The Wrath of Angels Page 0,157

had been discovered by the Abenaki while apparently hunting his own daughter, but despite the Abenaki’s own efforts, and a further search by Buckingham and his men, the girl was never found. Second, the Catholic Abenaki told Woolman they had set out to kill the inhabitants of the fort in reprisal for the earlier slaughter. The small band of warriors who had been willing to overcome their fear of the territory were all Catholic converts, although they were additionally armed with totems of their tribe. They arrived at the fort to find that the soldiers had done the job for them, and had to be content with taking their revenge on Holcroft alone, whom Tomah described by using the same word that Woolman had used when Buckingham first met him: majigek.

Finally, according to Woolman, the Abenaki claimed that, before he died, Holcroft came to his senses, and begged his tormentors for forgiveness for what he had done. Woolman admitted that he had trouble understanding Tomah’s description of Holcroft’s final words, and was forced to clarify them in halting French, to little avail. Holcroft, it seemed, had railed in English, of which Tomah knew little; in French, of which Tomah knew slightly more; and in some mishmash of Passamaquoddy and Abenaki that Holcroft had picked up during his postings in the region, for like Mordant himself he was known to be a scholar of languages, and a civilized man.

As Woolman understood it, Holcroft claimed to have committed the slaughter of the Abenaki on the orders of the tsesuna, the Raven God who pecked at his window. He also termed him the apockoli, the Upsidedown God who spoke to him from behind his shaving mirror, and who sometimes called to him from the depths of the forest, his voice bubbling up from deep beneath the earth. It was this same entity, this demon, who had infected his men with madness, and turned them upon one another.

Holcroft had used another word too in connection with him before the Abenaki set to torturing him: it was ktahkomikey, a word that referred to wasps, particularly a certain species that nested in the ground.

Holcroft had died screaming of the God of Wasps.

45

Outside the Cronin home, I rested The Gazetteer against the steering wheel while I tried to figure out the journey taken by Harlan Vetters and Paul Scollay on the day they found the plane. Marielle Vetters had told me that her father believed he and his friend had tracked the deer for four hours or more, traveling northwest or north-northwest for the most part, as best they could tell. There was a logging road that ran north from Falls End. It was the one Phineas had used on his illegal bear-hunting trip, and it seemed the most likely route for Vetters and Scollay to have taken as well. It veered northeast after ten miles, as though the road had been specifically designed to discourage anyone from venturing farther northwest: where the road altered direction was probably the closest point to Fort Mordant. From there, we’d move into the forest on foot. I had considered the possibility of using ATVs, but they were cumbersome to transport, and also noisy, and we were not the only ones looking for that plane. The sound of four ATVs moving through the woods might well be enough to get us killed.

I was so lost in the map, as though I were already deep in those woods, that the ringing of my phone came as an unwelcome distraction, and I didn’t even glance at the number before I picked it up. It was only when I had pressed the green button that I thought again of the message I had left on Marielle Vetters’ answering machine, and the possibility that the police might have listened to it, but by then it was too late.

Thankfully, it was only Epstein on the other end. He was calling from Toronto. I could hear traffic in the background, and then Epstein’s words were overcome by the roar of a jet.

‘You’ll have to repeat that,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’

This time, I heard him clearly.

‘I said, “I know who was the passenger on that plane.”’

Wildon’s widow remembered Epstein. They had met once before, she said, at an event to raise funds for the collection of DNA from Holocaust survivors so that the separated members of families might be reunited, and anonymous remains identified, an initiative that eventually became part of the DNA Shoah Project. It

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