The Wrath of Angels (2 page)

F
all was gone, vanished in wisps of white cloud that fled across clear blue skies like pale silk scarves snatched by the breeze. Soon it would be Thanksgiving, although it seemed that there was little for which to be thankful as the year drew to its close. People I met on the streets of Portland spoke of working second jobs to make ends meet, of feeding their families with cheap cuts of meat while their savings dwindled and their safety nets fell away. They listened while candidates for high office told them the answer to the country’s problems was to make the wealthy wealthier so that more crumbs from their table might fall into the mouths of the poor, and some, while pondering the unfairness of it, wondered if that was better than no crumbs at all.

Along Commercial Street some tourists still wandered. Behind them a great cruise ship, perhaps the last of the season, loomed impossibly high over the wharves and warehouses, its prow reaching out to touch the buildings facing the sea, the water supporting it invisible from the street so that it seemed a thing discarded, marooned in the aftermath of a tsunami.

Away from the waterfront the tourists petered out entirely, and at the Great Lost Bear there were none at all, not as afternoon melted into evening. The Bear saw only a small but steady stream of locals pass through its doors that day, the kind of familiar faces that ensure bars remain in business even during the quietest of times, and as the light faded and the blue of the sky began to darken, the Bear prepared to ease itself into the kind of gentle, warm mood where conversations were hushed, and music was soft, and there were places in the shadows for lovers and friends, and places, too, for darker conversations.

She was a small woman, a single swath of white running through her short black hair like the coloring of a magpie, with an ‘s’-shaped scar across her neck that resembled the passage of a snake over pale sand. Her eyes were a very bright green, and, rather than detracting from her looks, the crow’s feet at their corners drew attention to her irises, enhancing her good looks when she smiled. She looked neither older nor younger than her years, and her makeup was discreetly applied. I guessed that most of the time she was content to be as God left her, and it was only on those rare occasions when she came down to the cities for business or pleasure that she felt the need to ‘prettify’ herself, as my grandfather used to term it. She wore no wedding ring, and her only jewelry was the small silver cross that hung from a cheap chain around her neck. Her fingernails were cut so close that they might almost have been bitten down, except the ends were too neat, too even. An injury to her black dress pants had been repaired with a small triangle of material on the right thigh, expertly done and barely noticeable. They fitted her well, and had probably been expensive when she bought them. She was not the kind to let a small tear be their ruination. I imagined that she had worked upon them herself, not trusting in another, not willing to waste money on what she knew she could do better with her own hands. A man’s shirt, pristine and white, hung loose over the waist of her pants, the shirt tailored so that it came in tight at the waist. Her breasts were small, and the pattern of her brassiere was barely visible through the material.

The man beside her was twice her age, and then some. He had dressed in a brown serge suit for the occasion, with a yellow shirt and a yellow-and-brown tie that had come as a set, perhaps with a handkerchief for the suit pocket that he had long ago rejected as too ostentatious. ‘Funeral suits’, my grandfather called them, although, with a change of tie, they served equally well for baptisms, and even weddings if the wearer wasn’t one of the main party.

And even though he had brought out the suit for an event that was not linked to a church happening, to an arrival into or departure from this world, and had polished his reddish-brown shoes so that the pale scuffing at the toes looked more like the reflection of light upon them, still he wore a battered cap advertising ‘Scollay’s Guide & Taxidermy’ in a script so ornate and curlicued that it took a while to decipher, by which time the wearer would, in all likelihood, have managed to press a business card upon you, and inquire as to whether you might have an animal that needed stuffing and mounting, and, if not, whether you felt like rectifying that situation by taking a trip into the Maine woods. I felt a tenderness toward him as he sat before me, his hands clasping and unclasping, his mouth half-forming slight, awkward smiles that faded almost as soon as they came into existence, like small waves of emotion breaking upon his face. He was an old man, and a good one, although I had met him for the first time only within the hour. His decency shone brightly from within, and I believed that when he left this world he would be mourned greatly, and the community of which he was a part would be poorer for his passing.

But I understood too that part of my warmth toward him arose from the day’s particular associations. It was the anniversary of my grandfather’s death, and that morning I placed flowers upon his grave, and sat for a time by 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.’

T
hey 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.

But as Paul grew older, he came to prefer the rifle to the bow. He had arthritis in his right shoulder, and in a half dozen other places too. Paul used to say that the only major part of his body in which he didn’t have arthritis was the one place where he would have appreciated a little
more
stiffness, if the good Lord could have seen His way to answering that kind of prayer. Which, in Paul’s experience, He never did, the good Lord apparently having better things with which to occupy Himself than male erectile dysfunction.

So Paul was the better shot with a bow, and Harlan the superior hunter with a rifle. In the years that followed, Harlan would muse upon the likelihood that, had it been he who took the first shot at the deer, none of this business, for good or bad, would have happened.

But then they had always seemed opposites in so many ways, these two men. Harlan was softly spoken where his friend was loud, dry where he was obvious, driven and conscientious where Paul often seemed aimless and unfocused.

Harlan was thin and wiry, a fact that had sometimes led drunks and fools to underestimate his strength, even though only a strong man could have carried a grief-stricken boy for miles across rough, snow-covered ground without stumble or complaint, even in his seventies. Paul Scollay was softer and fatter, but it was padding over muscle, and he was fast for a big man. Those who did not know them well had them pegged for an odd couple, two men whose diverse personalities and appearances allowed them to form a single whole, like two matching pieces of a jigsaw. Their relationship was much more complex than that, and their similarities were more pronounced than their differences, as is always the case with men who maintain lifelong friendships with each other, rarely allowing a harsh word to pass between them, and always forgiving any that do. They shared a common outlook on the world, a similar view of their fellow man and their obligations toward him. When Harlan Vetters carried Barney Shore home on his back, the beams of flashlights and the raised voices guiding him at the last to the main search party, he did so with the ghost of his friend walking by his side, an unseen presence that watched over the boy and the old man, and perhaps kept the girl in the woods at bay.