‘Why?’ asked Louis.
‘Because there’s another version of the list on it,’ I said. ‘Barbara Kelly was killed because the people she worked for found out that she was trying to repent, to save herself by revealing what she knew. Her list is gone, but that list in the forest remains. It’s probably older than Kelly’s, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still worth securing.’
‘But we don’t know where the plane is,’ said Walter.
‘You could call your friend, Special Agent Ross, at the FBI,’ I said to Epstein. ‘He could look at satellite images, try to track changes in the forest that might reveal the path of a fallen airplane.’
‘No,’ said Epstein.
‘Don’t you trust him?’
‘I trust him implicitly, but as I told you yesterday, we don’t know who else is on that list. It may be that even the FBI is infected. The risk of alerting them to what we’re trying to do is too high.’ He leaned forward on the table, clasping his hands together. ‘Are you sure that the Vetters woman doesn’t know the location of the plane?’
‘She told me that her father didn’t say.’
‘And you believe her?’
‘Her father and his buddy were lost when they came across it. It may be that he gave some more specific indication of the area to her before he died, although if he did then she didn’t share it with me.’
‘You have to go back to her and discover everything that she knows. Everything. Meanwhile, we’ll try to trace the movements of Barbara Kelly and find out all that we can about her. It may be that she secreted away a copy of the list before she died.’
I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face. Epstein might have been right about Kelly making a second copy of the list and storing it away from her house, but if she did I was pretty certain that she gave up its location under torture.
‘Marielle Vetters,’ I said.
Epstein looked confused.
‘What?’ he said.
‘That’s the name of the woman who gave me that list. Her father’s name was Harlan, and his friend’s name was Paul Scollay. They come from a town called Falls End, at the edge of the Great North Woods.’
Epstein’s face cleared.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked, although I think he already knew the answer to the question.
‘Because I trust you.’
‘Even after what happened last night?’
‘Maybe especially after what happened last night. I didn’t like it at the time, and I don’t want a repeat of it, but I understand why you reacted the way that you did. We’re on the same side, rabbi.’
‘The side of light,’ he said.
‘Lightish,’ I corrected him. ‘I’ll talk to Marielle, and to Ernie Scollay, just in case his brother might have let something slip over the years. You’ll keep your people away from them, though.’
‘Only Liat will know their names.’
‘And Liat doesn’t tell, right?’
‘No, Mr Parker, Liat doesn’t tell. She is very good at keeping secrets.’
He glanced at Louis and Walter. There was more than he wanted to say about this.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of them.’
‘She spoke to me only of your wounds,’ he said. ‘Nothing more. And I did not ask her to sleep with you, in case you were wondering. She did that for her own reasons.’
‘I knew you got laid,’ said Louis’s voice from behind me. He turned to Walter. ‘I knew he got laid.’
‘I didn’t know he got laid,’ said Walter. ‘Nobody tells me anything.’
‘Shut up, both of you,’ I said.
‘You might also be interested to know that she believed in you from the start,’ said Epstein. ‘It was I who had doubts, not her. She had none, but she indulged an old man’s fears. She said that she knew from the moment she took you inside herself.’
‘Goddamn . . .’
‘I told you to shut up.’
‘So,’ said Epstein. He stood, and buttoned his jacket. ‘We move forward. You’ll talk to the woman today?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’d prefer to speak to her in person, her and Scollay. Along the way, though, I may stop off to meet with a lawyer in Lynn.’
‘Eldritch,’ said Epstein. He didn’t look pleased to be speaking that name.
‘I’ll be careful what I tell him.’
‘I suspect that whatever we know, he already knows more: he and his client.’
‘My enemy’s enemy –’ I said.
– ‘may be my enemy too,’ Epstein concluded. ‘We don’t share their aims.’
‘Sometimes I think we do. We may even share some of their methods.’
Epstein chose not to argue further, and he and I shook hands.
‘We have a car waiting for you outside,’ I said. ‘Louis will escort you back to Brooklyn.’
‘And my young friends?’
‘They’ll be fine,’ I assured him. ‘Well, mostly fine.’
I planned to fly up to Boston a couple of hours later. Louis and Angel would drive up in a day or two, along with their toys. In the meantime, I went back over what Marielle Vetters had told me, because there was one detail of her tale that stood out, and only because it conflicted with another story I had heard many years before. It might have been nothing, a piece of misremembering on my part or on the part of the man who had shared the tale with me, but if Marielle Vetters genuinely did not know anything more about the location of the plane it was possible that I could find another means of narrowing down the search area.
It would just mean talking to a man about a ghost.