“What?” Marla, bound by thoughts of murder, was thrown by the change of subject.
“My father’s crash was caused by a faulty brake line.”
“So?”
“A
“And Gareth put acid on Tripp’s brakes.”
“Exactly.”
“But Ray’s car was just old, there wasn’t any acid on it. At least, you never said.”
“They thought it was a faulty part. No one was looking for anything like that. Why would they? But two crashes? Two corroded brake lines? It’s too similar not to be connected, don’t you think?”
“But Ray didn’t die. The crash didn’t even hurt him. Stop it, Johnny. You’ve got to hold on to yourself. Tonight was enough. It’s enough to deal with. Drink. Stop thinking.”
Though Marla held me tightly to her, I was cold. Too cold to ever get warm again. What Gareth had said about the killing eventually being like it never happened would be true for him, I knew, but not for me. There was no hope of ever forgetting the weight of the pipe in my hands, the heft of it as it traveled through the air, the dull impact of it against Jeremy Tripp’s skull. These things would never leave me.
Some sort of shivering physical reaction set in and I knew I had to bury it or be overwhelmed by it. So I drank faster, filling my glass by the harsh light of the overhead bulb, a light that seemed to flay everything it touched. I had one, then another, and another. It took a long time for the alcohol to take hold and when it did, when its warm tide finally started to blur the edges of thought, my tired mind drifted not to a blank oblivion, but to images of another road, of another car hurtling down a different hill. My father and I escaping unhurt, laughing. And later, as I finally fell asleep, a mechanic, holding out a corroded piece of brake line for inspection…
CHAPTER 31
For the next two weeks I bought every newspaper I could get my hands on-the
No police came to Empty Mile to question or arrest me. No rumors of foul play were raised on the local radio station, no one in town muttered that there was something odd about the crash. But I was so scared of being caught that I couldn’t stop myself from grasping after a more concrete reassurance.
I figured that if the police had made anyone aware there was something suspicious about his death it would be his lover, Vivian. So, on the Monday of the second week after the crash I drove into Oakridge and saw her at the Plantagion warehouse on the pretext of needing to borrow a few sacks of potting mix for Plantasaurus.
They’d cleaned up the warehouse after Stan’s fire but there was still a damp burnt smell in the air and here and there, high up on the walls, I could see smears of soot they’d missed. Vivian was sitting behind the desk in the reception area and she looked bored. We made conversation and she told me she was finishing as manager at the end of the week. One of the installation guys was going to take over and run the business until whoever inherited the estate decided otherwise.
“I was really only doing Jeremy a favor. Without him I have no reason to be here. I need my energy for other things.”
“I read about the accident. What happened?”
She shrugged. “The usual story. He was driving too fast and lost control. Smashed his head to smithereens on the windshield. It would have been quick, at least.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She turned down the corners of her mouth and shrugged. “Ach, it was an affair.” After a pause she said, “Gareth called me as soon as he heard. He thought it might mean we would get back together. The child.”
“You won’t?”
“Good God, no. We have a conflict of interest in the road. I am close to convincing the council not to go ahead with it, you know. I have a lot of signatures.”
I took several sacks of potting mix to justify my visit and left her emptying the drawers of her desk.
And that was it. The night in the forest, which I had been so sure would bring the world down around me, slid into the past without a ripple. It seemed impossible that the consequences of something as monstrous as killing a human being could be escaped, but that was just what happened, and Stan and Marla and I remained free to pursue our unhappy lives at Empty Mile.
Besides allaying my fear of arrest, my visit to the Plantagion warehouse prompted me to put Plantasaurus out of its misery. The business had failed beyond the point of recovery. We had lost too many customers, our savings were gone-eaten up covering living expenses and subsidizing the last throes of the business-and we still had not been able to afford to replenish our stock of plants. Now that I knew Plantagion was set to stay in business, at least for the foreseeable future, it would have been an idiocy to continue the struggle.
I sat Stan down and explained that we had to let it go. He’d known it was coming and just nodded and kept his eyes on the ground. Later that week we met Vivian at her warehouse and signed over our remaining customers to them. Plantagion had been our enemy, one of the reasons our business had failed, and it was galling to have them bail us out of responsibilities we could no longer meet. But this way at least we avoided letting down those customers who’d stayed with us.
Stan was quiet as we sat with the lawyer Vivian had arranged and signed our names to various papers. He was silent, too, in the pickup on the way home and all I could think of to try and make him feel better was talk up how the gold we were going to mine out of our riverbed would eclipse anything he’d dreamed of earning as a businessman.
It didn’t seem to help much. Just before he got out of the pickup at Empty Mile he turned to me and said, “I know that, Johnny, but I
Later that morning I called Bill Prentice and told him we would cancel our lease on the warehouse if he still wanted us to. With Jeremy Tripp gone he didn’t have an immediate buyer for the garden center property anymore, but I guess he figured he was going to sell it sooner or later and that it would be easier to do so without tenants because he sent a cancelation agreement over in a taxi that afternoon. I signed it and sent it back with the driver and the next day, Saturday, Stan and I went around to the warehouse and cleared out what little stuff we still had there. We left the keys inside the building and never went back.
With Plantasaurus closed down, Stan and I were free to concentrate on our buried river. On Sunday we took our pans and shovels and went down to the trees at the bottom of the meadow to see if we really were going to get rich.
We spent the first couple of hours digging dirt from the hole Stan had started previously and carting it to the edge of the river in buckets. The weather was cool but we were sweating by the time we’d accumulated a pile large enough to last the day and for a short time, before our shoulders and backs started to ache, it was a pleasant change to crouch with our pans at the edge of running water.
An experienced panner can get through a bit less than a cubic yard of dirt a day. By midday Stan and I together hadn’t done anywhere near that, but we’d still liberated half a peanut butter jar of concentrates. It seemed we were indeed on the kind of untouched land that could make fairytale changes in lives. Like stories of lottery wins, or tourists picking up alluvial diamonds on a beach in Africa, we had one of those crazy, unearned chances at wealth. All we had to do was put dirt in a pan and wash it in the river.
The excitement of watching our jar fill steadily with black sand and gold dust began to rub off on Stan despite the emotional battering he’d taken over the last week. Though work on the river would never match the satisfaction a successful Plantasaurus might have brought him, the possibilities gold held for providing some sort of standing in society became more real to him as he held the jar and felt its weight and saw the swirls of yellow
