office and on through to the living area at the back of the house. Gareth got a Coke and a couple of beers out of the fridge. As he handed Stan his drink he gestured to the open back door.
“Dad’s working in the barn, Stan. You can go out and watch if you want.”
“Cool.”
Stan went outside and Gareth and I sat on the ratty lounge furniture. The room was dim and the light that came in through the doorway flared against the frame. Through it I could see some of the garden, and beyond that the barn with its doors swung wide and Gareth’s father in his wheelchair at the bench inside, working on something with a machine that made a high whining noise. And Stan standing beside him, yakking away.
Gareth slugged his beer and burped. “I got rid of the hookers.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m hearing noises that the council are thinking about the road again. Couple of whores on the premises isn’t a good look. Man, if that road gets built…” Gareth shook his head in wonder.
I couldn’t help spoiling his mood. “How’s Vivian?”
“Fucked. She’s working for that prick, fucking him… And she’s ended it. No more trips to the Slopes, no more visits to the big house. Old Gareth didn’t have the money to make the grade.”
I could see he was gearing up for a full-blown purge, so I cut him off quickly. “Marla took me to an Elephant Society meeting.”
Gareth looked nonplussed for a moment, then his eyes shifted a little. “Oh yeah?”
“You’ve heard of it, right?”
“You know I have, Johnny. I told you I used to go with your dad sometimes. Are you trying to catch me out?”
“A guy there said you and my father had the same interests.”
“That’s what the Society’s for, isn’t it? But I stopped going months ago.”
“Anything particular you two were interested in?”
“Lots of things to be interested in, Johnboy. Lots and lots.” He looked levelly at me for a long moment then his face brightened like he’d just remembered something. “Oh, I spoke to the bank and with the equity in this place I couldn’t buy all of that land off you, but I can raise enough for half of it. No problem. I mean, that would solve everything for you, wouldn’t it? You don’t have to give up the whole thing but you get a bunch of dough to keep you going.”
“I’ve told you twice I’m not selling. Besides, I’m living out there now.”
“At Empty Mile? Really?”
“The bank sold the house.”
“What are you doing with the land?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you doing with it?”
Gareth was leaning forward in his chair and the bottle in his hand had tilted so that beer was spilling onto the floor by his foot. I pointed to it and he set the bottle down in the puddle and pressed his hands hard together and took a breath.
“Promise me that if you ever want to sell some of it you’ll come to me first.”
I made a move to stand up but Gareth held on to my arm.
“Hey, did I sound like a fucking idiot or something? Sorry, man. It just seems like such a good idea to me, that’s all.”
He let go of me and I yelled through the doorway for Stan. Gareth said goodbye as we left but he didn’t come out of the house to see us off.
I made it down Lake Trail without incident and then turned left along the Loop to drop Stan off at the warehouse. He seemed chirpy after messing around in the barn and I asked him about his time with David.
“It’s really neat how he makes stuff. He let me drill a hole. Here, look. He let me keep this one.”
Stan dug inside his jacket and held something out so I could see it. I pulled immediately to the side of the road, a hot flush of triumph rising through me.
“Let me see that.”
It was a steel bracket with three countersunk holes in each arm. I’d put the bracket I found that morning in the glove compartment. I took it out now and held it next to the one Stan had given me. Except for Stan’s off-center drilling the two were identical.
“Wow, Johnny, they’re the same. Why would David put one on a tree?”
“Maybe he was just testing it out. Can I keep this for a while?”
I dropped Stan at the warehouse then carried on to Burton. It was a nice day for the drive, but I didn’t pay much attention to the scenery. I was too busy thinking about the brackets.
The Minco building in Burton had a utilitarian, ’60s feel to it-all sharp angles, blank unadorned walls, and windows that were simply inset sheets of glass. The floor of the reception area was covered with gray linoleum that was mottled with shoe scuffings and pitted here and there where something too heavy had pressed against it for too long. There was a counter across one end and behind it a walk space and then a wall with a large shuttered hatch in the middle and a flat wooden door at one end. There was no one behind the counter and the room felt abandoned, as though I had turned up in the middle of a fire drill.
A button on the counter had a laminated plaque next to it that said customers should ring for assistance. I pressed it and somewhere way back behind the wall I heard a faint buzzing. A minute later a fat woman with oversize glasses opened the door and shuffled sideways along her side of the counter. I told her I had something to collect from Reginald Singh. She scribbled my name in pencil on a small pad and then shuffled back through the door.
After a while the door opened again and Reginald Singh came out. He was a slender Fijian Indian. He wore a white lab coat and spoke in a voice that sounded as though he’d worked hard to eradicate his accent. He placed a small clear plastic vial on the counter in front of me. It contained a thin wafer of gold-colored metal that had been bent into a half-circle to fit in the narrow tube.
“John Richardson?”
I nodded and showed him my driver’s license.
“Ah, good. Nice to tie up loose ends. Would you mind signing?”
He opened a folder that had been wedged under his arm and took out a form for me to sign. When I handed it back he pushed the vial toward me and smiled. “Short and sweet.”
“What is it?”
Reginald Singh looked confused.
“The sample.”
“You didn’t read the report?”
“It’s a long story. My father disappeared a couple of months ago. I’m sort of tying up some loose ends of my own. You can call the Oakridge police department if you need confirmation.”
Reginald Singh looked mildly dismayed and shook his head. “Oh no, no, no. You have ID. Gold nine-thirty fine.”
“Excuse me?”
He tapped the vial with his forefinger. “We received a sample of concentrates-the mixture of black sands and fine gold that most placer miners can easily reduce their pannings to. The work request was to determine the purity of the ore it contained. There are a number of ways to do this-ion probe analysis, fluorescence spectrometry-but fire assay is simple, suitable for small samples, and more affordable for an individual prospector. It is considered to be as accurate as any other method. We performed this type of assay on your father’s sample. We determined the fineness-the purity-of this sample to be gold nine-thirty fine.”
“Which means?”
“Gold is always alloyed with a certain amount of silver and other trace metals. Gold fineness is based on a scale of zero to one thousand. So, after we had separated the metal from the black sands we determined, through our assay, that its pure gold content was in the ratio of nine hundred and thirty parts to one thousand. About average for California placer gold.”
I picked up the vial and turned it so that the light caught the small wafer of gold. “So this actually has silver in it too?”
