Authors: Christopher Bollen
She turned onto Browns Hill and headed toward the Kiefer house.
“Magdalena will be able to tell us who the woman is,” she said, setting the photo on the dash.
As they drove down Beth’s street, flashing red lights swept through the trees and across the windows of the houses. She slowed down. Two patrol cars were parked in front of Magdalena’s house. In the driveway, an ambulance sat with its back doors open, serving as a makeshift bench for a few EMT workers. Hope was an ambulance in transit—not a parked ambulance serving as a communal bench. As they drove closer, Beth saw Magdalena’s garage door raised and fragments of gold littered across the blacktop.
“What’s going on?” Mills leaned forward against the strap of his seat belt.
Beth drove past the patrol cars and parked in her driveway. Unhooking her belt, she wrestled out of the car. Mills was already scurrying around the hood with the book in his hand, and together they proceeded through the melee of concerned neighbors and EMT personnel. Beth waited for someone to stop her—a police officer gathering her in his chest for consolation or crowd control—but no one did. Her feet crunched the golden specks on the driveway. She entered the garage and was blinded with flashes by a man squatting with a camera over his face. Beyond a barricade of buckets, two coarse, rash-purple legs lay on the ground, outstretched, as if running sideways. A light-blue housedress was lifted to her thighs. The rest of the body was hidden behind three white bee boxes.
“Ma’am,” the photographer yelled. A police officer tried to grab her arm, but she pushed his hand away. She stepped forward to glance over the boxes and saw Magdalena’s face, red and bloated, her cheek resting near a drain, her ruined blue eyes staring at nothing, her hands knotted at her breasts. Her whole body was nothing, a hunk of fat and tissue dressed in clothes. The drain had more air moving in and out of it than her open mouth.
Now it was the police officer’s turn to call her ma’am. “Ma’am, please step back. Are you a relative?” He touched her arm firmly, and when she turned around, she recognized him: Mike Gilburn. She hadn’t seen him since high school. She’d gone on a few dates with Mike junior year—mostly out of guilt, since Mike Gilburn was ruthlessly nice, even when she threw him over. She heard he’d become a detective with the Southold Township Police Department, had married and divorced. In the last fifteen years, he had grown old and bearded, with wrinkles like withered rose petals around his eyes.
“Beth?” Mike said in disbelief. “My god, it’s you.”
Her hands were shaking. They shook at her chest as he led her out of the garage. Her voice shook as well. “Mike, I’m her neighbor.”
But there were other worried neighbors there too, lingering at a respectful distance on the curb. “And her friend.”
“I’m sorry about that. It’s probably best you return to your house and let us finish up in here.” He tapped the Southold Township badge pinned to his shirt pocket. “I didn’t know you were back on the North Fork.”
“What happened?” she demanded. She looked up at him, and he glanced down at his notebook, as if he’d already written down the answer to her question. The page was blank.
“She’s dead,” he said. “Her nurse found her about an hour ago. She must have been tending to her bees and suffered some kind of attack.”
“Attack?” She was having trouble processing simple words.
“Heart seems likely. There are bee stings down her arms. Looks like she got stung pretty badly and suffered some sort of cardiac event. We don’t know exactly, but she had heart problems. She was old. Are you staying at your mother’s place? I haven’t seen you since—”
Beth stared at him in confusion. Mike noticed her distorted face, and his smile became a seagull slowly shrinking into the distance. She started to ramble, trying to explain that it might not be an accident, that Magdalena believed in murderers, as if believing in murderers could somehow make you more likely to become a murder victim.
“Murder?” Mike repeated. His neck shot back and his voice tightened. “There’s no indication that this is a murder scene. Wait a minute, Beth. Why would you suspect foul play?”
“Because, Mike, Magdalena told me just the other day that she thought someone had murdered her friend.”
“What friend?” Mike was holding her by her elbows.
“Jeff Trader.”
The young officer who Beth had seen on the beach stepped forward.
“The old man who drowned himself out in Gardiners,” he informed the detective.
“I know who Jeff Trader is,” Mike said gruffly. He looked at Beth. “You mean, Jeff’s suicide.”
“No, Mike,” she screamed. She kept repeating Mike’s name to remind him that she wasn’t crazy, that they’d been friends once, that he owed it to her to hear her out. But all the
Mike
ing wasn’t helping. “Not a suicide. He was murdered too. Someone knotted the rope around his legs.”
“Beth.” He moaned. “What are you talking about? Are you all right?”
“It was murder. Jeff was murdered and now maybe Magdalena was. Please just listen.”
Mike winced—as if he was recalling those five dates they’d had almost two decades ago, as if he’d been the one to break it off because of some disturbing character trait that was now revealing itself at full force. He let go of her elbows and reached into his pocket. Beth looked around. The neighbors were staring at her now, people she’d known since she was a toddler, who had bought Girl Scout cookies from her, who’d complained to her parents about her reckless driving and sent her congratulatory cards with five or ten dollars on her graduation day. Neighbors she’d hardly spoken to since she’d returned to Orient. They watched her now with stunned expressions. Choking back her tears, she chose the off-ramp to self-preservation and said no more.
Mike handed her his business card.
“You’re upset and you need to go home and calm down,” he leaned in and whispered. “You’re creating a scene. When you calm down and your thinking is clearer, you can call me. But your friend was eighty, and there are no signs of a break-in. No signs of suspicious death. Beth, think carefully before you start making accusations. You know what people out here are like. You know how that kind of talk can work everyone into a panic.” Mike clapped her shoulder. “Kurt,” he told the young officer, “can you escort—”
“I can make it home on my own.”
Beth ignored the stares of neighbors as she headed down the
driveway. The golden specks sprinkled on the asphalt, she saw now, were the carcasses of honeybees, killed by the cold as they fled the garage. As she passed the ambulance, she heard a voice call her name.
“Lizbeth.” Magdalena’s nurse, Alvara, was sitting on the truck’s bumper, a police blanket draped over her shoulders. Beth hugged her, and the nurse cupped her hands. “She dead when I come. She just lie there. Stung. Poor Messus Kiefer.” Alvara crossed herself.
“What was she doing in the garage alone?” Beth asked quietly.
Alvara shrugged. “She never go to the hives without wearing protection. She was too smart for that.” Alvara’s eyes fidgeted nervously, and her fingers gripped Beth’s hands. “Lizbeth,” the nurse murmured. “It is a crime.”
“I know it is,” Beth said. She was thankful that someone else had reached the same conclusion. “I think you’re right.”
“It is a crime for me to be here. I not legal. I afraid I be deported. And my family, all of us, sent back. They tell me stay for more questions. I must walk off now. Please do not tell them my real name.”
Beth stared at Alvara in devastation. But out of duty she brought her arm around the nurse’s shoulder.
“Let’s walk off together,” she said. “It will look okay if you’re with me.” Beth collected Alvara against her chest. The young police officer trailed behind them.
“Ma’am, she needs to stay in case we have more questions.”
“This woman is cold,” she snapped. “I’m taking her where it’s warm, if you don’t mind.” Without a superior to guide him, the officer stepped back, looking in vain to Mike Gilburn for instruction. Beth led Alvara onto the Shepherd lawn. She glanced back to make sure Mike and Kurt weren’t running to detain them and saw Mills standing across the street. He waved the journal in his hand. “Ma’am, ma’am,” Kurt called. Adding Mills to the situation would only complicate matters. Beth gestured toward Paul’s house, signaling for him to go.
“Ma’am.” They kept walking, shoulders huddled in the wind. Gavril stood on the front porch with his arms folded, watching their progress through the bed of ivy. The police lights stained Gavril’s face. He held the front door open for the two women and, ten minutes later, held the back door open for Alvara as she escaped into the safety of Long Island.
P
aul said it was disrespectful, in light of Magdalena’s passing, to order pizza. “I don’t want to spend the night a friend died waiting for Domino’s to pull into my driveway.” He leveled his eyes at Mills, then let out a subdued laugh. It was the first time Paul had laughed since Mills had brought him the news.
What was appropriate to eat on the night one of Orient’s local stalwarts took her last breath? The homemade honey Magdalena had given the Benchleys each Christmas—ten years of unopened amber jars, taking up an entire shelf in the kitchen? Frozen pizzas, or peanut-butter sandwiches, or the locally caught oysters Paul had forgotten to buy at the farm stand for lunch? What do the living eat on a day of death?
Paul’s refrigerator contained scant provisions: a sliced loaf of whole wheat bread, a carton of eggs, a frosted jar of peanut butter, ten potatoes sprouting floral outgrowths. The Domino’s Pizza in Greenport, its building shaped like a pizza box exploding with astral light, as if heaven itself were among the twenty-three menu toppings, was the only restaurant willing to deliver beyond the causeway. Mills wanted pizza—Magdalena would have wanted them to eat, wouldn’t she, not starve?—but as a newcomer he had no standing to argue, and besides Paul had spent the majority of the afternoon in the cellar, preferring to be alone.
Mills had walked
the two miles home from Beth’s house. He watched the news of Magdalena’s death travel through the village, almost as if his own presence carried the message. Front doors opened and residents stumbled down their walks with their hands on their hips, staring toward the house they couldn’t see, staring at him because they could. As he approached Paul’s steps, he caught a shadow moving behind the glass in the front door.
“Paul?” he called, climbing to the porch. The door flew wide and a thin black woman stepped onto the welcome mat, the smoke from a cigarette circling the diamonds on her fingers. Her short hair was slippery and knotted close to the scalp. Her eyes were long and heavy-lidded; though she wore an ordinary black polo, its collar flipped up around her jaw, he smelled the expensive, churchlike scent of her perfume. She stood so confidently on the welcome mat, this strange young black woman in the middle of whitewashed Long Island, that for a moment Mills wondered if he’d wandered back to the wrong address. Mills hadn’t seen a single black person during his stay in Orient. He thought of the slaves buried in the Tuthill cemetery; maybe they too had descendants in the area.
“Yo,” she said, waving her cigarette.
“Can I help you?” He hid Jeff Trader’s book in his back pocket.
“Doubtful,” she replied. “I’m looking for Paul Benchley. He seems to be out.” She didn’t mention the fact that she had already invited herself in.
“He’s painting,” Mills said. “This is
his
house.”
She nodded to express,
Yeah, dumbass, I already know that
. “Which is why I’m here.” She tapped ash on the porch. “I’m a painter too. Well, not Benchley’s kind.” She grunted like she found the comparison amusing. “He does seascapes, right? Anyway, I have a house out here now and I’m doing a series of portraits of some of the locals. I heard Paul’s family has been out here forever, so I thought he might be willing to sit for me.” She took a drag and
waited, as if she expected him to hurry up with her lunch order. “I’m Luz,” she said with a smile.
Luz
like
fuzz, buzz
. She took so long to bestow a smile that when it arrived it felt like a reward.
“Mills,” he said.
“Yeah, I heard about you. Heard you were staying here.” She glanced at him as if assessing a bad reputation. Mills felt not for the first time that his body communicated a message that was lost on him but clear to others. “You know the doorbells in these prehistoric homes—they barely burp. The door was unlocked, so I went inside to see if he was around. You can do that out here, make yourself welcome, unlike in Manhattan.” She shrugged and guttered smoke through her teeth. “Screw it.” She jumped down the steps and headed for the street with graceless, stomping feet. He quickly descended after her, shepherding her off the property like a small mutt herding an uncaring game bird. She flicked her cigarette, a speeding bullet, into the curb.
“Do you want me to tell him you stopped by?”
She eyed him over the roof of her black sports coupe. “No. Better not to. I’ll come by another time.” He watched her drive toward Main Road, in the direction of the death that brought the neighbors to stand on their porches, oblivious, car windows rattling with the bass of her speakers.
Mills rounded the house and found Paul carting his wet landscape across the lawn. “I lost track of time,” Paul yelled. “I need to get our groceries before the market closes. Otherwise, it’s pizza night.”
When Mills told him the news of Magdalena Kiefer, Paul dropped the canvas, leaving a smudge of the sea on the grass. It was clear that Paul didn’t want to cry in front of him. He made an excuse about stowing his paint supplies in the cellar, and Mills watched him open the bulkhead doors and climb down the back steps.
Mills went up to his bedroom, sitting against the sill and flipping through the pages of Jeff Trader’s journal. There had to be something of interest in those pages. Each address had its list of tedious
tasks—as if it were a warning to Mills not to get too comfortable in the role of Paul’s housecleaner. Eventually he would have to find a skill, something he was good at, something dependable—and hopefully not just a minimum-wage job where time was a tract of land parceled off until there was no acreage left. What did Mills want from his future—anything more specific than a city? For so long New York had been his only direction.
He glanced across the lawn at the Muldoons’ house, as he had many times in the last week, hoping to catch sight of Tommy (coming home from school, taking out the garbage, flicking cigarette butts into his backyard at night). Mills had told Tommy that what he wanted out of his future was to be happy, as if happiness were a shell game no one had much chance of winning. Tommy wanted to blow the world up and be the last man standing—was that a skill that could be applied to anything but pain? Mills envisioned Tommy at his future job, a Wall Street one-percenter or cult leader or research scientist who tested brand-name products on laboratory animals. Heroic practitioners of other people’s pain. Mills also envisioned Tommy naked in the shower. He couldn’t help it. Scrubbing, dripping, water swirling, a drain with the perfect view.
Finding the Muldoons’ windows lacking in glimpses of nudity—even the constantly naked father—Mills returned his attention to the book. Since he couldn’t identify the addresses, he had no idea what certain notes referred to. But at some point in each entry, the boring inventory of jobs shifted in tone—“unpaid,” “overdue,” “last statement,” “calls to PF Real,” “cheating with Holly,” “B. & Y. at Seaview.” Cheating, at least, seemed promising, a hint of discord beneath the mundane happiness of all the well-maintained homes. Mills remembered what Beth had said to the detective in Magdalena’s driveway—“murder,” a word she hadn’t used once during their drive. Was this book worth murder? Had the old woman been killed before she could read it? Had Jeff Trader been another victim?
As a child, Mills had imagined that his biological parents had been murdered, Manson-like, or gunned down in a
botched carjacking, or pushed to their deaths from the cliffs of Big Sur. Murdered parents seemed preferable to living ones who never showed up to reclaim him. He never wanted to imagine his real parents happy. It was better for him to be happy by imagining them dead. At least until he discovered that one of them was very much alive, not seventy miles from Modesto.
At the bottom of every page, Jeff Trader had scrawled one of three simple words—
yes, maybe
, or
no. Yes, yes, no, maybe, yes, no, no, yes, yes
. The last page was devoted to a list of numbers, $200, $150, $500, and the last, $2,000, circled four times in black pen. The price of maintaining happiness, Mills supposed. As the sun set, he placed the book in his duffel bag for safekeeping and finally gave in to his appetite.
“Peanut butter sandwiches will have to do,” Paul said, sighing. Mills found him standing at the open refrigerator for what might have been minutes or hours. Paul quickly reactivated, shutting the door and removing two plates from the cabinet. “I’ll go into town tomorrow. I promise to be a better cook. I feel bad feeding you such awful meals after you’ve been working hard.”
Mills
had
been working hard. In the past week, he had managed to clear out an entire room of Benchley junk. At first Paul was devoutly unsentimental—out go the canoe paddles, the phone books, the 1980s Toshiba microwave, the buckets and canisters and tattered guides to deep-sea fishing. But as the room emptied out, Paul stepped away from his laptop at the dining room table and gazed somberly at his mother’s box of toiletries and his childhood croquet set. “Maybe we don’t throw it all out,” he said meekly. “No, never mind. I keep thinking I might still have children one day, but what kind of child would want this stuff? Children aren’t old women. Pitch it. Don’t let me interrupt.” In the end, the only things Paul insisted on keeping were photo albums and Orient-related bric-a-brac. When Mills discovered a rolled-up map of Orient, much like the smaller map in his bedroom, Paul pronounced it a rare specimen. “Maybe I’ll donate it to the historical museum, which I still haven’t taken you to yet. Fair
warning: we were royalists in the American Revolution. That doesn’t get a lot of play during the winter fund-raisers, but it’s a fact.”
As they sat in the flickering light of the dining room, Mills pressed his wrists against the cold African marble and considered mentioning the prospect of a murderer to Paul. Paul chewed on his triangle of sandwich, washing it down with chilled red wine from an East Marion vineyard. Pieces of damp, tugged hair jutted around his forehead like rough waves. The fireplace crackled lit balls of newspaper. Paul smiled at Mills, his teeth yellowed by the flames.
“I’m glad Beth drove you around today,” he said gently. “You just needed a change of scenery. Soon all that business in New York will be like a bad dream.”
“Beth took me to a bunch of cemeteries,” Mills told him. “Which one are your parents buried in?”
Paul looked at him over the rims of his glasses.
“Oysterponds. Did she take you there?” Mills shook his head. “That’s where my mom and dad are buried, their ashes anyway. And that’s where Magdalena will go. I suppose I should call about helping with the arrangements. Lena was so kind when my mother was dying, stopping by to check on us. Lena was always going out of her way, not just for me, for everybody. I can’t imagine Orient without her. I wonder if she left her money to the historical society. She was a longtime board member.”
“Is that where you’re leaving your money?” Mills asked. “If you don’t have children, I mean.” Mills was embarrassed to find himself imagining a future in which Paul was childless save for one adopted son he had brought to Orient to help with his house, leaving all his money and property to the closest thing to a relative he had. It was a passing daydream, one of a dozen futures that turned to dust before it set. But Mills enjoyed pacing through the back rooms, picturing what he would do with them if they were his.
Paul breathed heavily through his nose. “I haven’t really decided on that. I hope I don’t have to for some time.” He winked. “And where’d you get the idea I had any money?”
Mills had found a shoe box of bank statements, the accounts an asteroid shower of zeroes. He couldn’t decipher how much was company money and how much personal, but Paul clearly worked in high figures. He’d been successful as an architect, but also, Mills thought, a slave to that success. Even out here on his Orient sabbatical, Paul tinkered on his computer blueprints—“I just have to send this draft by tomorrow’s deadline”—like a kid chained to a video game.
“Nowhere,” Mills lied. He struggled to find an excuse for the question. “You just mentioned a few days ago that you wanted to donate some of your Orient stuff to the museum. It made me think—you’re throwing out junk you don’t expect your own children will want, but you’re certain future generations will want to preserve those old maps. What if they just stop caring? At some point there’s going to be too much history for anyone to keep up with it all.” All that history, Mills thought. All that junk. It seemed so much easier to throw it away.
If their dinner had required silverware, Paul would have set down his knife and fork. Instead he picked up his wineglass and swilled the liquid.
“You never know, I guess. But don’t you think it’s important to preserve some traces of the past?” Paul tongued his cheek. “I agree that history isn’t worth much if it’s just a bunch of artifacts to look at. But there’s a reason people hold on to their ancestors. There has to be something in our survival instinct that compels us to remember what happened and use that information as a guide.” The point was alien to Mills. He had no ancestors. People in Modesto looked at you funny if you tried to tell them about last week. When he was younger and an arcade on H Street with a superior pinball machine suddenly closed, he went to the gas station across the road to ask if it had moved. The cashier lifted her tired, mascaraed eyes and muttered, “Never heard of it.”
“I guess you’re right,” Mills said.
Paul slapped his napkin on the table and left his chair, disappearing down the hallway with heavy, receding steps. Mills hadn’t
thought it would be so easy to upset Paul. In the past week, no subject had seemed off-limits between them, except for love and sex, two topics Mills had learned to avoid like a tightrope walker over the Niagara Falls of messy, personal conversations. He was thankful when Paul returned with the rolled-up, camel-colored map. He spread it across the table and pointed to the tip.
“What I always thought was telling about Orient was the two islands just off the coast.” Paul’s finger traced two competing circles of land just beyond the bird beak. “One is Plum, owned by the government, a laboratory presumably for the common good. The other is Gardiners Island, owned privately—in fact, one of the largest privately owned islands in the United States. It was bought from the Indians in the seventeenth century by an English soldier and granted by the king. Lion Gardiner’s descendants still own it, three hundred years later.” Paul took a sip of wine to let the history lesson settle over his student. “So there you have it, two opposing forces, side by side, hanging just off our coast: public-controlled property and a private estate, the rights of the individual versus the betterment of the community. If that isn’t a split personality in geographic form, I don’t know what is.”