‘Because you didn’t want anyone to wonder why you might need the services of a private investigator?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Lots of people hire investigators, for lots of reasons. Cheating husbands—’
‘I’m not married anymore. And, for the record, I cheated on him.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘Are you shocked?’ she asked.
‘No, I just wish he’d had my card. Business is business.’
It made her laugh.
‘He was a jerk. Worse than a jerk. He deserved it. So why else do people hire you?’ she said.
‘Insurance fraud, missing persons, background checks.’
‘It sounds dull.’
‘It’s safe, for the most part.’
‘But not all the time. Not for the kind of investigation that ends up with your name in the papers, the kind that ends with people dying.’
‘No, but sometimes investigations start out as one thing and mutate into another, usually because someone tells lies right from the start.’
‘The client?’
‘It’s been known to happen.’
‘I won’t lie to you, Mr Parker.’
‘That’s reassuring to hear, unless that itself was a lie.’
‘My, the world has taken its toll on your idealism, hasn’t it?’
‘I’m still idealistic. I just keep it safe behind a carapace of skepticism.’
‘And I don’t want you to hunt anyone down either. At least, I don’t think so. Not in that sense, anyway. Ernie may disagree with me on that one.’
‘Did Mr Scollay try to dissuade you from coming here?’ I asked.
‘How did you know that?’
‘A trick of the trade. He’s not very good at hiding his feelings. Most honest men aren’t.’
‘He believed that we should keep quiet about what we knew. The damage was done, in his view. He didn’t want his brother’s memory besmirched in any way, or my father’s either.’
‘But you didn’t agree.’
‘A crime was committed, Mr Parker. Maybe more than one.’
‘Once again, why not go to the police?’
‘If everyone went to the police, you’d be a full-time bartender and a part-time private investigator.’
‘Or no private investigator at all.’
Ernie Scollay was returning from the men’s room. He removed his baseball cap as he walked and ran his fingers back through his thick white hair. If I was conscious of a tension between him and Marielle, I was more conscious of the fact that Ernie was frightened. So was Marielle, but she hid it better. Ernie Scollay: the last of the honest men, but not so honest that he didn’t want to keep his brother’s secrets hidden. He glanced at Marielle and me, trying to ascertain if we had been discussing anything that we shouldn’t have while he was absent.
‘Where were we?’ he asked.
‘At the clearing,’ I said.
Paul and Harlan looked to the clearing. The buck lay dead at their feet, but the fear it had emanated was still with them. Harlan tightened his grip on his rifle; there were four bullets left in his magazine, and Paul had the same. Something had spooked the buck, perhaps drawn by the smell of its blood, and they didn’t want to face a bear with their hands hanging or, God forbid, a mountain lion, because they’d both heard stories about the possible return of big cats to the state. Nobody had seen one for certain for the best part of twenty years, but they didn’t want to be the first.
They stepped around the remains of the buck and advanced on the open space. It was only as they drew nearer that they smelled it: dampness, and rotting vegetation. A body of still black water lay before them, so dark that it was more pitch than liquid, with the promise of a viscosity to match. Staring into it, Harlan caught only the barest reflection of his own face. The water appeared to absorb more protons than it should have, sucking in the beams of their flashlights and what little illumination filtered through the branches above, allowing almost nothing of it to escape. Harlan took a step back as he felt his sense of balance faltering, and he bumped into Paul, who was standing directly behind him. The shock caused him to teeter, and for a moment he was about to fall into the pool. The ground seemed to tilt beneath his feet. His rifle fell to the ground and he raised his arms instinctively and flapped them at the air, like a bird striving to escape a predator. Then Paul’s hands were on his torso, pulling him back, and Harlan found a tree against which to lean, circling its trunk with his arms in a desperate lover’s embrace.
‘I thought I was going in,’ he said. ‘I thought I was going to drown.’
No, not drown: suffocate, or worse, for just because he was certain that no living thing moved through its depths (Certain? Certain how? Certain north was north, and east was east? But such certainties did not apply in this place; of that, at least, he was convinced.), it did not mean that the pool was empty. It stank of malevolence, of the possibility that something more than the sucking power of its mass might drag you down if you fell into it. Harlan was suddenly aware of the silence of this place. He was conscious too that night was coming on quickly: he could see no stars in the sky, and the damn compass was gone all to hell. They could be stuck out here, and he didn’t want that to happen, not one damn little bit.
‘We ought to leave,’ said Harlan. ‘This place feels wrong.’
He realized that Paul had not spoken since they found the pool. His friend stood with his back to him, the muzzle of his gun now pointing at the ground.
‘You hear me?’ said Harlan. ‘I think we should get out of here. It’s bad. This whole damned place is—’
‘Look,’ said Paul. He stepped to one side and shined his flashlight across the expanse of the pool, and Harlan saw it.
It was the shape that marked it out, although the forest had done its best to obscure its lines. At first glance, it looked only like the trunk of a fallen tree, one much larger than those that surrounded it, but a portion of one wing protruded from the foliage, and the flashlight made parts of the fuselage glitter. Neither of the men knew much about airplanes, but they could see that it was a small twin-engine prop, now minus the starboard engine, lost during the crash along with most of that wing. It lay on its belly to the north of the pool, its nosecone hard against a big pine. The forest had closed over the path that it must have torn through the trees upon its descent, although that in itself was not so remarkable. What was strange, and what gave the men pause, was that the plane was almost entirely covered with vegetation. Vines had wrapped their tendrils around it, ferns had shaded it, shrubs had masked it. The very ground itself appeared to be slowly absorbing it, for the plane had sunk some distance into the earth, and the lower portion of the port engine was already lost. The plane must have been here for decades, Harlan thought, but the portions of it that were visible through the greenery did not appear that old. There was no rust, no obvious decay. As he would tell his family during his final days, it was as though the forest were absorbing the plane, and had accelerated its growth accordingly so that this end might be more rapidly achieved.
Paul began walking toward the wreckage. Harlan released his hold on the tree trunk, and gave the pool a wide berth as he followed his friend. Paul used his rifle butt to test the earth around the slowly sinking plane, but the earth was hard, not moist.
‘It’ll soften during the spring thaw,’ said Harlan. ‘That might explain the way the plane is going down.’
‘I guess,’ said Paul, but he did not sound convinced.
All the windows of the plane were covered with ivy, including those at the cockpit. For the first time, Harlan acknowledged the possibility that there might still be bodies in there. The thought made him shudder.
It took them a while to find the door, so thick was the cloak of vegetation. They used their hunting knives to hack at the ivy. It came away reluctantly, coating their gloves with a sticky residue that gave off a sharp, caustic odor. Paul got some of it on his exposed forearm, and he would carry the burn scar that it left until the day that he took his own life.
When they had exposed the shape of the door, they found that the sinking of the plane had left an inch or more of it beneath the earth, so they had to hack at the ground to make enough space for the door to open out a little. By that time the blackness was upon them.
‘Maybe we ought to come back when it’s light,’ said Harlan.
‘You think we’d even be able to find this place again?’ asked Paul. ‘It’s not like any part of the woods I’ve ever seen.’
Harlan took in their surroundings. The trees, a mix of tall evergreens and huge, misshapen deciduous, were older here. This area had never been logged. Paul was right: Harlan couldn’t even have said where they were, exactly. North: that was all he knew, but this was Maine, and there was a lot of north to go around.
‘We can’t find our way back in the dark anyway,’ said Paul, ‘not with the compass on the fritz and no stars to guide us. I figure we got to stay till first light.’
‘Stay here?’ Harlan didn’t like the sound of that at all. He glanced at the black pool, its surface smooth as a plate of obsidian. Vague memories of old horror movies came to him, B-features in which creatures emerged from ponds just like that one, but when he tried to put a name to the films he found that he could not, and he wondered if he had made up those images all by himself.
‘You got a better idea?’ said Paul. ‘We have supplies. We can light a fire. Wouldn’t be the first time we spent a night in the woods.’
But not in a place like this, Harlan wanted to say, not with a pool of not-quite-water calling to us, and the wreck of a plane that might well be a tomb for anyone still inside. If they could get far enough away from it then the compass might begin to function properly again, or, if the sky cleared, they could navigate their way home by the stars. He tried to find the moon, but the clouds had smothered all, and there was not even the faintest glow to be seen.
Harlan looked at the plane once again. Paul had his hand on the exterior handle of the door.
‘You ready for this?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Harlan, ‘but I reckon you’d best go ahead anyway. We’ve come this far. We may as well find out if there’s anyone left in there.’
Paul turned the handle and yanked at the door. Nothing happened. Either it was stuck fast, or it was locked from the inside. Paul tried again, his face contorted with effort. There was a grinding sound, and the door came free. Harlan raised his hand to his face, expecting the smell of dead, but there was only the musty odor of damp carpets.
Paul poked his head inside and passed the flashlight’s beam around the interior. After a couple of seconds, he climbed in.
‘Take a look at this,’ he called to Harlan.
Harlan steeled himself, and followed his friend into the plane.
The empty plane.
‘Empty?’ I said.
‘Empty,’ said Marielle Vetters. ‘There were no bodies, nothing. I think that helped. It made it easier for them to keep the money.’