Page 8 of The Furies

“I don’t see anything,” said Beth Ann.

“You need to look at it from an angle, close to the glass.”

Beth Ann did, Condell beside her. They saw a series of smudges, as though greasy fingers had been rubbed across it, creating a stain that was about a foot square, although one that had passed unnoticed because of the manner of its execution.

“I cleaned that mirror the day before yesterday,” said Marie, “and I left it spotless.”

“It doesn’t look random,” said Beth Ann. “There’s a pattern.”

“Not just a pattern,” said Condell. “I see traces of blood.”

Condell held up his phone and used it to take a series of snaps. When he was done, he ran through them on the screen. The last, either through luck or skill, was nearly perfect.

“Now,” said Condell, “just what the hell is that?”

CHAPTER IX

For a few days I saw and heard no more of Raum Buker, and experienced no great sense of regret. I finished up some routine jobs that paid the bills: the confirmation of a simple case of insurance fraud; the interviewing of potential witnesses for an upcoming trial; and the shadowing of a straying spouse as ammunition for an imminent divorce case. (Roby Logan, who’d been a PI in Bangor back in the sixties and seventies, once told me that the worst misfortune ever to have befallen the trade was the introduction of no-fault divorce in Maine back in ’73. After that, he said, he could no longer afford a new car every year.) Nobody got so irate with me that they felt inclined to throw a punch—or worse, pull a gun.

Each night I’d take a hot bath, because lately I hurt more than I used to, and a bath helped. Afterward I’d look in the mirror, note my scars, and test how deep they went. Sometimes I’d think about how I’d come by them. I’d heard it claimed that the mind buries the memory of suffering in order for life to go on, but it’s not true, or not from my experience. Some said the same about women and childbirth, but I knew plenty of women, my ex-partner Rachel included, for whom the pain of parturition remained fresh even years after the event. I could still recall the agony of the shotgun blasts that had almost taken my life—did take my life, if you talked to the doctors, because I died on that operating table and they brought me back not once, not twice, but three times. I still woke in the night to feel the pellets tearing through me, and then I died all over again.

On an icy early February morning, I took the long drive south to visit the graves of Susan, my wife, and Jennifer, my first daughter. I’d paid to have the marker cleaned, and the moss cleared from the carved letters. It made the stone look almost new, so that briefly I was a younger man again, seeing their passing confirmed for me by an artisan’s hand. The bite of their loss had dulled, but it would never entirely dissipate, and that was as it should be. Someday, long after I was gone, their identities would be erased entirely by the elements, or the stone would fall and become overgrown by vegetation, and this, too, was in the way of things. They wouldn’t be the first to be forgotten in this manner, not in that place. They lay in an old cemetery, and their names would be added to its secret list of the lost.

I would never join them in that plot, though. I had made a decision a long time ago not to rest there. It would have caused too much pain to the surviving members of Susan’s family, and I was already responsible in their eyes for a sufficiency of misery. In the end, it wouldn’t matter to me where I was laid, although I’d chosen to be buried next to my grandfather in Scarborough’s Black Point Cemetery, if only to save anyone else the stress of making the decision on my behalf. I knew that I’d be seeing Jennifer again in the next life—Susan also, perhaps, but certainly Jennifer. I knew, because sometimes I still glimpsed her in this life, too. She haunted me, and I was grateful for her presence.

For the most part.

CHAPTER X

Beth Ann Robbin was once again sitting in Marie’s kitchen. The morning sunlight streamed through the drapes from a clear blue sky, but it contained no warmth, no warmth at all. Even with the radiator turned up full, Beth Ann felt the winter chill prowling, nipping.

Beside Marie sat her mother, Ida. Marie had told her about the mark on the mirror, and shown her an image of it forwarded from Condell’s phone. She’d been requested to do so by Condell, if a few days after its discovery. Marie guessed that the police had drawn a blank, or the state detectives had briefly forgotten about her mother’s long employment at The Elms. Beth Ann arrived to do the follow-up interview, although she had always regarded Ida Biener as a dull woman who wouldn’t have noticed the Second Coming had Christ materialized in her own yard. But miracle of miracles, even the most obtuse of individuals still possessed the occasional capacity to retain and retrieve information.

“I’ve seen that before,” Ida told Beth Ann. “The stick figure thing.”

“Where?”

“On Mr. Ellerkamp’s computer, not long before I retired. It was so odd-looking that it stayed with me. He had it blown right up so it filled the big screen, and he was talking about it to someone on the phone.”

“Do you recall what he said, or who he was talking to?”

Ida shook her head.

“Not really,” she said. “I never stuck my nose in his business. I knew he wouldn’t like it.”

“When you say ‘not really’…”

“I might have heard a name, but I could as easily have misheard it, because I was already leaving him to his business. I could come back and clean later, and not disturb him. Funny the things that lodge in your mind. Ask me where I was last Tuesday, and I’d struggle to tell you, but a darn stick figure on a screen I can recall.”

Her big, soft eyes stared back at Beth Ann. It was, Beth Ann thought, like being regarded over a fence by a particularly placid cow.

“And what,” Beth Ann persisted, “was that name you heard?”

“Jeez, it was such a long time ago now. I’m kind of sorry I ever mentioned this, causing a fuss over nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, Ida,” said Beth Ann. “And we need all the help we can get, however small it might seem to you.”

Ida wrinkled her nose as she struggled to think.

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