Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

As soon as he saw her, Stan began to shake. “Rosie, what’s wrong!”

Rosie didn’t look at him.

“Johnny, something’s wrong.”

Marla reached out with her free hand and passed me a large brown envelope. “She was waiting for me when I got home. She had these with her.”

Stan sat down on the other side of Rosie and put his arm around her. She pressed herself stiffly against him.

The envelope was unsealed. I reached into it and took out a set of five photos which, from the look of the finish, had been printed on a home computer. As soon as I saw what was on them I knew I should have opened them somewhere away from Stan. But it was too late. He’d caught a glimpse of what they showed and he leapt from the couch to stand beside me. I tried to put them back in the envelope but he grabbed my wrist.

“No, Johnny, show me!”

I gave him the photos. Rosie was the lone subject of each one-naked, her body white, the soft tuft of pubic hair sharply dark between her legs. She stood as though frozen in the center of a large room with a polished wooden floor and white walls. A room both Stan and I knew.

“That’s Jeremy Tripp’s house!” Stan started to wave his arms rapidly back and forth in front of his face. “That’s Jeremy Tripp’s house! What’s happening? Rosie, what happened?”

He stumbled back to her, clumsily taking her hands. Rosie stared at her knees and spoke in a voice that was empty of emotion, as though she had been so crushed by life that she could not fully react to this latest bout of its unkindness.

“I was cleaning the house for him, in the big room that always seems so quiet. I never see him there, but he was today. He told me to take my clothes off and then he took pictures. Then he went away, then he came back and gave them to me. I didn’t want Granny to know so I came here instead.”

Stan was aghast. “He shouldn’t have done that!”

Rosie turned her head toward him but didn’t lift her eyes. “He said if I didn’t, he’d make it so you couldn’t keep doing Plantasaurus. He said I had to show you the pictures.”

Stan balled his fists and let out a bellow. His neck constricted and his entire head turned red. Another man might have punched holes in the walls but Stan had no experience with this level of rage and it bound him like a straightjacket.

There was no saving the situation, but Stan was so upset I had to try to at least eliminate the possibility that anything worse had happened.

“Did he do anything else besides take the pictures? Did he touch you?”

“No.”

“Did he say he was going to hurt you?”

She shook her head. “Just Stanley’s business.”

“I think I should go get Millicent.”

Rosie’s head snapped up. “I don’t want her to know. She’d be upset.”

“But will you be all right?”

“I guess I don’t feel much different than before.”

She got up and went out to the stoop and through the windows at the front of the cabin we saw her stand for several minutes looking out at the meadow then sit on the bench against the front wall.

Stan looked confused to the point of fear. “Johnny, this is bad.”

“I know.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“I do, Johnny, I have to make sure I act the right way. For Rosie. I don’t want her to be disappointed. If I don’t say the right things or if I don’t do what I’m supposed to it might be something she always thinks about.”

Marla spoke from the couch. “All Rosie wants is for you to be with her.”

Stan looked uncertain, as though he was sure a lot more than that was required, but after a moment he went outside and sat next to Rosie. A little while later they left the porch and headed to Millicent’s house. Marla shook her head in disgust.

“What an asshole. What does Rosie have to do with anything?”

“He didn’t do it to hurt Rosie.”

“Not Stan, surely?”

“Me. Hurt Rosie you hurt Stan, hurt Stan you hurt me. Telling him that Gareth made the video hasn’t changed anything.”

“Fucking great.”

Marla and I went to bed early. Around midnight I was woken by Millicent banging on the front door. She was carrying a flashlight and had a shawl around her shoulders. She looked frail and worried.

“Stan and my Rosie have gone off in the car. I heard them talking. He wanted her to drive him someplace.”

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. I tried to ask him but he wouldn’t say. I’ve never seen him like that before. He was angry. I think you should go after him.”

“I will.”

“Because he took the can of the kerosene we use for the heater and I don’t know why he would want that.”

Marla and I left Millicent making her way back up the slope to her house. We took Marla’s car. I drove. I knew where Stan had gone. Kerosene and anger made a pretty obvious sum.

I made it to the Oakridge commercial precinct in under twenty minutes. By that time the fire had just started.

Rosie’s Datsun was parked in front of the Plantagion warehouse. The glass reception door had been forced open and inside, through another open door behind Vivian’s desk, I could see the warm orange of reflected fire softly hazing the air back in the warehouse proper.

Marla and I went inside. I was hoping against hope that the fire would be small, something that could be handled, that I could put out before it caused any significant damage. But as we went through the doorway it was obvious I was out of luck. The warehouse was bigger than ours, and where ours was now bare of almost everything a plant business needed, this one was stuffed with it. Down one wall a shelving unit held stacks of planters, neatly arranged sacks of potting mix, and trays of the smaller plants that were used to dress displays. Along the opposite wall rows of weeping figs and dracaena and kentia palms stood ten and twelve deep.

Rosie was not far from the doorway, a yard or two along the corridor of concrete floor that ran between the plants and the shelving unit. She turned to us as we came in and pointed mutely toward the far end of the building. Stan was down there, frozen in front of a section of the larger plants, watching in horror as fire tore backwards through them.

I shouted but he didn’t move, so I ran the length of the warehouse. Stan stayed transfixed until I reached him, but when I hauled him back against the shelving unit he turned toward me and wailed. The sound went on and on as though it was something beyond physical, beyond lungs and vocal chords, was instead a wind of terror and sadness direct from his soul. The sheer uncontrollability of it frightened me and I shook him to make him stop. At the entrance to the warehouse Marla and Rosie screamed for us to get out.

The temperature was now too high to bear and the smoke that the green leaves of the plants threw off had begun to choke us. I took a handful of Stan’s shirt and dragged him toward the doorway. Burning plants fell into our path and as the smoke became too thick to see through I felt a jolt of fear that we might not make it out. But then the sprinkler system kicked in and water fell from the roof in a solid curtain of mist, flattening the smoke, hissing against the burning plants.

We made it to the doorway and I turned to look back. The fire was already dying. Some of the plants had burned themselves out and the rest had too little fuel left on them to fight the water for long. The wall on the plant side of the warehouse was scorched black to the height of the roof and the stock of plants was completely destroyed, but there was little chance that anything was going to reignite.

The four of us ran from the building. Marla drove her own car and I drove Rosie’s with Stan and Rosie in the back. As we pulled away I took a last look at the warehouse. The only sign of the fire that had blazed inside it so recently was a halo of smoke around the roof. We left there quickly. If the building had a sprinkler system it probably also had some sort of alarm. I led our two-car convoy around the perimeter of the precinct and then out, away from Oakridge.