Page 83 of The Furies

I knew then that Sarah was right: even if she handed over the money, she’d never see her daughter’s possessions again. Here was someone who enjoyed humiliating women. The thought of Sarah Abelli mourning the loss of all physical traces of her dead child would help keep him warm until summer came.

To her credit, she kept her temper.

“Are you done insulting me?” she said. “Do you want to get around to why you’re calling again?”

“Just checking where you are. Figure you must be out getting our money.”

So they’d been by the house and noted that her car wasn’t there. That was good. We had a potential idea of the color and make of their vehicle, which meant that one of Sarah’s neighbors could have noticed it. If nothing else, we might be able to confirm how many people we were dealing with.

“I have it for you,” she said, “or I will, in a few hours.”

“Good. We wouldn’t want any misunderstandings, not for your daughter’s sake. You know, sometimes it’s almost like she’s here with us. You ever get that sense, Mrs. Sawyer?”

I counted the silence that followed: it lasted a full five seconds.

“My daughter is always with me,” she said, but her voice was too even.

“Not lately, I’ll bet. We look forward to doing business with you. We’ll be in touch again about the arrangements. Goodbye, Mrs. Sawyer. If I see your little girl, I’ll give her a pat on the tush from you.”

He hung up. Barely a minute later, Sarah Abelli returned to the Great Lost Bear. That was smart of her, I thought. Her immediate reaction might have been to call me, but she hadn’t.

“Did you hear all that?” she said.

“Every word, and I have a recording of the call in case this ever gets to a court of law.”

“We never discussed what I was supposed to say—you know, whether I should draw them out, or try to get information from them.”

“Because I didn’t want you to do either of those things. If you did, you’d have given us both away.”

“That doesn’t sound like you think very much of me.”

“Not true,” I said. “I wanted you to act naturally, or as naturally as possible, under that kind of pressure, because then the caller would do the same. He did, and we now know a little more about him. He’s from the South, but probably first-generation American; he’s mature; and he’s a misogynist. He was also out at your place not so long ago. I’ll need the names and phone numbers of your neighbors on the road, on the off chance that one of them might have noticed the car and its occupants.”

“I can make those calls. You have enough to be getting along with.”

“Okay. Finally, you were also clever enough not to use your phone when you were done, but instead to come back in here and speak to me in person. I don’t have any doubts about your intelligence, Ms. Abelli.”

Suddenly, her phone rang once, as did mine: FlexiSPY again, the call coming from a concealed number. It didn’t ring a second time.

“It’s what I would have done,” she said. “If the number was engaged when I called back, I’d figure that the contents of the conversation were being relayed to a third party, and I was being set up.”

“Did that come from being married to a mobster?”

“No,” she said, “it came from being married to a man who was compulsively unfaithful.”

I played back the conversation in my mind, circling those five seconds of silence.

“When he asked you about your daughter, and whether you felt her near—” I began.

“Don’t you feel your daughter near,” she said, “the one who died?”

I didn’t reply. This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with a stranger, or with anyone. Sarah’s face was a mask as she watched me, but I saw that pain had clustered in her eyes, her grief as sharp as shards of glass. I could not have said how, beyond the experience offered by my own loss, but I believed I was looking at a woman who spoke to her dead child in the night, and heard something in the darkness answer back.

“Go home, Ms. Abelli,” I said. “I’ll do my best for you and your daughter.”

She nodded once, and I wondered if she understood me at least as well as I did her. I considered warning her against antagonizing the men with whom we were dealing, but decided she’d already learned that lesson, and it would make no difference anyway. At least one of them already hated her, if not for who she was, then for her sex. I didn’t tell her that I was now convinced they would cheat her. That suspicion had already begun hardening inside her before she ever came to see me.

If the opportunity presented itself, I thought, it might be pleasurable to hurt them.

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