“Honestly? I don’t think so.”
“And that’s okay because I killed your father, right? Well, I’m going to leave you with a little present. You too, Marla-you most of all. And if you’re smart, Johnny, you’ll do the right thing with it.”
Marla squatted so that her face was only a foot from his and hissed, “Don’t!”
“It’ll always be there between you if I don’t.”
“You promised.”
“Dying’s kind of a free pass. Johnny, get down here too, it hurts to talk.”
I squatted next to Marla. For a moment Gareth closed his eyes and gathered his strength. On the other side of the meadow I heard an engine start and a car pull away. When Gareth opened his eyes again the light had gone out of them and they were starting to look fixed and dull.
“Okay… I did fix the brakes on Ray’s car, same as Tripp’s. But I didn’t kill him. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have tried again, I just didn’t have to-”
I glanced at Marla and saw that she was watching me and crying.
“-because Marla did it for me. But you have to know, Johnny, it was an accident. It wasn’t her fault…” He paused and blinked rapidly several times. “And that pipe, I got rid of it weeks ago. Kiss my dad for me.”
Gareth tried twice to take another breath but couldn’t do it. The wound in his chest fizzed nastily. And then he was dead.
I stood slowly and looked down at him, at the now-cooling body of a man I had known for more than ten years-a friend I had robbed of the woman he loved, a friend I had made my enemy. So many years ago…
How could I have foreseen that his desire for Marla would one day lead my poor damaged brother to commit murder? There was no way, of course. Even so… even so, it seemed to me that I should have known.
Marla had her head in her hands; she wasn’t crying for Gareth, though. There was now a fresh horror in our lives demanding to be dug from its grave and examined. But I was terribly conscious that I had to go to Stan. Killing Jeremy Tripp had been something I could only just support. For someone like Stan, the most innocent of people, the act of murder would tear his soul to shreds.
I lifted Marla to her feet and began to pull her across the meadow toward Millicent’s house but she hung back and took her hand away from me.
“Johnny… Johnny…”
Her face was blotchy from crying and she stood in front of me unable to speak, her mouth twisting.
“Marla, come on. I need you with me.”
For a moment she didn’t move, then the briefest flicker of hope crossed her face and she held my hand again and ran with me, up the meadow to Millicent’s house.
When we got there I saw that the Datsun was gone. Millicent came to the door when she heard us on her stoop and the sight of her chilled me. That she was there meant someone else had driven the car away.
“What happened? Why did Stanley shoot that man? Is he dead?”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. They went into the bedroom for a minute, then Rosie got the keys and they took the car.”
“Didn’t they say anything?”
“Not a thing. Except Rosie stopped on her way out, just here by the door, and put her arms around me and told me, ‘Thank you.’ What for, I don’t know, but she hasn’t hugged me like that more than three or four times in her life.”
I called Stan’s cell phone from Millicent’s stoop but he didn’t answer. Marla and I ran back down the slope and got into the pickup and charged out of Empty Mile.
We went straight to Old Town first and then, when we didn’t find them there, doubled back to Back Town. With each street we checked I felt an increasing sense of foreboding. Marla tried Stan’s phone constantly but it went straight to voice mail.
Near the town hall a thought struck me and I accelerated past the remaining stores and headed out to the Oakridge commercial precinct. If Stan was being eaten alive with guilt he might go to the place he most closely associated with the beginning of that guilt.
But when we got to the Plantagion warehouse there was no sign of the orange Datsun. I got out of the pickup to look around just in case. The warehouse was locked up and deserted. Through the window I could see all the office furniture was gone. It seemed that whoever had inherited Jeremy Tripp’s estate had closed the business down. I made a circuit of the building but there was no sign Stan had broken in anywhere. When I got back to the pickup my cell phone was ringing. Stan-his voice dreamlike, as though while he was speaking to me he was looking at something of beauty.
“Hi, Johnny-”
“Where are you?”
“It’s okay.”
“What do you mean? Stan? I want you to go back to the cabin right now.”
“Rosie and me talked about it. And you mustn’t be sad, Johnny, okay? You mustn’t be sad.”
“Stan! Get back to the cabin now. Put Rosie on the phone.”
“I had to shoot Gareth.”
“I know you did, and it’s okay. I’m not angry with you.”
“I know that, Johnny. You’re never angry with me. You’re the best brother in the world.”
“Stan, please. Where are you? What are you going to do?”
I heard my voice break and though I knew I was crying I couldn’t feel the tears on my face or the tightness in my throat. My perception had narrowed to only the voice against my ear and the dreadful visions flying through my head.
“I love you, Johnny, and I know how you tried to make things good for me with Plantasaurus and the gold and you let me marry Rosie and you took care of me. And I remember all the times we had together, since you came back and before that when I was a kid. I remember them all and I’m going to take them with me. Just like when I drowned and came awake again. The first thing I saw was the sky and it was so deep and blue, and then I saw you looking down at me and you were so worried and I thought how much I loved you and even when you were gone I never stopped feeling that way. Don’t forget, Johnny. Don’t think anything else.”
“Stan, I’m not going to think anything. We’ll talk about it at home.”
“You should wear my costumes, Johnny. Sometimes when you put them on it feels like things can’t hurt you so much.”
“Stan, please… You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you? I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you. Promise me.”
“I’m going to take you with me in my heart. I love you, Johnny.”
The line went dead. I dialed him back immediately but there was no answer. Marla put her hand on my thigh.
“Where is he?”
I shook my head and was about to tell her I didn’t know, but then it hit me-the only place it would make sense for him to be.
“The lake.”
I threw the pickup into gear and began the race to get to Stan before he did anything to himself.
I drove fast. I took the shortest route I knew-out the other side of the precinct and along the narrow road we’d taken the night Stan set fire to the Plantagion warehouse. It took me fifteen minutes at high speed to reach the Loop and another two from there to get to the start of Lake Trail.
I had to take it slower from here because of the road. Everything in me screamed to go faster, but the one time I tried it the rear wheels lost traction and the pickup slid dangerously on a bend.
Two hundred yards from the end of the trail we found the Datsun. It had gone off the road, fortunately on the uphill side, and ploughed sideways into a tree. The passenger side was heavily dented. I stopped the pickup and ran to it, but it was empty. There was a small amount of blood on the dash in front of the passenger seat, but nothing that suggested serious injury.
We raced up the last short stretch of trail and flew out into the sunlight going way too fast. I had to wrench the pickup into a hard left turn and hit the brakes to avoid careening over the grass and onto the beach. Marla and I jumped out and scanned the lake and the land surrounding it.
I didn’t know where to look, what part of the
place to scour for a sign that Stan still existed. The world around me was a frantic series of snapshots, shuddering as I turned my head, impossible to assimilate. I felt as though some dazzling light shone into my eyes, allowing me to see only the edges of what I looked at. But then my brain caught up and all the images smashing at the air around me slammed into place and I was able to see what was happening at the lake that day.
So late in the year the weather was too cold for people to be swimming and there were only two vehicles in the parking lot. Gareth and David’s bungalow looked closed and without movement, though a weak column of smoke rose vertically into the air from its chimney. Beyond the bungalow and the cabins the wooden jetty caught my eye. The small rowboat that usually lay upturned at its end was missing.
I looked across the water and saw the boat empty and drifting, about as far from the beach as it was possible to get-out near the sheer rock wall that held back the land on the opposite side of the lake. There was nothing around it, no desperately flailing swimmers, no churned and broken water.
I moved my gaze quickly back to the beach, wanting to find Stan and Rosie sitting cuddled together waiting for me to find them and solve the problem of their crashed car. But they weren’t there. The beach was deserted except for two elderly couples standing at the edge of the water. I started to look beyond them, further up the beach, but there was something wrong. The old people were not admiring the stillness of the water or enjoying the thin autumn sun on their faces. They were pointing and shouting and looking desperately about them. I knew then where Stan was and I ran across the grass and the coarse sand to the lake.
One of the women spoke to me first. She appeared to be in her seventies. The weathered skin of her face was drawn tight with worry.
“Two people just drowned.”
“A man and a woman?”
“Yes, yes! We saw them out there and they were rowing and then both of them just stood up and jumped into the water. They didn’t even try to swim.”
The man standing next to her interjected, “They were holding hands when they jumped.”
The woman nodded rapidly. “They were on the surface for maybe a minute, then they went under and they didn’t come back up. We couldn’t do anything. We’re old. We couldn’t do anything.”
The two men nodded and made noises of agreement. The other woman was crying.
“How long?”
One of the men shook his head gravely. “They went under at least ten minutes ago. We called the police. There was no one else here.” He gestured uselessly with the cell phone he was holding.
I did the only thing I could do, a thing I couldn’t stop myself doing. I took off my clothes and swam out to the rowboat. It was a distance of almost two hundred yards and I was not a strong swimmer and when I got there I was gasping and had to hold on to the side of the boat to rest.
What I was doing was futile. The boat would have drifted and there was little chance I was close enough to where they entered the water to make an effective search. And even if I was, the lake here was more than fifty feet deep and they had been under far, far too long. But when I had my breath back I dove beneath the surface of the cold water and swam down as far as I could, stretching my eyes wide to see, groping about me as the light grew dimmer. I found nothing, touched no trailing limb, no waterlogged torso. I surfaced and dove down again, and again, and again, until the world became a tumbling storm of white bubbles and dark water and a terrible hunger for air.
I was so weakened that I would certainly have run into trouble, but at some point the police arrived and two officers swam out and dragged me back to shore.
There were three police cruisers there, pulled up on the grass at the edge of the beach, and while my rescuers dried themselves, their colleagues took statements from the elderly couples and then from Marla and me. When they were finished with us they went over to the bungalow and questioned David, but he had been in the barn out back and had no idea anything had even happened.
The Oakridge police had no resources to make a search of the lake themselves, and because there was no question that Stan and Rosie could still be alive, they shut the scene down until a dive team could be brought up from Sacramento the following morning. The couples were allowed to go, crime scene tape was strung across the entrance to Lake Trail to close it to the public, and a cruiser was posted there as backup.
Marla and I, however, were far from finished for the day. We had to take the police out to Empty Mile and explain why a dead body with a bullet hole in it was lying on the ground in front of our cabin. And how it connected to Stan and Rosie’s drowning.
One of the detectives who joined the uniforms at Empty Mile was Patterson, the lead officer on my father’s disappearance. There was, I think, some cynicism in his surprise that I was now part of a murder investigation, but the fact that Millicent confirmed she’d seen Stan shoot Gareth and that Marla and I had had nothing to do with it didn’t leave him much option but to accept the version of events we gave him.
The business of the crime scene-the recording of evidence, the videoing of the surrounding area, the photographing of the body, the repeated questioning-took until the middle of the afternoon. Then, around three p.m., Marla and I and Millicent, so shattered by the loss of her granddaughter that she had to be helped to stand by one of the officers, were taken to the Oakridge police station to give formal statements.
The police had a confirmed culprit, or at least they would have when they could raise him from the bottom of the lake, and we weren’t treated as suspects. The only finessing Marla and I had to do concerned Stan’s motivation for the shooting, but this was simple enough. In a private moment at the lake before we told them about the shooting we’d agreed to say that Gareth had sexually propositioned Rosie a number of times and that it had finally pushed Stan over the edge. We said nothing at all about Jeremy Tripp.
The statements took about an hour and a half and when they were done we were driven back to Empty Mile. The cruiser dropped us at Millicent’s house and Marla and I helped her up the steps and put her to bed where she lay staring at nothing, her hands loose and forgotten on top of the covers. Marla made tea but Millicent didn’t want it and after a while it seemed that we were out of place there, intruders on her misery, and so we excused ourselves and left her alone, lying in the slowly darkening room, without family now in the whole of the world.
Marla and I were silent on the walk across the meadow, dreading the conversation both of us knew we had to have.
Gareth’s body was gone from in front of the cabin. In its place there were small traces of police activity-strips of marker tape, empty evidence bags, some small yellow plastic stakes hammered into the ground to show where the body had lain. There was birdsong in the air with the approach of evening, but rather than soften the scene about us it made the place seem forlorn and abandoned as though, along with the corpse, the police had taken away with them whatever it was that had made the cabin and the land around it feel welcoming and lived in.
Marla went through the door with her head bowed. She walked straight to the couch and sat down and started talking before I’d finished taking my coat off. Her voice was flat, but there was relief in it as well, as though her words carried from her some poison that had been progressively corroding her system.
“When you came back to Oakridge Ray wanted to start fresh with you, to build a better relationship. But he thought the affair he’d had with me was something so terrible he wouldn’t be able to do this if he kept it hidden from you. The evening it happened, he came to my house and told me he was going to tell you what we’d done.”
Marla looked desperately at me. She had a small handkerchief in her lap and was shredding the thin material with her fingernails.
“I thought if you knew, we’d be finished. All I wanted was to be with you. It was all I ever wanted. And you’d just come back and I saw everything I thought I was going to have with you being taken away again. I begged him not to say
anything, to just let it stay in the past. But he wouldn’t. He kept saying he had to tell you. Over and over. And I was going crazy. I was begging. But he wouldn’t change his mind. And then I pushed him. That’s all. I just pushed him on the chest, just to make him stop. Just a push… I didn’t mean to kill him. I didn’t even want to hurt him. I just wanted him not to tell you.”
Marla paused and sobbed and then with an effort gathered herself and spoke again.
“We were in the kitchen and he fell. I don’t know why. It shouldn’t have happened, he should have just stepped backwards. But he didn’t. He fell and hit the back of his head on the edge of the counter. I tried to revive him. I did CPR… I’m so sorry, Johnny. I’m so sorry.”
“But his car was found out at Jerry’s Gas. I don’t understand.”
“When I saw he was dead I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Gareth. He was the only person I could think of who’d help me. He came around and we waited till two in the morning then we drove Ray’s car out to Jerry’s to make it look like he’d run out and hopped a bus somewhere. It was a stupid idea but it was the only thing we could think of to lead the police away from Oakridge.”
Marla stopped again. She looked drained and utterly exhausted.
“What did you do with his body?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Gareth said it would be safer if I didn’t know.”
“You don’t know where his body is?”
“Gareth took it away. I don’t know what he did with it.” Marla started to cry again. “And you know what the crazy thing is? The most fucking insane thing of all time? It didn’t need to happen. Ray’s death, the things I had to let Gareth make me do afterwards… None of it had to happen. Because when you found out about the affair you didn’t leave me. You didn’t even stop loving me. What I’d been so frightened of turned out to be… nothing.”
For a long time I sat there and watched Marla and tried to muster some sort of anger toward her, but the plain truth was that I couldn’t make my father’s death more important to me than keeping her.
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