I removed one from my wallet, just to convince him of my bona fides. The card was very simple, black on white, with my name, Charlie Parker, in bold, along with a cell phone number, a secure email address, and the nebulous phrase ‘Investigative Services’.
‘So you got a business?’
‘Just about.’
He gestured at his surroundings.
‘Then how come you don’t have a proper office?’
‘I get asked that a lot.’
‘Well, maybe if you had an office, then you wouldn’t get asked it so much,’ he said, and it was hard to argue with his logic.
‘Offices are expensive to keep. If I had one, I’d have to spend time in it to justify renting it. That seems kind of like putting the cart before the horse.’
He considered this, then nodded. Maybe it was my clever use of an agricultural metaphor, although I doubted it. More likely it was my reluctance to waste money on an office that I didn’t need, in which case I wouldn’t be inclined to pass on any associated costs to my clients, one Ernest Scollay, Esq., included.
But that was earlier, and now we had moved on to the purpose of the meeting. I had listened to Marielle tell me of her father’s final days, and her description of the rescue of the boy named Barney Shore, and even though she had stumbled a little as she told of the dead girl who had tried to lure Barney deeper into the forest, she had kept eye contact and had not apologized for the oddness of the tale. And I, in turn, had expressed no skepticism, for I had heard the story of the girl of the North Woods from another many years before, and I believed it to be true.
After all, I had witnessed stranger things myself.
But now she had come to the airplane, and the tension that had been growing between her and Ernie Scollay, the brother of her father’s best friend, became palpable, like a static charge in the air. This, I felt, had been the subject of much discussion, even argument, between them. Scollay appeared to pull back slightly in the booth, clearly distancing himself from what was about to be said. He had come with her because he had no choice. Marielle Vetters planned to reveal some, if not all, of what her father had told her, and Scollay had known that it was better to be here and witness what transpired than to sit at home fretting about what might be said in his absence.
‘Did it have markings?’ I asked.
‘Markings?’
‘Numbers and letters to identify it. It’s called an ‘‘N-number’’ here, and it’s usually on the fuselage, and always begins with the letter ‘‘N’’ if the plane was registered in the United States.’
‘Oh. No, my father couldn’t see any identification marks, and most of the plane was hidden anyway.’
That didn’t sound right. Nobody was going to fly a plane without registration markings of some kind.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Very. He said that it had lost part of a wing when it came down, though, and most of the tail was gone.’
‘Did he describe the plane to you?’
‘He went looking for pictures of similar aircraft, and thought that it might have been a Piper Cheyenne or something like it. It was a twin-engined plane, with four or five windows along the side.’
I used my phone to pull up an image of the plane in question, and what I saw seemed to confirm Marielle’s statement about the absence of markings. The plane had its registration number on the vertical fin of its tail: if that was gone, and any other markings were on the underside of the wing, then the plane would have been unidentifiable from the outside.
‘What did you mean when you said that most of the plane was hidden?’ I asked. ‘Had someone tried to conceal its presence?’
Marielle looked at Ernie Scollay. He shrugged.
‘Best tell the man, Mari,’ he said. ‘Won’t be much stranger than what he’s heard already.’
‘It wasn’t a person or people that did it,’ she said. ‘My father told me that it was the forest itself. He said the woods were conspiring to swallow the plane.’