“Well let’s fucking do something about it. Let’s hit back. We’ve got the weapon. All we have to do is tell Jeremy Tripp about him making the video. It’s got to stop, Marla.”
She nodded and reached for a tissue on the nightstand and blew her nose. “All right… all right.”
A few minutes later Stan came home with Rosie in tow. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom beaming at us, holding her hand.
“Hey, Johnny, look, my hair’s wet.”
They were wearing only their towels and their skin still shone from the water of the river. Stan stepped forward and put his arms around me and pressed the side of his damp head against my chest.
“You know what, Johnny? I feel like if I wasn’t holding on to you I’d float away. Come on.”
He took my hand and led me out of the cabin and he and I and Rosie walked down the meadow to the river.
At the edge of the water Stan didn’t waste any time. He positioned me carefully on the bank and told me not to move. Then he walked out onto the rock. Rosie made to follow him but he stopped her, so she stood near me and the two of us watched as he dropped his towel and started swinging his arms out in front of him, bending his knees as though he was preparing to dive.
“You watching, Johnny?”
“I’m watching, man.”
“You know how long it is?”
“Since you went swimming? Twelve years.”
“You think I’m going to do it?”
“I think you’re going to do it.”
“You bet I am. And you know what it means, don’t you?”
“You’re the bravest guy in the world.”
“It means you can’t feel sad about me anymore. You have to be happy. All the time.”
And then he whooped and launched himself out over the water and plunged feet-first into it through a shining crown that rose above him and came apart high in the air so that he surfaced in a rain of droplets that caught the sun and broke it into rainbows.
As I watched him I understood a little better what Marla meant about deserving punishment.
CHAPTER 25
Jeremy Tripp opened the front door of his house holding a magazine about sports cars. He motioned Marla and me inside without speaking and led us through to the deck at the back.
The sky was a high clear blue and there were small clouds in a line to the east. The archery target still stood at the end of the property but I could see no sign of the rabbit.
Jeremy Tripp sat down at a large round table and drank from a glass of sparkling water. He didn’t offer us a seat, but after standing uncertainly for a moment I took one anyway and Marla followed and held my hand under the table. Jeremy Tripp put his glass down and scanned the sky.
“You can feel autumn in the air. I can, anyway-a slight edge. Easier to notice here in the mountains.”
“You’re Patricia Prentice’s brother.”
“Until she killed herself.”
“And you think we had something to do with it.”
“I think you had everything to do with it.”
“Because of the video.”
Jeremy Tripp frowned. “I would have denied knowledge of that if I were you. That way you could have done the whole ‘It wasn’t us, we didn’t know anything about it’ routine. But yes, because of the video. You made it, Patty watched it, and then she killed herself.”
“We didn’t even know there
“And then it came to you in a dream?”
“I broke into Bill’s cabin. I wanted to see if he was planning to sell our warehouse. I saw the disk. I’d seen it in Patricia’s room the day she died-”
“Killed herself.”
“We watched it. Before that we didn’t know it existed.”
“I thought your brother was the retarded one.”
“He’s not retarded. And we didn’t know, I promise you. We didn’t know anything about the camera. We were just… performing for Bill.”
“And you’re telling me this… because?”
“Because you’re attacking us. You broke in and bleached all my plants-”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be silly enough to do something like that.”
“-you’ve set up your own company to compete against us, and you kicked Marla out of her house. And we’re not the right people. We didn’t do anything.”
“Please don’t tell me Bill made the video. He’s a degenerate but he loved his wife, in his own way. And he’s not stupid enough to put himself on film.”
“It wasn’t Bill. It was the guy who pimped Marla to you-Gareth Rogers. Everyone knows about Bill, what he’s like. Gareth used his… tastes to manipulate him.”
Jeremy Tripp looked at me like he didn’t expect anything but lies. “Go on.”
I took the two brackets out of my jacket and put them on the table in front of him. “Once I knew about the video I did some looking around. I found one of these on a tree where we did it. I’m pretty sure it’s what the camera was attached to. The other one I got from Gareth’s father’s workshop.”
Jeremy Tripp looked at it and snorted. “Does it have his name on it?”
“It’s custom made. You can’t buy them anywhere. His father does piecework for a fittings company. They’re part of a batch he made. Plus he and Gareth live at the lake, they own the cabins there.”
“Could have been the father by that logic.”
“He’s in a wheelchair.”
“Still doesn’t mean it was Gareth. Someone else could have gotten hold of one. You, for instance.”
“There’s more.”
I nudged Marla. She cleared her throat and tried to look him in the eye but failed and dropped her gaze to the surface of the table.
“It was supposed to be just another trick. Gareth wanted me to get Bill to watch me having sex with someone. He said it had to be in a certain part of the forest and his name wasn’t to be mentioned. I’d tricked with Bill once or twice a long time ago and when I put it to him he jumped at it. But I didn’t know it was going to be filmed. Gareth never said anything about that.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
“I was Pat’s friend. She used to come to my house. Why would I make a video of myself screwing in front of her husband?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that my sister killed herself because of a video of you two. Therefore, you had a hand in killing her, and that’s a little wrinkle I just have to iron out.”
Marla leaned back in her chair. There was nothing else she could offer. I spoke again.
“You’re not fixing anything if you have the wrong people. What about motivation? What do we gain from it? I’ve been out of town for eight years. All I care about is scraping a life together-”
“Bill owns the warehouse you use-perhaps you wanted a rent reduction.”
“We hadn’t even started the business when the video was made. Jesus Christ! Look, Gareth made it because he needs a proper road built up to the lake and he was going to use the video to blackmail Bill into lobbying it through with the council. He told me this himself three days ago. And believe me, he’s more than capable of blackmail. He hates Bill’s guts because when Bill sold him the cabins he told him that the council was just about to put the road in. That would have meant a ton of business and Gareth and his father would have ended up rich. But the road never happened, Gareth’s father tried to kill himself and got crippled instead, and Gareth’s blamed Bill
