Marla leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and ran her fingers through her hair. She let out a long breath. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t go through this endless rehashing of why Gareth did this, or why Gareth did that. We either accept that he’s an animal and try to live with what he did to Pat and what he maybe did to Ray, or…” She lifted her head and fixed her eyes on me. “Or we talk about killing him.”
We were both silent for a long time. Eventually she spoke again.
“Well, are we going to?”
“Going to what?”
“Talk about killing him.”
“Jesus, Marla, please…”
“It would be for the best, Johnny. It really would.”
CHAPTER 33
For the rest of that Sunday the idea that Gareth had killed my father grew inside me like a vicious pearl. It seemed to fit everything I knew. It made sense of my father’s disappearance, something I had always felt was completely out of character for the kind of man he’d been. And, knowing the violence that lay hidden in Gareth, it was certainly a possible response to the loss of what he must have seen as a way to save his father and himself from their failing cabins at the lake.
He’d had no compunction about pushing Patricia Prentice to suicide and he’d arranged Jeremy Tripp’s death. What was to say he hadn’t done the same with my father? But of course I had no proof, no indisputable item or event that could settle the matter one way or the other. And it was this lack of confirmation, this knowing but not knowing, that haunted me and ruined my sleep so that when Monday came I was primed and set to explode.
The weather was bad that morning and Stan had a cold and did not come down to the river. A fine misting rain hung in the air, collecting on the leaves of the trees, dripping, turning the surface of the river milky. Gareth and I were soaked in the first five minutes and we worked with our heads down, cold, saying little to each other. He was beside me at the sluice and seeing him there, so close, with what I assumed was a dreadful knowledge hidden inside his head but acting as though he had nothing more on his mind than soldiering through an honest day’s work, the rage within me boiled over and I threw a shovel of dirt in his face.
Gareth recoiled, spluttering and blinking, trying to clear his eyes, calling me an idiot. I grabbed him by the front of his jacket and threw him backwards into the river. He went under and came up and for a moment just sat there in the shallows, face now washed clean, staring up at me, his mouth working with the effort of figuring out what was going on. I thought I might jump on him, lock my hands around his throat and force him under the water until he was limp and dead, but then he moved and the grip of my rage loosened.
He climbed out of the river and we faced each other on the bank. I expected to see anger in his face, perhaps a quickly rising threat to go running to the police about Jeremy Tripp. But there was only shock and a hurt confusion, as though I had broken some unspoken code that existed between us.
“Jesus, dude, why did you do that?”
“The video.”
“The video?”
“The disk of me and Marla, you asshole. You didn’t send it to Bill. You sent it straight to Pat. And it didn’t have anything at all to do with the road to the lake.”
“If you say so.”
“Stop fucking with me. I know it was Pat who sold the land to my father. The video was supposed to stop the sale, wasn’t it? It was supposed to take her out of the picture before he had a chance to buy it.”
Gareth looked consideringly at me, then seemed to come to some decision. “You want to know about the video? All right. The whole thing was a fucking waste of time anyway.”
He turned and walked to the screen of trees that bordered the river. I followed him and we found partial shelter under the branches of a fir. Gareth squatted on the wet ground, he motioned for me to do the same but I stayed standing.
“Come on, Johnny, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
For a moment I didn’t move, then I gave up and squatted facing him.
Gareth nodded. “Good. Okay. Let me ask you first, how did you find out about the gold here? Did Ray tell you?”
“I figured it out after he disappeared.”
“The journal at that old lady’s house, the aerial photo-”
“The lecture at the Elephant Society about rivers changing course… Pretty much the way you and he did.”
“The difference being that Ray and I were together every step of the way. We got friendly because we were both into prospecting. We came across the journal together and then the photo. We took it from there. The thing you have to understand is that right from the start discovering the gold was something Ray and I did together. He didn’t have dibs on it. The plan was we were going to buy the place together and both get rich. Only Daddy didn’t stick to the plan.”
“Probably when he realized what a psycho you are.”
Gareth swallowed and, shockingly, just for an instant, his eyes filled with tears. “Do you want the story or not?”
I nodded. Gareth blinked and cleared his throat.
“Once we’d figured out about the land, we had to find out who owned it so we could make them an offer. We went to the deed office at the town hall-land’s owned by some holding company who won’t even discuss it with us. We think we’re fucked. But then, guess what? Ray’s been banging Patricia Prentice for months. He happens to mention he’s interested in the land at Empty Mile and, bingo, turns out Pattycake owns it. Instantly, instead of
The air was still full of rain. It dripped from the branches above us, tapping out a rhythm that made a wall against the rest of the world. Gareth picked up a twig and began poking it into the muddy ground.
“When I saw the way things were going I decided if Ray was going to treat me like that then I was going to fuck the deal up for him. And it was kind of fitting that Marla gave me the idea how to do it. She was friends with Patty and poor Patty was having trouble sleeping. Marla wanted me to get some weed for her, but I figured she had to be on antidepressants so I gave her a whole shitload of Halcion instead. As you know, I’m no stranger to what can happen when you mix benzodiazepines with acute depression. A few weeks later you and Marla were kind enough to star in my video. On top of Pat already having tried to kill herself a bunch of times it seemed to me that a little extra medication and watching her husband doing something nice and disgusting might very well be the final straw she needed to make a proper job of it.”
“But you couldn’t have known for sure.”
Gareth shrugged. “Nothing’s ever for sure, Johnny, but it was worth trying. By the time I got things together, though, Ray had already closed the deal. Of course I didn’t know that when I sent Pattycake the disk because Ray and I weren’t speaking a whole lot by then.”
“So Pat dies and Bill is fucked forever and it was all for nothing.”
“Like I said, big waste of time.”
