Empty Mile (12 page)

Patterson looked at him uncertainly for a moment and I knew he was trying to gauge the boundaries of Stan’s ability to understand the situation. To his credit he didn’t start speaking like a grade school teacher.

“No, you’re right. It seems unlikely. But I have to consider every possible scenario. And, unfortunately, it
is
a possibility.”

“Stan’s right, though. My father isn’t that sort of man.”

“I hear what you’re saying, but it’s a fact that in many, many missing persons cases the person, I don’t know …” Patterson looked around the room as though he might find some other way of putting it, then gave up and continued, “… just kind of snaps.”

Stan had tears in his eyes. He shouted at Patterson, “My dad didn’t snap! Something happened to him!”

Patterson nodded gently. “That, again unfortunately, is also a possibility and we will absolutely follow that line of inquiry as well. Listen, Stan, I wonder if you’d go into the front room with this officer here. He has a form we need you to fill out to start an official missing persons case.”

The uniformed officer rose. After hesitating a moment Stan got up too and followed him out of the room. Patterson looked at me carefully.

“Your brother …”

“There was an accident when he was eleven. He was underwater for a long time, he suffered some damage.”

Patterson made another entry on his laptop. “Must have made it doubly difficult for your dad bringing him up.”

“I can see where you’re going, but honestly it’s impossible for me to imagine my father just running away.”

“Was he seeing anyone?”

“How do you mean?”

“How do you think I mean?”

“Well, I don’t—”

“Johnny, this is not the time to get creative. Being discreet won’t help him or us.”

“A couple of weeks ago he told me he was having an affair with Patricia Prentice. I really don’t know any more than that, my father didn’t like to talk about anything personal.”

Patterson raised his eyebrows. “The Patricia Prentice who recently committed suicide?”

I nodded.

“How long had they been seeing each other?”

“Six months, apparently.”

“Did her husband know?”

“As far as I know, no.”

Patterson winced. He asked a few more questions then had me fill out a formal missing persons report. By the time we were done Stan and the officer were back in the kitchen. Patterson packed his laptop away and shook our hands and told us someone would be in touch every day and that the minute they knew anything, we would. He stopped in front of Stan before he left and put his hand on his shoulder.

“We’re going to do everything we can to find your dad. I promise.”

After he’d gone Stan walked around the kitchen running his hands through his hair.

“Oh boy, Johnny, oh boy … What’s happened to Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he mean about the car when he said
marks
?”

“Just anything that was a clue, I guess.”

Stan shook his head solemnly. “He was talking about blood.”

“I don’t think he was talking about blood, but anyway he said they
didn’t
see any.”

“Do you think he got on the bus? Do you think inside he always wanted to go somewhere else?”

“No, I don’t. Do you?”

Stan looked at me miserably and shook his head. “I have to put a costume on, Johnny, I don’t have enough power.”

“Stan, listen, calm down. What we have to do is wait and let the police do their stuff and try not to freak out before we know anything solid, okay?”

But although that’s what we did, and although Patterson was genuine and diligent and the Oakridge police combined forces with the larger Burton department, nothing came of it.

During the two weeks following my father’s disappearance the police interviewed the people he worked with and the one or two acquaintances who were the closest thing he had to friends. None of them had any idea what might have happened to him. Police patrols covered all the roads that ran through the hills around Oakridge and the forestry service did the same with the fire trails. Neither found any trace of him. His bank and credit card accounts were monitored but they remained unused and a photo of my father, e-mailed to the driver of the San Francisco bus that had picked up at Jerry’s Gas, brought forth no excited cry of recognition. A story about my father’s disappearance in the
Oakridge Banner
was similarly unproductive.

At one point Patterson showed us a video from a security camera in the San Francisco bus terminal. He asked us to look for anyone who might be our father. It was black-and-white and shot from high up. We watched it twice but we didn’t see him and I got the feeling that Patterson wasn’t seriously considering the bus scenario anymore.

It seemed, briefly, that Stan and I may have become suspects because Burton sent over a forensics team to go through our house. But the fact that there was nothing to find and that my father, although he carried home and car policies, had only minimal life insurance, turned the investigation back out toward the world again.

Bill Prentice, too, had his fifteen minutes of institutional scrutiny. As the husband of my father’s lover the notion that he might have exacted a fatal revenge was not something the police could ignore. It turned out almost immediately, though, that the day after Pat’s funeral, Bill had taken his BMW and headed down to Los Angeles to visit his mother. While down there, grief over his wife’s death had driven him to the bottle and on the evening and night of my father’s disappearance he had the cast-iron alibi of having been locked up in Santa Monica while he was processed for DUI.

Patterson came around to our house for the last time a month after my father vanished. He told me the police had run out of ways to approach the case. Stan was up in his room at the time and Patterson asked me not to call him down. We went out into the back garden and sat in the shadow of the house.

“Truthfully, we have no indication as to what might have happened to him. We’ve listed him as missing but I have to tell you, those details have been available to the California law enforcement community since the start of the investigation and nationally for the last two weeks and we haven’t had a bite. The length of time is very much a negative factor. On the other hand, we have nothing concrete to say he isn’t alive and well—no items of clothing, no blood, nothing. The case will stay open of course, and we’ll keep doing what we can, but we’re off that part of the curve now where we could expect any sort of timely resolution. I’m sorry. Basically, all we can do is hope he makes contact with you, or …” He shrugged, and didn’t say any more, but it was plain enough he meant: …
or the body turns up.

After Patterson had gone I went upstairs to Stan’s room. He was sitting on the corner of his bed, crying quietly. His head was bowed and he didn’t look up when I came in. I sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulders. After a long time he cried himself out and his breath shuddered through his heavy body.

“I saw him through the window. I didn’t want to come down.”

“It’s okay.”

I told him what the detective had said. When I’d finished he said solemnly, “Dad’s dead.”

“Yes, I think he must be.”

“Does it feel weird to you, Johnny? That there’s just you and me now? It feels like we’re in the sea and there’s nothing holding us in the right place anymore. Like everything around us is empty.”

“Yeah, it’s weird.”

“Remember that night at the beach, when you were showing me the stars?”

When I had just turned sixteen and Stan was nine our parents took us on a short summer vacation to Santa Barbara. One warm night Stan and I lay on the beach after dark and looked up into the sky and I pointed out the few constellations I knew and told him how a planet didn’t twinkle and how sometimes you could see satellites moving against the backdrop of stars. And Stan had been lost in thoughts of infinity and dreams of what might be out there, and I felt his wonder and shared it, and in sharing had been drawn so close to him that it seemed we became for those moments almost part of each other, seeing with the same eyes, feeling together the vastness of the universe passing through us …

“Yes, I remember.”

“I wish we could be back there.”

Stan’s voice slowed and a little while later he started to drowse. I laid him on the bed and pulled the covers over him even though the sun was still high outside and the room was warm. I went downstairs and made a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table and thought about that night in Santa Barbara.

It was a memory I had cherished through all my years apart from Stan. My mother and father had both been alive then, Stan had not yet slipped beneath the dark waters of Tunney Lake, and I had still to spiral from my own good graces. It seemed a memory like that should have led to a better life for Stan and me, should have been part of a lifetime of events that were equally as cherished. In the kitchen that day I felt that I had thrown something away, that I had been granted some magic opportunity but had chosen to waste it.

In the evening the phone rang. I knew it would be Marla but I didn’t answer it. Stan slept without waking until the following morning and I was left alone with my own terrible thoughts.

CHAPTER 14

B
etween my father’s disappearance and Patterson’s last visit there had been days where Stan and I did nothing more than sit in the house waiting for news. But there had been days, too, when we could not bear to be alone with our thoughts. On these days we either went into town and walked ourselves to exhaustion delivering Plantasaurus fliers, or to the warehouse to tend to our stock of plants. And once each week we drove to the Slopes to maintain the displays at Jeremy Tripp’s house. In this way we put Plantasaurus into a holding pattern while we absorbed the absence of our father.

But the news that the police had reached the end of their inquiries was a turning point for us. We did not discuss it. We did not sit down and try to figure out what the right thing to do was. We simply started work in earnest the day after Patterson’s visit.

We got to our warehouse around ten that morning. We’d had around twenty responses to our fliers so far and I started calling people back and making appointments to see them. We took a guess at how many plants we might need over the coming month, on top of those that Bill had given Stan, and placed our first order with the wholesaler in Sacramento. In the afternoon we went into Oakridge and closed deals with three of the stores I’d contacted, then we went back to the warehouse and made up displays. It was a good day. We were occupied enough not to think too much and we had made definite progress with Plantasaurus.

In the evening Marla came to our house. She’d been over a number of times in the past weeks to cook for us and be supportive. That night she brought a bottle of wine and the three of us had dinner at the kitchen table with the back door open and the warm evening air drifting in. There were moths above us, softly battering themselves against the frosted glass of the ceiling light. Stan looked at them often as we ate.

“There’s a lot of moths, Johnny.”

“It’s the light.”

“I know, but there’s more than usual.”

“Do you think so?”

“I think it’s a message.”

“Really?”

“Because of Dad and Plantasaurus and everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need power, Johnny, to make sure Plantasaurus works. They might be here to bring it across for us.”

“Dude, you’re freaking me out.”

“They might be magnets for power.”

“Stan—”

“They might be, Johnny, you don’t know.”

“They’re not magnets, they’re moths. They’re insects.”

Stan ignored me and lifted his hand toward the light. One of the moths, in the process of making a longer than usual loop, touched down on his finger and clung there for a second before continuing its mad orbit. For a long moment after that Stan looked as though he had discovered a wondrous secret.

That night he wore his Superman suit to bed. He made me open his windows and leave the light on.

“I wish there was a Mothman, Johnny, with moth powers and stuff. I could have one of his costumes.”

“What sort of powers would he have?”

“Walk upside down on the ceiling? Be able to fly?”

“Be a bit of a pain, though. Every time you went past a light you’d have to run into it.”

Stan rolled his eyes. On the way out of the room I turned the light off by reflex, but he called out and I went back and turned it on again. When I left this time he was staring at the bulb.

In the morning, after Marla had gone to work and Stan and I were still cranking up for the day, the mail came. Among the usual junk from supermarkets and electronics stores there was a single window envelope. I opened it while Stan was upstairs in the bathroom cleaning his teeth and combing Brylcreem through his hair. It was a form letter from one of the banks in town, addressed to my father, and it said that payment on the mortgage for the house was overdue.

Two things went through my mind in quick succession. First, that it must be a mistake. My father, as far as I knew, owed nothing on the house. The small life insurance policy when my mother died had enabled him to get enough of a jump on it to close out the debt a year or so before I returned to Oakridge. He’d told me so in an e-mail while I was in London. The second was the realization, whether the threat to the house was real or not, that I was now solely responsible for Stan, for the place he lived in, the food he ate, the clothes he wore … My father was no longer here to cover what it cost for him to survive in the world.

I called the bank and got an emergency slot with one of their customer service people that morning. Before Stan and I headed into town to keep the appointment I filled a cardboard folder with various papers—our copy of the missing persons report, my father’s bank account details, his passport, a statement by Detective Patterson attesting to his disappearance …

The bank was air-conditioned and the cubicle we were shown into had a small octagonal aquarium of goldfish in one corner. Stan and I sat on padded vinyl chairs across a low table from a bank guy who had a name plate clipped to his shirt pocket that said he was a loan officer and that his name was Peter.

I showed him the contents of my folder to prove I had a right to the information I was asking for and after he’d called Patterson to confirm things he spent a couple of minutes checking records on his computer. Stan sat very straight in his chair. Every so often he glanced worriedly over at me. His hand rested against the top of his thigh and beneath it he held a matchbox. I saw that he’d pushed it open a crack.

Peter looked up from his computer and spoke earnestly. “It’s true that at one point your father had paid off the house. But two months ago he remortgaged it in order to buy a piece of land at a place on the Swallow called Empty Mile. The house was the only collateral he had.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“We owe two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

“Your father does.”

“But he’s disappeared, he might not even be alive anymore. How can you expect him to make payments on a loan?”

“We’re a bank, that’s what we do. We lend money on the expectation that it’s going to be paid back.”

“But that means we’re going to lose the house.”

“It’s brutal, I know.” He paused for a moment and softened a little. “In the final analysis all the bank cares about is that the debt gets serviced. It’s immaterial to us whether your father makes the payments or someone else does. This might be an option for you. Though you should know that he took this mortgage out over a much shorter period than usual—ten years. Possibly because of his age. The payments are proportionally higher as a result.”

“There is no way we can make payments whatever level they’re at. No way at all. We’ve just started a small business, we have virtually no income.”

“Do you have any assets?”

I was about to say no when I remembered that I was now technically the owner of the land at Empty Mile. I told Peter about the transfer of title.

He nodded and thought for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Okay. Given the situation with your father I’m sure we can put the payments on hold for a few weeks to give you some thinking room. But what it’s going to come down to is one of four options. You make the mortgage payments; you don’t make the payments and the bank forces a mortgagee sale of the house; you make payments until your father is officially declared dead and you can then legally sell the house yourself; or you sell the Empty Mile land and, if it realizes sufficient funds, you pay off the mortgage and keep the house.”

“Jesus.”

Stan reached over and tugged at my sleeve. “We gotta keep the house, Johnny.”

Peter made an unhappy face. “It’s a horrible situation. But unless your father reappears there really are only a set number of outcomes.”

He walked us to the bank’s front door. As it slid open he put his hand against the back of my shoulder.

“I’ll see what we can do about that freeze.”

And then Stan and I were outside on the sidewalk again in the sun and the heat with people passing by. Stan lifted the matchbox he was holding to his nose and breathed deeply.

“What’s that?”

“We don’t have enough power, Johnny.”

“Let me see.”

He handed over the box. I pushed it a little further open and saw two silvery-brown moths fluttering limply inside.

“Don’t be mad, Johnny, okay? Please?”

I closed the box and gave it back to him and we worked through another day at our plant business.