it reflected on that black water. He kept coming back to the list of names even as they discussed the cash and those who had come to seek it. The list made him uneasy, but for no reason that he could figure out.
‘You could use the money,’ said Paul. ‘You know, what with Angeline getting sick and all.’
Harlan’s wife was showing the first signs of Parkinson’s. She was already in the middle stage of Alzheimer’s and Harlan was finding it harder to take care of her needs. Meanwhile Paul was always being chased by some bill or another. There would be hard times ahead as old age tightened its hold on them and theirs, and neither man had the kind of funds that would permit any difficulties to be handled with ease. Yes, thought Harlan, I could use the money. They both could. That still didn’t make it right.
‘I say we keep it,’ said Paul. ‘It stays out here much longer and it will sink into the ground along with that plane, or it’ll be found by someone even less worthy of it than we are.’
He tried to make a joke of it, but it didn’t quite work.
‘It’s not ours to keep,’ said Harlan. ‘We ought to tell the police about this.’
‘Why? If this was honest money then honest men would have come looking for it. It would have been all over the news that a plane had gone down. They’d have been scouring the woods looking for wreckage or survivors. Instead, what did we get but some woman pretending to be a reporter, and a swarm of creeps who were no more hunters or birders than the man in the moon?’
The bag lay between them. Paul had left it open, probably deliberately, so that Harlan could see the money inside.
‘What if they find out?’ said Harlan, and his voice almost cracked as he spoke. Is this how evil is done, he asked himself, in small increments, one foot after the next, softly, softly until you’ve convinced yourself that wrong is right, and right is wrong, because you’re not a bad person and you don’t do bad things?
‘We use it only as necessary,’ said Paul. ‘We’re too old to be buying sports cars and fancy clothes. We just use it to make the years that are left a little easier for ourselves and our families. If we’re careful, then nobody will ever find out.’
Harlan didn’t believe that. Oh, he wanted to, but secretly he didn’t. It was why, in the end, though they took the money, he chose to leave the satchel where it was, with its lists of names intact. Harlan sensed their importance. He hoped that, if the plane was eventually found by those who had been seeking it, they would accept his offering as a form of recompense for their theft, an acknowledgment of what was truly important. Perhaps if the papers were left for them, they wouldn’t come looking for the money.
That had been a long, long night. When they weren’t talking about the money, they were talking about the pilot or pilots. Where had they gone? If they had survived the crash, why hadn’t they taken the money and the satchel with them when they went to look for help? Why leave them in the plane?
It was Paul who went back inside, Paul who examined one of the passenger seats and found that its arms had been broken, Paul who found two pairs of handcuffs discarded beneath the pilot’s seat. He showed all that he had discovered to Harlan.
‘Now how do you suppose that happened?’
And Harlan had sat in the seat, and gripped the broken armrests, pulling them up. Then he’d examined the handcuffs, each set with the key still in the lock.
‘I think someone was cuffed to this chair,’ he said.
‘And they got free after the crash?’
‘Or before. Could be they even caused it.’
They both stepped out of the plane then, and the blackness of the pool was mirrored in the blackness of the forest, and the beams of their flashlights were swallowed up by both. Somehow they managed to sleep, but it was an uneasy rest, and while it was still dark Harlan woke to find Paul standing over the embers of the fire, his rifle in his hand, his aged body tensed against the night.
‘What is it?’ said Harlan.
‘I thought I heard something. Someone.’
Harlan listened. There was no sound at all, but still he reached for his rifle.