and his fingers moved, and it was like he was stripping the clothes 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