I pulled his hands away from his face. He looked suddenly frightened.
“Johnny… Am I going crazy?”
I took a breath and forced myself to calm down. “You’re not going crazy. But I don’t think any power or anything not coming back from some other place has anything to do with that guy and his van.”
“Why is he here, then? We checked and no one else did plants in Oakridge.”
Stan was right. Before we’d kicked off Plantasaurus we’d done a search of the local business directory to make sure no one else in town was already leasing plants. We hadn’t found anyone. Which meant Plantagion had only recently started operating.
“I don’t know.”
What I did know, though, was that we were in trouble-our business simply would not survive competition. And looking at Stan I could see he knew this just as well as I did.
As we sat in the pickup and watched the Plantagion guy move plants and sacks of potting mix around in the back of his van I wondered about the timing of this new company.
I used my cell and dialed the number on the side of the van. The call was answered by a female voice that sounded vaguely familiar. I told the woman I was interested in leasing plants and asked where the Plantagion office was. She gave me an address in the Oakridge commercial precinct. Stan and I put lunch on hold.
The Oakridge commercial precinct was an area of warehouses and workshops set in a couple of acres of tarmac five minutes drive from the eastern edge of Back Town. There’d been an outcry by environmentalists when it was built in the ’80s, but it had given the town a solid base for its small manufacturing and service industries.
Plantagion occupied a pressed metal warehouse on the edge of a maze of similar buildings. A sliding glass door in the front wall opened directly onto a reception/office area and as soon as Stan and I stepped inside I understood why the voice on the phone had sounded familiar. Vivian, the woman Gareth was supposedly in love with, the woman I’d bumped into in Jeremy Tripp’s bedroom, sat behind a desk with an Oakridge business directory open in front of her. I saw that a number of entries had been crossed through. It looked like she was working her way down the page. She was in the middle of dialing a number but she put down the phone when she saw us and waved us to a couple of chairs in front of the desk.
“You can’t be here to lease plants.”
“We wanted to check out the competition. You do know you’re the competition?”
“Of course, but I don’t like to think in terms of competition. Do you know Schumacher?”
“The car racing guy?”
“Economist. Buddhist economics. Came up with a model for a limited-growth economy. Very popular among us greenies.”
“Er, anyway… This is your business?”
“No. I was bored up there on the hill. Jeremy Tripp is the owner. You’ve met him I think.” She looked archly at me as she said this. “He asked me to manage it. I’m very good at getting things started.”
“When did you open?”
“A week ago.”
“Got many customers?”
“Quite a few. But with the prices Jeremy’s charging it’s not surprising; they are far too low.”
“Can I see a price list?”
“Of course.”
She handed me a printed sheet that gave fees for various combinations of plants and the charges for maintaining them. What we offered customers was simpler, but wherever I could make a comparison, Plantagion was at least twenty-five percent cheaper than we were.
“We saw your van.”
“We have two. Jeremy had them painted specially. He said he wanted them to be visible. To stand out.”
“You’ve got
“Two vans, two men working them, a warehouse man, and me.”
I glanced at Stan. His face was pale and set. He looked as though he’d just been robbed.
“I am not trying to intimidate you. But Jeremy said that you would visit us and he wanted me to be quite open about how robust the business is.”
“It’s an odd business for someone like him to be involved in. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of money in it.”
“He’s planning to grow it. Jeremy was quite the big shot out in the world, you know.”
After that there was a moment of awkward silence. Stan broke it by clearing his throat and nodding toward a dracaena in the corner behind her. “Your plant is too wet. The ends of its leaves are dead.”
Vivian glanced at it, then her phone rang and when she answered it I nudged Stan and we got up and headed out of the office.
Outside the warehouse the day seemed too hot and too bright. The right kind of climate for forests and rivers and mountains but wrong for this area of tarmac and bolted-together metal. The heat came off the steel walls of the buildings like it was trying to push us away.
As we passed the end corner of one of the adjacent warehouses someone called out to me. I turned and saw Gareth pressed close to the metal wall. He was partly covered by the shadow the building made and it looked like he had chosen the spot for the small measure of concealment it offered. He waved quickly for us to come over, then pulled us around the corner so that we were out of sight of the Plantagion warehouse.
“Is he in there?”
“Who?”
“Tripp.”
“I don’t think so. What are you doing?”
“I told you something was going on. She’s fucking him.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell.”
“So you’re, what? Trying to get evidence?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“And then what?”
“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, Johnboy. Maybe I’ll just walk away. Maybe I’ll cut his balls off. That’d help you out, wouldn’t it? Neutralize the competition, so to speak.”
“We have to go.”
“We should catch up sometime, it’s been awhile.”
Stan and I began to walk away. But before we’d gone more than a couple of steps I felt Gareth’s hand on my arm.
“Did you think about the Empty Mile land? I’m still interested, you know.”
“I’m not selling it.”
“But you guys have got to need the money.”
“Maybe so, but it’s not for sale.”
Gareth frowned at me for a moment, then turned away without saying anything else and went back to the corner of the warehouse.
Stan didn’t want to go to lunch anymore and asked me to take him home. When we got there I sat with him out in the back garden, watching the trees in the shimmering afternoon stillness while he slumped in his chair like the bones had been pulled from his body. When I stirred, about to get up and go into the cooler house, he roused himself and said, “Jeremy Tripp is trying to get us.”
It was true. Any businessman would know that Oakridge couldn’t support two plant companies. Even if they charged similar prices, one would eventually have to go. The fact that Plantagion was charging twenty-five percent less than us, a level of pricing that simply couldn’t earn them a worthwhile return, said to me that Tripp had set the business up purely to compete us out of existence. And he’d wanted us to know it. He’d wanted us to see the vans, he’d wanted us to go to the office.
Stan stood up and headed into the house. “I’ve got to get some more moths.”
