Empty Mile (20 page)

CHAPTER 22

T
he first few days we were at the cabin I kept Stan as busy as I could. There was Plantasaurus to take care of during the day and in the evenings we had our cleaning, unpacking, and arranging of furniture to occupy us. Although he was withdrawn and quiet early on, by the end of the three days it took us to get the cabin into some sort of shape it seemed that he was coming to terms with his new surroundings, something that was helped enormously by the fact that he was now so close to Rosie.

Shortly before we’d left the house on Taylor Street two items had been delivered to it. One was a small gift basket with a card identifying it as having been sent by Rolf Kortekas, my father’s boss at the real estate office, expressing his regret at our “situation.” The other, by regular mail, was a business envelope addressed to my father. I’d opened it expecting a bill of some sort but had found instead a letter from a company called Minco Inc. in Burton.

Dear Mr. Richardson,

We note that you have not collected the samples you submitted on May 11 to this laboratory. We thank you for your payment, which was received May 30, and trust our analysis was satisfactory. However, it is not our policy to hold samples longer than ninety days and we would be obliged if you could collect them at your earliest convenience. Alternatively, we would be happy to deliver them to you for a small charge.

Kind regards,

Reginald Singh, Compositional Analyst Minco Inc.

I had no idea what samples Reginald Singh was referring to, or why my father might have submitted them to a “Compositional Analyst,” but once we’d finished settling into the cabin I felt the need to follow up on the letter. The pattern of life around me had become so complex that I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to unravel even the smallest part of it. So, on our fourth morning at Empty Mile I called the number on the letterhead and asked if I could collect the samples for my father. No problem as long as I brought some ID with me.

I rescheduled the maintenance visits we had booked for that day and arranged with Stan that I’d go to Burton in the afternoon while he worked at the warehouse. Before that, though, I planned to take the first step toward finding some proof for my theory that Gareth was responsible for the video of Marla and me in the forest.

When I suggested an early picnic lunch in the woods at Tunney Lake I was prepared for Stan to balk at the idea—it was the site of his drowning, after all—but he just nodded with his jaw held firm and said it sounded okay to him.

The lake was not yet fully out of the shadow of the hillside behind it when we got there and away from the beach the water looked flat and dark, like a cover thrown over secrets. As we walked along the sand Stan kept me between the water and himself, but when we reached the part of the beach where he’d been dragged out and brought back to life he stepped close to the water and stopped and looked around at the lake and the cliff and the trees.

“It’s weird, Johnny. I felt so much … space around everything when I came back alive and I felt it all the time afterwards too. But now sometimes I don’t feel anything except just what I can see.”

“But that’s how everyone feels, Stan. That’s how I feel.”

“I know, Johnny. I know.”

Stan looked so bereft as he said this that the giant corkscrew of guilt on which it seemed I would be forever impaled made one more wrenching turn in my guts. I had made it plain to him that I thought his ideas of power, of something beyond the world we could see, were nonsense. I suppose some part of me had hoped that this reaction would school him toward a more socially palatable interpretation of the world around him. But I realized now that rather than guiding him toward some replica of normality, my selfishness of spirit had begun to rob him of something he found beautiful about life.

“Have you ever been swimming again?”

“No.”

He put his head down and we started toward the trees.

It was shadowy in the forest and in the denser, darker areas the undergrowth was finely beaded with dew. If I had brought Stan on this walk earlier, before Plantasaurus and Jeremy Tripp, before the loss of my father and our house, I knew he would have stampeded through the damp clumps of ferns, barrel-rolled across open patches of grass, pretended he was an explorer. That day, though, he walked somberly beside me. He chatted responsively enough, but his usual bouncing energy was just not there.

I remembered the way easily enough and after a couple of minutes we found the rock with red paint and the dip in the ground behind it where two months ago I had had sex with Marla in front of another man, while somewhere close by the mechanism of a video camera had whirred silently away, recording everything we did.

Stan made a small sound of delight as we skirted the rock and stepped into the hidden depression behind it. After his staid performance through the forest it was heartening to see there was still enough wonder left in him to enjoy the discovery of a secret place. He settled in the middle of the bowl. I left him pulling things to eat out of the backpack we’d brought with us and went to see what evidence I could find.

It wasn’t hard to figure out where the camera had been placed. The position in which Marla and I had lain that day was clear in my mind. Matching it to the image we’d watched on the TV in Bill’s cabin indicated a group of trees at one end of the curving screen of foliage. About seven or eight feet off the ground the trees threw out lightly leaved branches that did little to obscure the trunks from which they grew. I found what I wanted almost as soon as I started looking for it.

A metal, L-shaped bracket had been fixed to the side of one of the trees immediately below the bough line. The horizontal part of it stuck out about four inches and had three holes drilled along its length. The screws that held the bracket in place, through another three holes in the vertical section, looked like they’d been hammered into the tree. There were pieces of brown packing tape stuck to the bracket and it was a fair guess that the camera had been taped into place.

I went back to where Stan had set out our food, got the Swiss Army knife that was part of our picnic kit, and spent five minutes struggling with the battered screws until I had the bracket loose. Stan came over to watch me work but as he knew nothing of the thing’s significance he lost interest after I explained I had no idea why it was there but that I didn’t want it to damage the tree.

When I had it free I turned it in my hand but there wasn’t much to be learned from it. It was steel. Its edges were smoothly ground and the holes for the screws were countersunk. It was well made and nicely finished but beyond that it was just a bracket. I put it in my jacket pocket and went to sit with Stan. We ate peanut butter sandwiches and potato chips. We told jokes and for a couple of brief minutes talked about my father.

Later, when we were done, we walked back out into the sunshine of the lake. My mission to the forest was over and I wanted to get the visit to Burton and the mineral laboratory out of the way and still have some of the day left. But as we approached the pickup in the parking lot near the cabins the door to the bungalow/office opened and Gareth trotted over to us.

“Dude. Hey, Stan. I saw the truck but I didn’t know where you went. Come in the house and have a beer. Coke for you, buddy.” He winked and cocked his finger at Stan.

“We’ve got things to do in Burton.”

“Fuck that. Come inside. Ten minutes. We gotta catch up, man.”

“I really have to get—”

“Haven’t I kept my word about the Marla thing? I’m trying, dude. Come on. We’ll sit, we’ll chat, and then you’ll go to Burton.”

Stan tugged my sleeve. “I’m thirsty, Johnny, I need a Coke.”

After that there didn’t seem much chance of getting out of it without a scene and the three of us went into the office and on through to the living area at the back of the house. Gareth got a Coke and a couple of beers out of the fridge. As he handed Stan his drink he gestured to the open back door.

“Dad’s working in the barn, Stan. You can go out and watch if you want.”

“Cool.”

Stan went outside and Gareth and I sat on the ratty lounge furniture. The room was dim and the light that came in through the doorway flared against the frame. Through it I could see some of the garden, and beyond that the barn with its doors swung wide and Gareth’s father in his wheelchair at the bench inside, working on something with a machine that made a high whining noise. And Stan standing beside him, yakking away.

Gareth slugged his beer and burped. “I got rid of the hookers.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, I’m hearing noises that the council are thinking about the road again. Couple of whores on the premises isn’t a good look. Man, if that road gets built …” Gareth shook his head in wonder.

I couldn’t help spoiling his mood. “How’s Vivian?”

“Fucked. She’s working for that prick, fucking him … And she’s ended it. No more trips to the Slopes, no more visits to the big house. Old Gareth didn’t have the money to make the grade.”

I could see he was gearing up for a full-blown purge, so I cut him off quickly. “Marla took me to an Elephant Society meeting.”

Gareth looked nonplussed for a moment, then his eyes shifted a little. “Oh yeah?”

“You’ve heard of it, right?”

“You know I have, Johnny. I told you I used to go with your dad sometimes. Are you trying to catch me out?”

“A guy there said you and my father had the same interests.”

“That’s what the Society’s for, isn’t it? But I stopped going months ago.”

“Anything particular you two were interested in?”

“Lots of things to be interested in, Johnboy. Lots and lots.” He looked levelly at me for a long moment then his face brightened like he’d just remembered something. “Oh, I spoke to the bank and with the equity in this place I couldn’t buy all of that land off you, but I can raise enough for half of it. No problem. I mean, that would solve everything for you, wouldn’t it? You don’t have to give up the whole thing but you get a bunch of dough to keep you going.”

“I’ve told you twice I’m not selling. Besides, I’m living out there now.”

“At Empty Mile? Really?”

“The bank sold the house.”

“What are you doing with the land?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you doing with it?”

Gareth was leaning forward in his chair and the bottle in his hand had tilted so that beer was spilling onto the floor by his foot. I pointed to it and he set the bottle down in the puddle and pressed his hands hard together and took a breath.

“Promise me that if you ever want to sell some of it you’ll come to me first.”

I made a move to stand up but Gareth held on to my arm.

“Hey, did I sound like a fucking idiot or something? Sorry, man. It just seems like such a good idea to me, that’s all.”

He let go of me and I yelled through the doorway for Stan. Gareth said goodbye as we left but he didn’t come out of the house to see us off.

I made it down Lake Trail without incident and then turned left along the Loop to drop Stan off at the warehouse. He seemed chirpy after messing around in the barn and I asked him about his time with David.

“It’s really neat how he makes stuff. He let me drill a hole. Here, look. He let me keep this one.”

Stan dug inside his jacket and held something out so I could see it. I pulled immediately to the side of the road, a hot flush of triumph rising through me.

“Let me see that.”

It was a steel bracket with three countersunk holes in each arm. I’d put the bracket I found that morning in the glove compartment. I took it out now and held it next to the one Stan had given me. Except for Stan’s off-center drilling the two were identical.

“Wow, Johnny, they’re the same. Why would David put one on a tree?”

“Maybe he was just testing it out. Can I keep this for a while?”

I dropped Stan at the warehouse then carried on to Burton. It was a nice day for the drive, but I didn’t pay much attention to the scenery. I was too busy thinking about the brackets.

The Minco building in Burton had a utilitarian, ’60s feel to it—all sharp angles, blank unadorned walls, and windows that were simply inset sheets of glass. The floor of the reception area was covered with gray linoleum that was mottled with shoe scuffings and pitted here and there where something too heavy had pressed against it for too long. There was a counter across one end and behind it a walk space and then a wall with a large shuttered hatch in the middle and a flat wooden door at one end. There was no one behind the counter and the room felt abandoned, as though I had turned up in the middle of a fire drill.

A button on the counter had a laminated plaque next to it that said customers should ring for assistance. I pressed it and somewhere way back behind the wall I heard a faint buzzing. A minute later a fat woman with oversize glasses opened the door and shuffled sideways along her side of the counter. I told her I had something to collect from Reginald Singh. She scribbled my name in pencil on a small pad and then shuffled back through the door.

After a while the door opened again and Reginald Singh came out. He was a slender Fijian Indian. He wore a white lab coat and spoke in a voice that sounded as though he’d worked hard to eradicate his accent. He placed a small clear plastic vial on the counter in front of me. It contained a thin wafer of gold-colored metal that had been bent into a half-circle to fit in the narrow tube.

“John Richardson?”

I nodded and showed him my driver’s license.

“Ah, good. Nice to tie up loose ends. Would you mind signing?”

He opened a folder that had been wedged under his arm and took out a form for me to sign. When I handed it back he pushed the vial toward me and smiled. “Short and sweet.”

“What is it?”

Reginald Singh looked confused.

“The sample.”

“You didn’t read the report?”

“It’s a long story. My father disappeared a couple of months ago. I’m sort of tying up some loose ends of my own. You can call the Oakridge police department if you need confirmation.”