‘You could join the Mile High Club,’ said Harlan.
‘I got a fear of flying,’ said Jackie. ‘I was hoping we could just stay on the ground and do our business there.’
‘Jackie, how old are you?’
‘Seventy-two next birthday.’
‘You got a dicky heart. Any business you did with that woman would probably kill you.’
‘I know, but it’s how I’d like to go. If I survived, my wife would kill me anyway. Better I go in the arms of a woman like that than give my Lois the pleasure of beating me to death after.’
And so the men fed Darina Flores tales both real and fantastic, and she in turn fed their fantasies, and a pleasant night was had by all except Ernie Scollay, who wasn’t drinking at the time because he was on medication, and who had noticed that Darina Flores barely sipped at her vodka tonic, and her smile rose no further than her upper lip, never even coming close to those extraordinary eyes that grew darker as the night drew on, and she had long ago stopped writing and was now listening yet not listening, just as she was smiling yet not smiling, and drinking yet not drinking.
So Ernie tired of the game before the others, and he excused himself and left. He was walking to his truck when he saw April Schmitt, who owned the town’s other motel, the Vacationland Repose, standing outside the motel office, smoking a cigarette in a manner that could only be described as distracted. April didn’t smoke much, Ernie knew, this knowledge based upon the fact that he and April were content to share a bed when the mood struck them, each of them being generally inclined to solitude yet still requiring a little company on occasion. April only smoked when she was unhappy, and Ernie preferred April to be happy as that state of mind was more conducive to bed-sharing, and Darina Flores, falsely affable or not, had put him in the mood for some female company.
‘You okay, hon?’ he asked, laying a hand gently on the small of her back, the heel of it resting upon the swell of her still fine buttocks.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said.
‘You’re smoking. It’s never nothing when you’re smoking.’
‘There was a guy came asking for a room. I didn’t care for the look of him so I told him we were full up.’
She took a drag on the cigarette, then looked at it in disgust before throwing it to the ground, still only half smoked, and stamping it out. She wrapped her arms across herself and shivered, even though it was a warm evening. Tentatively, Ernie put an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him. She was shaking, and April wasn’t a woman who scared easily. Her fear drove any carnal thoughts from his mind. April was a frightened woman. Ernie loved her in his quiet way, and he did not wish her to be frightened.
‘He asked me why the “Vacancy” light was on if we were full,’ said April. ‘I said that I’d forgotten to turn it off, was all. I could see him looking at the lot. I mean, there are only four cars in it, so he knew that I was lying. He just smiled, the ugly piece of shit. He smiled, and his fingers moved, and it was like he was stripping the clothes from my body, and the flesh from my bones. I swear, I felt his fingers on me, in me, in my . . . in my private parts. He was hurting me, and he wasn’t even touching me. Christ!’
She started to cry. Ernie had never seen her cry before. It shocked him more than what she had said, the swearing included, because April didn’t swear much either. He held her tighter, and felt her sobbing against him.
‘Fat, bald son of a bitch,’ she said, gasping the words out. ‘Piece of shit bastard, touching me like that, hurting me like that, all over a fucking motel room.’
‘You want me to call the cops?’ asked Ernie.
‘And tell them what? That a man looked at me funny, that he assaulted me without laying a hand on me?’
‘I don’t know. This guy, what did he look like?’
‘Fat. Fat and ugly. He had a thing on his throat, all swollen like a toad’s neck, and he had a tattoo on his wrist. I saw it when he pointed at the sign. It was a fork, a three-pronged fork, like he thought he was the devil himself. Bastard. Miserable rapist bastard . . .’
‘What?’ Ernie had stopped talking. ‘What is it?’
He had seen the look on my face. I could not hide it.
I know who he was. I know his name.
After all, I killed him.
‘Nothing,’ I said, and he caught the lie, but chose to set it aside for now.
Brightwell. Brightwell the Believer.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Finish the story.’
Darina Flores left after two days with little to show for her efforts but a hole in her expense account, real or imagined, and a store of old tales that were barely on nodding terms with reality. If she was disappointed, she didn’t show it. Instead she passed around some cards with her phone number printed on them, and invited anyone who remembered anything useful or pertinent to her article to call her. Some of the more optimistic men of the town, strengthened by a beer or three, tried calling the number in the days and weeks after she left but got through only to an answering service on which Darina Flores’s dulcet tones invited them to leave a name, number, and message, with a promise to get back to them as soon as possible.
But Darina Flores never called anyone back, and over time the men grew tired of the game.
Now, squatting in the wreckage of a plane in the Great North Woods, Harlan and Paul thought back on Darina Flores for the first time in years, and once the floodgates of memory were opened a torrent of related incidents followed, each inconsequential in itself but suddenly meaningful when taken as a whole in the light of what they had just found: city men and women who hired guides for hunting or hiking or, in one unlikely case, bird-watching, but who seemed to have little interest in nature while being very clear on the areas that they wished to explore, to the extent of marking them carefully in the form of grids on their maps. Harlan recalled Matthew Risen, a guide since deceased, talking to him of a woman whose skin was a virtual gallery of tattoos that seemed almost to move in the forest light. She had not spoken a single word to him during the long hours of a deer hunt that ended with a single desultory shot at a distant buck, a shot that might possibly have scared a squirrel who was halfway up the tree struck by the bullet but posed no danger to the deer itself. Instead, her partner did all of the talking, a garrulous man with red lips and a pale waxen face who reminded Risen of an emaciated clown and never even unslung his rifle, chatting and joking even as he gently overruled his guide’s choice of direction, moving them away from any deer and toward . . .
What? Risen had not been able to figure that out, but now Harlan and Paul thought they knew.
‘They were looking for the plane,’ said Paul. ‘All of them, looking for the plane, and the money.’
But it was Harlan who wondered if it was less the money that interested those strangers than the names and the numbers on the papers in the satchel, as he and Paul Scollay sat by the fire that they had made, the barest flicker of it reflected on that black water. He kept coming back to the list of names even as they discussed the cash and those who had come to seek it. The list made him uneasy, but for no reason that he could figure out.
‘You could use the money,’ said Paul. ‘You know, what with Angeline getting sick and all.’
Harlan’s wife was showing the first signs of Parkinson’s. She was already in the middle stage of Alzheimer’s and Harlan was finding it harder to take care of her needs. Meanwhile Paul was always being chased by some bill or another. There would be hard times ahead as old age tightened its hold on them and theirs, and neither man had the kind of funds that would permit any difficulties to be handled with ease. Yes, thought Harlan, I could use the money. They both could. That still didn’t make it right.
‘I say we keep it,’ said Paul. ‘It stays out here much longer and it will sink into the ground along with that plane, or it’ll be found by someone even less worthy of it than we are.’
He tried to make a joke of it, but it didn’t quite work.
‘It’s not ours to keep,’ said Harlan. ‘We ought to tell the police about this.’
‘Why? If this was honest money then honest men would have come looking for it. It would have been all over the news that a plane had gone down. They’d have been scouring the woods looking for wreckage or survivors. Instead, what did we get but some woman pretending to be a reporter, and a swarm of creeps who were no more hunters or birders than the man in the moon?’
The bag lay between them. Paul had left it open, probably deliberately, so that Harlan could see the money inside.
‘What if they find out?’ said Harlan, and his voice almost cracked as he spoke. Is this how evil is done, he asked himself, in small increments, one foot after the next, softly, softly until you’ve convinced yourself that wrong is right, and right is wrong, because you’re not a bad person and you don’t do bad things?
‘We use it only as necessary,’ said Paul. ‘We’re too old to be buying sports cars and fancy clothes. We just use it to make the years that are left a little easier for ourselves and our families. If we’re careful, then nobody will ever find out.’
Harlan didn’t believe that. Oh, he wanted to, but secretly he didn’t. It was why, in the end, though they took the money, he chose to leave the satchel where it was, with its lists of names intact. Harlan sensed their importance. He hoped that, if the plane was eventually found by those who had been seeking it, they would accept his offering as a form of recompense for their theft, an acknowledgment of what was truly important. Perhaps if the papers were left for them, they wouldn’t come looking for the money.
That had been a long, long night. When they weren’t talking about the money, they were talking about the pilot or pilots. Where had they gone? If they had survived the crash, why hadn’t they taken the money and the satchel with them when they went to look for help? Why leave them in the plane?
It was Paul who went back inside, Paul who examined one of the passenger seats and found that its arms had been broken, Paul who found two pairs of handcuffs discarded beneath the pilot’s seat. He showed all that he had discovered to Harlan.