his side, watching the cars pass by on their way to and from Prouts Neck, and Higgins Beach, and Ferry Beach: locals all.
It was strange, but I had often stood by my father’s grave and felt no sense of his presence; similarly for my mother, who had outlived him by only a few years. They were elsewhere, long gone, but something of my grandfather lingered amid the Scarborough woods and marshes, for he loved that place and it had always brought him peace. I knew that his God – for each man has his own God – let him wander there sometimes, perhaps with the ghost of one of the many dogs that had kept him company through his life yapping at his heels, scaring the birds from the rushes and chasing them for the joy of it. My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a man to be reunited with his dogs in the next life then He was no God worth worshiping; that if a dog did not have a soul, then nothing had.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’
‘An airplane, Mr Parker,’ said Marielle Vetters. ‘They found an airplane.’
We were in a back booth of the Bear, with nobody else near us. Behind the bar, Dave Evans, the owner and manager, was wrestling with a troublesome beer tap, and in the kitchen the line chefs were preparing for the evening’s food orders. I had closed off the area in which we sat with a couple of chairs so that we would remain undisturbed. Dave never objected to such temporary changes of use. Anyway, he would have more significant worries that evening: at a table near the door sat the Fulci brothers with their mother, who was celebrating her birthday.
The Fulcis were almost as wide as they were tall, had cornered the market in polyester clothing that always looked a size too small for them, and were medicated to prevent excessive mood swings, which meant only that any damage caused by nonexcessive mood swings would probably be limited to property and not people. Their mother was a tiny woman with silver hair, and it seemed impossible that those narrow hips could have squeezed out two massive sons who had, it was said, required specially-built cribs to contain them. Whatever the mechanics of their birth, the Fulcis loved their mother a lot, and always wanted her to be happy, but especially so on her birthday. Thus it was that they were nervous about the impending celebrations, which made Dave nervous, which made the line chefs nervous. One of them had already cut himself with a carving knife when informed that he was to be solely responsible for looking after the Fulci family’s orders that evening, and had requested permission to lie down for a while in order to calm his nerves.
Welcome, I thought, to just another night at the Bear.
‘You mind me asking you something?’ Ernie Scollay had said, shortly after he and Marielle had arrived and I’d offered them a drink, which they’d declined, and then a coffee, which they’d accepted.
‘Not at all,’ I replied.
‘You got business cards, right?’
‘Yes.’
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.’
3
They would never even have found the airplane had it not been for the deer; the deer, and the worst shot of Paul Scollay’s life.
As a bow hunter, Scollay had few equals. Harlan Vetters had never known a man like him. Even as a boy, he’d had a way with a bow, and with a little proper training Harlan believed that Paul could even have been an Olympic contender. He was a natural with the weapon, the bow becoming an extension of his arm, of himself. His accuracy wasn’t merely a matter of pride to him. Although he loved hunting, he never killed anything that he couldn’t eat, and he aimed to despatch his prey with the very minimum of pain. Harlan felt the same way, and for that reason he had always preferred a good rifle with which to hunt; he didn’t trust himself with a bow. During archery hunting season in October he preferred to accompany his friend as a spectator, admiring his skill without ever feeling the need to participate.
