Page 37 of The Furies

Here is a truth, or as close to one as I can come: Those who have lost children will speak to them until death stills their own tongue. They will perceive their presence in a gust of air that passes briefly through a locked room, in the tinkling of a wind chime where there is no breeze, in the settling of boards that have long since found their alignment, and to these things they will give the name of a son or daughter. In grief we look for solace where we can, and in whatever we believe to be true. Who is to say that we are wrong, should this bring us peace and cause no harm to another? And if, as the years go by, we speak less often to the shadows, and these wordless visitations grow rarer, it is not that we are forgotten, or have forgotten in turn, but rather that the dead perhaps better understand the needs of the living than the living themselves, and are more cognizant of meaning and meaninglessness. For the dead, love has consequence, time has none, and absence lasts the blink of an eye.

From the tamarack tree, the black-crowned night heron soared into the sky and was lost to the stars.

CHAPTER XLIV

The maid Floriana was late in attending to Mr. Kepler’s room that morning. First there was a problem with her car, and then two of the other maids—cousins who shared an apartment, and consorted, in Floriana’s view, with the wrong order of men—had come down with something, which meant that she spent the day running to catch up with herself and failing.

She knocked on Mr. Kepler’s door and received no reply. Typically she’d have given a second knock, as the rules of the motel required, but she was weary and distracted, and the unease she felt whenever she approached his quarters had mutated into a deeper dread. She just wanted to give his maldita habitación a cursory cleaning and have done with it.

She opened the door. The first thing she noticed was a pair of ivory dice on the table beside the closet. It was the first time she had discovered anything of a personal nature in the room, beyond a toothbrush, toothpaste, a disposable razor, and a travel-size can of shaving foam. Next to the dice was a small clock with exposed workings and multiple dials on its face. Its numerals were from no alphabet that Floriana recognized, and the arrangement of the dials was so complicated as to make telling the time impossible for her.

Floriana touched a finger to the dice. They appeared to be very old. She also noticed, after a moment, that their dots were oddly arranged. Instead of the opposite faces adding up to seven—1 and 6, 2 and 5, 3 and 4—the distribution was random. On the other side of 6 was 2, opposite 5 was 4, and 1 was paired with 3. The second die was different again: 4 and 6, 1 and 5, 2 and 3. She had never seen anything like them before.

As she drew back from them, she heard a sound from the bathroom. It was very slight, barely there at all, like the release of gas from a valve.

“Hello?” she said, but softly, so softly, even as a voice in her head told her it would be better if she left the room now, closing the door gently behind her, forgetting the dice, forgetting the noise….

She peeked into the bathroom. Mr. Kepler was sitting naked before her, his eyes closed, seemingly asleep on the edge of the tub. His entire body, with the exception of his face, neck, and hands, was covered in tattoos, even down to his foreskin. They looked like symbols, or letters of an alphabet, but again, none that was familiar to her. At his neck, on his chest, and amid the sparse hairs of his groin, she saw swelling and blistering, and knew that here was a man enduring near-unimaginable pain.

Floriana backed away. She did not speak, and Mr. Kepler disappeared from view. She made it to the door, still lodged open with a wooden stop. She stepped into the hall and removed the stop, steadying the door with one hand and holding the handle down with the other so that it would make no sound when it closed. Only when the door had locked behind her did she release a breath.

And only then did Kepler open his eyes.

* * *

I SPENT THE MORNING at the Maine District Court, waiting to testify in an insurance case that was eventually settled on the courthouse steps. I had a book for company, they were billable hours, and there’s something pleasant about being paid to read. When I was done, I grabbed coffee and a sandwich at the Crooked Mile on Milk Street, and tackled the parts of the New York Times that weren’t depressing. I was just finishing up when Angel called.

“You were asking about Egon Towle,” he said.

“Am I going to be sorry?”

“How about if I start by telling you that they call him ‘Weird Egon’?”

“You know,” I said, “I’m sorry already.”

* * *

EGON TOWLE, ACCORDING TO Angel’s information, didn’t have faith in God, or not any incarnation of Him that involved itself in human cares, but he did believe in demons. He was fascinated by transcendentalism, theosophy, spiritualism, hermeticism, Kabbalah, neo-paganism, and witchcraft. He’d worked briefly in the library at East Jersey State Prison before it was discovered that he had somehow managed to have five occult volumes—including a modern edition of the eighteenth-century Grimorium Verum, The Book of Ceremonial Magic by Arthur Waite, and a treatise on occult warfare—smuggled in as part of a charitable donation from the collection of a defunct home for elderly spinsters. He also claimed to have infiltrated the Bilderberg Group and the outer margins of the British royal family, and to have personally forged President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Egon Towle wasn’t just out where the buses don’t run, he was out where no bus was ever likely to run, not unless he hijacked it first.

“So he’s crazy?” I said.

“Oh, he’s out of his mind,” said Angel. “But he’s also a very, very good thief.”

CHAPTER XLV

Raum Buker had not yet returned to the Braycott Arms, and was overdue on his rent, yet Bobby Wadlin, who was not liable to demonstrations of kindness, did not immediately order his room to be emptied and cleaned. It was not that, as Wadlin’s middle grew softer, so too did his heart: the organ in question was as hard as its surrounding arteries, and had atrophied to the size of a nut. No, it was more that the Raum Buker currently residing at the Braycott Arms was not the man familiar to Wadlin from memory and rumor, and he believed that caution needed to be exercised with him.

Wadlin had encountered plenty of disturbed individuals over the years, which was why he rarely emerged from behind his screen, not if it could be avoided. But plexiglass offered only so much protection, and even Wadlin was occasionally obliged to venture onto the city’s streets. This was why it was important for him to maintain the fiction that he was merely an employee of the Braycott’s absentee owners, not a principal shareholder in the operation, in order to avoid being accosted by unhappy tenants. Similarly, he avoided antagonizing the residents unnecessarily, and would call the cops only as a last resort. The second-last resort was a low-level bruiser named Tony Motti, who had once gone all of two rounds with Joey Gamache, the only Maine boxer ever to win a world boxing title. Joey had played around with Tony for a while before flooring him with a punch that Tony still felt when the weather turned cold. Now Tony worked security at the kind of bars that sane people avoided on the grounds that they required someone like Tony Motti to maintain a semblance of order, and helped landlords of Bobby Wadlin’s stripe deal with recalcitrant tenants.

Raum Buker was not quite a problem tenant, and Wadlin sincerely hoped he wouldn’t become one, because, in Wadlin’s opinion, Buker was displaying signs of cracking up. One of the other tenants had complained that he was keeping him awake at night by shouting in his sleep. The tenant also mentioned to Wadlin that he thought Buker might be entertaining visitors after hours, because he was sure he’d heard someone else in there with him. When Wadlin had gone to check, he’d discovered Buker alone in the room. But that wasn’t all. Standing in Buker’s unit, Bobby Wadlin had smelled something burning.

“You lighting fires in here?” he asked. “Don’t be smoking no cigarettes. You know the rules.”

“I don’t smell anything,” said Buker, “and I don’t smoke. I was asleep when you knocked.”

He hadn’t looked sleepy to Wadlin, and he didn’t resemble someone bothered by an intrusion, only amused. But that smell—damn, it was like someone grilling bad bacon. If he hadn’t known better, Wadlin might even have said it was coming from the man standing before him.

From that point on, Bobby Wadlin decided he wanted Raum Buker to clear out. Another deadbeat would be along to replace him soon enough, and it wasn’t as though the income from one unit was the difference between eating and not eating; Wadlin and his relatives could take the hit. But he didn’t want to give Buker cause for animosity, which was why he waited a few more hours before dispatching a maid to the room with instructions to gather up any personal possessions and put them in storage. If Buker came back and tried to pay in advance for another week, or even another day, Wadlin would tell him that the unit had already been rented to a new guest, and there was nothing else available. Wadlin was done with him. Buker was giving him the creeps, and not only Buker but also—

---