The Wrath of Angels

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.

‘Now how do you suppose that happened?’

And Harlan had sat in the seat, and gripped the broken armrests, pulling them up. Then he’d examined the handcuffs, each set with the key still in the lock.

‘I think someone was cuffed to this chair,’ he said.

‘And they got free after the crash?’

‘Or before. Could be they even caused it.’

They both stepped out of the plane then, and the blackness of the pool was mirrored in the blackness of the forest, and the beams of their flashlights were swallowed up by both. Somehow they managed to sleep, but it was an uneasy rest, and while it was still dark Harlan woke to find Paul standing over the embers of the fire, his rifle in his hand, his aged body tensed against the night.

‘What is it?’ said Harlan.

‘I thought I heard something. Someone.’

Harlan listened. There was no sound at all, but still he reached for his rifle.

‘I don’t hear anything.’

‘Someone’s out there, I tell you.’

And every hair on Harlan’s body seemed to stand on end at that moment, and he got to his feet with the alacrity of a man a third of his age, because he felt it. Paul was right: there was a presence out there among the trees, and it was watching them. He knew it as surely as he knew that his heart still