Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  The first cracks began to show on a Sunday in November when Marla and I were sitting on the couch in front of the fire drinking coffee and Bill Prentice picked up his phone and called me.

  I hadn’t heard from him since I’d canceled the lease on the Plantasaurus warehouse and the time during which we’d had no contact seemed to have drained some of the burning anger he had previously directed toward me. Perhaps he now believed Gareth was to blame for the video. I had no way of knowing. But his voice over the phone was measured and tiredly businesslike, as though he had become resigned to a life he knew could never be set back on course. He began without small talk.

  “The lawyers who administered my wife’s investments have recently supplied me with her financial records.”

  “Okay.”

  “They show a payment to her from your father. Do you know anything about it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s hard to believe. He wasn’t a rich man and this is a lot of money. A quarter-million.”

  “Must be a mistake, he didn’t have anywhere near that much.”

  As I spoke, however, it dawned on me that he had indeed had that much money. The remortgaging of our house had given him exactly that amount. And I knew what he’d spent that money on. When I spoke again I had to work to stop my voice from shaking.

  “Can I ask you a question? Does the name Simba Inc. mean anything to you?”

  “Patricia had family wealth, she administered her assets through a business entity of that name. What about it?”

  “Do you know what assets she had, exactly?”

  “Some of them, not all. Her money was always very much her own. She didn’t discuss it with me. Her will left whatever she had under that company to her brother. I had no visibility of it. I have no idea where it’s gone now that he’s dead too. How do you know about Simba?”

  “You know that I live outside Oakridge now?”

  “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “I have some land at a place called Empty Mile. My father bought it just before he disappeared. Before Pat died. The seller is listed on the papers as Simba Inc. It’s the only thing the payment could be for.”

  “Oh…” There was a long pause and a heavy, slowly let out breath, and then, quietly, “Lovers and business partners.”

  “As far as I know there was just that one deal.”

  Bill made a small choking noise.

  “Bill, I’m sorry, but there’s something else I have to ask you.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he stayed on the line.

  “The video, the one Patricia was watching. Was that sent to you? Did Pat somehow… stumble across it?”

  Bill spoke with a furious exactness. “That disk was sent straight to Patricia. The first time I saw it she was dead in our bedroom.”

  He hung up and in the dark, empty silence of the phone against my ear I heard another piece of Bill Prentice’s soul scream and die. For me, though, there was a sunburst of sudden understanding.

  Marla saw my expression and looked questioningly at me.

  “I know what the fucking video’s about.”

  Marla sighed. “Oh Christ…”

  “It wasn’t just to hurt my father. There’s more to it than that. Gareth made it to try and stop him from getting this land.”

  I told Marla what I had just learned, that Patricia Prentice had been Empty Mile’s previous owner and that the video had been sent straight to her, not to Bill.

  “You told me that Pat hated Gareth because he ran her dog over, right? That means after my father severed his relationship with him, Gareth didn’t have a hope in hell of buying Empty Mile and getting his hands on the gold, even if he had the money. Pat wouldn’t have given him the time of day, let alone sold him anything. So what would he do? His first thought would be that if he couldn’t have it, then he was going to make damn sure my father couldn’t either. So he makes a video which he knows has a good chance of pushing an already suicidal woman over the edge. If she’s dead she can’t sell the land.”

  “But Ray still bought it.”

  “Yeah, but only because he closed the deal before Gareth could get the video together.”

  “Jesus, I’m so tired of this.”

  “What are you talking about? This isn’t something you can be tired of. It’s not just Pat and the video and the fact that we got sucked into some failed plan of Gareth’s. This gives Gareth a reason for killing my father.”

  “Johnny, please-”

  “Listen to me. If Pat was just a way to hurt my father for cutting Gareth out of the land deal, some kind of revenge after the fact, then, like you said, when she died Gareth had achieved his objective and he had no reason to do anything else. But if the aim was to stop my father getting the land in the first place, to fuck up the deal before it happened, then Gareth had failed. And if that was the case, then the only way to make things right, to stop my father from benefiting from the gold even though he now had the land, would have been to kill him. And you know what? I think my father knew. He’d spent enough time with Gareth to know what he was capable of and after we had that crash I think he saw the writing on the wall. That’s why he put the land in my name, not because of any bogus accountant. He knew Gareth was after him.”

  Marla leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and ran her fingers through her hair. She let out a long breath. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go through this endless rehashing of why Gareth did this, or why Gareth did that. We either accept that he’s an animal and try to live with what he did to Pat and what he maybe did to Ray, or…” She lifted her head and fixed her eyes on me. “Or we talk about killing him.”

  We were both silent for a long time. Eventually she spoke again.

  “Well, are we going to?”

  “Going to what?”

  “Talk about killing him.”

  “Jesus, Marla, please…”

  “It would be for the best, Johnny. It really would.”

  CHAPTER 33

  For the rest of that Sunday the idea that Gareth had killed my father grew inside me like a vicious pearl. It seemed to fit everything I knew. It made sense of my father’s disappearance, something I had always felt was completely out of character for the kind of man he’d been. And, knowing the violence that lay hidden in Gareth, it was certainly a possible response to the loss of what he must have seen as a way to save his father and himself from their failing cabins at the lake.

  He’d had no compunction about pushing Patricia Prentice to suicide and he’d arranged Jeremy Tripp’s death. What was to say he hadn’t done the same with my father? But of course I had no proof, no indisputable item or event that could settle the matter one way or the other. And it was this lack of confirmation, this knowing but not knowing, that haunted me and ruined my sleep so that when Monday came I was primed and set to explode.

  The weather was bad that morning and Stan had a cold and did not come down to the river. A fine misting rain hung in the air, collecting on the leaves of the trees, dripping, turning the surface of the river milky. Gareth and I were soaked in the first five minutes and we worked with our heads down, cold, saying little to each other. He was beside me at the sluice and seeing him there, so close, with what I assumed was a dreadful knowledge hidden inside his head but acting as though he had nothing more on his mind than soldiering through an honest day’s work, the rage within me boiled over and I threw a shovel of dirt in his face.

  Gareth recoiled, spluttering and blinking, trying to clear his eyes, calling me an idiot. I grabbed him by the front of his jacket and threw him backwards into the river. He went under and came up and for a moment just sat there in the shallows, face now washed clean, staring up at me, his mouth working with the effort of figuring out what was going on. I thought I might jump on him, lock my hands around his throat and force him under the water until he was limp and dead, but then he moved and the grip of my rage loosened.

  He climbed out of the river and we faced
each other on the bank. I expected to see anger in his face, perhaps a quickly rising threat to go running to the police about Jeremy Tripp. But there was only shock and a hurt confusion, as though I had broken some unspoken code that existed between us.

  “Jesus, dude, why did you do that?”

  “The video.”

  “The video?”

  “The disk of me and Marla, you asshole. You didn’t send it to Bill. You sent it straight to Pat. And it didn’t have anything at all to do with the road to the lake.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Stop fucking with me. I know it was Pat who sold the land to my father. The video was supposed to stop the sale, wasn’t it? It was supposed to take her out of the picture before he had a chance to buy it.”

  Gareth looked consideringly at me, then seemed to come to some decision. “You want to know about the video? All right. The whole thing was a fucking waste of time anyway.”

  He turned and walked to the screen of trees that bordered the river. I followed him and we found partial shelter under the branches of a fir. Gareth squatted on the wet ground, he motioned for me to do the same but I stayed standing.

  “Come on, Johnny, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  For a moment I didn’t move, then I gave up and squatted facing him.

  Gareth nodded. “Good. Okay. Let me ask you first, how did you find out about the gold here? Did Ray tell you?”

  “I figured it out after he disappeared.”

  “The journal at that old lady’s house, the aerial photo-”

  “The lecture at the Elephant Society about rivers changing course… Pretty much the way you and he did.”

  “The difference being that Ray and I were together every step of the way. We got friendly because we were both into prospecting. We came across the journal together and then the photo. We took it from there. The thing you have to understand is that right from the start discovering the gold was something Ray and I did together. He didn’t have dibs on it. The plan was we were going to buy the place together and both get rich. Only Daddy didn’t stick to the plan.”

  “Probably when he realized what a psycho you are.”

  Gareth swallowed and, shockingly, just for an instant, his eyes filled with tears. “Do you want the story or not?”

  I nodded. Gareth blinked and cleared his throat.

  “Once we’d figured out about the land, we had to find out who owned it so we could make them an offer. We went to the deed office at the town hall-land’s owned by some holding company who won’t even discuss it with us. We think we’re fucked. But then, guess what? Ray’s been banging Patricia Prentice for months. He happens to mention he’s interested in the land at Empty Mile and, bingo, turns out Pattycake owns it. Instantly, instead of us being fucked, I’m the one who’s fucked. One, because Ray suddenly has all the power. He’s obviously going to get preferential treatment-I mean, he’s fucking her, right? And two, she hates my guts because-how pathetic is this?-I ran her dog over like a year ago, so I can’t be part of any deal he arranges. At this point Ray’s all, yeah, yeah, don’t worry, I’ll do the deal and then we’ll split it afterwards. But I knew right then he couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to have all that money for himself. I could see it on his face. What brought things to a head, or at least the way your father played it, was Marla. While we’d been getting to know each other I’d told him about my hookers, Marla included. And you know, it was weird, but he didn’t say shit about it then. Just when he held all the cards on the land deal, though, he started getting all pissy and moral and told me I had to leave her alone. His story was that he didn’t want you to come home and find out your old girlfriend was a whore. I told him to fuck off, of course. Stupid in a way because it gave him just the excuse he needed to cut me out of the Empty Mile deal. But you know what? Even without Marla he would have done it. He smelled that money and he was hooked.”

  The air was still full of rain. It dripped from the branches above us, tapping out a rhythm that made a wall against the rest of the world. Gareth picked up a twig and began poking it into the muddy ground.

  “When I saw the way things were going I decided if Ray was going to treat me like that then I was going to fuck the deal up for him. And it was kind of fitting that Marla gave me the idea how to do it. She was friends with Patty and poor Patty was having trouble sleeping. Marla wanted me to get some weed for her, but I figured she had to be on antidepressants so I gave her a whole shitload of Halcion instead. As you know, I’m no stranger to what can happen when you mix benzodiazepines with acute depression. A few weeks later you and Marla were kind enough to star in my video. On top of Pat already having tried to kill herself a bunch of times it seemed to me that a little extra medication and watching her husband doing something nice and disgusting might very well be the final straw she needed to make a proper job of it.”

  “But you couldn’t have known for sure.”

  Gareth shrugged. “Nothing’s ever for sure, Johnny, but it was worth trying. By the time I got things together, though, Ray had already closed the deal. Of course I didn’t know that when I sent Pattycake the disk because Ray and I weren’t speaking a whole lot by then.”

  “So Pat dies and Bill is fucked forever and it was all for nothing.”

  “Like I said, big waste of time.”

  “That must have made you pretty mad. I bet after that, you couldn’t stand the sight of Ray.”

  Gareth narrowed his eyes. “Careful there, Johnboy. That sounds a little bit like an accusation.”

  “You know my father had a car crash just a couple of days after Pat died?”

  Gareth shook his head and frowned. “Didn’t hear about that.”

  “No? You know what caused it? A corroded brake line.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Johnny, come on! Because I did Tripp that way?”

  “And it wasn’t long after that, that he disappeared.”

  “Why would I do anything to Ray? What would I get out of it? It wasn’t like the land would pass to me. Don’t go looking for skeletons where there aren’t any. We’re sitting pretty. We’ve got the land, we’re going to be rich. Just stay in line while we get the gold and a couple of years from now it’s sayonara, dude-we all go our separate ways.”

  Gareth looked out through the trees at the rain-stippled river. He threw the twig he’d been playing with away and stood up.

  “Might as well forget it for today, this isn’t going to let up.”

  After Gareth had gone I went up to the cabin and lit a fire. Stan came out of his bedroom wearing his Captain America suit and we sat in front of the fire and listened to the rain on the roof. Stan sprawled in his chair and tipped his moths out of the pouch around his neck and watched them crawl jerkily around on the surface of his belly. They were too damaged to fly and one or two of them weren’t moving at all. He tapped them with his finger and sighed.

  “Keeping the power coming across makes me tired out.”

  After a while he pushed the moths back into the pouch and sat up straighter.

  “I have to marry Rosie soon.”

  He had a small notebook with him in which he kept a tally of the gold money he’d deposited in his bank account. He leaned forward over it now, running his thumb down the column of pencil-written figures, staring at them morosely, as though they somehow failed to convey the meaning he expected to find in them.

  “You have a lot of money, Stan. You’re going to have a lot more.”

  “I know.”

  “More than you’d ever have made from Plantasaurus.”

  “Yeah.”

  Though he had worked hard at the river throughout our mining, and though his spirits had lifted enough to share in the reflex enthusiasm any person would feel at acquiring wealth, I knew that the money didn’t mean much to him. He had more in the bank than many families ever saved, but nothing else had really changed. He was still Stan, he was still the fat guy with heavy glasses who was treated in town with t
he overly careful attention usually reserved for children. Gold had not brought about the kind of magical transformation he had hoped for from Plantasaurus.

  The only thing he had left now, the only thing of any real emotional worth, was Rosie. It seemed to me that he felt marrying her was his last chance to participate in at least some part of the mainstream world. I had previously seen such a move as fraught with potential sadness, but there wasn’t much else I could give him-Plantasaurus had failed, and the gold, of itself, was meaningless to him. So now I embraced the idea of his marriage. It was the only thing I could contribute to that might claw back some happiness for him.

  For half an hour we talked about it and Stan came alive. The cold he’d had that morning was already clearing and he stood up and moved around the room, chattering about all the things he and Rosie would do together, elated now that he had my support. And because I wanted my support to be real for him, because I really did want his world to change, I took him into Oakridge that afternoon and helped him buy an engagement ring and two wedding rings from a jewelry store in Old Town.

  That evening was a happy affair. Stan went over to Rosie’s with the engagement ring held tightly in his hand and when he came back he had Rosie and Millicent with him and Rosie was wearing the ring. Marla fussed over Rosie and made her hold her hand out so the diamond would flash in the light. Rosie tolerated the attention with her head bent as always and her arms limp and straight at her sides, but every now and then a small wondering smile played at the corners of her mouth and it was hard not to think that on this day, at least, she felt herself to be lucky.

  Millicent drank wine with Marla and me, and later we all had dinner together. Stan and Rosie held hands under the table and we had the fire and candles, and the lights were off so that the night became a series of glowing frescoes. And I was there at last, after so many years away. I was with my brother when something important and good was happening to him. Across the plates and glasses his face was luminous with happiness and I saw that he had, if only for those fire-lit hours, reached a point where he felt as good as everyone else, where the concept of difference had ceased to exist.