Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “I had an appointment with my accountant today to go over a few things and we talked about the Empty Mile land. He suggested that it might be better if I put it in the name of a family member. There’s some sort of a tax penalty if you own a house and another piece of property. Capital gains or something. I didn’t quite follow the ins and outs of it, but he says it will save a fair amount of money. So I wondered if you’d mind if I put it in your name.”

  “The land?”

  “And the cabin. All of it. It’s all paid for, you’re not liable for anything. It’s just a matter of bookkeeping.”

  “You really want to put it in my name?”

  “There isn’t anyone else I can trust with it. All you need to do is put your name on a piece of paper. Nothing else. I’ll still take care of everything. My lawyer drew this up. It’s a standard transfer of title.”

  My father flipped through the pages. My name had been typed below several signature spaces. This was way out of left field, but it was such an expression of his trust in me that I didn’t want to disappoint him. And if it was going to help him with his taxes I could hardly say no.

  “All right, Dad.”

  He handed me his fountain pen, but for a moment he held on to it. “There’s just one thing you have to promise me, John, and it’s very, very important. If there’s ever a time when I’m not around, for whatever reason at all, and there’s some question of what to do about the land, you cannot sell it. Okay? If I’m not here to make the decision you’ve got to hold on to it no matter what. Do you understand?”

  “Sure, Dad, I promise. I won’t sell the land.”

  “Good boy.”

  And so I signed the papers and then my father signed them as well. There were two copies and he told me I should keep one in a safe place and that he’d lodge the other with his lawyer.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jeremy Tripp lived on the downhill side of Eyrie. I recognized the street immediately. It was the first of those that ran off the steep forest road after you hit the Slopes, and it was the same street on which Vivian, Gareth’s woman friend, lived.

  His house was a two-story piece of modern architecture with flat off-white walls and dark smoked-glass windows that looked violently out of place against the surrounding natural beauty. A tall, precisely clipped hedge ran more than halfway across the front of the property from right to left. Tripp’s driveway led behind this and made a sharp left at the side of the house into an open garage in which his E-type Jaguar gleamed softly.

  The front door was open and when we rang the bell Tripp’s distant voice shouted for us to enter. Inside, there was a wide foyer that rose the full height of the building. Ahead of us a flight of stairs led to the second story, and to our right and left corridors disappeared into the two opposing wings of the house. The whole space was covered with polished white stone and the ceiling was dotted with small inset lights that glowed golden and made the stone shine. Stan turned around in a circle, wide-eyed.

  “Wow, Johnny! It’s like Disneyland.”

  Tripp yelled again and we followed the corridor on our right till we found our way out onto a deck at the back of the house that held a large Jacuzzi and scattered wooden outdoor furniture. The deck looked across a gently sloping expanse of lawn that ended in a wall of forest. There was an archery target set up in front of the trees and Jeremy Tripp was loosing arrows at it from a longbow. He was a good shot and his arrows were all clustered inside its two central rings.

  Stan stood off to one side and announced formally that we were ready to begin our installation. Jeremy Tripp didn’t seem particularly interested and told us to just bring the plants inside and put them wherever we wanted. His voice was brusque and I could tell Stan was a little hurt.

  We went back out to the truck and manhandled the planters into the foyer one by one. While Stan fussed with the positioning of two trough displays in the foyer I hauled several of the single-shrub drum planters upstairs and looked for places to put them. Most of the rooms I checked were unfurnished but in the master bedroom there was a large unmade bed, several pieces of blond-wood furniture, and an open built-in wardrobe showing a rack of expensive men’s clothes. As I was positioning one of the planters in a corner of this room a louvered door beside the wardrobe opened and Vivian stepped out of a bathroom, wrapped in a towel and wet from a shower.

  She seemed perfectly relaxed.

  “Johnny, how nice to see you again.”

  I pointed at the plant. “My new business.”

  “Very enterprising.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I turned to leave.

  “Johnny.”

  “Yes?”

  “Whatever you do is your own business, of course, but Gareth is very young. In the way his mind works.”

  “I’m not going to say anything.”

  “He would be upset.”

  “I think he’d be very upset.”

  I went back downstairs and Stan and I left the house without seeing Jeremy Tripp again. As I was about to pull out of the driveway an old orange Datsun stopped in front of the house and Rosie got out and started loading herself with buckets and mops and other cleaning equipment. Stan jumped out of the pickup and they spent a couple of minutes speaking hesitantly to each other. When they were done Stan kissed her awkwardly on the cheek. Back in the pickup he told me she’d been hired by Jeremy Tripp to clean his house once a week.

  We’d done our first installation and Stan was ecstatic. On our way down from the Slopes he babbled about his plans for moving forward-distributing fliers, visiting every business in Oakridge, ordering plants from the wholesaler in Sacramento…

  We spent the remainder of the day back at our warehouse and then headed home. On our way through town Stan said he wanted to celebrate, so we picked up Chinese food for a surprise dinner with my father.

  At the house we set out plates in the dining room and put the food in the oven to keep warm. We sat in the kitchen and waited for my father. But my father didn’t come home.

  When it was past seven I called his office but it was closed and I got the machine. There was no answer from his cell phone. It was unlikely, but still possible, that he was out late showing a property, so we kept on waiting. After a while Stan went off and watched TV and at eight we took the food out of the oven and the two of us ate a quiet dinner in the kitchen. Stan put a brave face on but I knew he was worried.

  An hour later I called the Oakridge police. I got put through to a detective who told me they had no reports of recent car wrecks or any other incidents that might have accounted for my father’s absence. He said he’d check with the medical center in town and the hospital in Burton and call back. In the meantime he wanted me to call my father’s friends and the people he worked with in case they knew anything.

  My father’s boss was Rolf Kortekas. I found him in the phone book and called him at home. All he could tell me was that my father had left the office around six as usual and that he hadn’t said anything about showing a property after hours. Kortekas assumed he’d headed straight home.

  After that, who was there? My father had no close friends and the woman he’d been seeing had been buried two days ago. The only other person I could think of was Marla. I figured he might have gone around to her place to commiserate about Pat. I called her house and her cell phone. There was no answer at either.

  When the detective called back he had nothing to report. No one of my father’s name or description had been admitted to the medical center or to the Burton hospital. He said he’d put the word out to the patrol cars and that if my father hadn’t turned up by morning someone would come around to the house. Before he hung up he told me not to worry too much, in his experience ninety percent of these cases turned out to be nothing more serious than someone sleeping off a drinking binge in a motel room.

  I wasn’t convinced. Drinking binges weren’t something my father did. But we seemed now to be in the grip of the police machine and all its iron
procedures. In an attempt to feel like we weren’t just waiting around, that we were in fact doing something, rather than out of any real hope that he would actually be there, I suggested to Stan that we check the only other place I could think of that had any connection to my father-the cabin on the piece of land at Empty Mile.

  The drive out there in the dark felt as though it was mandated to end in some episode of domestic tragedy. The roads were unlit and the tunnel our headlights cut into the night served only to point up all the uncounted horrors that could befall a human being. The meadow, though, when we pulled off Rural Route 12, was peaceful. Under the starlight the long grass held a sheen of silver and when I parked in front of the cabin and turned the pickup’s engine off the silence of the place seemed to fall like some heavy curtain about us.

  The cabin was dark. No flashlight or lamp or burning candle gave away my bivouacking or binge-drunk father and when we entered through the unlocked door it took us less than a minute to confirm that the place was empty, that indeed it bore no sign my father had ever been there.

  Across the meadow there was light in some of the windows of Millicent and Rosie’s house. On our way back I stopped and asked them if they had seen my father at Empty Mile that day. They had not.

  My father was still absent when we returned to our house and the anxiety that had been riding Stan all evening rose to a physical agitation that had him pacing the hallway and shaking his hands, asking me over and over what could have happened and what we were going to do. It took me half an hour to calm him enough to get him into bed and even then he lay staring at the ceiling, wide-eyed with apprehension.

  Afterwards, I stayed up, sitting alone in the kitchen, calling both of Marla’s phones every half hour. I was worried about my father, of course, but the fact that Marla didn’t seem to be at home added a streak of jealousy to the mix. There weren’t too many encouraging scenarios I could come up with for her not being there at that time of night. When she still hadn’t answered half an hour after midnight I gave up and went to bed.

  Stan and I were both awake early the next morning. Neither of us had slept well and around dawn we got up and sat in the kitchen. I made coffee and Stan drank hot chocolate. He looked haunted and drawn and he sat hunched in his chair. My father had not come home during the night and we both knew something was very wrong.

  Around seven a.m. I called Marla’s landline. She answered on the second ring.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Johnny?”

  “Yeah, are you all right? You sound weird.”

  “I’m okay. I just woke up, that’s all. I was going to call you today. I miss you. Is everything okay?”

  “My father’s disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? What do you mean?”

  “He didn’t come home last night. We don’t know where he is.”

  “Oh no.”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “No. Why would I see him?”

  “I thought because of Pat and everything he might have come around.”

  “No. I haven’t seen him since before she died.”

  “But you were there all night? You would have known if he came around? I called you till about twelve and there was no answer.”

  “I had a killer day at work. When I got home I just turned off the phones and crashed out. I’m sorry, you must have needed someone to talk to. Have you called the police?”

  “Yeah, last night. They’re sending someone over.”

  “Are they going to do an investigation?”

  “Well, I’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, jeeze, Johnny, I really don’t want to get dragged into it.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Because of the room. They’re obviously going to ask you if he was seeing anyone. And then they’ll come here.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Of course! I’m renting a fuck pad to a woman who just killed herself, whose husband’s a big noise on the council, and whose lover has just disappeared. Not to mention I gave her those fucking pills.”

  “Did anyone else know about the room?”

  “No one. No one knew anything. Can you please keep me out of it? Please.”

  “Okay… If it comes up I won’t say anything about the room. Okay?”

  Marla sounded relieved. “Thank you, Johnny. Thanks.”

  Detective Patterson turned up midmorning with a uniformed officer and a laptop. Patterson was about fifty. He was not a tall man and he was thick around the middle. He wore a dark suit and his hair was held in place with some sort of product that smelled faintly of mint.

  Stan and I and the two cops went into the kitchen. Patterson put his laptop on the table and faced us with his hands slightly raised, as though he wanted to make absolutely sure we understood what he was going to say.

  “All right. The news so far is that we have not found your father. Neither do we have any information about his movements last night. What one of our cars did find in the last hour, though, was a white Ford Taurus parked in the lot behind Jerry’s Gas.”

  He handed me a sheet of paper that bore the logo of a car rental company. My father’s signature was at the bottom.

  “Your father’s rental agreement. We’ve checked with the car people and there’s no question-the car we found is the one he rented. No one at Jerry’s knows anything about how it got there. Unfortunately they don’t have camera coverage in the lot. The car was unlocked and the key was in the ignition.”

  Stan let out a small moan.

  “We’ve checked it out pretty thoroughly and we haven’t found anything to indicate that he might have come to harm-no damage to the bodywork, no marks on the interior.”

  For the next half hour Patterson asked about what my father did, where he worked, how long we’d lived in Oakridge, what happened to my mother… obviously compiling background to help him in his search. He typed all our answers into his laptop without looking at the keys.

  “How long ago was it that your mother died?”

  “Fourteen years.”

  Stan was sitting beside me. Patterson was opposite us across the table and I saw him glance at my brother.

  “So there were just you two boys and your father after that?”

  “For a while. I went to live in London eight years ago. I only just got back.”

  “Do you think your father found it difficult, working and being Mr. Mom all those years? Particularly after you left?”

  “I guess.”

  “Was he bitter about it, do you think?”

  “I think he was… frustrated that he didn’t have the money to make it easier.”

  “Mmm.” Patterson frowned and nodded to himself. “Would you call him a happy man?”

  “He wasn’t suicidal, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of depression. Was he unhappy with the state of his life? Would that describe him? Was he on medication? Antidepressants?”

  “No, no medication, no antidepressants. He wasn’t a happy man but he wasn’t clinically depressed, either. He was unfulfilled. He always wanted to be more successful.”

  “Okay. See, where his car was found, that lot, that’s a pickup stop for the Greyhound that runs up to Burton and on to Nevada, and back the other way to San Francisco. Several people got on the San Francisco bus last night.”

  “Was he one of them?”

  “We don’t know. We spoke to the driver by phone. All he remembers is that out of the people who got on there were a couple of men. They weren’t together and they paid for their tickets with cash-no credit card ID. He couldn’t give a description beyond that they were white and middle-aged. We’ll e-mail him a photo, but I don’t know how much we’ll get out of him. All we know is that all the passengers went through to San Francisco, no one got off along the way. I’ll need your father’s bank details, by the way, so we can put a trace on his cards.”

  St
an had been listening to all of this, rubbing his hands together as though they were hurting him. He spoke up now and his voice was angry. “My dad wouldn’t go away like that. You’re talking crazy.”

  Patterson looked at him uncertainly for a moment and I knew he was trying to gauge the boundaries of Stan’s ability to understand the situation. To his credit he didn’t start speaking like a grade school teacher.

  “No, you’re right. It seems unlikely. But I have to consider every possible scenario. And, unfortunately, it is a possibility.”

  “Stan’s right, though. My father isn’t that sort of man.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, but it’s a fact that in many, many missing persons cases the person, I don’t know…” Patterson looked around the room as though he might find some other way of putting it, then gave up and continued, “… just kind of snaps.”

  Stan had tears in his eyes. He shouted at Patterson, “My dad didn’t snap! Something happened to him!”

  Patterson nodded gently. “That, again unfortunately, is also a possibility and we will absolutely follow that line of inquiry as well. Listen, Stan, I wonder if you’d go into the front room with this officer here. He has a form we need you to fill out to start an official missing persons case.”

  The uniformed officer rose. After hesitating a moment Stan got up too and followed him out of the room. Patterson looked at me carefully.

  “Your brother…”

  “There was an accident when he was eleven. He was underwater for a long time, he suffered some damage.”

  Patterson made another entry on his laptop. “Must have made it doubly difficult for your dad bringing him up.”

  “I can see where you’re going, but honestly it’s impossible for me to imagine my father just running away.”

  “Was he seeing anyone?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “How do you think I mean?”

  “Well, I don’t-”

  “Johnny, this is not the time to get creative. Being discreet won’t help him or us.”

  “A couple of weeks ago he told me he was having an affair with Patricia Prentice. I really don’t know any more than that, my father didn’t like to talk about anything personal.”