either: they flowed across the border like driven snow, but they mainly came in by truck and car and boat, not by plane.
‘It’s possible,’ said Harlan. ‘I don’t see no drugs, though.’
‘Could be they sold them already, and these are the proceeds,’ said Paul. He flipped through the bills with his index finger, and seemed to like the sound they made a lot.
A larger object in the cash bag caught Harlan’s eye, and he pulled it out. It was a copy of the Gazette out of Montreal, dated July 14, 2001, just over one year earlier.
‘Take a look at that,’ he told Harlan.
‘It’s not possible,’ said Harlan. ‘This plane has been here longer than that. It’s almost part of the woods.’
‘Well, unless the Gazette delivers to crash sites, she hit the ground sometime around July fourteenth,’ said Paul.
‘I don’t remember hearing nothing about it,’ said Harlan. ‘A plane goes down, you figure somebody is going to notice and come asking, especially if it went down with a couple hundred thousand dollars on board. I mean—’
‘Hush!’ said Paul. He was trying to remember. Something about a reporter, except . . .
‘I think someone did come asking,’ he said at last.
A moment later, Harlan caught up.
‘The magazine woman,’ he said, then grimaced as Paul added, ‘And the man who came with her.’
Ernie Scollay shifted in his seat. His unease was more obvious now. It was the mention of the man and the woman that had provoked it.
‘Did she have a name?’ I asked.
‘She gave a name,’ said Marielle, ‘but if it was her own then she never wrote for any newspaper or magazine that my father could find. She called herself Darina Flores.’
‘And this man you mentioned?’
‘He wasn’t the kind to give a name,’ said Ernie. ‘They came separately, and didn’t keep each other’s company, but Harlan saw them talking together outside the woman’s motel. It was long after dark, and they were sitting in her car. The interior light was on, and Harlan thought they might have been arguing, but he couldn’t be sure. Harlan already thought there was something hinky about them both. That just confirmed it for him. The next day they were gone, and the woman didn’t come back again.’
The woman didn’t come back again.
‘But the man did?’ I said.
Beside him, Marielle trembled slightly, as though an insect had crawled across her skin.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He came back for sure.’
Darina Flores was as beautiful as any woman Harlan had ever seen. He had never been unfaithful to his wife, and each had given up their virginity to the other on their wedding night, but if Darina Flores had offered herself to Harlan – a possibility as unlikely as any that Harlan could imagine short of his own immortality – then he would have been sorely tempted, and might somehow have found a way to live with the guilt. Her hair was chestnut brown, her face olive complected, and there was a hint of Asian to her eyes, the irises so brown that they shaded to black in a certain light. It should have been disconcerting, even sinister, but instead Harlan found it alluring, and he wasn’t alone: there wasn’t a man in Falls End – and perhaps a couple of women too – who didn’t go to bed at night with impure thoughts of Darina Flores after meeting her. She was the talk of the Pickled Pike from the moment she arrived, and probably the talk of Lester’s too, although Harlan and Paul didn’t frequent Lester’s because Lester LeForge was an asshole of the highest order who had played loose with Paul’s cousin Angela when they were both nineteen and had never been forgiven for it, although Harlan’s son Grady drank in Lester’s whenever he came back to Falls End, just to spite his father.
Darina Flores took a room at the Northern Gateway Motel on the outskirts of town. She told folk that she was putting together a magazine feature on the Great North Woods, an attempt to capture something of their grandeur and mystery for the kind of people who not only subscribed to glossy travel magazines, but had the money to visit the places described therein. She was, she said, particularly interested in stories of disappearances both recent and not-so-recent: early settlers, any Maine equivalents of the Donner Party, hikers who might have vanished . . .
Even airplanes, she added, because she’d heard the woods were so dense that planes had come down in them