kissed her goodnight on the cheek. I followed him upstairs and saw him into bed. He climbed in carefully and lay flat on his back under a light blanket with the moths still taped to him. He looked up at me and said, “Don’t be frightened, Johnny. I’m not crazy. Sometimes I don’t think like you, that’s all.”
Marla was already in bed when I got to my own room. I undressed and squeezed in beside her. The single bed made things tight but I didn’t care. I wanted to press my body against hers, to push my face into her hair and pretend there was nothing beyond the smell and the warmth of her and the soft protection of the blankets around us. But of course that was impossible, so I lay with my arm around her and stared into the darkness and told her about the new plant company in town, about Bill Prentice’s attempt to get us out of the warehouse, and how badly Stan had been affected by these things.
“Hence the moths?”
“He thinks they connect him to some other world that can send him power.”
“I could do with some of that.”
“You and me both.”
“Was Chris Reynolds any help with Empty Mile?”
“I don’t know. I still can’t figure it out. But there’s one thing my father seems to have known that no one else did. Chris said that Empty Mile got called that because someone came along, dug up all the gold, and then, when all the rest of the miners showed up, there was nothing left. And this is obviously what anyone else looking into Empty Mile would conclude as well. But my father got ahold of an old journal from the Gold Rush where the guy says he’s at the same part of the river that ended up getting called Empty Mile and that it looks like the river’s never been mined before. He’s the first guy to get a crack at it, right? Before anyone else even gets there. But he doesn’t find any gold. He pans right along the bend and gets nothing. And this journal was written two months before that letter Chris showed us.”
“So? Empty Mile’s still Empty Mile.”
“Yeah, but the difference is that while the general belief is that there was gold and it got panned out, my father knew that there was never any gold there in the first place. Empty Mile was just empty, end of story.”
“And that would make him want to buy the land, why?”
I wanted to hit her with a great explanation, a cast-iron reason to support me hanging onto the land, but the fact that there had never been any gold there was, if anything, more of an argument for selling it than keeping it. I sighed.
“I have no idea.”
The other thing I had no idea about, as we lay there chasing sleep, was the connection between my father and Gareth. They’d both been to Millicent’s house and read the journal, Chris Reynolds at the Elephant Society had said there seemed to have been some sort of relationship between them, and Gareth himself maintained that they’d been friends.
On the other hand my father, while he was drunk after hearing about Pat’s death, had warned me against him. Given that, and the fact that Gareth had stopped attending Elephant Society meetings three months ago while my father kept going, it was beginning to look to me as though they may well have had a falling out at some point. This seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I just couldn’t see a man like my father finding anything in Gareth he’d admire or respect. What I couldn’t understand, however, was why he would ever have spent time with him in the first place.
For a long time I lay awake trying out imaginary conversations between the two of them. After that I started worrying about Stan. And then finally, finally I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 21
I woke the next morning in despair. It seemed a certainty that all areas of my life were set to crash and burn. Stan was going to go mad, we were going to end up living someplace we didn’t want to be, Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp were going to maneuver us out of the warehouse, and Plantasaurus was going to die a premature death.
Stan was already in the kitchen reading a comic book and eating cereal when I came downstairs. He was wearing fresh clothes-dark blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt-and his hair was combed and freshly Brylcreemed. It didn’t look like he had any moths taped to himself under his shirt. He seemed serious but relaxed, as though sleep had eased the hold our current problems had on him.
“Know why I like comics, Johnny? They’re about a different way of living. The comic world isn’t the same as this one.”
“Oakridge ain’t Gotham City, that’s for sure.”
“I pretend that all the things in comics are really happening, it’s just that they’re in another dimension we can’t see.”
The depression I’d woken up with jumped another notch. Stan finished the last of his cereal. Outside, I heard the bleep of a small horn. Stan pushed himself up quickly and took his empty bowl to the sink.
“That’s Rosie. The hall’s open on weekends, we’re going to practice our dancing.”
“Did I just kind of forget this arrangement?”
“Johnny, you have Marla here. You’re going to be doing stuff with her.”
“All right, but tell me next time, okay?”
“Sure, Johnny. Can you pick me up from Rosie’s later? We’re going to go back there.”
“Yeah, okay.”
He winked and made pistols with his hands. “See ya later, pardner.”
He left the room and a moment later I heard Rosie’s Datsun pull away.
By the time Marla came down for breakfast I’d decided I was going to try Bill Prentice at his cabin again and, one way or another, get him to tell me what he had planned for the warehouse. If he was selling it to Jeremy Tripp I could brace myself for it, maybe try to figure out some alternative way to house the business. And if he wasn’t, I could at least cross something off my list of things to worry about.
It was a beautiful day, a few white clouds in a blue sky and a light breeze that up in the hills around the Oakridge basin made the air feel almost brisk. Marla and I drove to Bill Prentice’s cabin without speaking much. After the scene outside the Black Cat cafe she hadn’t wanted to put herself near him again and it had taken me half an hour of cajoling to get her to come along for support. She needn’t have worried, though, because when we got to the cabin there was no one home.
We parked and got out and stood in front of the place. There were no cars in sight and the cabin itself had the hollow look of a house people have gone away from. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I knocked again, listening as each roll of sound lengthened into emptiness.
These cabins were not hard to get into. Doors shifted in their jambs, windows in their frames, locks were not fitted with the precision of those in the cities. So, as I stood there, I was aware of an opportunity. I had seen Jeremy Tripp in the cabin. It was possible there was something inside that might help explain what he and Bill were doing together. I went back to the pickup and got a screwdriver.
The window at the side of the cabin, which had been so useful to me before, opened easily after a little levering. I hoisted Marla up and climbed in after her. For a moment we stood motionless inside the room, waiting and listening. But no dog came snarling from under a table, no knife-wielding hillbilly came thundering through a doorway, so we stepped away from the window and started to search the place.
In daylight the cabin looked untidy and dirty. It smelled of old food and unwashed clothes. The sink at the end of the main room was filled with dirty dishes and opened cans and most of the surfaces around it held items that should have been in the trash or stored elsewhere.
We checked the bedroom first. It held nothing but a rumpled bed, a lamp on a side table, and a pile of clothes on top of a low dresser. The small bathroom off it was just as barren-a towel, a piece of soap, a toothbrush and shaving gear. If there was anything to be found it looked like it was going to be back in the main room.
The first thing I checked in there was the large piece of paper I’d seen on my last visit to the cabin. It still lay on the coffee table and was indeed an architectural drawing, but it was for the garden center as it stood, not for any proposed hotel.
