We spent the next twenty minutes hurriedly picking things up and putting them carefully back, listening all the time for the sound of an approaching car, but we found nothing that told me how Bill and Jeremy Tripp knew each other, or what plans Bill had, if any, for the warehouse.
We did, however, find something else.
A hip-high bookcase ran along a good part of the wall opposite the widow we’d entered through. It held paperback novels and a lot of coffee-table books about the scenery and the history of the area. It was also where Bill stored a small stack of DVDs. I rifled through them not expecting to find anything of interest, but near the top of the pile I came across one I’d seen before-at Patricia Prentice’s house when Stan and I had waited with her body for Bill and the police. A burned disk with a smiley face sticker on its upper surface.
I showed it to Marla and told her how it had looked like Patricia was watching it before she killed herself. If it had been a set of papers or a contract I might have stolen it to examine in the safety of my own house. But I couldn’t bring myself to take something so intimately connected with that day, something that Bill obviously felt strongly enough about to keep from the police and bring with him on his self-imposed exile in the mountains. Instead, Marla and I stood and watched it on the TV in the corner of the cabin.
When the disk started to play there were a few seconds of empty gray, then the screen cleared abruptly to show long grass, a shallow declivity, a surrounding wall of trees. Next to me Marla groaned and brought her hands to her mouth.
The scene stayed that way as I fast-forwarded through the first twenty minutes, unchanging except for the movement of a light breeze across the grass. Then three people walked into view. Marla, me, and Bill Prentice. The scene was shot from a foot or two above head height, as though the camera was in the branches of one of the surrounding trees, and the field of vision was narrow enough that the grassy hollow filled most of the frame.
After that there was ten minutes of action, ten minutes of Marla and me undressing, of the pale skin of my back and Marla’s rocking legs. Of Bill watching us.
The camera had recorded sound as well, but the breeze and its movement through leaves had muffled most of what there might have been to hear. Bill’s instruction to us to take our clothes off was barely audible and the few words Marla and I spoke were only a deeper muttering against the background rub of the air.
There was no camera wobble or change of angle, no panning or zooming. It seemed to me that the camera had been fixed in place rather than held by someone during the filming. And indeed, no one could have stood as close to us as the shot suggested without us spotting them.
It was sinister to see myself this way, to see how I looked when I had no idea I was being recorded. And it was strange, too, when the sex ended, to watch ourselves disappear simply by walking out of frame. First Bill, even before we had started to dress. And then Marla and me several minutes later, subdued, not speaking. I kept expecting the camera to swivel, to follow us, to supply some sort of cinematic closure, but it remained focused instead on the place where we had been and stayed that way as I fast-forwarded through the rest of the recording.
I put the disk back in its place on the bookshelf and turned off the TV. Marla and I left the cabin immediately. We drove to my house without saying anything to each other beyond a breathed “Jesus Christ…” or the occasional, disbelieving “Fuuuuck”- each of us silenced by the dreadful weight of the knowledge we had just acquired.
The kitchen had trapped the warmth of the afternoon and when we got back I opened the windows and the back door and poured cold soda into glasses and we sat at the table and stared out at the green-gold blur of the garden.
When Marla spoke her voice was flat and final. “It was our fault she killed herself.”
“You don’t kill yourself just because you see a video of your husband watching people have sex.”
“But it obviously pushed her over the edge. If I had said no she’d still be alive.”
“She might not be.”
“I shouldn’t have done it.”
“There were two of us there, it wasn’t just you.”
Marla shook her head sadly. “Yes, it was. You would have said yes to anything. And I knew it.”
“So it was a stupid thing to do, but we didn’t know it was going to be filmed. And we sure as hell didn’t know Patricia would ever see it. You can’t talk yourself into thinking we killed her. If anyone’s to blame it’s Bill.”
“You think he shot it?”
“Who else? He chose the place. He could have easily put the camera in a tree beforehand and started it with a remote. Value for money. He gets to watch us and he gets the movie too.”
“But to give it to Pat? He’s not that far gone.”
“Maybe she found it by accident.”
“He’d have to be a complete moron to leave something like that lying around.”
We were quiet for a while and I thought about Pat watching the video, lying there on her bed as her husband masturbated over two people squirming on the ground, waiting for the Halcion and the whiskey to take hold and end the dreadful knowledge of the distance that separated her from a man she must still have loved. And I thought about Bill too, of the sickening guilt he must have felt when he saw what she’d been watching.
And then it struck me. “Bill didn’t make the video. He thinks
“What?”
“That’s why he freaked out in front of the Black Cat. Not because he felt guilty about watching us screw, but because he thinks we set him up to be filmed. And he probably thinks we gave the disk to Pat as well.”
Marla groaned. “You are fucking kidding.”
“But if it wasn’t him, and we know it wasn’t us, then who was it?”
Marla looked blank and didn’t say anything.
“I’m thinking Gareth,” I said.
“Why?”
“He hates Bill because when they bought the cabins Bill told them a new road up to the lake was a done deal-”
“-And it never happened. Yeah, I’ve heard the story.”
“So he has a reason to want to hurt him. What I can’t figure out, though, is how he would have known where to put the camera. And when to start it. I mean, it was Bill who took us to that place.”
Marla was silent for a long time then she said, “You know what I’d like to do, Johnny? What I’d really, really like to do? I’d like to forget the whole thing in the forest ever happened.”
She got up then and said she was tired and was going upstairs to lie down for a while. When she’d gone I sat by myself on the kitchen step and stared out at the garden and thought about how changed Marla was. When I’d come back to Oakridge she had been older, of course. The loneliness and the life she’d suffered had taken its toll on her youth. But there had still been a spark to her, a feeling that she was still young, that life could begin again. Now, though, it seemed she had none of that left, that she was so worn down by living it was beyond her to even care about the truth behind the death of a woman she’d been friendly with.
Toward the end of the day Marla and I went out to Empty Mile to pick up Stan. The clear brightness of the sky had softened by then and the curving blades of the long grass in the meadow were burnished where the late sun touched them.
Stan and Rosie lay on their backs in the middle of the meadow staring up at the sky, holding hands. Rosie had made a ring of field daisies and Stan wore it on his head like a crown. I stood with Marla beside the pickup watching them for a moment, reluctant to intrude on their time together.
That afternoon, in contrast to the hell that life back in town seemed bent on becoming, this land with its trees, its birdsong, and its protecting rock wall gave the illusion of somewhere to escape to. And as I looked over it, reveling in its peace, it occurred to me that the answer to at least one of my problems was staring me in the face.
The cabin that came with the property had three bedrooms, a large central room that was both kitchen and living room, a rainwater tank, a septic system in the ground, and electricity. Water, power, shelter. Room enough for the three of us, easily. And best of all, the money we would otherwise have had to spend on rent could be ploughed back into Plantasaurus. It wouldn’t be enough to save the business from the impact of Jeremy Tripp’s rival company but it would keep Stan’s dream alive a little longer. And for Marla and me it was the right thing to do. Our relationship would not progress beyond the fragile reconnection we had so far established until we started
