Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“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.”

Reginald Singh looked mildly dismayed and shook his head. “Oh no, no, no. You have ID. Gold nine-thirty fine.”

“Excuse me?”

He tapped the vial with his forefinger. “We received a sample of concentrates-the mixture of black sands and fine gold that most placer miners can easily reduce their pannings to. The work request was to determine the purity of the ore it contained. There are a number of ways to do this-ion probe analysis, fluorescence spectrometry-but fire assay is simple, suitable for small samples, and more affordable for an individual prospector. It is considered to be as accurate as any other method. We performed this type of assay on your father’s sample. We determined the fineness-the purity-of this sample to be gold nine-thirty fine.”

“Which means?”

“Gold is always alloyed with a certain amount of silver and other trace metals. Gold fineness is based on a scale of zero to one thousand. So, after we had separated the metal from the black sands we determined, through our assay, that its pure gold content was in the ratio of nine hundred and thirty parts to one thousand. About average for California placer gold.”

I picked up the vial and turned it so that the light caught the small wafer of gold. “So this actually has silver in it too?”

“No, that is pure gold. After we do the fire reduction we dissolve the silver content by immersion in a 50 percent solution of nitric acid. Weighing the sample before and after gives the percentage of non-gold metal. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Well, I was wondering if you remembered anything about when my father was here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know really. Did he say anything about the samples, where he got them? Did he make any sort of comment about anything that stood out?”

“Oh, I didn’t meet your father, I performed the assay only. One of my colleagues took the work request. I can get him if you like.”

I said that would be good and Reginald Singh went back into the building proper. A minute later a younger man with blond hair that hadn’t been washed for a while came out and took his place behind the counter. Before he said anything he placed a large see-through plastic bag containing what looked like soil and gravel on the counter.

“This is yours too. I haven’t been here too long and when your father…?” He raised his eyebrows and I nodded. “When your father came in he had the sample you already got, which he wanted tested for purity, and this one,” he nodded at the bag, “which he wanted tested for content, like he wanted to know how much gold was in the whole thing. I accepted it by mistake. We don’t work on samples that aren’t at least refined down to concentrates. My fault, I’m sorry.”

“Do you remember him saying where the samples came from?”

“Thing about prospectors-they don’t say nothing about nothing. You find gold, you’re not going to tell anyone where it is. No, he didn’t say where he got it. That one,” he pointed at the bag, “looks like river gravel to me.”

“Did he say anything else… about anything?”