secret. At least until it happens.”

Mills nodded, and an architectural rendering of a building filled the screen. The bones of the current Seaview were hardly visible through its cosmetic upgrade: huge picture windows framing the blue waters, dining rooms and decks jutting above the rocks, a canopy of willows shading the long sweep of guest doors, a shell
replacing a swordfish on a sign above the entrance. It looked as beautiful as any dream could that was rendered in straight lines. “Eleanor’s got to give it up sometime, and if I don’t get it before she dies, her grandchildren will sell it to the highest bidder. It’ll end up as a strip mall if I can’t convince her that I want to respect the history of the place. Getting her to sign, though, is like trying to marry the devil. As soon as you agree on a price, she thinks you’re trying to steal from her.”

Mills had never seen Paul so animated. In all his agonizing over his own future, he had never once asked Paul what he wanted out of his. It had been easier for him to imagine Paul as an a possible murderer than as a middle-aged man with a modest dream.

“It’s a great idea,” Mills said encouragingly. “You already know how to build.”

“Not just build, but conserve. Keep the history and the beauty of the view. It’s not in Orient, but it’s close enough, and it’s a lot easier than getting around all of the zoning laws and squabbling neighbors out here. That’s why I like it—because it’s in-between.”

“You should have kept the old Oysterponds sign.”

“It’s best to start fresh. This is my chance to break free from all those corporate parks and do something that’s mine. No more onyx ogres with tinted conference-room windows. I hate that my biggest contribution to date has been perfecting the parking-lot grid.”

“I hope you keep the bar inside. I could bartend.” Paul’s dream was contagious. “We could hang your landscapes in the guest rooms. And you could build another miniature Bug lighthouse on the rocks.”

“Maybe.” Paul snorted. “It’s just a little dream for now.” Paul closed the computer in embarrassment. His dream, once exposed, faced its own potential failure. “So what did you find there?” Paul asked. “What about the Muldoons?”

“Nothing,” Mills said. “I guess we just went to stretch our legs.”

They ate mackerel for dinner, scooping up pieces of fish around its open eye. Their conversation drifted away from the Muldoons
and the police. But Mills prayed that the detective would solve the case, that the perpetrator would be a stranger, a luckless pyromaniac who happened through town. If Mills adopted Orient as his home, he’d need to have his name removed from Gilburn’s list of suspects. Mills wondered if he was contracting the disease of the suburbs: the desire to be liked. After all, the Muldoons were the only ones who hadn’t welcomed him.

When he went upstairs, he realized that he no longer felt afraid of the birthing room or the scraping oak branches in the wind. He’d been in Orient for almost two months, and maybe that was enough to claim it as his.
My bedroom. My dresser. My toothbrush, laid out on a green towel of the very same quality as the man who owns the house—no cheaper and no finer
. He went to bed thinking of Lisa Muldoon, who had lost a family in nearly the same instant that Mills had been offered one. He thought of her crying in the parking lot of the Seaview, shivering with small, lost steps. And he thought of himself, with each step more firmly planted in the Orient soil.

It was deep into the night when a bolt shot through him like a cramp of stomach sickness. He woke, reaching his arms out over the blanket, remembering something that had been bothering him earlier in the day. It was a revelation that caused him to think of the Muldoons as strangers, to each other and to the rest.

CHAPTER
22

A
nerve pinched in Adam Pruitt’s shoulder, trembling his hand whenever he grabbed a pen to write down a customer order. Now his hand shook as he tried to knot his tie in the mirror, dressing for a funeral he didn’t have the time or interest to attend. He would be expected to pay his respects at the service for the Muldoons at the United Church of Christ, even though Bryan Muldoon had been his main business competitor, even though Adam had never darkened United Church of Christ with his prayers, even though Pruitt Securities was now trying to keep up with an influx of work that his five-man outfit could barely handle. He had the Muldoons to thank for the sudden windfall; that was one prayer that had been answered. Everyone on the North Fork suddenly wanted a security system, and no one wanted to hire Muldoon Security, since it was an intruder who’d apparently killed Bryan Muldoon and his family in their home. On paper, Pruitt Securities was thriving—more contracts in the last two weeks than he’d imagined possible for his first year in business. But Adam had not anticipated the immense amount of effort it would take to keep up with demand. If he faltered in accepting a single job, a bigger security company from Long Island would swoop in to plant its badge on an Orient lawn—and he knew how quickly weeds could spread on local soil.

Adam had hijacked Bryan’s own suppliers, offering the exact same security equipment at a slightly cheaper rate, relying on the same Riverhead telecom service to direct satellite calls to emergency
responders and process forgotten codes to harried homeowners trying to remember the answer to their secret password questions while alarms wailed into the receiver.

All of the special services Adam had promoted on their flyers had been put on hold. So far, his company wasn’t offering anything beyond what Muldoon Security provided, for less money. Adam was still in negotiations with a New York City–based environmental lab to supply the soil and water testing he had advertised. Not even the richest new residents would spend two thousand dollars to test their wells and garden when contamination seemed like a county responsibility. How had Bryan managed to run his business day after day, pulled on all sides by installation appointments, late payments, and nervous clients? For one thing, he hadn’t hired his out-of-work hunting buddies. Installations that should take one hour took four, when his so-called technicians showed up, if they showed up sober. Adam had leased a green van, but they forgot to lock its doors when they went crawling through bushes trying to secure wobbly Orient windows, leaving thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment exposed. He needed to fire Dennis, and Josh had to be warned about lighting up on porches, and Toby needed a refresher on the basics of using a screwdriver. How had Bryan managed to turn this kind of business into a profitable enterprise that paid for a house, three children, and time to hunt on weekends—and still left him time to volunteer on the historical board? If Adam hadn’t hated Bryan, he would have admired him. Now that he was dead, he did.

Adam pawed at his tie, but the knot dissolved as he tried to tighten it. A wave of laziness overtook him, a warm laziness that Adam used to enjoy, like slipping into a heated pool in his underwear. It was the kind of laziness that turned the simplest tasks into a concentrated effort: a fifteen-minute drive to Greenport to park the car and walk to the back of the IGA for two pints of milk and up to the front of the IGA to buy the milk and drive fifteen minutes back to his bungalow just to pour the milk over granola for breakfast. As a child, Adam had been a workhorse for his father. Clean the
gutters, mow the lawn, wax the deck, tar the leak in the roof. He had worked and worked, so hard that by the age of eighteen he had come to view adulthood as a form of retirement.

Adam lit a cigarette, ignoring his ringing cell for fear that it was another customer or collection agency—or, worse, her. She wouldn’t stop calling, crying, demanding that he see her, that he come right now. He hadn’t seen her in days. The relationship he wanted with a woman was the kind he had with the four ferns he watered in his bungalow—the commitment of sticking his fingers in them once a week and giving them just enough to live on. But that wasn’t what she wanted, what she
had been promised, what she had done to be with him
. His bed was tangled in blankets; it would be so easy to crawl under them and sleep until noon. Some days, Adam seemed almost to stop existing for whole minutes, his brain gone blank like a computer in sleep mode. He used to love that gift of nothing, of not being someone for a stretch of time, but now he had to fight to stay centered. The business owned him, and she thought she did too.

He hadn’t been an extraordinary child. He knew that. Mediocre grades, the normal interests in football and guns, talents designed for hobbies instead of ways out. He was prized in Orient as a teenager because he hadn’t been extraordinary. The extraordinary never stayed out here, they moved to the city as soon as they could, and so the year-rounders crowded around him and loved him with their hands and words, because they knew he would live here forever. They were patriotic about his disappointments. All he had done in the last few months was find a way to be extraordinary. Pruitt Securities was suddenly a booming business. Badge-shaped signs bearing his name were cropping up on every lawn. As the head of the Orient Volunteer Fire Department, he had bravely rushed to put out the biggest fire ever to scorch the village. But there were still steps to be taken, one this week when no one was looking. His cell phone rang again. Unidentified number. He let it go to voice mail and finished his cigarette.

He needed to hire a secretary, someone to field the calls. But that meant more money that he didn’t have to spend, another employee
who wanted five dollars more than minimum wage and health care and wasn’t there a union that stipulated holidays and a 401K? Dennis had asked for a 401K—Dennis, a man who could barely find his shower in the morning, but who knew what he stood for, and would stand for it until he was replaced by the cheaper labor of the illegal Mexicans in Greenport. Adam couldn’t hire a Mexican for a secretary. Security required an American accent.

Instead, he was spending the money he’d saved up for the ’67 Maserati he already imagined rehabbing and driving around Orient to show off just how extraordinary he had become. But he froze in his cluttered bedroom, unable to move his hands to knot his tie. At his feet was a box of lime green flyers and another box of Pruitt Securities signs. He’d need to borrow more money. Maybe he could borrow money from her. There was so much money in Orient lately, green fields of it, guarded with security systems he’d installed but wasn’t allowed to touch.

Yesterday he had gone to the old farmhouse inn to do a job estimate for an artist couple, a gorgeous black woman and her pale, whiny husband. They were bickering about furniture—eight thousand dollars for an anemic, understuffed couch, a couch the husband no longer deemed worthy to sit on. The husband sat in a leather chair with his shirt unbuttoned, holding a glass of whiskey, yelling about the couch and the bulldozed holes in the yard. The husband was the very sort of man Adam’s father had despised, the kind who made money just by sitting around and letting his investments do his work, the kind who had married a gorgeous black woman to prove a point.

“I can’t secure the house until you’ve finished construction,” Adam tried explaining to her. “There’s no way to rig a system when you’ve got plastic-covered holes for walls. I can’t even install lasers in your yard because of all of the dirt mounds.”

“We’re excavating,” the black woman replied. She stretched her arms over her head, cracked the bones in her back, and shut her eyes. “We may never finish construction,” she said with a restless
smile. “We may just keep adding and changing. We’re like that.” He hated her but very much wanted to take her to bed, to show her that he could do things to her that her husband couldn’t.

“You’ve got a great face,” she had told him. “I’d like to paint you if you’re ever up for it. I’ve been doing a series on people out here.” The husband winced and drank his whiskey. The husband tried to apologize with his eyes, but for what, a compliment? Because she was right, Adam did have a great face—muscular where the husband’s was bland and formless, like a coin in a washing machine. He laughed at the compliment and examined her small breasts, as if trying to figure out how an intruder might get at them. Behind their house, beyond the half-dug holes, he saw a speedboat tied to their private dock. They had the money to be lazy, and Adam had a laziness that money would have loved. What could this couple have accomplished in their short lives to make them so rich?

He glanced around his cramped bungalow, its chipped wood and hairy corners. He had two Pruitt Securities signs in his front lawn—no security system yet, he’d been too busy, but the signs were what really mattered. He had that speech on repeat: “Intruders see this sign, they move on to the next house. This piece of metal is your best deterrent.” If he wasn’t in the security business, he realized, he might actually enjoy watching those rich weekenders, who were buying up Orient like it was one gigantic yard sale, get robbed of their obscenely expensive furniture, their ridiculous collections of art.

His father had collected only one thing in his life, and that was rifles. Even when he was dying of lung cancer, leashed by a long thin tube to an oxygen tank, he carried two rifles around his property just waiting for a chance to use them. On those last days, as Adam held his father’s hand at his hospital bed, squeezing it to distract him from the morbid ICU soundtrack of game-show applause and ventilating machines, his father had told him, “You keep my property and you keep those rifles. Don’t let anyone get to them.” Adam sold the property and every rifle but one. He needed the money a little more than he needed his dead father’s wishes met. But now he
understood what his father had been trying to protect him from: when you let strangers in, Orient won’t be yours anymore, and where will you go with your slim talent and low ambition when the more extraordinary make your home into theirs?

His cell phone rang. “Pruitt Securities, how can we protect you? . . . Yeah, I know. I know, don’t worry, I’m on it. I’ll be there. But we need to talk about money.” As he hung up, he fought through another wave of laziness and pulled his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. He opened the front door and walked around the bungalow. It was a cold, sunless day that brought out the blackness of the branches, a perfect day for a funeral, for sunglasses to hide dry eyes.

Before he left, there was one more thing he had to do. He walked toward the shed in his backyard, catching the smell of the carcasses from the hunt even before he opened the padlocked door. His cell phone vibrated. It was her. The plant wanted water.

The water might be toxic, you never knew, thanks to Bryan Muldoon’s success in blocking the county water main. Adam knew that, sooner or later, he would convince the wealthy, worried Orient homeowners to pay to have their wells and pools tested—the money that could make him extraordinary. He knew the one vulnerable spot in the fences of the rich: it was fear. Fear was viral, airborne, contagious. It opened doors for him. It allowed him to touch things that weren’t his.