Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“All I remember is that he was with another guy, about your age. And I remember because a week or so after your father submitted the samples this guy came back and wanted to pick them up and get the report. But the only name on the work request was your father’s so legally we couldn’t tell him anything and we sure couldn’t give him the samples. He was pretty pissed off about it.”

I showed him the photo of Gareth on my cell phone. “This the guy?”

“That’s him.”

Out in the pickup I put the vial in my pocket and tossed the bag of dirt on the passenger seat. I made it back to Oakridge toward the end of the afternoon and picked Stan up from the warehouse. When he saw the bag of river gravel he was full of questions. I showed him the wafer of gold and spent the rest of the drive telling him about the samples and trying to contain his immediate assumption that my father had discovered a gold mine.

We were staying the night at Marla’s place, to have dinner and help her with the last of her packing before she moved to Empty Mile, but first I wanted to drop by the real estate office where my father had worked to thank them for the gift basket they’d sent. During the drive Stan sat with the larger sample on his lap and at one point he shifted it a little and smoothed the plastic against its contents. I heard him make a small sound of happy surprise and turned to see him pointing at several small faded pink petals mixed with the dirt.

The real estate office, like most of the other businesses in Old Town, was housed in a converted two-story wooden building that had probably been a private residence or some sort of store back in the 1800s. A large plate-glass window had been cut into the front and was filled with rows of photographs advertising properties in the Oakridge area. I knew Rolf Kortekas, the guy who owned the business, well enough to say hello to. He was a Dutchman who’d come to the States as a kid-an immigrant like my father. But unlike my father he had achieved a reasonable level of financial success. I left Stan in the truck while I went inside.

Rolf was the only one in the office that afternoon and when I walked in he stood up behind his desk and spread his arms.

“Johnny. My God, what can I say? Do you need something? Sit down, sit down.”

I told him I’d just dropped in to say thanks for the gift. We talked for a few minutes about my father and his disappearance and after that I asked Rolf if he had any idea why my father had bought the Empty Mile land.

“He was a good man, your father, I think. But I can’t say that I knew him well, even after all this time. I know he bought the land, but I have no idea why. Your father wasn’t a man who confided in others.”

The office was decorated to mimic a turn-of-the-century land office. The plank walls had been painted a muddy cream and hung with antique land documents. It had a nostalgic, comfortable feel and for a moment I gazed idly at its old-fashioned decorations and wondered if there was anything else Rolf could tell me.

I’d been staring at a set of three pictures on the wall behind him for several seconds before I realized what they were. Black-and-white aerial photographs. Different part of the landscape, but the same size, the same gray toning as the one my father had so proudly shown Stan and me. Rolf saw me looking at them.

“Bureau of Land Management. They had a project to photograph some of the land around here. Aerial cataloging. Helps them decide if they should move more land into government ownership, or if they have any they can get rid of because it isn’t of environmental significance. One of their surveyors was based in Oakridge for a while. We helped him out a little with local land knowledge, he gave us some prints in return.”

“When was that?”

“April. Your father was fascinated with them. I think he even went to see the man to talk about them.”

“Is he still in Oakridge?”

“No, he moves around, but he’s in Burton sometimes, I think. I have his card if you’d like it.”

Rolf rummaged through a drawer in his desk and passed me a business card for a surveyor named Howard Webb. I stood up to go. Rolf stood as well and leaned across his desk to shake my hand and tell me if he could help me out with anything to just let him know.

At the office door, before I went out, I thought of something and stopped. “Do you know who my father’s accountant was?”

Rolf laughed pleasantly. “You won’t get mad at me if I tell you your father was not so very smart when it came to money? If any man should have had an accountant it was him. But he didn’t. Again, as far as I know. But you work with someone, you get to know these kinds of things. He didn’t have an accountant.”

On the street outside Marla’s house there was a small rented dumpster half full of the things she was throwing away. Inside, the house had taken on a feeling of desolation. The living room was piled with the furniture she was going to get rid of in her own yard sale, the bedroom my father and Pat had used was crammed with the things she wanted to keep, and all over the house there were open cartons in various stages of being filled. Everywhere was sad and too bright and devoid of the welcoming comfort that for ten years had made the place a home.

While Stan watched superhero cartoons on a TV Marla hadn’t yet disconnected, she and I sat in the small garden behind the house with bottles of beer and caught the last of the afternoon sun.

I told her about going to Burton and up to the lake, and I showed her the two metal brackets-one from the tree, one from David’s workshop. She took them from me and sat with one in each hand, staring dully at them, her head bowed as though the metal’s touch had somehow drained her energy. I explained what I thought they meant.

“You can’t buy them anywhere, Gareth’s father is the only person who makes them. Gareth must have taken one, hammered it onto the tree, and attached the camera to it before we got there. Then he probably just turned it on and left. Those things run for like two hours. What I can’t figure out is how the hell he knew where we were going to be. Would Bill have told him? He picked the spot, after all.”

Marla didn’t say anything. I was so preoccupied with trying to solve the puzzle that I hardly noticed.

“But that doesn’t make sense. Bill and Gareth don’t even speak, and Bill would never let Gareth get that sort of power over him. But then we come back to how Gareth could possibly have known where to put the camera.”

I groaned and ran my hands over my face.

“It has to be Gareth, but how? How the fuck did he know where we’d be?”

Finally Marla raised her head and I saw that there were tears on her cheeks. When she spoke her first words were so quiet I could hardly hear them. “Gareth knew because he was the one who chose the place. He told me I had to take Bill there.”

“What are you talking about? Bill led us there.”

Marla shook her head. “I told him it had to be that place behind the rock or we wouldn’t do it. He knew where to go because back when I was hooking, when I first started, before Gareth or anything, we’d both been there. Together… I just let it look like he was leading the way.”

“You fucked Bill Prentice?”

Marla stood abruptly, took two steps away from me, bent at the waist, and threw up on the grass. She stayed like that for a while, clearing her throat and wiping her mouth, then she straightened and turned back to me.

“It was a long time ago. You know I have this stuff in my past. Please don’t be a bastard about it.”

Her hands were shaking and her crying, which had been interrupted by her throwing up, started again. I took a deep breath and tried to force the image of Bill on top of Marla out of my head. Then the deeper meaning of what she’d said hit me.