Page 1 of The Furies

CHAPTER I

Like Noah and his ark, the town of Athens, in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, seemed destined forever to be associated with floods. In 1916, a new steel bridge built across the Susquehanna River was destroyed by flooding. The only human casualty was a local farmer, Abraham Hiltz, who had been on his way to warn his neighbor of the rising waters when he was hit by a train that tossed his body one hundred feet from the tracks, as a bull might brush aside a matador. But the waters were to blame for his death, whatever anyone might have said to the contrary, since old Abraham wouldn’t have found himself in such a rush if it hadn’t been for the river becoming a torrent.

Ever since, the locals had kept a wary eye on the Susquehanna, and sometimes their worst fears were realized. In September 2011, most of the town had ended up underwater when Tropical Storm Lee caused the river to burst its banks, and it was accepted that the Susquehanna would flood again in the future. But what was a small town of some 3,200 people to do, situated as it was between the Susquehanna and Chemung rivers? It wasn’t as though the Historic District could be put on the beds of trucks and moved to higher ground; and anyway, folks liked Athens where it was, and just the way it was. Once a person started running from nature, well, he was unlikely ever to stop, because wherever one went, nature would be waiting. One might as well have tried running from oneself.

Like most small communities, the inhabitants of Athens looked out for one another, although the price to be paid for this was a certain loss of privacy. A person could mind his own business if he chose, but that didn’t equate to a shortage of people eager to help him mind it, should the opportunity arise, or being curious about what kind of business it was that he was so keen to hide from view in the first place. Still, some managed to keep their interests concealed, and old Edwin Ellerkamp was among them. He lived in a rangy house to the north of town, a rambling stone place called The Elms, which had been in his family since the mid-1800s. The Ellerkamps made their money on the railroads, before losing most of it in the stock market crash of 1929, and never quite succeeded in finding it again, although Edwin and his older brother, Horace, had managed to restore the Ellerkamp fortunes somewhat through hard work and wise investments. It meant that the Ellerkamps weren’t rich by Manhattan standards, or even by Scranton standards, but they were doing fine for themselves compared to the rest of Athens, or even the rest of the Valley, the name given to four contiguous communities in the states of Pennsylvania and New York, of which Athens was one. Edwin and Horace, the last of their line, were able to continue living in The Elms, pay their bills on time, and employ a local woman named Ida Biener to cook and clean for them. This left Edwin and Horace with more time to read, watch daytime soap operas, and collect old coins. The Ellerkamps paid Ida well, too, which ensured her silence and discretion—or a degree of both acceptable to all parties concerned, by Athens standards.

When Horace passed away, not long after the flood of 2011, Ida kept on working for Edwin until her knees began to give out, by which point she had paved the way for her daughter Marie to take her place. The daughter was a virtual facsimile of the mother, right down to the lock on her mouth, because there were far worse ways—and far harder—to make a living in Athens than by cooking and cleaning for an old man who kept his hands to himself and didn’t leave too much of a mess after going to the bathroom. Sometimes Marie’s own husband didn’t seem to know where he was pointing that thing. Why he couldn’t just sit when he peed, like a sensible human being, she’d never been able to establish. Lord knows, he took every other opportunity to sit when it was offered, so there appeared to be no comprehensible reason why he couldn’t have extended that policy to peeing, too.

Marie had now been working for Edwin Ellerkamp for nigh on a year, and yes, he might have been a bit odd, but who didn’t reach eighty without developing a few eccentricities? There was his coin obsession, for a start, and the collection of books on numismatics, history, and obscure religious beliefs that he and his late brother had accumulated over the years, which rivaled in size the holdings of the local Spalding Memorial Library. His dietary requirements were very specific, too, because Edwin was intent on beating the house odds and becoming the first man to live forever, or near enough to it. Nothing unhealthy passed his lips, and he took so many pills each day that it was a wonder there was any room left in his stomach for real food. To his credit, he remained sprightly, and Marie had to concede that his brain was sharper than hers, but his days struck her as joyless, which might have explained why Edwin Ellerkamp was such a grim old man.

No, he was worse than that, Marie had decided: he was poisonous. Her mother had suggested as much to her before she began working for him, even if Marie now felt that Ida had been understating the case. It wasn’t anything Edwin did, or said; it was more a negative energy he gave off, one that had tainted the whole house. It lurked in the corners, and shadowed her from room to room in the manner of a malign black cat. On occasion, when she inadvertently disturbed Edwin during his examination of a coin or perusal of a book, she caught an inkling of something in his eyes beyond mere annoyance, like the brief flash of a sharp blade before its owner thinks better of using it and sheaths it once again. And although he bathed regularly, dressed in clean clothes every day, and used some old man’s scent each morning, Edwin carried about him a whiff of vinegar.

But a job was a job, and this one paid twice as much as she might have expected to receive elsewhere, and for half the work. Despite these boons, Marie remained glad to leave The Elms at the end of her working day, and sometimes it would take an hour or two for its residual gloom to lift from her. Marie’s mother had worked for the Ellerkamps for twenty-five years, even if exposure to them or The Elms hadn’t affected her as deeply or immediately as it was agitating her daughter. But then, Ida Biener always did have a way of shutting herself off from unpleasantness, or else she couldn’t have remained married to her husband for thirty years, Charles “Chahlee” Biener being a lush, a bigot, and a shitbag of the first order. When he finally passed away, the only reason anyone came to the funeral home, Marie herself included, was to ensure he was actually dead.

Marie was therefore aware of the reality of men more deficient than Edwin Ellerkamp, even as the specifics of why he made her so uneasy continued to elude her, as did the reason for her conviction that he harbored ill will, or even active malevolence, toward the world or some unnamed part of it.

Ever and again, one just knew.

* * *

MARIE’S DUTIES REQUIRED HER to work from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. three days a week, 3 to 6 p.m. two days, and from 9 to 11 a.m. on Saturdays, when she prepared Edwin’s meals for the weekend and ran any last errands he required. Edwin preferred to have his food freshly cooked each day, and had offered Marie extra money also to work Sunday mornings, but apart from being a good Christian, Marie wanted—needed—at least one day a week away from The Elms. Edwin persisted in muttering some about it, and had even hinted that Ida might care to fill in for her on Sundays, but Marie wasn’t about to let him have his way, and her mother’s knees weren’t going to get better if she returned to domestic labor—or not without being replaced, and Ida Biener wasn’t in the market for that kind of surgery, either financially or psychologically.

In addition, Marie noticed that her mother’s mood had improved since she’d left Edwin Ellerkamp’s employ, and Marie had no desire to cause a regression in a woman who was, by nature, prone to melancholy. The alteration in her mother’s demeanor also caused Marie to worry about what degree working at The Elms might be altering her, like a body slowly being contaminated by constant exposure to harmful radiation. She would give Edwin Ellerkamp only a few more years, she assured herself, before seeking gainful employment elsewhere. By then her children would be older and wouldn’t require her to be around so much. And who knew? In a couple of years Edwin, for all his pills, breathing exercises, and nutritional fancies, could well be rotting in the grave. The Elms, and whatever wealth he had accrued in life, including that coin collection, would have to be disposed of, and there was a chance that Ida and Marie might be remembered in his will. They had done more than anyone else to ease the passage of the years, and for all his oddness and underlying distastefulness, Edwin was not entirely without gratitude: Marie had received a generous bonus the previous Christmas, and more often than not Edwin remembered to thank her when she left for the day.

But Marie had to concede that, on this particular cold, damp afternoon in late January, she was in no mood for any of Edwin’s nonsense. Her eczema was flaring up, and she had slept fitfully. At least Edwin had never objected to the extra cost of the skin-friendly laundry detergents and cleaning products she purchased for her duties, and had even advised her to try using turmeric, both in supplement form and as a topical cream, which helped with the discomfort. Nevertheless, she didn’t think she’d be scrubbing with quite her usual vigor that day, and she wasn’t likely to be whistling while she worked, either.

The house was quiet as she let herself in through the front door, Edwin having entrusted her with a key a couple of weeks after she took over from her mother, once he was assured of her probity. Silence was unusual, though; whichever room he occupied, Edwin liked to listen to WRTI, the classical music station out of Philadelphia, and Marie had, through osmosis, become something of an aficionada, to the extent that she could now identify a range of classical pieces from the first couple of bars. Contrarily, she had failed to reach an accommodation with opera, and wished Edwin would let what was left of his hair down once in a while and listen to music that was a bit more contemporary, stuff with a beat that didn’t come from a timpani section, and lyrics sung in a language other than Italian or German.

“Mr. Ellerkamp?” she called. “You awake in there?”

She would have been surprised were he not, Edwin Ellerkamp rarely sleeping beyond 8 a.m., despite, as far as she was aware, never going to bed before one or two in the morning, or so he claimed—and why would he lie? What he did with all this time she could not say, but a significant portion of it, from her observations, must have involved reading about old coins, examining old coins, and finding ways to buy and sell old coins. Many of said coins, which he stored in mahogany cabinets and glass-fronted display cases, couldn’t even be held in the hand, because they were kept in sealed individual containers for protection. Marie understood the reasoning, but considered it a shame that they could only be looked at, not handled. She was a tactile person, and everything she loved—her husband, her children, her dog, the little knickknacks on her own shelves—was imprinted with her touch. She couldn’t see the point in having something and not being able to caress it with her fingers or her lips.

While coins constituted the main part of Edwin’s collection, he also liked ancient crosses, religious icons, and pre-Columbian pottery, some of which Marie found marginally more interesting than coins. But as with most aspects of Edwin’s life, Marie did not speak about the contents of the house with others, and even her husband was not aware of the extent of the old man’s obsession. If word got out about it, Marie wouldn’t have put it past some Valley lowlife to break into The Elms, and even hurt Edwin into the bargain. Marie did not wish to be party to any such theft or suffering.

The most valuable items were kept in a wall safe behind the bookshelves. A section of the shelving was hinged, with a release catch built into one of the supports; apply some foot pressure to the support, and the shelf clicked free. She’d seen Edwin open it once, but she hadn’t stayed to observe further for fear he might grow concerned that she was spying on him. If he were to be robbed, she didn’t want to give Edwin or the police any grounds for suspecting her of complicity.

Marie closed the front door behind her and listened. Edwin Ellerkamp had still not answered. She sniffed the air. Familiarity with The Elms had attuned her not only to its rhythms but also to its scents, and instantly the air smelled wrong to her, like a toilet that hadn’t been flushed fully, its contents allowed to sit for too long. Now she followed the stink with a rising feeling of dread, because she’d encountered a version of it before, back when she had been the one to discover her father’s body on the kitchen floor. Her mother had been away, visiting her sister in Lambertville, New Jersey, and Marie had spent the previous night at her best friend Evelyn’s. Charlie Biener had died in his pajamas, probably after getting up during the night to hunt for milk—or more likely a beer—in the refrigerator. The massive stroke that felled him also caused him to soil himself, and forever after Marie would associate that odor with death. It was one of the reasons she kept her own bathroom so clean, even if her husband complained that he smelled of lavender for the day should he remain in there for too long.

The stink was coming from the living room, its door slightly ajar.

“Edwin?” she said, worry causing her to lapse into informality.

She pushed the door open, and her coat fell from her hand.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”

CHAPTER II

The Great Lost Bear was crowded in the way that only the best bars could sometimes be, as though the gods of drinking and socializing had chosen this of all nights to smile upon it. There was space to move, space to sit, space to speak without being overheard, space to order a drink at the bar, and a mood of good humor prevailed. Even Dave Evans—who habitually tried to be gone before the evening rush descended on this venue that he’d owned for so long—had stayed late, because sometimes the Bear just felt like the place to be.

Beyond the Bear’s walls, Portland was changing. Cities were always in the process of transformation, but I didn’t like the new Portland as greatly as the old. I wasn’t so foolish as to try to deny that it was partly a function of age, a desire to hold on to as much of the best of the past as possible because I knew how much had already been lost. Ultimately, we are all descendants of Lot’s wife, unable to resist the urge to gaze back at what we’d been forced to leave behind, but in this case it wasn’t the advancing years alone that were contributing to my mood. I saw locals reacting unhappily as more hotels rose along the waterfront, and they read about the opening of restaurants in which they couldn’t afford to eat. Cruise ships docked, disgorging blasé passengers who bought T-shirts, nautical souvenirs, and a couple of beers and a lobster roll in some tourist-trap eatery, but who weren’t in the market for forty-dollar steaks. Yet someone was eating in those places; it just wasn’t me or anyone I knew. It felt at times as though the city was being sold out from under us, and when the process was complete we might, if fortunate, be permitted to press our noses against the glass in order to observe how the other half lived.

But then I could also remember when Portland was less prosperous, and people toiled to make a living amid the decrepit wharfs on Commercial Street and the empty lots off Congress. The poor had always struggled, and would continue to struggle, but now they had to hold down two jobs just to stay afloat, and in bad times they drowned. Some of these thoughts I shared with Dave Evans as we sat in the Bear that night, but it was nothing he hadn’t heard before, and from smarter men.

“Strange Maine,” said Dave Evans, who was drinking a porter so bitter that some antecedent of it had probably once been offered to Christ on the cross.

“The store, or the whole state?”

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