floorboards. Tripp’s jaw muscles bunched as he watched whatever had just appeared on the screen. Bill slumped forward and covered his face with his hands.
I stayed there for several seconds but the scene didn’t change and soon the fear of getting caught forced me away from the window and back along the trail to my truck.
CHAPTER 19
A week later, as Stan and I were finishing breakfast, a guy with a beard and sunglasses rang our doorbell. He held out an envelope and a paper on a clipboard for me to sign. He wore a windbreaker that was frayed around the cuffs and the car I could see behind him out on the road was an old sedan with a bad paint job. I figured he must be a local guy UPS outsourced to.
When I signed for the envelope he nodded and said, “Served.”
It dawned on me as he drove away that UPS probably didn’t outsource.
I knew what the envelope held, I’d been expecting it. Plantasaurus hadn’t magically unleashed an avalanche of money in the last few weeks and the mortgage on the house remained unpaid. I held the result of that failure in my hand now-a notice of eviction and a statement about the right of the bank to undertake a mortgagee sale. We had two weeks to vacate.
When things had started to look like they might reach this point I’d talked it over with Stan. He’d been more than horrified. In a way he was like a blind man, someone who could only survive the chaos of the world by sectioning off a small piece of it and progressively limiting its variables until it was ordered and repeatable enough to exist within. Losing the house would rob him of an environment that had not only been a safe and familiar refuge since childhood, but which was also a touchstone to that time before he changed, before the lack of oxygen took away part of him.
I stayed on the doorstep after the courier had gone. Around me the sounds of morning-birdsong, a car starting, a child shouting somewhere further up the street-made the small front garden seem suddenly precious, a place whose true importance had only just been revealed. I stood and listened for a while, then I went inside and told Stan.
He was very quiet for a long time afterwards and just looked around at the walls of the kitchen. Then he wrapped his arms around himself and folded forward a little.
“I won’t be able to remember it all, Johnny. How can I store everything up inside me so it won’t get lost? There’s too much.”
“You won’t forget anything.”
“But some of the things I don’t even know I know. I can’t think of them right now but sometimes I look at something and then suddenly I remember what happened or what someone said or who was there. Like a flash. How can I do that for everything before we go?”
It was technically possible for me to spare Stan this heartache, of course, all I had to do was pick up the phone and list Empty Mile with a realtor. If the land had had no mystery about it, if I could have been certain that it was a plot of grass and trees and nothing more, Stan’s distress was such that I would have done so despite the promise I had made to my father. But I couldn’t believe Empty Mile was only what it appeared to be. My father simply wouldn’t have bought it if it was.
It was in an attempt, then, to find some justification for subjecting Stan to the loss of the house, for my decision not to sell the land, that I went upstairs.
My father’s room was a dark, strange place to me. As children Stan and I had not been allowed into it without permission. Ours had not been a family where we could wander in and bounce on the bed and kick off a Saturday morning horsing around with just-woken parents. This had always been their room, and after my mother died, his room. It was a dim place of adult secrets, of glimpsed-into cupboards that held things you never saw anywhere else-boxes for cuff links, a small stack of books that were never held in the bookcase downstairs, a rack of ties, shadowy ranks of clothes through wardrobe doors just ajar… Stan and I had spent a silent ten minutes there after my father disappeared and then avoided it ever since.
There was a bed, an oak dresser with small belongings ordered neatly across its top, a looming wooden wardrobe with a mirror on its center panel, worn carpet, a bedside table. Everything old and dark. And against the foot of the bed the large wooden trunk he’d made as a schoolboy assignment in England and which he’d possessed longer than I’d been alive.
This had been his private storage space. In here he kept his photographs, his papers, his letters, private copies of his real estate deals, bits and pieces of his early life in England. As I lifted the lid and smelled the cool waft of old paper and the dry tang of wood long closed up, I felt as though I was trespassing.
And as I began searching through the trunk I found that I was reluctant to examine some of the things it contained, to have them cast their small illuminations across the shadowed terrain of his personality. A lifetime of being held at arm’s length had made it difficult for me to take more than the crippled intimacy I was used to from him. I left many of his possessions alone for this reason-a pair of gold cuff links, a watch that did not work, a rugby trophy from his youth, a bag of old coins. But I spent an hour flicking through papers and documents and at the end of that time I’d found three things connected to Empty Mile.
I had seen one of them before, or at least a version of it-an eight-by-ten aerial photograph, a smaller print of the image my father had so excitedly hung on the wall of the living room. It looked like this smaller photo was the original. It was sharper and the paper had a heavy professional feel to it. I turned the print over. There was writing in a corner, done in my father’s hand with a fountain pen-a short note:
I flipped the picture several times, looking first at the image and then reading again what my father had written. There were trees on either side of the Empty Mile curve of river, but there was nothing special in that. There were trees everywhere in this part of the country. What had my father seen in these particularly? I looked at the picture a little longer but I couldn’t find an answer, so I put it aside and picked up the second of my finds-the papers for the original sale of the Empty Mile land to my father.
The date of the sale was recorded-just two weeks after my return to Oakridge. There was information that the owner possessed, along with freehold to the land, both mineral and water rights. There were references to the cabin and to boundaries and numbers of acres. And there were, of course, the details of the parties involved-my father as the new owner, and a company called Simba Inc. as the seller. The address for Simba Inc. was given as care of a law firm in Sacramento.
I called information on my cell phone, got the firm’s number, and called them. After bouncing from a receptionist, to an assistant, to a lawyer, I was finally told that the reason the law firm’s contact details were used for Simba Inc. was because Simba Inc. was a small investment concern whose principal valued privacy. The firm regretted, therefore, that it could provide no details whatsoever as to the identity of the previous owner of the Empty Mile land without a court order.
I hung up disappointed, but I figured that if there was some secret to Empty Mile the last owners wouldn’t have known about it anyhow, otherwise they wouldn’t have sold it to my father.
The final thing I’d found relating to Empty Mile was over a hundred and fifty years old and its presence in the trunk was as puzzling as the information it contained. Three sheets of discolored paper. Six pages of precise handwriting in ink. The missing pages from the gold-hunter’s journal I’d read at Millicent Jeffries’s place.
I could think of no explanation for them being there other than that my father had stolen them. But in all my life I had never known him to do anything remotely like that.
The room was gloomy. I turned on the lamp that stood beside my father’s bed and started to read, hoping that in these final pages of the journal I would discover some reason for his purchase of Empty Mile.
