Page 11 of The Furies

As I pulled into the drive, my headlights caught a form standing on the lowest branch of the bare tamarack tree at the eastern edge of my yard, which overlooked a small pond: a black-crowned night heron, its pale underside like a mirror reflecting the moonlight; a nocturnal hunter, emerging to feed when its competitors were asleep. I hadn’t glimpsed it before, and had mixed feelings about its presence. The other marsh birds would soon start to breed, and their eggs and their young would be vulnerable to the heron, especially the terns over by Pine Point. But I wasn’t about to trouble the bird. I might even have felt a certain commonality with it.

* * *

EVENTS DID TAKE THEIR course, as events are wont to do. Raum Buker was about to re-enter my life with a vengeance, but that wasn’t even the bad news. He might have been a troubled, troublesome man, but the one who followed after him was infinitely worse.

CHAPTER XII

Two days after my meal with Angel and Louis, I met Will Quinn at Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth. The Lobster Shack eatery above the rocks was closed up for winter, and the cold wind coming in from the sea meant that few people were around to notice us. Those locals who had chosen to walk by the lighthouse kept their heads down, which was even better. To help ward off the chill I’d brought along late-morning take-out coffee for both of us from the C Salt Gourmet Market, and a couple of pastries for soakage.

I didn’t maintain an office, just as I didn’t employ a secretary who secretly carried a torch for me, and with whom I could exchange lightly sexualized banter. I kept all my current records and case notes at home, and the older paperwork in storage. My cell phone functioned as an answering service, and I never took on more work than I could comfortably manage alone. I owned my home, had money in the bank, and a retainer from the Federal Bureau of Investigation—your tax dollars at work—offered me a degree of leeway that others in my profession might have envied, if they had known anything of it. The retainer, for what was nebulously described as “consultancy services,” came with strings attached—every retainer did, just like every favor—but they were pretty elastic. Admittedly, I’d been forced to cut one or two of them in the past, but only as a last resort. SAC Edgar Ross, who was responsible for administering those funds from an office at Federal Plaza in New York, had been known to shout at me when I did this, but I liked to think it was because he cared too much. I liked to think this, but I knew it to be untrue. We take our consolations where we find them, and if we can’t find any, we make some up.

When I had to engage privately with clients, I did so at their home or office. If that wasn’t possible, I preferred to opt for quiet, neutral ground. Early morning at the Bear often worked, before it opened for business at 11:30, but I’d sat down for consultations in coffee shops, the back rooms of bookstores, even in one of the empty theaters at the Nickelodeon. Because of some of the cases in which I’d been involved, my face was better known than I’d have preferred. If you were seen talking to me, you or someone you knew was in difficulty. If you didn’t care to advertise that fact, I fully understood.

But often I found it helped initially to meet clients in the open air, and talk while we walked. It was less formal and oppressive, and freed people to share whatever they needed to share. They didn’t even have to look at me if they didn’t want to. They could just unburden themselves, and I’d listen. In that sense, it wasn’t all that different from the quiet of the confessional, apart from the promise of expiation—and the fees, although I’d waived enough of those to give my accountant nightmares.

Two Lights had been Will’s suggestion. He was already waiting for me when I arrived, standing by the Lobster Shack, watching the waves crash on the rocks, like a figure from some nineteenth-century Romantic painting, assuming any of those artists had favored models wearing plaid work shirts. I knew Will from around town, and we’d exchange a nod or pleasantry when we met. He was a small, bearded man in his early fifties, unmarried, no kids. I’d always found him shy, even slightly naive, as though the casual cruelties of the world remained somehow baffling to him. He ran a lumber company in York: rough-sawn hemlock and kiln-dried pine, with a sideline in custom sawing, although you got fined if the blade hit iron. His clothing always bore a fine coating of sawdust, and he carried traces of it on his skin and hair. I think he liked it that way, and there were worse smells than timber with which a man might be associated.

I handed him his coffee and pastry, along with a stirrer and a couple of sugars in case he needed them. He added both sugars while we walked, and we chatted about the weather and the lumber business while feeding most of the pastries to the gulls. He asked after Rachel and Sam. I told him they were fine, and that Vermont was being largely gentle with them.

“Vermont’s nice,” said Will. “My mother lives with her second husband in the eastern part of North Dakota. First time I visited, I thought I’d never seen a place so flat. I asked a gas station attendant if there was anything worth seeing, so he pointed to a hill just about a mile from where we were, and told me I could always go stand on that. So I said to him, ‘What will I see?’ and he said, ‘The same as you can see here, except without the hill.’ I think there might have been a metaphor involved, but I couldn’t be sure.”

“So did you climb the hill?”

“Sure, because it was something to do. And it wasn’t so much a hill as a mound. I’d have gotten a better view standing on a chair.”

And with that, Will got around to his reason for asking to meet me.

“You know Raum Buker?” he said, and it gave me no satisfaction to realize that my belief in the intermingling of our destinies had been vindicated.

“Yes, I know Raum.”

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“I haven’t yet hit rock bottom, so no.”

“That’s what I assumed. I just wanted to be sure before this went any further.” He sipped some more of his coffee. “I usually take it sweeter,” he said.

“I could go back and get you more sugar, but I’d have to charge you for my time.”

“I’ll survive.”

“I thought you’d take that attitude. What’s your problem with Raum?”

“I’ve been seeing someone,” said Will. “A woman,” he added, just in case this needed clarification. “I like her a lot.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s good,” although I guessed it wasn’t unreservedly, or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“It was, until Buker showed up,” said Will, “because the woman is Dolors Strange.”

I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that Will Quinn and Dolors Strange might be an item. Perhaps it was because Will appeared an unlikely candidate to be sharing his affections with the same woman as Raum—and more pertinently, to have found those attentions welcomed. It was like learning that someone enjoyed simultaneously listening to death metal and Perry Como.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“Me and Dolors? About four months. It started when she came by to pick up bark mulch for her yard.”

Which, I supposed, passed for meeting cute in the lumber trade.

“Had you known her before then?”

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