He opened his mouth, but the earth silenced his final scream.
And the girl had her playmate at last.
54
I do not know if all that I have shared with you is true. Some of it I experienced, and some of it was told to me. Some of it, I may have dreamed.
I picked up fragments from Grady Vetters, once he had recovered consciousness. Together we visited his sister at the hospital. She was still deep in her coma. The comatose state into which she had been plunged by the needle had not been alleviated by the coma cocktail of drugs with which she had been treated. In the end, she had not been as strong as her brother, not physically: combined with restrictions on her breathing caused by the position in which she had been left on the couch, the injection had left her with hypoxic brain damage.
Marielle slept, and it seemed that she would never wake again.
We left Jackie Garner’s body in the plane to protect it from animals. Later, the wardens retrieved it, and he was brought back to his mother and his girlfriend for burial. The bodies of the woman named Darina Flores, and the man known as Malphas, were taken to Augusta for examination. What happened to them after that, I do not know.
Liat managed to walk out of the forest, with each of us taking turns supporting her. By the end, she was barely conscious. She refused to look at me, or even to recognize my presence beside her while I was helping her. She had been sent to ensure the list’s safe retrieval, and she had failed. In the darkness, we came upon the road that we had taken into the wilderness. Louis and Angel stayed with Liat while I went to get the truck. Only when I started driving did I notice that Jackie’s totem, the necklace of bear claws that hung from his rear view mirror, was gone, and I wondered when the Collector had added it to his trove: before he killed Jackie, or after?
I took Liat to the local medical center, and explained that she had fallen on an arrow. Stranger things had happened, it seemed, for the doctor on duty barely blinked an eye, and arrangements were made to transfer her immediately to Bangor. I explained that she could neither speak nor hear, but could read lips. I then called Epstein and told him most of what had occurred. When he asked if the list was safe, I answered yes, but nothing more.
After all, it was, in its way.
Shortly before dawn, I drove my own car back up that timber company road, and returned to the forest. This time, I was prepared. I was still two miles from the wreckage of the plane when I picked up the beacon’s signal on my cell phone. Twenty feet from the plane, at the base of a white pine, I found the list. I had not thrown it far from the airplane, just far enough. Some small animal had already nibbled at the plastic, but the package remained more or less intact, the little beacon I had placed inside it blinking redly.
Of the boy who was Brightwell, there was no sign, but days later, while the search of the area continued, and the police began gathering and identifying the remains of those killed by Malphas, one of the boy’s shoes was discovered near the hollow tree trunk of a massive oak, and it was thought that he might have been taken by a bear.
I told the investigators most of what I knew at that point about the airplane, for I was nothing if not adept at hiding truths. Gordon Walsh was among the police who questioned me, although the north of the state no longer fell into his remit. He had been sent to observe, he said, but I did not ask by whom. I told them that Marielle Vetters had hired me to find the plane, for she believed that her father’s silence about its existence might have caused unnecessary pain for the families of those who had been aboard when it crashed, and who still waited for some knowledge of the fate of their loved ones. I left out only the existence of the list, and something of my knowledge of the Collector, although I gave a detailed description of him to the police, and fed them the link to the lawyer, Eldritch. After all, I owed nothing to either of them now. I told the police, too, about Jackie’s final sin, the one that had led to his death. One cannot libel the dead, and lying to protect Jackie’s reputation, or to spare the feelings of those who loved him, would have caused more problems than telling the truth.
Slowly a narrative began to emerge that was, if not entirely satisfactory, then plausible. The Collector had come seeking revenge for the fatal explosion, and the woman and the boy were searching for the plane for unknown reasons of their own, possibly connected to the man named Malphas but perhaps also in the belief that some money remained hidden in the plane. Meanwhile the process of identifying the remains of Malphas’s victims began. Two men, subsequently identified as Joe Dahl and Ray Wray, were added to his list of victims, and I said nothing to contradict that assumption. With so much else to occupy their time, the forces of law and order seemed content to let any holes in my story remain unexplained.
And, in a corner, Gordon Walsh watched, and he listened.
It was Walsh who first asked for more information about Liat, once her connection to what had happened was discovered. I told him that she was eventfully an expert on aviation history, a claim she duly confirmed when it was eventually put to her. As Walsh wasn’t about to try to interrogate a deaf and dumb woman about a subject on which he knew nothing, he let that one slide. Before he left Falls End, though, he made it clear to me that, assuming I lived long enough, he expected to hear, at some future date, a more detailed version of events than the one he had just been offered.
By the time the investigators reached the private medical center where the lawyer, Eldritch, was being treated, they found that he had been released from the care of his physicians into the custody of a man who claimed to be his son, and no trace of him could be found. Subsequently, it appeared that the ruined building that had once housed his office was actually owned by an elderly couple who ran a pawnbroking operation nearby, and their agreement with their missing tenant had rested on a handshake, and nothing more. The damaged building was torn down within weeks, and the insurance money, when it came, was swallowed by their pockets.
One month after all this had occurred, Epstein came to visit me. Liat was with him, as well as one of those seemingly interchangeable young men-at arms upon whom he relied for his safety. Epstein and I walked for a time on Ferry Beach, Liat and her companion watching us from a distance.
‘Why did you destroy the list?’ Epstein finally asked.
‘What would you have done with it?’ I replied.
‘Watched, investigated.’
‘Killed?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Before or after those people named upon it could act?’
He shrugged again. ‘Sometimes, preventive actions are necessary.’
‘
‘In the right hands, it could have proved most useful.’
‘In the right hands,’ I echoed.
‘From what I hear, Liat was at risk of death because of what you did. The Collector threatened her life unless the list was given to him.’
‘He wasn’t going to kill her.’
‘You seem very sure of that.’
‘He has a code. It’s a twisted, blasted thing, but it’s a code nonetheless. He wouldn’t have killed her because of something that I did: he would only have killed her for something that she herself had done. I didn’t believe that she was guilty of something that would have brought the Collector down upon her.’
‘I will try to explain that distinction to her. I fear that, if you were to attempt to do so, she might try to shoot you.’
We reached the end of the beach, and turned back. The sun had begun to set as we turned to the north, the wind breathing winter on our faces.
‘What do you think Malphas was doing out there?’ said Epstein. ‘Liat spoke of an altar, a kind of shrine.’
‘Malphas had a dent in his head big enough to hold a book,’ I said. ‘He was brain-damaged. You think even he knew for sure what he was doing?’
‘He certainly had a purpose. Liat said that the altar faced north. A north-facing altar, in a northern state. How far north can one go, do you think, before there is nothing left, nothing to worship, only snow and ice?’
We walked on in silence until we were back at the parking lot.
