Page 2 of The Furies

“The store. That’s the marker, the canary in the coal mine. When that goes, we can raise a cross above the city that was and lock the cemetery gates.”

Strange Maine stood at 578 Congress. It sold vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, and used Stephen King books alongside ancient consoles and board games so obscure that even their creators had forgotten them. It had been around since 2003, but felt like a throwback to a more distant era. I had no idea how it stayed in business although I was grateful that it did. Each time I passed, I tried to leave some money in the register. My daughter Sam, who already loved vinyl records, along with virtually any cultural artifact older than she was, thought it one of the coolest places on earth—or in Portland, at least.

“You know how ancient we sound?” I said.

“You started it,” said Dave.

“Well, there’s a lot about this city that I’ve begun to miss.”

Which was when Raum Buker came into view, and I realized there were some things about the city that I hadn’t missed at all.

* * *

THERE ARE MEN WHO are born into this world blighted, men who are blighted by the world, and men who are intent upon blighting themselves and the world along with them. Raum Buker somehow contrived to be all three in one person, like a toxic, inverted deity. He came from somewhere deep in the County, as Mainers termed Aroostook, the largest region in the state: 7,000 square miles, with 70,000 people to share them, a great many of whom were content not to be able to see their neighbors, and even happier not to see strangers. Raum’s father, Sumner, had worked as a cleaner at Loring Air Force Base, where the B-52 Stratofortress bombers were once based, but lost his job for lighting up a cigarette next to a fuel dump. Since Loring’s tanks stored nearly ten million gallons of aviation fuel alongside more than 5,000 tons of ordnance, the resulting explosion would have left a crater that could be viewed from space.

Once he’d been shown the door from Loring, Sumner Buker decided that he was temperamentally ill-suited to the strictures of regular employment, and his time would be better spent engaging in low-level criminality, drinking, sleeping with women who were not his wife, and smoking anywhere he damn well pleased. To these lifestyle choices he committed himself with commendable zeal. Sumner hadn’t made many wise decisions during his time on earth, but he did choose the perfect woman to be his life partner. Vina Buker also liked drinking and smoking, slept with men who were not her husband, and was once arrested while trying to fill a panel van with canned food and toiletries from the Hannaford in Caribou, at which she happened to be employed. Sumner and Vina took turns occupying cells at the Aroostook County Jail in Houlton, which meant that one of them was always home to neglect their only child, Raum. Inevitably the boy was conveyed into foster care, and shortly thereafter his father fulfilled an enduring ambition by dying in a fire caused by an unattended cigarette, taking his wife with him.

Raum was a sickly youth, but with more brains than both his parents put together, even if that wasn’t likely to earn him a mention in the record books. He was placed with a good family down in Millinocket, where he proceeded to do everything in his power to make his foster parents despair of him. This set a pattern for the future, as Raum was shifted from foster home to foster home, each tougher than the last, until finally he ended up in an institution. By then he’d earned a reputation for hitting back hard, but in juvie he learned how to strike first, because he wasn’t so sickly anymore. It would be unfair to say that he developed a taste for violence; he was no sadist—that would come later—and was shrewd enough to learn to control his temper, but when he had to use aggression, he did so without hesitation or remorse. He took his knocks in turn, and one particularly brutal altercation with a guard left Raum with bleeding on the brain that came close to killing him. One month after Raum’s release, someone entered the guard’s property and severed the brakes on his wife’s car, resulting in a collision that would leave her walking with the aid of a cane for the rest of her life. Raum didn’t forget hurts. It was possible that he even manufactured cause to take offense, just to give himself something at which to lash out.

So it could be said, with some justification, that Raum Buker didn’t have the best of starts, but that was true of many who didn’t subsequently decide to make the world regret the steady hand of the doctor who had delivered them. Raum became his own worst enemy by election, and resolved by extension to become the worst enemy of a lot of other people, too.

In adulthood Raum was physically imposing, and might even, in dim light, have been regarded as handsome. He was also profoundly dishonest and sexually incontinent, with a malice that, at its worst, was both deep and cruelly imaginative: he had once used a hand plane on a carpenter who owed him money, shaving the skin and upper layers of flesh from the man’s buttocks and thighs. The debt was less than a thousand dollars; a man left in pain for the rest of his life, over a three-figure sum. Gradually, like fecal matter flowing down a drain, gravity brought Raum to Portland. He kept company with men whom others avoided, and women who were too foolish, desperate, or worn down by abuse to make better life choices.

Then a curious rumor began to circulate. Raum Buker, according to semi-reliable witnesses, was involved with two sisters, the Stranges. The older Strange, Dolors, lived in South Portland and owned a coffee shop. (Her parents hadn’t been much for spelling, and intended to name her Dolores. Regardless, she was destined to end up with a moniker meaning “sorrows,” which might have impacted on the subsequent patterns of her existence.)

The younger Strange, Ambar—that defective spelling gene raising its head once again—lived over in Westbrook, where she worked as a dental assistant. Both were unmarried, and by popular agreement Dolors was likely to remain so. She was a forbidding woman at first sight, mouth pinched tight as a miser’s purse. Ambar was prettier, but was regarded as lacking her sister’s acumen. I was familiar with them only by sight and reputation, and was content to let that be the way of things. Still, the news that the Sisters Strange, as they were known, might be sleeping with Raum Buker was met with a degree of incredulity combined with some small sense of relief, since it meant that only three people instead of six would be made unhappy by the ensuing carnal arrangements.

One story, which might or might not have been true, was that the Sisters Strange were, appropriately enough, estranged, and had not spoken in years. Raum had begun sleeping with Dolors before also—possibly by accident, but probably by design—taking Ambar to his bed. He then continued to alternate between the pair for a number of years, sometimes consorting with one or the other, but often juggling both at the same time. Either each sister was unaware of the other’s presence in Raum’s life, which was unlikely, or they chose to tolerate the peculiarity of the relationship rather than deprive themselves of their share of Raum’s attentions, a circumstance beyond the comprehension of mortal men. This is not to say that these complex liaisons were juggled without conflict, for the police were summoned on more than one occasion to deal with domestic disturbances in Westbrook, South Portland, and at Raum’s apartment in Portland’s East End. But then, no relationship is ever perfect.

Raum had served time in a variety of houses of correction; like a lot of sharp men and women, he wasn’t as sharp as he thought. He eventually ended up doing four years in Maine State for a class C felony assault, elevated from a class D misdemeanor because he had prior convictions for aggravated criminal trespass, criminal threatening, and terrorizing. Upon his release, Raum completed eighteen months of parole before vanishing from the state. Mourning at his departure was confined to those owed money by him, and even they were prepared to swallow their losses in return for his absence. The Sisters Strange were not canvassed for their views. As far as anyone could tell, the siblings continued to lead separate lives, connected only by blood and their respective unions with a man who remained unloved by all but them.

Was there another side to Raum Buker? No man is completely bad, and I’d heard tales of small kindnesses, often rendered by him to those who had fallen further and deeper than the rest: ex-junkies, old whores, aging criminal recidivists. When Raum had money, he shared it with them. If someone was giving them bother, Raum, if he was so disposed, gave bother in return. It might have been that, in these lost souls, Raum saw some glimpse of his own future, and sought to build up goodwill in the karmic bank; yet there was no consistency to his interventions, no apparent logic to the objects of his largesse. In the end, his actions may have been a mystery even to himself.

Now Raum had returned to Portland from his years in the wilderness, and all that could be said for sure was that scant good could come of it.

CHAPTER III

Murders were rare in Athens, Pennsylvania. In fact, serious transgressions were unusual in the town, where the crime rate was less than half the national average, and theft, assault, and property offenses took up most of the Athens PD’s time and resources. With that in mind, Beth Ann Robbin, the town’s chief of police, sought the assistance of the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation just as soon as she glimpsed the state of Edwin Ellerkamp’s body, because she knew when she was out of her league. Now Beth Ann and a pair of state police detectives, all suited and booted, were watching as the crime scene investigators prepared for the removal of the remains. The three officers had gone over the room together—looking, examining—before returning to the doorway to permit the body to be taken out.

Edwin remained uncovered on the couch by the fireplace, which meant that Beth Ann’s gaze kept being drawn back to his engorged mouth and throat. Some of the coins had spilled onto his chest during his final struggles, but the majority were still inside him. She’d never come across such coinage before, the edges uneven, the markings in some cases barely visible, so old were they. A few were about the size of her thumbnail, and the rest only marginally larger. She pondered how many might have been required to choke the victim to death. It resembled, she reflected blackly, one of those fund-raising drives that the Elks Lodge came up with at Christmas, where you paid a dollar to guess the number of nickels in a jar. Correctly guess the number of weird coins lodged in old Edwin Ellerkamp and you can take them home with you, once they’ve been disinfected—oh, and his killer has been found. I mean, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Beth Ann gave an involuntary snort, and was surprised to feel a tear spurt from the corner of her right eye. Christ, an old man who kept to himself, forced to eat coins until he choked and died…

“Valerian,” said the more senior of the detectives, whose name was Peter Condell. “I knew it would come to me.”

Beth Ann was surprised that Condell hadn’t taken retirement by now, because he had his twenty-five, and more. He could have sailed into the sunset with 75 percent of his highest year’s salary, which is what Beth Ann would have done in his shoes. Instead, here he was, in a living room that smelled of death, staring at a corpse that was bleeding money from its mouth. Beth Ann wouldn’t have said that Condell looked happy, exactly—that would have made him some form of psychopath—but she suspected he wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else, or doing anything else, at that precise moment. Condell was born to be police.

“Like the herb?” said the other detective. Shirley Gardner was a young Black woman with the kind of perfect skin Beth Ann would have killed for. She was wearing a nicely cut blue trouser suit and comfortable, but polished, flat shoes. Next to her, Condell resembled an unmade bed that had been slept in by bums.

“Like the Roman emperor,” Condell said. He didn’t sigh or roll his eyes. He corrected Gardner matter-of-factly, and she took no umbrage. She clearly wanted to learn, and Condell had a lot to teach, not only about police work. “A Persian king is reputed to have killed him by feeding him molten gold, although other accounts suggest he flayed Valerian alive.”

“Why?” said Beth Ann.

“Why did he kill him,” said Condell, “or why might he have forced him to swallow molten gold?”

“Both.”

“Well, he died because he lost a battle and was captured, if I remember right. As for the story of the gold, assuming it’s true, Valerian tried to buy his freedom, and the king took offense. Whatever the reason, it was a punishment.” Condell pointed a finger at Edwin Ellerkamp. “Just like this.”

“Not a robbery gone wrong?” said Beth Ann. That had been her first instinct, and she never liked second-guessing herself. When dealing with the local population, her first instinct was usually right, although she was prepared to accept that it might be a bad habit to indulge in more esoteric instances.

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