Page 78 of The Furies

“It was. I spent a week planning what I was going to say, and rehearsing it with my lawyer. He, in turn, cleared it with, um, others in advance.”

“The Office.”

“Who else?”

I could understand why they might have been prepared to let her speak. Even the Office wouldn’t want to be perceived as condoning sexual homicide by one of their number.

“How hard did the federal agents push?” The feds would have wanted more than the story of how the girls might have come to be buried under Nate Sawyer’s garage.

“Pretty hard, but I only gave them what I was told to give.”

“Did they ask you to testify?”

“It wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Most of it was just hearsay.”

“But?”

“Enough wasn’t.”

“Who did it damage?”

“Not the Office, but some people they wanted to see squirm on a federal hook. You know, annoyances.”

That was a clever move, if it could be made to work.

“Does the Office know about your change of name?”

“We tried to keep it quiet, because that was part of the deal. But nothing is secret in Boston, or not that kind of secret. In the end, what does it matter? It’s just me now. The rest is memories.”

“Of your daughter?” I said gently.

“Yes. Of Kara.”

CHAPTER IX

“I replay it, you know,” said Sarah Abelli, in the booth at the Great Lost Bear. “I try to locate the moments when I might have changed the outcome, so she’d still be alive. I stay with her upstairs, instead of going downstairs to call my sister. I insist that she come with me, instead of leaving her with her crayons and coloring book. I go to help her on the stairs when I hear her coming down, instead of staying at the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and the phone in the other. I react faster when I hear her fall. I explain what happened more coherently to the emergency operator. I use different words when I’m talking to Kara while we wait for the ambulance, words that lodge in her brain and keep her with me. I see all these forks in the path, these opportunities to alter the future, and they’re tiny, seemingly inconsequential, yet because of those choices I made, the story ends with her dying in an ambulance.”

I didn’t interrupt, or offer consolation. I’d spent years tormenting myself in a similar way, except my choices appeared to lead inexorably to the killings of my wife and first daughter. It took me a long time to accept, if only partially, that the fault lay with the man who had taken their lives. Sarah Abelli didn’t even have another with whom to share the blame, not unless it was God Himself. If she took that route, I wouldn’t have begrudged her, and I don’t believe God would have either.

By the time Kara died, Sarah Sawyer was the wife of a rat, soon also to be labeled a femicidal killer. As well as being ostracized by her community and her husband’s former associates, she was also under pressure from the latter to explain where certain skimmed monies might have gone, because in addition to being a snitch and a murderer, Nate Sawyer had been thieving from his own people.

“A week after Kara’s funeral,” said Sarah, “two men I didn’t know came to the house. They forced me into the back of a van, put a hood over my head, and drove me to a property by the sea, because I could hear waves crashing and smell salt, even through the hood. And that hood stank; it had been used before, maybe many times.

“I was led down to a basement. They cut off my clothes, left me in my underwear, and then one of them put his fingers inside me. He said they’d been assured they could do what they wanted with me, but if I told them where the money was, they might consider not raping me. Then they began hitting, punching. At one point, I blacked out. When I came to, there was another man in the basement, and I’m sure that I recognized his voice, because I’d met him a couple of times with my husband. Nate had introduced him to me as Luca, but I never found out his last name, because I never asked. He said that if I didn’t tell them about the money, they’d dig up Kara’s body and feed it to the same hogs who’d consumed my husband’s ashes.”

She took a moment, pursed her lips, looked inward.

“I married one of those men,” she said, “the kind who would threaten to disinter a child and throw her to pigs. I slept with him, had a daughter by him—although Kara was always mine, never his. But how fucking stupid was I?”

There was no point in telling her that she couldn’t have known, because she had known: the generalities, if not the specifics. She had simply elected not to acknowledge the fact. Sometimes, that’s the only way we can survive.

“But if Nate did steal from them, like they said,” she continued, “I didn’t know about it. Sure, everything was cash with him, but that wasn’t unusual, not in his circles. When I needed to buy something, the money was there. He wasn’t cheap, and he didn’t mind my putting a little aside for myself, but we’re talking a low four-figure sum. I couldn’t make them believe me, though. I thought for sure they’d do what they said they were going to do, and leave Kara’s grave empty. Luca told the one who’d threatened to rape me that he could go ahead and do it if he wanted, and when he was finished, Luca would come back and talk to me again, to see if it had made me see reason.”

Sarah kept her eyes fixed on me. She did not look away.

“The one who’d put his fingers inside me whispered in my ear about what he was going to do to me. He already had his hands on my breasts when there was a noise from nearby. I heard a door opening, and everything stopped for a while. When someone spoke again, it sounded like an older man. He said that he didn’t want to see me hurt, that he had children of his own, but there was a limit to the protection he could offer. The money Nate stole had to be paid back. That was how it worked. It wasn’t personal, just business.”

In the end, she agreed to sign over her home to them—$200,000, with $50,000 plus change left on the mortgage—and they let her go. When she returned to the house, she found that it had been torn apart in an effort to discover some of her husband’s hiding places. They’d succeeded, too, finding $5,000 in the wall behind the medicine cabinet and another $12,000 in the false bottom of the garage workbench.

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