Empty Mile

were so quiet I could hardly hear them. “Gareth knew because he was the one who chose the place. He told me I had to take Bill there.”

“What are you talking about? Bill led us there.”

Marla shook her head. “I told him it had to be that place behind the rock or we wouldn’t do it. He knew where to go because back when I was hooking, when I first started, before Gareth or anything, we’d both been there. Together… I just let it look like he was leading the way.”

“You fucked Bill Prentice?”

Marla stood abruptly, took two steps away from me, bent at the waist, and threw up on the grass. She stayed like that for a while, clearing her throat and wiping her mouth, then she straightened and turned back to me.

“It was a long time ago. You know I have this stuff in my past. Please don’t be a bastard about it.”

Her hands were shaking and her crying, which had been interrupted by her throwing up, started again. I took a deep breath and tried to force the image of Bill on top of Marla out of my head. Then the deeper meaning of what she’d said hit me.

“Gareth picked the place? So the whole thing was a setup?”

“I didn’t know anything about the camera, I swear. I swear, Johnny.”

“Well, what the fuck, then?”

She took a breath and tried to calm herself. “During the time I was hooking in Burton I went with Bill a couple of times. Once over there and once at that place at the lake. That was it. I didn’t want to be doing it with somebody from where I lived so I cut him off. A long time later, when I had my job and Gareth was pimping me in Oakridge, I mentioned having been with Bill to him. No reason, it was just conversation, but it meant he knew about our connection. And one day, a little while after you got back, he told me I had to get Bill to watch you and me having sex. And he told me it had to be at that place up at the lake and that he had to know beforehand when it was going to happen. And I couldn’t mention anything about him to Bill. I had no idea why. I mean, it was fucking weird, but in the end it was just one more installment of Gareth’s madness. There was nothing I could do about it anyhow. You didn’t know about my past then and Gareth said if I didn’t do it he’d tell you I’d been a hooker. I was so scared of you finding out. I thought you’d never want anything to do with me again and I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t take losing you a second time. So I did what he said and I didn’t ask questions. But I promise you, I absolutely promise, I didn’t know it was going to be filmed.”

“How do you get some guy to want to watch you having sex with someone else?”

“It wasn’t hard, you know what he’s like. I’d never bumped into him at work before because our offices are in different buildings, but it wasn’t hard for me to find an excuse to take a file over to him. He recognized me right away and started offering me money for sex. I told him I didn’t do that anymore but if he wanted just to watch I could arrange something. He jumped at it. And I… I made it all look like a chance meeting so you wouldn’t know.”

“If Gareth wanted something incriminating on video why didn’t he just get you to fuck him?”

“Because Gareth’s a sick bastard and whatever he was up to, it would have tickled him to have you involved somehow. He hates you just as much as he hates me.”

“But I might not have wanted to do it.”

“Then it wouldn’t have happened. But I knew you would. And so did Gareth. I’m so sorry, Johnny. I could cut my heart out.”

Marla had stopped crying but her face was swollen and she looked tired and incredibly sad. She stood in front of me as though she was waiting to be executed.

I could have hated her for dragging me into something so sordid, I suppose. But I didn’t. I was angry that I’d been used in someone else’s plan. I was angry with Gareth for making Marla do it. But I wasn’t angry with her. How could I be? As she’d said, I knew she had these things in her past. And I knew that I had played a role in creating that past. But even if I had not felt some measure of responsibility for how life had turned out for her, I could not have hated her the way she looked then. The need for this relationship with me, the utter necessity of it for her, was just too plain on her face.

So instead of shouting and accusing, I held her in the sunlight of that fading afternoon, in the small garden of the house she loved so much and was soon to leave, and tried somehow to absorb back into myself the seeds of damage my selfishness had sown eight years before. Later, we sat down again and finished our beer and talked about Gareth and the video.

“So the question now is why? Why did he do it?”

Marla shrugged. “It can’t be anything related to us. What do we have to lose? We don’t have reputations to worry about and we were hardly being unfaithful to anyone. I do know that there was bad blood between Pat and Gareth, though.”

“I didn’t know they knew each other.”

“She used to have this dog, this big Lab that went everywhere with her, never on a leash, a bit old and dopey. She loved that dog. About a year ago Gareth was pushing his father around Old Town and it started barking at the wheelchair, really frightened the old man. Which was a big mistake, because a couple of days later Gareth ran it over with his Jeep. It was an ‘accident,’ of course, but…” Marla shrugged. “Pat knew he did it on purpose and she hated him for it.”

“A year ago? That’s a long time for Gareth to wait around. Plus he doesn’t get anything material out of it. What if the video was a blackmail attempt that went wrong? Gareth might have thought he could pressure Bill into pushing the road through with the council.”

“I don’t think Bill has that sort of power. The Resource and Development Committee has to vote on things like that.”

“Which he’s on.”

“He’s the head of it but there are six other members.”

“Surely he could influence them to some extent.”

“Maybe.”

Marla didn’t sound convinced.

“Well, whatever the deal is, Gareth’s up to something. And it’s more than just Bill or Pat. All these connections between him and my father keep cropping up. Like at the Elephant Society-Chris Reynolds, the first thing he remembers about them is their interest in the history of Empty Mile. But Gareth’s never said a thing about it, and I gave him plenty of opportunity today. The sample thing too-if he and my father had panned gold somewhere and were excited enough about it to get it assayed, wouldn’t you think he’d have mentioned it by now? And on top of that he won’t shut up about wanting to buy Empty Mile.”

We sat outside for a while longer, then we went in and dragged Stan away from the TV and had dinner.

The rest of that evening was spent lugging furniture around, wrapping things in newspaper, and packing cardboard cartons with Marla’s possessions. Marla was throwing away a lot of stuff and at one point after it got dark I made a few trips out to the dumpster with black plastic bags filled with papers and junk she no longer wanted.

The sides of the dumpster were high enough that I had to heave the bags up and half throw them into it. I misjudged my swing on one of them and caught it on a corner. The bag split open and a small avalanche of papers spilled out onto the grass next to the road. I was tired and for a moment I felt like just walking away from the mess, but I knew that any small breeze in the night would blow the papers into the road. So I bent and gathered up armfuls of old brochures, magazines, bills, and credit card statements and stuffed them back into what was left of the bag. Halfway through the pile I saw, poking from between the pages of an old computer manual, the corner of a photograph.

I was vaguely interested to see what sort of picture Marla might be throwing away so I pulled it out to look at it. I got a whole lot less vague when I saw what the photo was of-Marla, posing in front of the entrance to a wooden roller coaster, beside a sign with San Diego painted on it. A quick-fire vacation snap on a standard-size print. Nothing remarkable about it. Except that it was a duplicate of the photo I’d found in my father’s trunk a few weeks back. Marla was posing instead of him but the place and the framing were the same. And from what I could remember even the light and the color of the sky behind the wooden framework matched.

In the photo Marla looked a couple of years younger than she was now. She was laughing as though the person behind the camera had just made a joke.