Authors: Christopher Bollen
M
ills placed seven candles in the cake around the frosted lighthouse, one candle for each year after forty. He lit the wicks. Seven reedy streams of smoke rose from the cake, and he hurried to the doorway of the dining room, checking to make sure that Paul was still working on his laptop at the table. They hadn’t said a word to each other all morning. He flicked the light switch on the wall, heard Paul mutter “What the?” into the darkness, and returned to the counter, gathering the cake in his hands. He walked slowly through the rooms, allowing the glow to jaundice the woodwork and announce his entrance. He started to sing.
Mills rounded the doorway, his eyes temporarily blinded by the conflation of sugar and fire.
Dear Pa-aul
. . . Paul sprung from his chair, standing behind the table, his face eradicated by the bobbing flames, but Mills imagined a smile there, fingers spread against his chest, a wish forming behind his lips, lungs preparing supplemental storage facilities to blow at their full capacity. He set the cake on the table, one of the candles leaning into the lighthouse and pouring wax on its beacon . . .
to you
. Mills put a fist to his mouth and faked a muffled stadium roar.
Paul looked at him, lips worming, his eyes squinting in the light. It wasn’t exactly a stellar reaction, the usual
oohing
at the sight of his own name in cursive icing, emphasized by an exclamation point (that mark seemed so unlike Beth, making “Happy birthday Paul” read like a hysterical demand:
you will be happy!
). Paul missed all
his cues: the flurried attempt to hug the deliverer, the disbelief that someone actually remembered the date, the admiration in the choice of the lighthouse as a decorative element on the frosting. Perhaps he was distracted by the sound of bulldozers backing up next door, the pulverized hash of metal and wood being consumed by a shovel and disgorged into a Dumpster. The Muldoon house was being demolished. The county team had been at it all morning.
“But—” Paul started. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his shirt.
“Go on,” Mills said. “Make a wish and blow them out.”
“But what is this?”
What part of
Happy birthday Paul!
was confusing him?
“Uh . . . it’s a cake. For your birthday. November 3, 1966. It’s chocolate mud.”
Paul leaned over his computer to check the date. “Is that today?” he said. “I thought we were still in October.” He laughed at his own confusion. Glassware and china clinked from the reverberation of the backhoe scooping up a nest of iron plumbing next door.
“It became November three days ago. I guess you didn’t notice because we had no Halloween.” The holiday had been canceled after the fire, postponed until a year when it was safe to allow children dressed as monsters to travel to once-familiar doors.
“Oh, God, you’re right. But how did you know it was my birthday?” Paul seemed to turn pale over the throbbing candles, as if the frosting spelled out another year of loneliness and occupational frustration to add to all the others in his life.
“I found your birth certificate.”
Paul fit his glasses on his nose. “Ah, the junk in the back ratted me out. I haven’t celebrated my birthday in so long. It’s something I usually avoid and only remember after it’s passed. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble. Is that a lighthouse?” Paul examined the red-and-white pole rising from the chocolate. His name swirled under it.
Mills nodded. “I wanted to. I wish I could have gotten you a gift—a case of brushes for your landscapes or a frame for the picture
of you and your brother. Maybe even one of those brass desk bells for Seaview.” Mills whipped a knife from his back pocket. He held it out, its corrugated blade gathering small spikes of birthday fire.
“Patrick,” Paul said quietly. “How did you manage to get one with a lighthouse?” He looked up at him worryingly. Mills knew he must be wondering where he’d gotten the money for the cake.
“Beth picked it up for me, in exchange for posing for her yesterday. The lighthouse is perfect, right? Aren’t you going to blow?”
“Thank you,” he said, blushing. “That was very kind. I really didn’t expect it.” He held his sweater against his chest as he bent forward. “Christ, how old does this make me?”
“You’re forty-seven.”
“That might be the saddest number on earth.”
Paul took a last gasp of air, his lips contorted, his eyes wide like a deer’s on the road, as if the weight of something awful were speeding toward him. Mills suddenly wondered if he’d done the right thing. As a young person he had assumed birthdays to be universally positive occasions. He hadn’t taken into account that older men might prefer to close the windows and let them blow by, checking for damage only in their aftermath.
“I’m sorry. I thought it would make you happy.”
Paul’s mouth fidgeted. He was not a successful liar. Whatever had been bothering him continued its affliction, and the flames remained on their wicks.
“I am happy,” he stammered. “It’s just . . . I was going to bring something up, but it doesn’t seem like the right time anymore, so—”
“What is it? Just tell me.” A lump grew in Mills’s throat. Paul pulled the blue winter coat off the back of his chair, the one Mills liked to borrow. Paul shoved his hand in its front pocket and withdrew a rolled-up plastic Baggie, which Mills immediately recognized as the pot he’d removed from Tommy’s safe. The pebble in his throat swelled to a tennis ball. In his excitement over finding the journal, he’d forgotten to dispose of Tommy’s stash. Paul watched his response with dark eyes.
“Paul,” he said, begging, “it isn’t mine.” The same words every human being since the creation of recreational drugs has uttered whenever illegal substances were found in their possession. The ring of implausibility wasn’t diminished by the fact that the pot actually wasn’t his, and certainly not by the fact that Mills couldn’t reveal how he’d acquired it—stealing it from a broken safe at a crime scene. He queasily felt the guilt of Tommy’s drug use slide onto him, like a hitchhiker on a road near a state prison.
“I thought I made it clear that no drugs—”
“Please,” Mills said, grabbing Paul’s hand. It was warm and hairy and capable of shutting the front door on him. “I’m telling the truth. That belonged to Tommy. I never smoked it. I’ve been clean.” His eyes stung. Five minutes ago he’d been singing “Happy Birthday”; now he was pleading not to be ejected from the house. “I gave you my word, and I’m telling you now I didn’t break it. Tommy asked me to hold on to it because his mother was snooping around.” It was a small lie in service of the truth. “I shouldn’t have agreed, but I did because I liked him. But I didn’t touch it, and I didn’t even remember it was there. You can search my room. I’ll take a drug test. Anything.”
Paul watched him as he fumbled between the lookalike states of innocence and deception. He breathed out of his nose, forty-seven years old today, never married, no children, no one else to buy him a cake and light it with candles and remind him that someone else was around to keep track of his years.
“I don’t do drugs anymore,” Mills swore, almost crying now, Mills, who was nineteen, who wasn’t afraid of years. He shoved his fist against his heart. “Listen to me. Please. I’m innocent.”
In that moment, Mills might have seen what a young man sees in a father, a decision against all evidence to the contrary to trust the kinder possibility. “Okay,” Paul said. “All right. If what you say happened that way.”
“You believe me, right? I want to hear you say that you do.”
But Paul wasn’t staring at him anymore, he was looking past him.
Mills turned around. The police detective stood on the front porch, his hand against the glass. Paul leaned over the table and blew out the candles. Then he quickly shoved the Baggie into his coat pocket.
Detective Gilburn rang the doorbell.
“I want you to stay in the kitchen,” Paul said. “I’ll handle this.”
“It’s fine,” Mills replied, still trying to pacify him. “Beth talked to him. There are other suspects now.”
Paul pointed toward the kitchen. Mills grabbed the cake and carried it to the counter. The lighthouse was covered in wax. He heard the detective’s voice over the rumble of the house being torn apart.
“Hi, Paul.” Gilburn’s tone was professional, edged with concern. “We need to talk.”
“Of course, Mike, come in.” They moved into the living room. Mills slipped into the hallway, remaining in the shadows, watching Gilburn fill an armchair.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Gilburn said. Paul nodded. “I’ve known you for what, thirty years?”
“Just about. Since you were a little boy.”
“So let’s cut out the niceties and the hurt feelings. I’m on your side here. But there’s a problem.”
Gilburn opened a briefcase and dealt five photographs across the coffee table. Paul drew one toward him with the tip of his finger.
“What’s that, a gas canister?” Paul asked.
“It was found hidden in the hallway closet of Beth Shepherd’s house. She claims someone besides her and her husband put it there.”
Paul picked up the photo and pinched the rim of his glasses to study it.
“You think it was the canister the arsonist used next door?”
“Could be,” Gilburn replied. “Had trace amounts of gasoline inside. And gasoline was the accelerant used on the Muldoons. It would be quite a coincidence if it weren’t, don’t you think?” He waited for Paul to finish examining the photograph. Paul placed it back on the coffee table. “Do you own, or have you ever owned, a red plastic gas canister matching the one in the picture?”
Paul flinched as he slumped against the back cushion. “Sure. I think I own more than one. I own a lawn mower, as I’m sure everyone in Orient does, and if you own a lawn mower you own a gas can. I own a snowblower too.”
“Do you have all of your gas cans in your possession?”
“Now wait a minute, Mike,” Paul said, leaning forward. “I don’t exactly keep an inventory. I could check my cellar. Come to think of it, Mills and I threw out a red gas canister just like this when we were cleaning out the junk in the back.”
Mills noticed the detective’s ears reddening.
“You threw one away recently?”
“We put it out on the curb on garbage day along with a pile of trash. About two weeks ago, maybe three. I can’t remember.”
“Do you remember if the garbage collectors removed it?”
Paul grunted. “Well, I have no reason to believe they didn’t. I do remember that there was a red canister out there in the garbage. What happened after we put it on the curb, I can’t say.”
Gilburn scratched his cheek.
“We found partial fingerprints on the handle and a complete set on the base.”
Paul shifted. His eyes rotated under his lenses. Then, abruptly, he said, “Are you here to take our fingerprints? Before you ask for our prints, especially Mills’s prints, I’m going to have to call my lawyer.”
“Where is that kid, anyway?”
“He’s in the backyard. Why?” Mills retreated a foot into the darkness and waited a minute in case the detective turned around for corroboration.
“You know, Paul, I had a hunch those prints were going to belong to him. I would have bet my house in Southold on it. But we have Millford Chevern’s prints in the database.
He was something of a juvie thief when he was younger. Racked up detention time in Fort Bragg for stealing hubcaps and car radios and pawning them for cash. He was even accused of a domestic break-in, but they couldn’t get the charges to stick. Did you know about his history of petty theft?”
Mills closed his eyes. He resisted ownership of a record that didn’t belong to him. Why couldn’t the real Mills Chevern have been a simple teenage truant? He could disown Mills Chevern’s rap sheet by submitting his fingerprints now and reclaim the sad, clean file of Leonard Thorp. But how would he explain stealing the identity of someone guiltier than himself?
“No, I didn’t know that,” Paul admitted. “How old was he?”
“I’ll give him credit. Seemed to straighten out by the age of fifteen. We don’t have a record of him after that. Not a picture or a crime. Not even a driver’s license. But we still have his prints.”
“And you’re saying they match?” Paul wrung his hands and anchored his chin to his thumbs.
Gilburn straightened his neck. He stopped fondling his beard.
“No, Paul. His prints don’t match. The fingerprints on the canister are yours.”
There was a second of quiet before the information sunk in. In that second the brain submitted to the words, made peace with their syntax, had not yet jumped into the snare trap of their content. To live entirely in that second was to exist sweetly between the tidal wave and the coast. But no one existed in one second.
Paul jolted from his chair, as if raised by a calling. The floorboards rumbled as a heap of house was tossed in the Dumpster.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Paul’s laugh was artificial, his smile spiked by spit, a smile of agony and disbelief. He arranged his legs wider so he could smack the coffee table with his hand. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he screamed. “My fingerprints are on the murder weapon. Is that what you’re telling me? You think I killed the Muldoons?”
“I’m not saying you killed—”
“Well, of course my fingerprints are on that can. If it belonged to me, they’re going to be all over it.”
“We had a set of your prints from your drunk-driving accident last June.”
Mills knew about the accident—the tree that got in his way on Main Road coming off the causeway, the injury that still caused him to limp at night or when it rained, the medication he’d been prescribed to help with the pain. He even knew from Tommy that the police had been called to the scene. But Mills didn’t know that Paul had been drunk. The accident must have happened right after his mother died.
“I hit a tree in a bad swerve after one too many whiskeys. I was only a point above the legal limit. That doesn’t make me a criminal. The judge said as much.”
“I’m just telling you the facts of the situation. Have you ever been inside the Shepherd home?”
“No. Not for years. Mike, what reason would I have to kill the Muldoons? They were my neighbors for thirty years.” His voice was no longer fighting for Mills’s innocence. It was fighting more desperately for his own. “Before I say another word, I want to call my lawyer.”