Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

None of this was unexpected and we rode back to Oakridge with Gareth smugly proclaiming that at this rate each of us would earn a quarter of a million dollars in a year. While he was on this high I got him to agree to confining our workdays to Monday to Friday with the weekends off. This was necessary anyhow if we were going to last the distance, but it also meant Marla would at least be spared him two days a week.

But two days a week for Marla was, by then, nowhere near enough. Since we’d started mining she’d descended rapidly into a state of outright distress. When Gareth was anywhere on the property she withdrew completely, sequestering herself in our bedroom, coming out only for brief dashes to the kitchen or bathroom or to run for her car.

In fact, during the same period, the stresses at play on all elements of life at Empty Mile had grown greater and more destructive and it seemed now only a matter of time before everything must surely fall to pieces-before Marla went berserk, or Stan became lost to a world of moths and power, or I could no longer hold myself back from confronting Gareth over my father’s disappearance.

The first cracks began to show on a Sunday in November when Marla and I were sitting on the couch in front of the fire drinking coffee and Bill Prentice picked up his phone and called me.

I hadn’t heard from him since I’d canceled the lease on the Plantasaurus warehouse and the time during which we’d had no contact seemed to have drained some of the burning anger he had previously directed toward me. Perhaps he now believed Gareth was to blame for the video. I had no way of knowing. But his voice over the phone was measured and tiredly business-like, as though he had become resigned to a life he knew could never be set back on course. He began without small talk.

“The lawyers who administered my wife’s investments have recently supplied me with her financial records.”

“Okay.”

“They show a payment to her from your father. Do you know anything about it?”

“No.”

“That’s hard to believe. He wasn’t a rich man and this is a lot of money. A quarter-million.”

“Must be a mistake, he didn’t have anywhere near that much.”

As I spoke, however, it dawned on me that he had indeed had that much money. The remortgaging of our house had given him exactly that amount. And I knew what he’d spent that money on. When I spoke again I had to work to stop my voice from shaking.

“Can I ask you a question? Does the name Simba Inc. mean anything to you?”

“Patricia had family wealth, she administered her assets through a business entity of that name. What about it?”

“Do you know what assets she had, exactly?”

“Some of them, not all. Her money was always very much her own. She didn’t discuss it with me. Her will left whatever she had under that company to her brother. I had no visibility of it. I have no idea where it’s gone now that he’s dead too. How do you know about Simba?”

“You know that I live outside Oakridge now?”

“I don’t know anything about you.”

“I have some land at a place called Empty Mile. My father bought it just before he disappeared. Before Pat died. The seller is listed on the papers as Simba Inc. It’s the only thing the payment could be for.”

“Oh…” There was a long pause and a heavy, slowly let out breath, and then, quietly, “Lovers and business partners.”

“As far as I know there was just that one deal.”

Bill made a small choking noise.

“Bill, I’m sorry, but there’s something else I have to ask you.”

He didn’t say anything, but he stayed on the line.

“The video, the one Patricia was watching. Was that sent to you? Did Pat somehow… stumble across it?”

Bill spoke with a furious exactness. “That disk was sent straight to Patricia. The first time I saw it she was dead in our bedroom.”

He hung up and in the dark, empty silence of the phone against my ear I heard another piece of Bill Prentice’s soul scream and die. For me, though, there was a sunburst of sudden understanding.

Marla saw my expression and looked questioningly at me.

“I know what the fucking video’s about.”

Marla sighed. “Oh Christ…”

“It wasn’t just to hurt my father. There’s more to it than that. Gareth made it to try and stop him from getting this land.”

I told Marla what I had just learned, that Patricia Prentice had been Empty Mile’s previous owner and that the video had been sent straight to her, not to Bill.

“You told me that Pat hated Gareth because he ran her dog over, right? That means after my father severed his relationship with him, Gareth didn’t have a hope in hell of buying Empty Mile and getting his hands on the gold, even if he had the money. Pat wouldn’t have given him the time of day, let alone sold him anything. So what would he do? His first thought would be that if he couldn’t have it, then he was going to make damn sure my father couldn’t either. So he makes a video which he knows has a good chance of pushing an already suicidal woman over the edge. If she’s dead she can’t sell the land.”

“But Ray still bought it.”

“Yeah, but only because he closed the deal before Gareth could get the video together.”

“Jesus, I’m so tired of this.”

“What are you talking about? This isn’t something you can be tired of. It’s not just Pat and the video and the fact that we got sucked into some failed plan of Gareth’s. This gives Gareth a reason for killing my father.”

“Johnny, please-”

“Listen to me. If Pat was just a way to hurt my father for cutting Gareth out of the land deal, some kind of revenge after the fact, then, like you said, when she died Gareth had achieved his objective and he had no reason to do anything else. But if the aim was to stop my father getting the land in the first place, to fuck up the deal before it happened, then Gareth had failed. And if that was the case, then the only way to make things right, to stop my father from benefiting from the gold even though he now had the land, would have been to kill him. And you know what? I think my father knew. He’d spent enough time with Gareth to know what he was capable of and after we had that crash I think he saw the writing on the wall. That’s why he put the land in my name, not because of any bogus accountant. He knew Gareth was after him.”

Marla leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and ran her fingers through her hair. She let out a long breath. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go through this endless rehashing of why Gareth did this, or why Gareth did that. We either accept that he’s an animal and try to live with what he did to Pat and what he maybe did to Ray, or…” She lifted her head and fixed her eyes on me. “Or we talk about killing him.”

We were both silent for a long time. Eventually she spoke again.

“Well, are we going to?”

“Going to what?”

“Talk about killing him.”

“Jesus, Marla, please…”

“It would be for the best, Johnny. It really would.”

For the rest of that Sunday the idea that Gareth had killed my father grew inside me like a vicious pearl. It seemed to fit everything I knew. It made sense of my father’s disappearance, something I had always felt was completely out of character for the kind of man he’d been. And, knowing the violence that lay hidden in Gareth, it was certainly a possible response to the loss of what he must have seen as a way to save his father and himself from their failing cabins at the lake.

He’d had no compunction about pushing Patricia Prentice to suicide and he’d arranged Jeremy Tripp’s death. What was to say he hadn’t done the same with my father? But of course I had no proof, no indisputable item or event that could settle the matter one way or the other. And it was this lack of confirmation, this knowing but not knowing, that haunted me and ruined my sleep so that when Monday came I was primed and set to explode.