Page 38 of The Furies

The phone beside him rang, temporarily derailing his train of thought and distracting him further from the action on his TV screen, namely Johnny Ringo’s efforts to establish the truth about the outlaw Boone Hackett. He picked up the handset.

“Braycott. Manager speaking.”

And an unwelcome voice said, “Why are you interfering with Raum Buker’s room?”

CHAPTER XLVI

The drive down to New Hampshire was uneventful, helped by the fact that I stayed at seventy-five and slowed anytime I saw a sports car that wasn’t tearing up the road, the Maine State Police liking nothing better than to lurk in Mustangs and Chargers to trap the unwary.

I’d never been to Ossipee before. It was a conglomeration of villages sharing variations on the name, and located around Center Ossipee, “Home of the First Snowmobile,” because somewhere had to be. Emmeline Towle lived on Moultonville Road, close to Lord’s Funeral Home. Her house stood farther back than its neighbors, and was sheltered by evergreens. One car was parked outside the garage, a boxy blue Oldsmobile Cutlass from the 1980s, bearing a faded election sticker for a politician I’d never heard of—which, given the nature of so many of that species, was almost certainly the best kind.

I parked behind the Oldsmobile. As I got out, the front door of the house opened and a woman in her early fifties stepped onto the porch. Her hair was gray-blond and unwashed, and she wore a Howdy Doody apron that came down to her knees. Her right hand was buried in one of the apron’s pockets. I was prepared to offer good odds that the hand was holding a gun. Get shot at often enough and you become adept at spotting the signs, if only as a belated survival strategy. I decided to stay by my car in the hope that the hand would likewise remain in her pocket.

“What do you want here?” she said.

“I was looking for Emmeline Towle.”

“You’re about two months too late.”

“Why is that?”

“Because we buried her over at Chickville Cemetery.”

I sometimes think life would be a lot simpler if we could press “reset” on any preceding ten seconds. In the absence of that facility, I’d have to keep working on my diplomatic skills, or start conversations by making sure the person I was inquiring after didn’t happen to be dead.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“You can go drop off flowers if you like.”

“I didn’t know her that well. In fact, I didn’t know her at all.”

“Then you got nothing to be sorry for.”

“Except your loss.”

She untightened enough to nod an acknowledgment.

“You still haven’t told me who you are,” she said, “or what you wanted with my mother.”

“I was hoping to talk with her about her son, Egon, or with Egon himself, if he happened to be around. My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. It concerns a case I’m working.”

At the mention of Egon, the shutters came down again, and her right hand altered its grip on whatever was in her apron pocket.

“Egon’s not here—and before you ask, I don’t know where he is, so you can be on your way.”

“I’m not trying to create any awkwardness for you,” I said. “Or him, not if I can help it.”

“What other reason would a private investigator have for being on my property, other than to create awkwardness for someone?”

Which was a fair observation, even an astute one. The sun would soon be setting behind the trees, and I could already feel the evening chill creeping into the air after the temperate day. I’d driven for nearly two hours in roadwork traffic to the Home of the First Snowmobile, and I didn’t even like snowmobiling. Neither did I especially like Raum Buker, or the Sisters Strange, and whatever Will Quinn was paying me wasn’t enough to compensate for the toll the case was taking on my natural ebullience, so I decided to be honest.

“I think two women may be in danger because of their association with a man named Raum Buker,” I said. “Your brother served time with him in East Jersey State Prison. They may even have grown close. Raum is congenitally dishonest, and your brother is a convicted thief. If they cooked up something between them for after their release, I’d like to know what it is. If they were in it together, it could be that they’ve drawn someone down on them by what they did, and those women are at risk of being caught in the crossfire.”

Egon Towle’s sister drew her right hand from her apron, and I instinctively backed up a step, as though that might have helped in the event of a bullet being fired. She saw the expression on my face, and lifted her hand to display a bulky vape pen. I breathed out while she breathed in.

“Did you think it was a gun?” she said.

“It’s been known to happen. No offense meant.”

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