thick, and she didn’t want to lose sight of her husband. The only thing worse than being in their current situation would be to find herself in it alone. He was setting a fast pace now. That was Chris all over. Once he eventually got an idea fixed in his head, he’d pursue it full speed to its conclusion. Like a lot of men she knew, he couldn’t follow more than one clear line of thought for any length of time, but he had a determination that she sometimes lacked.
‘Wait up, Chris,’ she said.
‘We’ll lose him.’
‘You’ll lose
He paused, his left hand outstretched to her from the top of a small incline while he continued to look ahead.
‘Is he still there?’
‘No. Hold on, he’s back again. He’s staring at us.’
‘Where?’ She strained her eyes, squinting into the forest gloom. ‘I still can’t see him.’
‘I think he’s raising his arm. He wants us to follow him. Yep, that’s definitely it. He’s showing us the way.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘What else would he be doing?’
‘Uh, leading us
‘Why would he want to do that?’
‘I don’t know. He might want to steal from us.’
‘He wouldn’t have to lead us deeper into the forest to do that. He could just hold us up right here.’
Chris had a point, but she still felt uneasy.
‘Let’s just be careful, okay?’
‘I’m always careful.’
‘No you’re not. That’s how I got pregnant with Danielle, remember?’
He flashed that grin at her, the one that had attracted her back at college, the one that had made her climb into bed with him the first time, and she responded in kind with that sly, sexy smile that always caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise up, and other parts of him to rise too, and both of them made the same wish: that they were in bed together with a bottle of wine half-drunk beside them, and the taste of it on their lips and tongues as they kissed.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said.
‘I believe you,’ she replied. ‘But no more hiking for a while after this, promise?’
‘Promise.’
She took his hand, and he squeezed it. As she stood beside him she saw the man for the first time. Perhaps it was the cloud cover combining with the natural gloom of the forest, but it seemed to her that he was dressed in some kind of a cloak. He wore a hood over his head, so that she could not see his face. He was clearly beckoning to them, though. Her husband had been right about that.
She felt an ache in her stomach, a cold pain. She’d always had a good sense about other people, although Chris just tended to smile indulgently when she spoke of it. Men were different. They were less attuned to their own potential vulnerability. Women needed that added awareness of the dangers that surrounded them. She’d passed it on to their girls, she hoped, attuning them to it. This man meant them some harm: she was sure of it. She was just glad that the girls were safe with her parents in Albany and not out here in the woods. She tried to speak, but then Chris’s hand slipped from hers, and he was moving again, following the slowly waving figure, following him deeper and deeper into the woods.
And she followed after.
10
It was the day after my meeting with Marielle Vetters and Ernie Scollay.
The month of November was set to die a sticky death, it seemed. A snowstorm had hit early in the month, presaging a long, cold winter, but no further snows had followed, and slowly the temperature had climbed until there were days when a sweater seemed too much to wear, and nights when the bars let their doors stand open to allow a little air to circulate. Now there was at least a north wind blowing, and from the window of my office at home I watched the cordgrass of the Scarborough marshes perform delicate dances at the breeze’s call.
On my desk before me was the typewritten list given to me by Marielle. It consisted of seven names: six men and one woman. Beside four of those names were sums of money, ranging from $3,000 to $45,000. The other three names each had the word ‘Contacted’ handwritten beside them, followed by ‘Accepted’ in two cases, and ‘Refused’ in one. Just one of the names was familiar to me, and then only after I had cross-checked a box number to make sure that it was the same person: Aaron Newman was a reporter with one of the New York newspapers, a political writer with what appeared to be extremely good sources. His profile had risen recently following a series of articles exposing a married congressman’s contacts with a pair of nineteen-year-old boys whom he may or may not have paid for sexual favors. Naturally, the congressman’s career had immediately gone down the toilet, and his wife had helped to flush the bowl by failing to appear at any of his teary-eyed press conferences. The flock is easily led: show them a penitent with a forgiving spouse and they’ll consider forgiving too, but give them a penitent alone on a platform and they’ll start looking for rocks to throw. Newman’s name did not have a sum of money beside it, only the word ‘Accepted.’
The name of a second man, Davis Tate, rang a bell somewhere, and the miracle of Google did the rest. Tate was a talk radio shock jock, a minor celebrity on the extreme right, the kind who gave a bad name to ordinary conservatives who didn’t immediately hate on sight anyone who wasn’t like them in race, creed, or sexual orientation. Tate’s name had a letter ‘A’ handwritten after it, along with three asterisks. Either he was a very good student or Davis Tate had accepted, or been accepted, with more than usual enthusiasm.
One of the others, a woman called Solene Escott, had a twelve-digit number beside her name, but it didn’t work as a telephone number, and when I tried an Internet search on it I came up with nothing, even when I included her name alongside. A further trawl produced a handful of Solene Escotts, including a banker, a writer, and a housewife who had died in a car accident in October 2001 somewhere north of Milford, New Hampshire.
I looked again at those twelve digits beside Solene Escott’s name, which, unlike the others on the list, was typed in red, then separated them into two six-digit numbers. The first set ended in ‘65’, the second in ‘01’. The first numbers conformed to the date of Solene Escott’s birth, according to her obituary, and the second set matched the date on which she died. But according to the newspaper found in the plane, it had gone down in July 2001, three months before Solene Escott perished. Either someone connected to that plane had a direct line to God, or Solene Escott’s death had been planned well in advance.
The obituary also gave me the name of Solene Escott’s husband. Solene had kept her own name when she married. Her husband’s name was Kenneth Chan, apparently known to his friends and associates as Kenny. His name was typed above Solene’s on the list.
Beside it was written the word ‘Accepted’.
It took me another hour to come up with a possible identity for one further name on the list, and again it was Solene Escott who provided the link. The only person with ‘Refused’ beside his name was one Brandon Felice. A Brandon Felice had been killed in a gas station robbery outside of Newburyport, Massachusetts in March 2002. There was no apparent reason for his death. According to an eyewitness, a salesman who had been drinking coffee in his car across the street when the robbery occurred, Felice had been pumping gas into his Mercedes when two masked men pulled up in a Buick, both armed with pistols. One of the men ordered the attendant to empty the register while the other forced Felice and a woman, Antonia Viga, who had been putting air in the tires of her minivan, to lie on the ground. When the first raider emerged with the cash, having first shot and seriously wounded the attendant, the second walked to where Felice and Viga were lying and shot both of them in the back of the head. The men then drove off, and the Buick was later found burned out off Route 1. The Buick had been stolen earlier from Back Bay in Boston. The raiders netted a total of $163 in the course of the robbery, and were never found.
