Page 43 of The Furies

“I wish I still smoked,” she said. “This damned thing just isn’t the same.”

Her eye came to rest on something to my left, and her face fell. I turned to look, and saw a photograph of a younger Eleanor between two older people, a man and a woman. I could see a little of each of them in her, possibly because they were one of those couples who, either through a quirk of fate or years of exposure, resembled each other deeply. Sunlight had faded the picture slightly. In time, if it wasn’t moved, the faces might cease to be identifiable. I was reminded of the photograph in the room at the Braycott: Raum with his mom and dad, the color saturation degenerating, evanescing like memory. Funny how he and Eleanor Towle had found each other. Perhaps the two of them had more in common than I, or they, knew.

“Were they good parents?” I said.

She smiled.

“Yes, they were. My father, had he lived, wouldn’t have let someone like Raum Buker set foot in his yard. But then I’ve never yet picked the right man for my bed, or the right man never picked me. It’s this place—not the house, or not just that, but I’ve stayed too long in this town, this county. People get to know you. They put you in a little box, and you start to become whatever it is they’ve decided you are. Me, I’m Eleanor Towle, spinster. Good for a turn on a Saturday night, if there’s nothing better on offer, and assuming I’d put out, but not someone you’d want to wake up beside for the rest of your life, or not even two mornings in a row.” Her mouth curled with self-disgust. “Listen to me. You ought to be charging by the hour for this.”

“I’m on someone else’s dime, if that helps,” I said. “Even if I wasn’t, I don’t have anywhere else to be right now, and I don’t feel like driving back to Portland until the traffic has eased.”

“You’re kind,” she said. “I haven’t spoken properly to anyone since my mother’s funeral, or not beyond Egon, and Raum that one night, and neither of them showed much interest in my sorrows. You were asking why Raum got the tattoo. He said it was for protection.”

“Did he happen to mention from what?”

“Not what, but whom. And we’re getting ahead of the story. We need to go back to why they were here to begin with.”

“You said they were celebrating,” I said.

“Yes, because whatever thievery they’d cooked up together had come off, I suppose.”

She looked away, but I wasn’t going to let her slip the hook so easily.

“You ‘suppose’?”

“Okay, I know. Is that better?”

“I told you already: I’m not the police.”

“But you look like police. I had a cousin who was a cop. It marks a person, if you can spot the signs. I see them in you.”

“I was police, once.”

“Where?”

“New York.”

“You retire early?”

“Very.”

“Don’t want to talk about it, huh?”

“Not so much.”

“Now you know how I feel.”

“Touché. Let’s get back to the celebration.”

She rubbed the fingers of her right hand across her lips.

“Jesus, I wish I still smoked,” she said again.

I waited.

“It was coins,” she continued at last. “With Egon, what else would it be? Egon had heard about this guy. He was said to be a high-end collector, but real reclusive, and he made acquisitions largely from abroad, through agents or by remote auction, specializing in Greek, Roman, Persian, Chinese, and early British: coins mainly, but also religious artifacts, and the rarer the better. When he set his sights on a prize, he didn’t like to be beaten to it. If he was, or if someone refused to respond positively to one of his approaches, he’d find another way to get what he wanted.”

“By theft? Or violence?”

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