Being wet every day forced Stan to change his approach to his moths. Instead of keeping them in a pouch around his neck, he put them, while he was working, in a large glass jar with a screw top which he stood on a nearby rock. The moths were always dying but Stan didn’t seem to care and called the jar his power generator and often during the day would touch it and hold it up and breathe in deeply with the glass pressed against his forehead.
All three of us stopped shaving, and as any clothes became soaked and filthy after five minutes of work, we tended, at the river, to wear the same things day after day without washing them. Sometimes Stan would bring his cassette player with him and run it on batteries and we would work to the sound of his mellow dance music, but mostly there was just the sound of water splashing, shovels going into dirt, and at intervals through the day the grind of the backhoe’s diesel engine.
Most days we took at least five ounces of gold from our hidden river. There were times when the content of the dirt dropped, when we found ourselves with nothing in our sluices after several hours work, but then all that was needed was for Gareth to direct his backhoe more to the left or the right and the gold always returned. Gradually, in this way, we were able to define the banks of the old river and get some idea of the distribution of gold along its length. And the better our picture of the river became, the more consistent our returns were.
We worked the first ten days straight through. After that we were exhausted and we took a day off to melt down the gold we had so far acquired in a crucible at Gareth’s place and take it to the assayer in Burton. We walked out of the Minco office with a check for a little more than forty thousand dollars. We’d sold them around fifty five ounces, but there was a commission fee plus our gold contained a small percentage of silver. This brought the per-ounce price down a little and also incurred a charge for the further refining that would be necessary to turn it into gold that fell into the standard purity range of between.995 and.999.
None of this was unexpected and we rode back to Oakridge with Gareth smugly proclaiming that at this rate each of us would earn a quarter of a million dollars in a year. While he was on this high I got him to agree to confining our workdays to Monday to Friday with the weekends off. This was necessary anyhow if we were going to last the distance, but it also meant Marla would at least be spared him two days a week.
But two days a week for Marla was, by then, nowhere near enough. Since we’d started mining she’d descended rapidly into a state of outright distress. When Gareth was anywhere on the property she withdrew completely, sequestering herself in our bedroom, coming out only for brief dashes to the kitchen or bathroom or to run for her car.
In fact, during the same period, the stresses at play on
The first cracks began to show on a Sunday in November when Marla and I were sitting on the couch in front of the fire drinking coffee and Bill Prentice picked up his phone and called me.
I hadn’t heard from him since I’d canceled the lease on the Plantasaurus warehouse and the time during which we’d had no contact seemed to have drained some of the burning anger he had previously directed toward me. Perhaps he now believed Gareth was to blame for the video. I had no way of knowing. But his voice over the phone was measured and tiredly business-like, as though he had become resigned to a life he knew could never be set back on course. He began without small talk.
“The lawyers who administered my wife’s investments have recently supplied me with her financial records.”
“Okay.”
“They show a payment to her from your father. Do you know anything about it?”
“No.”
“That’s hard to believe. He wasn’t a rich man and this is a lot of money. A quarter-million.”
“Must be a mistake, he didn’t have anywhere near that much.”
As I spoke, however, it dawned on me that he had indeed had that much money. The remortgaging of our house had given him exactly that amount. And I knew what he’d spent that money on. When I spoke again I had to work to stop my voice from shaking.
“Can I ask you a question? Does the name Simba Inc. mean anything to you?”
“Patricia had family wealth, she administered her assets through a business entity of that name. What about it?”
“Do you know what assets she had, exactly?”
“Some of them, not all. Her money was always very much her own. She didn’t discuss it with me. Her will left whatever she had under that company to her brother. I had no visibility of it. I have no idea where it’s gone now that he’s dead too. How do you know about Simba?”
“You know that I live outside Oakridge now?”
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“I have some land at a place called Empty Mile. My father bought it just before he disappeared. Before Pat died. The seller is listed on the papers as Simba Inc. It’s the only thing the payment could be for.”
“Oh…” There was a long pause and a heavy, slowly let out breath, and then, quietly, “Lovers
“As far as I know there was just that one deal.”
Bill made a small choking noise.
“Bill, I’m sorry, but there’s something else I have to ask you.”
He didn’t say anything, but he stayed on the line.
“The video, the one Patricia was watching. Was that sent to you? Did Pat somehow… stumble across it?”
Bill spoke with a furious exactness. “That disk was sent straight to Patricia. The first time I saw it she was dead in our bedroom.”
He hung up and in the dark, empty silence of the phone against my ear I heard another piece of Bill Prentice’s soul scream and die. For me, though, there was a sunburst of sudden understanding.
Marla saw my expression and looked questioningly at me.
“I know what the fucking video’s about.”
Marla sighed. “Oh Christ…”
“It wasn’t just to hurt my father. There’s more to it than that. Gareth made it to try and stop him from getting this land.”
I told Marla what I had just learned, that Patricia Prentice had been Empty Mile’s previous owner and that the video had been sent straight to her, not to Bill.
“You told me that Pat hated Gareth because he ran her dog over, right? That means after my father severed his relationship with him, Gareth didn’t have a hope in hell of buying Empty Mile and getting his hands on the gold, even if he had the money. Pat wouldn’t have given him the time of day, let alone sold him anything. So what would he do? His first thought would be that if
“But Ray still bought it.”
“Yeah, but only because he closed the deal before Gareth could get the video together.”
“Jesus, I’m so tired of this.”
“What are you talking about? This isn’t something you can be tired of. It’s not just Pat and the video and the fact that we got sucked into some failed plan of Gareth’s. This gives Gareth a reason for killing my father.”
“Johnny, please-”
“Listen to me. If Pat was just a way to hurt my father for cutting Gareth out of the land deal, some kind of revenge after the fact, then, like you said, when she died Gareth had achieved his objective and he had no reason to do anything else. But if the aim was to stop my father getting the land in the first place, to fuck up the deal before it happened, then Gareth had failed. And if that was the case, then the only way to make things right, to stop my father from benefiting from the gold even though he now had the land, would have been to kill him. And you know what? I think my father knew. He’d spent enough time with Gareth to know what he was capable of and after we had that crash I think he saw the writing on the wall. That’s why he put the land in my name, not because of any bogus accountant. He knew Gareth was after him.”
