Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “So? Empty Mile’s still Empty Mile.”

  “Yeah, but the difference is that while the general belief is that there was gold and it got panned out, my father knew that there was never any gold there in the first place. Empty Mile was just empty, end of story.”

  “And that would make him want to buy the land, why?”

  I wanted to hit her with a great explanation, a cast-iron reason to support me hanging onto the land, but the fact that there had never been any gold there was, if anything, more of an argument for selling it than keeping it. I sighed.

  “I have no idea.”

  The other thing I had no idea about, as we lay there chasing sleep, was the connection between my father and Gareth. They’d both been to Millicent’s house and read the journal, Chris Reynolds at the Elephant Society had said there seemed to have been some sort of relationship between them, and Gareth himself maintained that they’d been friends.

  On the other hand my father, while he was drunk after hearing about Pat’s death, had warned me against him. Given that, and the fact that Gareth had stopped attending Elephant Society meetings three months ago while my father kept going, it was beginning to look to me as though they may well have had a falling out at some point. This seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I just couldn’t see a man like my father finding anything in Gareth he’d admire or respect. What I couldn’t understand, however, was why he would ever have spent time with him in the first place.

  For a long time I lay awake trying out imaginary conversations between the two of them. After that I started worrying about Stan. And then finally, finally I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 21

  I woke the next morning in despair. It seemed a certainty that all areas of my life were set to crash and burn. Stan was going to go mad, we were going to end up living someplace we didn’t want to be, Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp were going to maneuver us out of the warehouse, and Plantasaurus was going to die a premature death.

  Stan was already in the kitchen reading a comic book and eating cereal when I came downstairs. He was wearing fresh clothes-dark blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt-and his hair was combed and freshly Brylcreemed. It didn’t look like he had any moths taped to himself under his shirt. He seemed serious but relaxed, as though sleep had eased the hold our current problems had on him.

  “Know why I like comics, Johnny? They’re about a different way of living. The comic world isn’t the same as this one.”

  “Oakridge ain’t Gotham City, that’s for sure.”

  “I pretend that all the things in comics are really happening, it’s just that they’re in another dimension we can’t see.”

  The depression I’d woken up with jumped another notch. Stan finished the last of his cereal. Outside, I heard the bleep of a small horn. Stan pushed himself up quickly and took his empty bowl to the sink.

  “That’s Rosie. The hall’s open on weekends, we’re going to practice our dancing.”

  “Did I just kind of forget this arrangement?”

  “Johnny, you have Marla here. You’re going to be doing stuff with her.”

  “All right, but tell me next time, okay?”

  “Sure, Johnny. Can you pick me up from Rosie’s later? We’re going to go back there.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He winked and made pistols with his hands. “See ya later, pardner.”

  He left the room and a moment later I heard Rosie’s Datsun pull away.

  By the time Marla came down for breakfast I’d decided I was going to try Bill Prentice at his cabin again and, one way or another, get him to tell me what he had planned for the warehouse. If he was selling it to Jeremy Tripp I could brace myself for it, maybe try to figure out some alternative way to house the business. And if he wasn’t, I could at least cross something off my list of things to worry about.

  It was a beautiful day, a few white clouds in a blue sky and a light breeze that up in the hills around the Oakridge basin made the air feel almost brisk. Marla and I drove to Bill Prentice’s cabin without speaking much. After the scene outside the Black Cat café she hadn’t wanted to put herself near him again and it had taken me half an hour of cajoling to get her to come along for support. She needn’t have worried, though, because when we got to the cabin there was no one home.

  We parked and got out and stood in front of the place. There were no cars in sight and the cabin itself had the hollow look of a house people have gone away from. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I knocked again, listening as each roll of sound lengthened into emptiness.

  These cabins were not hard to get into. Doors shifted in their jambs, windows in their frames, locks were not fitted with the precision of those in the cities. So, as I stood there, I was aware of an opportunity. I had seen Jeremy Tripp in the cabin. It was possible there was something inside that might help explain what he and Bill were doing together. I went back to the pickup and got a screwdriver.

  The window at the side of the cabin, which had been so useful to me before, opened easily after a little levering. I hoisted Marla up and climbed in after her. For a moment we stood motionless inside the room, waiting and listening. But no dog came snarling from under a table, no knife-wielding hillbilly came thundering through a doorway, so we stepped away from the window and started to search the place.

  In daylight the cabin looked untidy and dirty. It smelled of old food and unwashed clothes. The sink at the end of the main room was filled with dirty dishes and opened cans and most of the surfaces around it held items that should have been in the trash or stored elsewhere.

  We checked the bedroom first. It held nothing but a rumpled bed, a lamp on a side table, and a pile of clothes on top of a low dresser. The small bathroom off it was just as barren-a towel, a piece of soap, a toothbrush and shaving gear. If there was anything to be found it looked like it was going to be back in the main room.

  The first thing I checked in there was the large piece of paper I’d seen on my last visit to the cabin. It still lay on the coffee table and was indeed an architectural drawing, but it was for the garden center as it stood, not for any proposed hotel.

  We spent the next twenty minutes hurriedly picking things up and putting them carefully back, listening all the time for the sound of an approaching car, but we found nothing that told me how Bill and Jeremy Tripp knew each other, or what plans Bill had, if any, for the warehouse.

  We did, however, find something else.

  A hip-high bookcase ran along a good part of the wall opposite the widow we’d entered through. It held paperback novels and a lot of coffee-table books about the scenery and the history of the area. It was also where Bill stored a small stack of DVDs. I rifled through them not expecting to find anything of interest, but near the top of the pile I came across one I’d seen before-at Patricia Prentice’s house when Stan and I had waited with her body for Bill and the police. A burned disk with a smiley face sticker on its upper surface.

  I showed it to Marla and told her how it had looked like Patricia was watching it before she killed herself. If it had been a set of papers or a contract I might have stolen it to examine in the safety of my own house. But I couldn’t bring myself to take something so intimately connected with that day, something that Bill obviously felt strongly enough about to keep from the police and bring with him on his self-imposed exile in the mountains. Instead, Marla and I stood and watched it on the TV in the corner of the cabin.

  When the disk started to play there were a few seconds of empty gray, then the screen cleared abruptly to show long grass, a shallow declivity, a surrounding wall of trees. Next to me Marla groaned and brought her hands to her mouth.

  The scene stayed that way as I fast-forwarded through the first twenty minutes, unchanging except for the movement of a light breeze across the grass. Then three people walked into view. Marla, me, and Bill Prentice. The scene was shot from a foot or two above head height, as though the camera was in the branches of one of the surrounding trees, and
the field of vision was narrow enough that the grassy hollow filled most of the frame.

  After that there was ten minutes of action, ten minutes of Marla and me undressing, of the pale skin of my back and Marla’s rocking legs. Of Bill watching us.

  The camera had recorded sound as well, but the breeze and its movement through leaves had muffled most of what there might have been to hear. Bill’s instruction to us to take our clothes off was barely audible and the few words Marla and I spoke were only a deeper muttering against the background rub of the air.

  There was no camera wobble or change of angle, no panning or zooming. It seemed to me that the camera had been fixed in place rather than held by someone during the filming. And indeed, no one could have stood as close to us as the shot suggested without us spotting them.

  It was sinister to see myself this way, to see how I looked when I had no idea I was being recorded. And it was strange, too, when the sex ended, to watch ourselves disappear simply by walking out of frame. First Bill, even before we had started to dress. And then Marla and me several minutes later, subdued, not speaking. I kept expecting the camera to swivel, to follow us, to supply some sort of cinematic closure, but it remained focused instead on the place where we had been and stayed that way as I fast-forwarded through the rest of the recording.

  I put the disk back in its place on the bookshelf and turned off the TV. Marla and I left the cabin immediately. We drove to my house without saying anything to each other beyond a breathed “Jesus Christ…” or the occasional, disbelieving “Fuuuuck”- each of us silenced by the dreadful weight of the knowledge we had just acquired.

  The kitchen had trapped the warmth of the afternoon and when we got back I opened the windows and the back door and poured cold soda into glasses and we sat at the table and stared out at the green-gold blur of the garden.

  When Marla spoke her voice was flat and final. “It was our fault she killed herself.”

  “You don’t kill yourself just because you see a video of your husband watching people have sex.”

  “But it obviously pushed her over the edge. If I had said no she’d still be alive.”

  “She might not be.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “There were two of us there, it wasn’t just you.”

  Marla shook her head sadly. “Yes, it was. You would have said yes to anything. And I knew it.”

  “So it was a stupid thing to do, but we didn’t know it was going to be filmed. And we sure as hell didn’t know Patricia would ever see it. You can’t talk yourself into thinking we killed her. If anyone’s to blame it’s Bill.”

  “You think he shot it?”

  “Who else? He chose the place. He could have easily put the camera in a tree beforehand and started it with a remote. Value for money. He gets to watch us and he gets the movie too.”

  “But to give it to Pat? He’s not that far gone.”

  “Maybe she found it by accident.”

  “He’d have to be a complete moron to leave something like that lying around.”

  We were quiet for a while and I thought about Pat watching the video, lying there on her bed as her husband masturbated over two people squirming on the ground, waiting for the Halcion and the whiskey to take hold and end the dreadful knowledge of the distance that separated her from a man she must still have loved. And I thought about Bill too, of the sickening guilt he must have felt when he saw what she’d been watching.

  And then it struck me. “Bill didn’t make the video. He thinks we did.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why he freaked out in front of the Black Cat. Not because he felt guilty about watching us screw, but because he thinks we set him up to be filmed. And he probably thinks we gave the disk to Pat as well.”

  Marla groaned. “You are fucking kidding.”

  “But if it wasn’t him, and we know it wasn’t us, then who was it?”

  Marla looked blank and didn’t say anything.

  “I’m thinking Gareth,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “He hates Bill because when they bought the cabins Bill told them a new road up to the lake was a done deal-”

  “-And it never happened. Yeah, I’ve heard the story.”

  “So he has a reason to want to hurt him. What I can’t figure out, though, is how he would have known where to put the camera. And when to start it. I mean, it was Bill who took us to that place.”

  Marla was silent for a long time then she said, “You know what I’d like to do, Johnny? What I’d really, really like to do? I’d like to forget the whole thing in the forest ever happened.”

  She got up then and said she was tired and was going upstairs to lie down for a while. When she’d gone I sat by myself on the kitchen step and stared out at the garden and thought about how changed Marla was. When I’d come back to Oakridge she had been older, of course. The loneliness and the life she’d suffered had taken its toll on her youth. But there had still been a spark to her, a feeling that she was still young, that life could begin again. Now, though, it seemed she had none of that left, that she was so worn down by living it was beyond her to even care about the truth behind the death of a woman she’d been friendly with.

  Toward the end of the day Marla and I went out to Empty Mile to pick up Stan. The clear brightness of the sky had softened by then and the curving blades of the long grass in the meadow were burnished where the late sun touched them.

  Stan and Rosie lay on their backs in the middle of the meadow staring up at the sky, holding hands. Rosie had made a ring of field daisies and Stan wore it on his head like a crown. I stood with Marla beside the pickup watching them for a moment, reluctant to intrude on their time together.

  That afternoon, in contrast to the hell that life back in town seemed bent on becoming, this land with its trees, its birdsong, and its protecting rock wall gave the illusion of somewhere to escape to. And as I looked over it, reveling in its peace, it occurred to me that the answer to at least one of my problems was staring me in the face.

  The cabin that came with the property had three bedrooms, a large central room that was both kitchen and living room, a rainwater tank, a septic system in the ground, and electricity. Water, power, shelter. Room enough for the three of us, easily. And best of all, the money we would otherwise have had to spend on rent could be ploughed back into Plantasaurus. It wouldn’t be enough to save the business from the impact of Jeremy Tripp’s rival company but it would keep Stan’s dream alive a little longer. And for Marla and me it was the right thing to do. Our relationship would not progress beyond the fragile reconnection we had so far established until we started living with each other again.

  I raised the subject as the three of us drove back to Oakridge. Five days later Stan and I had sold the things we weren’t taking with us in a yard sale and moved into the cabin. Marla would join us the following week.

  CHAPTER 22

  The 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 wa
s 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.