Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

We spent the remainder of the day back at our warehouse and then headed home. On our way through town Stan said he wanted to celebrate, so we picked up Chinese food for a surprise dinner with my father.

At the house we set out plates in the dining room and put the food in the oven to keep warm. We sat in the kitchen and waited for my father. But my father didn’t come home.

When it was past seven I called his office but it was closed and I got the machine. There was no answer from his cell phone. It was unlikely, but still possible, that he was out late showing a property, so we kept on waiting. After a while Stan went off and watched TV and at eight we took the food out of the oven and the two of us ate a quiet dinner in the kitchen. Stan put a brave face on but I knew he was worried.

An hour later I called the Oakridge police. I got put through to a detective who told me they had no reports of recent car wrecks or any other incidents that might have accounted for my father’s absence. He said he’d check with the medical center in town and the hospital in Burton and call back. In the meantime he wanted me to call my father’s friends and the people he worked with in case they knew anything.

My father’s boss was Rolf Kortekas. I found him in the phone book and called him at home. All he could tell me was that my father had left the office around six as usual and that he hadn’t said anything about showing a property after hours. Kortekas assumed he’d headed straight home.

After that, who was there? My father had no close friends and the woman he’d been seeing had been buried two days ago. The only other person I could think of was Marla. I figured he might have gone around to her place to commiserate about Pat. I called her house and her cell phone. There was no answer at either.

When the detective called back he had nothing to report. No one of my father’s name or description had been admitted to the medical center or to the Burton hospital. He said he’d put the word out to the patrol cars and that if my father hadn’t turned up by morning someone would come around to the house. Before he hung up he told me not to worry too much, in his experience ninety percent of these cases turned out to be nothing more serious than someone sleeping off a drinking binge in a motel room.

I wasn’t convinced. Drinking binges weren’t something my father did. But we seemed now to be in the grip of the police machine and all its iron procedures. In an attempt to feel like we weren’t just waiting around, that we were in fact doing something, rather than out of any real hope that he would actually be there, I suggested to Stan that we check the only other place I could think of that had any connection to my father-the cabin on the piece of land at Empty Mile.

The drive out there in the dark felt as though it was mandated to end in some episode of domestic tragedy. The roads were unlit and the tunnel our headlights cut into the night served only to point up all the uncounted horrors that could befall a human being. The meadow, though, when we pulled off Rural Route 12, was peaceful. Under the starlight the long grass held a sheen of silver and when I parked in front of the cabin and turned the pickup’s engine off the silence of the place seemed to fall like some heavy curtain about us.

The cabin was dark. No flashlight or lamp or burning candle gave away my bivouacking or binge-drunk father and when we entered through the unlocked door it took us less than a minute to confirm that the place was empty, that indeed it bore no sign my father had ever been there.

Across the meadow there was light in some of the windows of Millicent and Rosie’s house. On our way back I stopped and asked them if they had seen my father at Empty Mile that day. They had not.

My father was still absent when we returned to our house and the anxiety that had been riding Stan all evening rose to a physical agitation that had him pacing the hallway and shaking his hands, asking me over and over what could have happened and what we were going to do. It took me half an hour to calm him enough to get him into bed and even then he lay staring at the ceiling, wide-eyed with apprehension.

Afterwards, I stayed up, sitting alone in the kitchen, calling both of Marla’s phones every half hour. I was worried about my father, of course, but the fact that Marla didn’t seem to be at home added a streak of jealousy to the mix. There weren’t too many encouraging scenarios I could come up with for her not being there at that time of night. When she still hadn’t answered half an hour after midnight I gave up and went to bed.

Stan and I were both awake early the next morning. Neither of us had slept well and around dawn we got up and sat in the kitchen. I made coffee and Stan drank hot chocolate. He looked haunted and drawn and he sat hunched in his chair. My father had not come home during the night and we both knew something was very wrong.

Around seven a.m. I called Marla’s landline. She answered on the second ring.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

“Johnny?”

“Yeah, are you all right? You sound weird.”

“I’m okay. I just woke up, that’s all. I was going to call you today. I miss you. Is everything okay?”

“My father’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared? What do you mean?”

“He didn’t come home last night. We don’t know where he is.”

“Oh no.”

“You haven’t seen him?”

“No. Why would I see him?”

“I thought because of Pat and everything he might have come around.”

“No. I haven’t seen him since before she died.”

“But you were there all night? You would have known if he came around? I called you till about twelve and there was no answer.”

“I had a killer day at work. When I got home I just turned off the phones and crashed out. I’m sorry, you must have needed someone to talk to. Have you called the police?”

“Yeah, last night. They’re sending someone over.”

“Are they going to do an investigation?”

“Well, I’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, jeeze, Johnny, I really don’t want to get dragged into it.”

“Why would you?”

“Because of the room. They’re obviously going to ask you if he was seeing anyone. And then they’ll come here.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Of course! I’m renting a fuck pad to a woman who just killed herself, whose husband’s a big noise on the council, and whose lover has just disappeared. Not to mention I gave her those fucking pills.”

“Did anyone else know about the room?”

“No one. No one knew anything. Can you please keep me out of it? Please.”

“Okay… If it comes up I won’t say anything about the room. Okay?”

Marla sounded relieved. “Thank you, Johnny. Thanks.”

Detective Patterson turned up midmorning with a uniformed officer and a laptop. Patterson was about fifty. He was not a tall man and he was thick around the middle. He wore a dark suit and his hair was held in place with some sort of product that smelled faintly of mint.

Stan and I and the two cops went into the kitchen. Patterson put his laptop on the table and faced us with his hands slightly raised, as though he wanted to make absolutely sure we understood what he was going to say.

“All right. The news so far is that we have not found your father. Neither do we have any information about his movements last night. What one of our cars did find in the last hour, though, was a white Ford Taurus parked in the lot behind Jerry’s Gas.”

He handed me a sheet of paper that bore the logo of a car rental company. My father’s signature was at the bottom.

“Your father’s rental agreement. We’ve checked with the car people and there’s no question-the car we found is the one he rented. No one at Jerry’s knows anything about how it got there. Unfortunately they don’t have camera coverage in the lot. The car was unlocked and the key was in the ignition.”