Page 84 of The Furies

CHAPTER XIII

Pantuff and Veale sat in their car outside the Goodwill store at the Falmouth Shopping Center, watching a bum push a cart filled with his possessions. The bum moved with a sense of mission, his back straight, his head erect, and a surgical mask dangling from one ear. Pantuff felt a peculiar sense of resentment toward him.

Pantuff had not spoken since ending the call with the Sawyer woman. Veale could tell that he was thinking hard, and had elected not to disturb him.

At last Pantuff said, “I think she’s been talking to someone about us.”

* * *

PAULIE FULCI STAYED WITH Sarah Abelli’s car as she headed up to Freeport. He kept an eye out for a late nineties blue Chrysler LHS, which meant that he reacted to any blue vehicles he saw along the way. It made the ride tense, and not a little challenging, but he enjoyed having a purpose, even if he prayed that none of his acquaintances spotted him behind the wheel of the Kia. It was also a tight fit for him, and he was starting to feel claustrophobic. He didn’t know anything about the woman he was following, or why he was following her. He knew only that she’d turned to the private detective for help, and that help had been given, which was enough for him.

Paulie didn’t follow her all the way to her home, but stopped by the Freeport Medical Center and let her proceed up Durham Road alone. His brother had called to say that he had her car in sight so Paulie could be sure she was safe. He killed the engine and tried to make himself comfortable. Tony called him a second time to say that the woman was now inside and all was okay. Paulie’s mother had left an audiobook of a Bill Loehfelm novel in the car, so he put that on to pass the time. Paulie had never been to Staten Island, where the novel was set. Pretty soon into the audiobook he was thinking that, if he ever did visit, he’d bring a gun.

CHAPTER XIV

I spoke briefly to Tony Fulci when he called to confirm that Sarah Abelli was back under her own roof. Earlier he had made a brief recce on the woods by Merrill Brook, as instructed, but had seen no one acting strangely, and found no location that would have permitted an unrestricted view of the Abelli house without drawing attention to the watcher. He had also approached some of the people using the nearby trails who, once they’d recovered from the shock, informed him they hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, although I suspected they had the good sense not to add that at least they hadn’t until Tony showed up. Meanwhile, Sarah had been calling her neighbors to ask if they’d spotted a blue car on the road that morning, or anyone acting suspiciously near her property, but so far no one had seen anything worth mentioning.

As I hung up on Tony, Dave Evans appeared once again on the horizon, looking like a servant who was regularly being forced to impart bad news to the king and was growing weary of the whole exercise.

“You really need to get an office,” he said. “Or a hotel room, given the number of women currently asking after you. There’s another one at the host’s station. She says her name is Marjorie Thombs, and she, like all the rest, has been leaving messages you haven’t answered.”

I was tempted to ask Dave to lie on my behalf, enabling me to slip out the back door. I’d already informed Marjorie Thombs once that I didn’t think I could be of much assistance to her. She’d been disappointed, but had taken the news reasonably well. She and I had been at Scarborough High together, although we hadn’t moved in the same circles. She had never been unkind, just distant. She was good-looking, popular, and graduated in the top 10 percent of the class, meaning she got her name in the Press Herald and made her parents proud. Upon those less fortunate than herself she had bestowed occasional smiles like gold coins from the hands of royalty.

Since I’d never gone to a high school reunion, any knowledge I obtained about SH alumni came from chance encounters or obituary columns. I’d lost track of Marjorie Thombs until she reached out to me in the summer of the previous year. Marjorie had married too young, raised a kid, got divorced, ditched her office job at MaineHealth, and trained to be a psychotherapist, specializing in families and troubled couples. Unfortunately, Melissa, her only child, was intent on being a bad advertisement for her mother’s business. She’d taken up with a guy named Donnie Packard, who for years had been a fixture in the local police logs for the kind of apprentice work that promised more serious offending at a later date: OUIs, operating while license suspended or revoked; unlawful possession of a scheduled drug; and criminal mischief. His record, therefore, consisted of transgressions likely to earn him a fine or ten days in the county jail, and a label as an irritant to society in general, and the police in particular. Lately, though, and as anticipated, I’d noticed Donnie upping the ante with unlawful sexual contact and domestic violence, the latter almost certainly involving his girlfriend, Melissa. Marjorie Thombs would obviously have preferred her daughter to find someone better, which wouldn’t have been too difficult, but Melissa appeared either unable or unwilling to extract herself from the train wreck that was her relationship with Donnie Packard.

I’d tried talking with the daughter as a favor to the mother, but the conversation had lasted about as long as it took Melissa to tell me to mind my own business, which wasn’t long at all since she’d only had to use two words. I returned to Marjorie to notify her that I’d already exhausted all my options, since engaging with Packard would be as pointless as discussing morals with a shark. It wasn’t a tangle in which I cared to involve myself any further. People had to be free to make bad choices, and it was possible that Melissa Thombs actually loved Donnie Packard, in which case beating the shit out of him in an effort to encourage him to seek pastures new—as Marjorie Thombs had suggested, in a roundabout way—would only compound an already unfortunate situation. I gave Marjorie the names of a couple of people who might be of more help to her daughter, if she could be made to see some sense, including Molly Bow at the Tender House women’s shelter up in Bangor, then walked away from the whole affair. I experienced a twinge of guilt, but I’d learned long ago that walking away was often the next-to-worst option, the worst being not walking away.

“What the hell, I’ll talk to her,” I told Dave. “But after this, I’m gone, and I don’t care if Jesus himself comes asking after me.”

My priority now was Sarah Abelli. Anything else was a distraction I didn’t want and wouldn’t countenance.

From a distance, Marjorie Thombs looked as fresh and elegant as I remembered, because she’d always been destined to age gracefully. Up close, though, it was obvious she hadn’t been sleeping as well as she should, and there were lines on her face that I couldn’t recall from last year—dry now, like old riverbeds, but cut by anguish.

I hadn’t even managed to speak before she opened her mouth.

“He’s going to kill her,” she said, and she started to cry.

CHAPTER XV

Bobby Wadlin was beginning to suspect that everyone in the Braycott was going crazy, and was intent on dragging him down with them. The Vietnamese women whom he paid in cash to work as housekeepers had reported that they’d found no trace of a child in the rooms they’d cleaned, although they hadn’t gone into any room on which a DO NOT DISTURB sign was hung. There were three of these, they said. One was room 11, currently home to a drunk named Max Sapon, and Bobby didn’t think that old Max was a candidate for having a kid anywhere near him, not unless the kid was 50 percent alcohol. The room would have to be checked regardless, for fear that Max had accidentally mistaken a kid for a bottle of Admiral Nelson’s Spiced Rum and brought it back to kick-start his day. Max Sapon rarely surfaced to awareness before noon, so Bobby instructed one of the housekeepers to ignore the DO NOT DISTURB sign, hold her nose to ensure the fumes didn’t get to her, and take a quick look around while Max was still too far gone to know any better.

The second room with a sign on the door was 38, in which a couple named the Sussmans was staying. They’d checked in for a few days to attend a funeral, and were so old that it would hardly be worth their while leaving the cemetery afterward. Bobby guessed they were afraid to move from their accommodation unless it was absolutely necessary, and might have pushed the furniture up against the door as well, because better safe than sorry. They were up there now, pissing their britches at the sound of approaching footsteps, but Bobby thought that if he called the room and told them he needed to fix something, they’d let him in. Mind you, if they were willing to let him in, they didn’t have anything to hide, including a child.

Which left the final room, 29, the one occupied by Lyle Pantuff and Gilman Veale. Bobby knew that the Pantuffs and Veales of this world didn’t put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on their door and not mean it, and would be sure to take it amiss were someone to ignore it. Then again, what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them, and while what passed for Bobby Wadlin’s conscience was barely a flicker in the void of his soul, it did allow for some small protective instinct when it came to children, one that now also extended to himself. If it turned out that Pantuff and Veale did in fact have a child in their room, and that child was there under duress—which was more than plausible, Pantuff and Veale not striking Bobby as the paternal or avuncular types—then the ramifications might be severe for the Braycott. Should Bobby be discovered to have ignored claims that a child was on the premises, and the child came to some harm, he’d be tied up with lawyers until doomsday.

Esther Vogt had returned to her quarters, and Phil Hardiman had gone off on urgent narcotic business, although not before reminding Bobby that the Vogt woman’s contribution to the debate might have clinched the deal on his requested discount. Very reluctantly, Bobby once again opened the door separating his desk and apartment from the rest of his kingdom, removed his key chain from his belt, and locked the front entrance. He then placed a handwritten sign against the glass, indicating that the desk would be unattended for a short time and advising anyone waiting to enter, or claim their room key, to have some “patiens.”

One of the housekeepers, Thi, returned to say that Max Sapon was still lost to the world, and his room contained no children, empty bottles not counting as offspring. Bobby then called the Sussmans and asked if it would be okay for one of his staff to enter their room in order to check for a possible leak. They didn’t sound enthused by the prospect, so Bobby threw in an offer of some complimentary cookies and a bag of potato chips, and they acquiesced. Bobby and Thi went upstairs, and Bobby waited by the Sussmans’ room while Thi performed a search on the pretext of examining the pipes. He was really hoping that the Sussmans had smuggled a grandchild in with them because then he could have avoided entering room 29. Much to Bobby’s disgust, God didn’t elect to smile on him, or was otherwise occupied, because the Sussmans hadn’t even unpacked their suitcase, and the bed was barely used. Thi told Bobby that she thought they might have slept on the comforter. If they had, Bobby hoped they’d done so fully clothed, because the comforters got laundered only every couple of months. He shuddered to think what might have shown up on one of them under UV light.

With nothing else for it, he ordered Thi to get back to cleaning, and to make sure that she stayed away from the lobby. The last thing he wanted was for Pantuff and Veale to return to the Braycott, demand entry, and return to their room while Bobby was still inside. That would not end well for him.

Then, like a condemned man ascending the scaffold, he made his way to room 29.

CHAPTER XVI

I didn’t ask Dave to bring coffee for Marjorie Thombs, or even a glass of water, but sat her down and took the time to listen to what she had to say. According to her testimony, Donnie Packard’s disposition had deteriorated considerably in recent weeks, as had his behavior toward his girlfriend. If he’d left bruises in the past, he’d made sure they were in places where they wouldn’t be seen, but now Melissa Thombs was sporting marks on her face and arms—or had been when last her mother saw her, because Packard was also discouraging Melissa from meeting her mother, or anyone else. Only considerable perseverance had enabled Marjorie to gain access to her daughter, and then just briefly. Packard had even taken to confiscating Melissa’s phone to ensure she couldn’t make or receive calls on the sly, and when her mother did manage to speak with her, Packard listened in on their conversations. Melissa had succeeded in calling her mother a couple of times from pay phones, but their exchanges were inevitably hurried, and it was hard for Marjorie to get her to open up. All Marjorie could say for sure was that Packard’s current drug of choice was Spice, or synthetic marijuana; he was doing as much of it as he could afford, and at the highest potency. And while Melissa, she thought, was finally coming around to the idea that Donnie Packard might not be a keeper, he had now made her a virtual prisoner in their home, so her opinion was incidental.

Despite its name, synthetic marijuana is unrelated to marijuana itself, and its effects are completely different. Even relatively low-strength Spice heightens anxiety, and stronger doses induce paranoia and psychosis. If Donnie Packard was doing as much of it as Marjorie Thombs claimed, he stood a good chance of killing himself. More unhappily, he might end up taking his girlfriend with him.

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