Page 25 of The Furies

In a motel room by South Portland’s Maine Mall, Kepler sat before a screenshot of Raum Buker lying on a bed in lodgings that were even more nondescript, and definitely more down-at-the-heel, than Kepler’s own. Buker, Kepler noted, had done little to impose his presence on the room: whatever possessions he might have brought with him were neatly stored away, and when he ate at the single small table, he opened a window to let out any odors and placed his trash in a sealed plastic bag to be disposed of at the first opportunity.

In some ways, though, the spruceness of Buker’s lodgings mirrored Kepler’s, although the latter’s showed even fewer signs of human habitation, and some might well have disputed the use of the term “human” in connection with his occupancy. The bed was made, the bathroom had barely been used, the closets were empty, and an ancient leather bag, of the kind once favored by nineteenth-century medical practitioners with a drinking problem, contained all his traveling needs. He took the bag with him when he availed of housekeeping, which he did each day, setting it by his feet as he ate poached eggs and fried apples at the Cracker Barrel while waiting for his room to be cleaned, because hygiene was important to him.

Every morning he would toss the sheets and muss the pillows on the bed, even if it had not been slept in. He would dampen the towels and throw them in the tub, just to give the impression of use. If he rested at all, he did so during the day, and then only for an hour or two. Like certain mammals, Kepler was primarily nocturnal. He was now also in constant pain, and struggled particularly with maintaining a horizontal position for any extended period of time. He self-medicated with over-the-counter remedies—and where necessary, under-the-counter narcotics, too.

Floriana, the maid responsible for servicing his room, had noticed a distinctive but not unpleasant odor about it, which she tended to associate with her great-grandfather, her bisabuelito Adelardo, who had spent the entire span of his years in a grand mansion located in the Paseo Montejo neighborhood of Mérida, Yucatán. As he grew older and poorer, Adelardo had been forced to rent out more and more rooms in the mansion, until finally he was reduced to living in the attic, a tenant in what had once been his own home. But every morning Adelardo would shine his shoes, put on a shirt and tie, and promenade for hours around the Plaza de la Independencia before imbibing a single glass of tepeztate at El Cardenal. He might have been reduced to the status of a near pauper, but that was no reason to let standards slip.

On Sundays, Adelardo would apply his special scent, the one he poured only sparingly from an unmarked bottle, before hearing Mass at the cathedral. The cologne, the source of which remained a mystery to Adelardo’s family, had a base of civet and rosewater, and it was a version of this same smell that Floriana detected in room 313. It caused her to feel an instinctive deference toward its occupant, Mr. Kepler, a regard only enhanced by the five dollars he left for her each morning, despite the fact that his room took barely any time to freshen, and frequently appeared to be as unblemished as she had left it the day before, if not more so. (Floriana had worked as a housekeeper for three decades, and never failed to be shocked by the many ways in which seemingly ordinary men and women were capable of defiling their habitations.)

It did not matter to Floriana that Mr. Kepler looked odd, or that she had never heard him speak. Neither was she concerned that, when viewed in proximity, his clothing was more distressed than it first appeared, for this also had been true of her bisabuelito. If they passed each other in the hallway, Mr. Kepler would silently raise his hat and smile, a curiously old-fashioned gesture in a world that increasingly viewed kindness and civility as signs of weakness, even as his lips parted to reveal spaced, decaying teeth, their enamel striated with fault lines of dark yellow.

Yet for all Mr. Kepler’s many apparent, even undeniable, good qualities, Floriana did her best to avoid crossing his path, and tried not to look him in the eye when she did, because she couldn’t help but flinch at the evidence of grave illness. Neither did she spend more time in his room than was absolutely necessary. She made sure to wear rubber gloves while moving through it, but still washed her hands with disinfectant when done.

Her sleep patterns had also become disturbed. Floriana worked two jobs—she stocked shelves at Shaw’s four evenings a week, and all day Saturday—so exhaustion usually ensured immediate oblivion, but for the past four nights she had not rested well. She would wake in darkness, and feel the urge to check the latches on the door and windows of the apartment she shared with her husband and two adult children. She tried to fight it, but the longer she waited, the more alert and disquieted she became. She would get up as quietly as she could, make her rounds, and return to bed, only to wake a couple of hours later to commence the routine again.

Four nights without proper sleep.

Four mornings spent cleaning Mr. Kepler’s room.

And sometimes, as she tested the locks, Floriana thought she could pick up the faintest hint of rosewater and civet, and she wondered if this was how incipient madness smelled.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The bell above the entrance to Strange Brews tinkled, but Dolors Strange didn’t turn to see who might have come in, because Erin, her assistant, could take care of it. Right now Dolors was more concerned with why the cinnamon rolls she’d defrosted just the night before were speckled with mold. The only reason could be that they’d arrived that way from Becker & Co., the local bakery that supplied her, but Johanna Becker was reluctant to accept that this might be the case, and was trying to blame Dolors for storing them improperly. Since Dolors was counting every dime in order to keep her business running, determining responsibility for the mold was a matter of some financial import.

“Dolors,” said Erin.

Dolors waved a hand at her to hush. She had Johanna on the ropes, and wasn’t about to be distracted before she could land the crucial blow. Finally, after further back-and-forth, Johanna, with nothing resembling good grace, agreed to have a dozen freshly baked rolls delivered to Strange Brews within the hour, free of charge, to replace the original consignment, if only to get Dolors off the phone. Satisfied, Dolors turned to see what the next problem might be.

Her sister, Ambar, was standing at the counter. She was crying.

“You got a minute?” said Ambar. “Because I think we need to talk.”

CHAPTER XXIX

Following a discussion with Will Quinn, in the course of which we each made our respective positions clear and came to an agreement about how best to proceed, I ate an early lunch at the Bayou Kitchen while I worked the phone.

As rumor suggested, and Ambar Strange had confirmed, Raum had been an inmate in Jersey at East Jersey State Prison under Title 2C of the New Jersey Code of Criminal Justice: five years for manslaughter, which was at the lower end of the sentencing scale. He had killed a man named Clayton Dempsey in Lindenwold during an argument over a parking space that then continued into a nearby bar. The disagreement escalated, Dempsey threatened Raum with a broken bottle, and Raum stabbed him to death with a knife used by the bartender to slice lemons.

A couple of witnesses subsequently recanted and claimed that Dempsey had broken the bottle accidentally, with no intention of actually using it as a weapon, but enough doubt was sown in the minds of the jury for Raum to have avoided a first-degree felony charge, and a sentence of ten to thirty years. The defense of reasonable provocation in the heat of passion was accepted, and Raum got sent down for five. Under New Jersey’s mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, he served fifty-one months in prison. East Jersey was the state’s second-oldest facility, housing maximum-, medium-, and minimum-security prisoners. It wasn’t an easy place to do time, and nobody would be rushing back for a second taste of its hospitality, but it wasn’t as bad as New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, which was grim as all hell, with a reputation for inmate violence. If that pentacle tattoo represented the sum total of Raum Buker’s scarring from almost five years in the New Jersey prison system, he could consider himself halfway fortunate.

I was curious to know what company Raum might have been keeping down there. A man who emerges from prison sporting a pair of Waffen-SS cracker bolts has been hanging around with white supremacists. Someone who comes out with a Pagans tattoo is likely to start shopping for a motorcycle. But a prisoner who returns to freedom bearing an occult symbol on his arm—well, he’s fallen into some unusual society. Of course, it was entirely possible that a bored inmate with too much time on his hands, combined with exposure to the kind of books or DVDs that fundamentalist preachers liked to rail against during Sunday sermons, might take it into his head to get inked with pitchforks and horned devils, but Raum Buker didn’t strike me as falling into that category. Raum thought before he acted, which made his wrongdoings so much more difficult to forgive.

I’d been dancing around the margins of Raum’s life, but it wasn’t yet the moment to confront him directly. There weren’t many things worth learning from the company of lawyers, apart from the fact that it was best avoided, but among them was not asking questions to which one did not already have the answers. That didn’t quite work for investigations, but a version of the same rule could still apply: Try discreetly to discover for yourself as many answers as possible before you begin asking any questions aloud. Before I again confronted Raum, I wanted to find out as much as I could about his reasons for returning to Portland. From the inquiries I’d made, I now knew where he was living.

I was about to pay an unsocial call to the Braycott Arms.

CHAPTER XXX

Dolors Strange waved to her sister as Ambar drove away from Strange Brews. Ambar always seemed so small, so vulnerable, but never more so than now. She had shown Dolors the bruises left by Raum Buker on her arm, as though his fingers had burned their imprint into her skin. He hadn’t intended to do it, Ambar said, but whether he’d intended it or not was of no consequence: Raum had hurt Ambar, which meant he’d overstepped the mark.

Even while they were alienated from each other, Dolors had worried about Ambar. They had been close in childhood, drifted apart during adolescence, and actively clashed in adulthood, but Dolors had never ceased to feel protective of her younger sibling. Their mother had acted as a conduit for information, and made various efforts to encourage a reconciliation, but only her final illness, and ultimately her death, had succeeded in bridging the distance between the sisters. Dolors struggled to recall what it was that had caused their estrangement to begin with; under duress, she doubted she could have pointed to any single incident or exchange to justify years of mutual hostility. It was just that, for a while, their differences were too extreme, and their similarities too close, for them to be able to coexist comfortably in the same spaces.

Of course, there was also Raum. In the beginning the sisters had not even been aware that he was sleeping with both of them. It had amused him, Dolors now knew, to move from one to the other, sometimes in the space of the same night. Raum possessed an undeniable streak of sadism, and although he had never admitted it to either of them, Dolors thought that the idea of driving a final, insurmountable wedge between the Sisters Strange might have appealed to him. In that, at least, he had failed, because when they did finally learn of the arrangement, they had confronted him together, and he had laughed in their faces. Dolors had vowed to have nothing more to do with him, but Ambar—well, for her it was more difficult. Raum had buried his hooks deep in Ambar, because she did not have her sister’s protective carapace. When Ambar told Dolors that she was sleeping with him again following his return to Portland, Dolors could only stare at her in bafflement. No envy intruded (because that would have implied desire), only a renewed awareness on Dolors’s part that some of her sister’s ways, like those of God Himself, were beyond all understanding.

Dolors had difficulty remembering what it was about Raum Buker that she had initially found so attractive, beyond the fact that it was nice to be wanted by a man, even one such as he. In Ambar he had satisfied some deeper need—for company, for protection—but she was struggling with the version of him that had emerged from incarceration. Now he had left his mark on her, and a man who did that once would do so again, if permitted. A good sister would have advised Ambar to walk away, even to go to the police. Occasionally, though, as in fairy tales, what was required was not to be good, but to be clever.

So Ambar would stay with Raum, and Dolors would observe.

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