Page 79 of The Furies

“They gave me a week to move out,” she said. “I arranged to have Kara’s body exhumed and reburied under her initials, spoke to the feds like I was told to, and then came up here. I started to believe I might have been forgotten, but I was wrong.”

She’d returned home from the gym a week earlier to another house that had been ravaged by intruders: upholstery and mattresses torn, clothing strewn across carpets, bookshelves stripped, and even the kitchen cabinets emptied of their contents, with opened boxes of rice and cereal upended on the floor. It was almost vindictive in its destruction, but thorough in its investigation. More of her husband’s people, she thought, but if she informed the police, she would invite their scrutiny; anyway, the intruders couldn’t have discovered anything of value because she had little worth stealing, and what she had was well hidden. It was only when she checked her bedroom for the second time that she realized what had been taken. Her reaction was to scream.

“I kept Kara’s relics in a box,” she said, “all those little things from her first years that I could save: her first booties, her first pacifier, the first tooth she lost, drawings that she’d made, photographs, even plaster casts of her hands and feet from the day we brought her home from the hospital. Everything I had of her, they took.”

I could see she was determined not to cry in front of me. Her fists were clenched, and she was barely holding it together. Also, there was that rage again: had she been able to get to those responsible for the theft, she would happily have ripped out their hearts with her bare hands.

“I was about to call the police then,” she continued. “I didn’t care about my identity being revealed, or having my windows broken and being forced to move again. I just wanted Kara back. I had invested so much of myself, of her, in those things. They were my link to her. Without them, I’d lose her forever.”

Watching, listening, I had the sense of words left unsaid and deeper emotions unexpressed. Perhaps it was only the natural grief of a mother who had lost her child, and an understandable shock and anger at the physical reminders of that child’s former presence in the world being stolen. But no: I’d grown adept at identifying the hiding places, the silences, because that was where the truth so often lay. Sarah Abelli was concealing information. Whoever had burgled her house had taken more from her than mementos, however important they might have been to her.

“And did you turn to the police?” I said.

“I didn’t get a chance. I received a phone call. I’m not sure how they got my number, because I’d changed it after leaving Massachusetts. I don’t even keep my old bills in the house. Fewer than a dozen people have that number, and I trust them all.”

“If you have a cell phone, the number can be found,” I said, “no matter how sparsely it’s shared. Tell me about the caller.”

“He didn’t give his name. He just told me that they had Kara’s things, and I could have them back for fifty thousand dollars. I informed him that I didn’t have fifty thousand. I barely have a thousand in my accounts, and my credit card is a hundred off its limit. I work at L.L. Bean and drive a ten-year-old car. I told him all that, but I think he already knew, and it didn’t make any difference to him or his demand. He advised me to find a way to get the money together or they’d destroy everything they’d taken. He suggested I borrow against the house.” She swallowed hard. “So that’s what I did. The bank would only go to thirty thousand, so my brother and sister came through with another ten thousand each.”

“I’m waiting for the ‘but,’ ” I said.

“The caller got in touch again this morning. Now they want the money by this evening. The bank promised that the cash from the refinancing would be in my account by the end of the week. I’ve just been in touch with the assistant manager again, begging him to fast-track it for today. I said it was an urgent payment to cover medical expenses for my sister, and he told me that he’d see what he could do.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“I think they’re going to double-cross me,” she replied. “I’m convinced they have no intention of ever returning what they stole.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they know who I am. They wouldn’t have taken the Kara box otherwise. The caller said that he didn’t think he needed to warn me against going to the police because they wouldn’t have much sympathy for someone like me. And I could hear it in his voice: his spite for me, his amusement at my grief. Jesus, I pleaded with him, and he just laughed. He was getting off on my pain.”

“And what is it you want me to do?”

“I want you to ensure that they give back what they stole from me, all of it.”

I didn’t reply for a long time. I had every reason not to become involved: the sense of panic on the streets; my urge to leave Portland for Vermont and my daughter; and the workload I already had, some of which I might be unable to complete for weeks, or even months, depending on the virus.

But most of all there was the Office. I’d long ago grown tired of trying to second-guess hoods, and my intervention in their dealings had never ended well. I also had bad memories of Providence, including crossing paths with what was once the Office’s local competition, the Freudian nightmare known as Mother. Mother had seemingly scuttled back into the shadows, and her former territory was now the preserve of the Office, but the memory of that encounter persisted. Right now, sitting across from me and asking for my help was a woman whom the Office would have been happy to see suffer, and it was possible they’d already set about putting that wish into motion.

But she was also a mother mourning her lost child, and whoever was responsible for invading her home and removing her keepsakes of her daughter was guilty of a reprehensible act. I thought of Jennifer, my own dead child, and the tokens of her brief existence that I retained. Had someone taken them from me, I’d have hunted the culprits down and hurt them badly. If I didn’t help Sarah Abelli, who would? If I turned my back on her, what moral authority would remain to me?

“You’ve sometimes been using the words ‘they’ and ‘them’ when talking about whoever stole the box,” I said, “but if I understand you correctly, you’ve dealt only with one man.”

“That’s right, but he spoke in the plural all the time. I suppose he might have been lying to intimidate me further, but why bother? He had the Kara box, and that was enough. Also—”

I waited.

“I can’t be sure of this,” she went on, “because his voice was muffled over the phone—deliberately, I think—but this may be the same man who hurt me in the basement. His speech has an odd rhythm, as though he learned English as a second language, except he doesn’t have an accent. If that’s the case, it’s possible that the other man who abducted me is also with him.”

“Did you ever see their faces?”

“No, not really. They wore masks when they came to take me: see-through plastic, but with a distorting effect. It was like looking at images in a fun-house mirror. I barely got a glimpse, though, before I was hooded, and the hood remained in place until they brought me home. I don’t think I’d be able to recognize them without those masks.”

This wasn’t good news. If it was the same men, there was a chance, even a likelihood, that they were working at the behest of the Office. The story was that Nate Sawyer had skimmed $500,000 over six or seven years, which was no small beans. Either that money remained hidden, its location taken to the grave—or rather, the digestive system of hogs—by Sawyer, or his widow was harder and more cunning than anyone had guessed, and had managed to keep some of the cash. Had she sold her home after her husband’s death, she’d have made $150,000, give or take, although the deal with the Office had left her with nothing. But had she been able to hold on to the Office’s money in turn for sacrificing the house, she might potentially have secured up to three times that amount, assuming her late husband hadn’t spent it all. It was possible that someone in the Office had begun thinking the same way, and had tracked her to Maine. Holding her daughter’s possessions for ransom would be a good way to test the waters. If she could access the $50,000 too easily, there would be more where that came from, and a second trip to a basement might be in order, this time one she wouldn’t survive.

Helping her, though, would inevitably involve a conversation with the Office, which didn’t appeal. These men had quick tempers, the world had no shortage of basements, and a hole in the ground would accommodate two just as easily as one.

“Were you given any way to contact them?” I asked.

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