John Connolly - The Wrath of Angels

Who would know?

Neither would have considered himself a thief. Oh, they’d shaved a few dollars here and there from the IRS, but that was your duty as a taxpayer and an American. Someone had once told Harlan that the IRS factored cheating into their calculations, so they kind of expected you to do it, and by not holding out on them you messed up their system. You caused more trouble by not cheating on your taxes than you did by smudging your return, the fella said, and if you looked too square then the IRS would start thinking that maybe you were hiding something, and next thing you knew they had their claws in you and you were scouring the attic for receipts for ninety-nine cents just to stay out of jail.

But now they weren’t talking about a hundred dollars here and there kept back from Uncle Sam’s purse; this was potentially a serious criminal enterprise, which raised the second question:

Where had it come from?

‘You think it’s drug money?’ asked Paul. He watched a lot of TV cop shows, and immediately associated any cash sum too large to be kept in a wallet with drug dealing. It wasn’t like drugs weren’t a thing here, 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 and never been found.

Harlan wasn’t sure how stories of folk going missing or resorting to cannibalism would appeal to well-heeled travelers with a lot of disposable income, but then he wasn’t a journalist, and, anyway, the dumbness of people had long ago ceased to surprise him. So he and Paul and Ernie and a few others recycled all the old tales they could recall for the delight of Darina Flores, embellishing the details where required, or making them up entirely where necessary. Darina Flores dutifully noted them down, and bought rounds of drinks on her expense account, and flirted outrageously with men who could have been her grandfather, let alone her father, and as the night drew on, she gradually brought the conversation back to airplanes.

‘You think she might have a, you know, a thing for airplanes?’ Jackie Strauss, one of the town’s three resident Jews, had asked as he and Harlan stood side by side in the men’s room, making space in their bladders for more beer and, by extension, more time with the divine Darina Flores.

‘Why, you hiding an airplane that I don’t know about?’ asked Harlan.

‘I was thinking maybe I could borrow one, and offer to show her around.’

‘You could join the Mile High Club,’ said Harlan.

‘I got a fear of flying,’ said Jackie. ‘I was hoping we could just stay on the ground and do our business there.’

‘Jackie, how old are you?’

‘Seventy-two next birthday.’

‘You got a dicky heart. Any business you did with that woman would probably kill you.’

‘I know, but it’s how I’d like to go. If I survived, my wife would kill me anyway. Better I go in the arms of a woman like that than give my Lois the pleasure of beating me to death after.’

And so the men fed Darina Flores tales both real and fantastic, and she in turn fed their fantasies, and a pleasant night was had by all except Ernie Scollay, who wasn’t drinking at the time because he was on medication, and who had noticed that Darina Flores barely sipped at her vodka tonic, and her smile rose no further than her upper lip, never even coming close to those extraordinary eyes that grew darker as the night drew on, and she had long ago stopped writing and was now listening yet not listening, just as she was smiling yet not smiling, and drinking yet not drinking.