black pool where something was rising from the depths, always threatening to surface but never appearing before they woke.
Rarely, too, did a day pass during those years without Harlan and Paul fearing that the plane would be discovered, and some trace of their presence at the wreckage would be revealed. They were not sure which they feared more: the law, or those who might have a personal interest in the plane and its contents. But those fears faded, and the nightmares came less frequently. The money was gradually spent until only a little of it remained, and Harlan and Paul had started to believe that they might just have committed a victimless crime when the man with the distended neck returned to Falls End.
6
It was a cold January afternoon in 2004 when the man known as Brightwell – if man he truly was – reappeared.
Harlan Vetters had always hated these winter months: they’d been bad enough when he was a young man with stamina and muscle tone and strong bones, but now he had significantly less of all three and had grown to dread the first fall of snow. His wife used to find it amusing when he began railing at the photographs in the winter catalogs that started turning up in their mailbox in August, or at the glossy store advertisements tucked inside the Maine Sunday Telegram as summer ended, all of them depicting happy, grinning people wearing warm clothing and holding snow shovels, as if three or four hard months of winter was just about the best damn thing that could be imagined, and even more fun than Disneyland.
‘Nobody in this state posed for those photos, I tell you that,’ he would say. ‘They ought to fill these things with pictures of some poor bastard up to his knees in snow trying to dig his truck out with a spoon.’
And Angeline would pat him on the shoulder and say, ‘Well, they wouldn’t sell too many sweaters that way, would they?’ and Harlan would mutter something in turn, and she’d kiss him on the crown of his head and leave him to his business, knowing that later she would find him in the garage, checking that the plow attachment for his truck was undamaged; that the flashlights worked, and there were batteries to spare; that the backup generator was in working order, and the woodshed was dry, and this before the first leaves had even begun to drop from the trees.
In the weeks that followed he would make a list of all that was needed, both food and equipment, and then he would set out early one morning to the big suppliers in Bangor or, if he felt like the ride, Portland, returning that same evening with tales of bad driving, and two-dollar cups of coffee, and donuts that weren’t as good as the ones Laurie Boden served at the Falls End Diner, don’t know why, after all how hard could it be to make a donut? She would help him to pack his purchases away, and there would always be hot chocolate mix, more than a whole town could ever drink in the longest winter imaginable, because he knew that she loved hot chocolate and he didn’t want her to be without.
And there would be some small treat for her at the bottom of the box, something that he had chosen himself in a boutique and not in one of the big department stores. It was the real reason why he drove so far, she knew, so that he could find her something that wasn’t available locally: a scarf, or a hat, or a small item of jewelry, with maybe a box of candy or cookies thrown in with it, and often a book, some big hardback novel that would keep her going for a week when the snow settled upon them. It amused and touched her to think of him in a fancy women’s clothing store, fingering varieties of silk and wool and interrogating the saleswoman on issues of quality and price, or browsing the aisles of a bookstore with his notebook open to a page filled with titles he had jotted down over the preceding months, a list of books that she had mentioned in passing, or novels about which he had read himself and thought she might like. She knew that he would have spent as much time, if not more, on choosing those gifts for her as he did on buying all of his