Empty Mile

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.”

Stan 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.”

Patterson raised his eyebrows. “The Patricia Prentice who recently committed suicide?”

I nodded.

“How long had they been seeing each other?”

“Six months, apparently.”

“Did her husband know?”

“As far as I know, no.”

Patterson winced. He asked a few more questions then had me fill out a formal missing persons report. By the time we were done Stan and the officer were back in the kitchen. Patterson packed his laptop away and shook our hands and told us someone would be in touch every day and that the minute they knew anything, we would. He stopped in front of Stan before he left and put his hand on his shoulder.

“We’re going to do everything we can to find your dad. I promise.”

After he’d gone Stan walked around the kitchen running his hands through his hair.

“Oh boy, Johnny, oh boy… What’s happened to Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he mean about the car when he said marks?”

“Just anything that was a clue, I guess.”

Stan shook his head solemnly. “He was talking about blood.”

“I don’t think he was talking about blood, but anyway he said they didn’t see any.”

“Do you think he got on the bus? Do you think inside he always wanted to go somewhere else?”

“No, I don’t. Do you?”

Stan looked at me miserably and shook his head. “I have to put a costume on, Johnny, I don’t have enough power.”

“Stan, listen, calm down. What we have to do is wait and let the police do their stuff and try not to freak out before we know anything solid, okay?”

But although that’s what we did, and although Patterson was genuine and diligent and the Oakridge police combined forces with the larger Burton department, nothing came of it.

During the two weeks following my father’s disappearance the police interviewed the people he worked with and the one or two acquaintances who were the closest thing he had to friends. None of them had any idea what might have happened to him. Police patrols covered all the roads that ran through the hills around Oakridge and the forestry service did the same with the fire trails. Neither found any trace of him. His bank and credit card accounts were monitored but they remained unused and a photo of my father, e-mailed to the driver of the San Francisco bus that had picked up at Jerry’s Gas, brought forth no excited cry of recognition. A story about my father’s disappearance in the Oakridge Banner was similarly unproductive.

At one point Patterson showed us a video from a security camera in the San Francisco bus terminal. He asked us to look for anyone who might be our father. It was black-and-white and shot from high up. We watched it twice but we didn’t see him and I got the feeling that Patterson wasn’t seriously considering the bus scenario anymore.

It seemed, briefly, that Stan and I may have become suspects because Burton sent over a forensics team to go through our house. But the fact that there was nothing to find and that my father, although he carried home and car policies, had only minimal life insurance, turned the investigation back out toward the world again.

Bill Prentice, too, had his fifteen minutes of institutional scrutiny. As the husband of my father’s lover the notion that he might have exacted a fatal revenge was not something the police could ignore. It turned out almost immediately, though, that the day after Pat’s funeral, Bill had taken his BMW and headed down to Los Angeles to visit his mother. While down there, grief over his wife’s death had driven him to the bottle and on the evening and night of my father’s disappearance he had the cast-iron alibi of having been locked up in Santa Monica while he was processed for DUI.

Patterson came around to our house for the last time a month after my father vanished. He told me the police had run out of ways to approach the case. Stan was up in his room at the time and Patterson asked me not to call him down. We went out into the back garden and sat in the shadow of the house.

“Truthfully, we have no indication as to what might have happened to him. We’ve listed him as missing but I have to tell you, those details have been available to the California law enforcement community since the start of the investigation and nationally for the last two weeks and we haven’t had a bite. The length of time is very much a negative factor. On the other hand, we have nothing concrete to say he isn’t alive and well-no items of clothing, no blood, nothing. The case will stay open of course, and we’ll keep doing what we can, but we’re off that part of the curve now where we could expect any sort of timely resolution. I’m sorry. Basically, all we can do is hope he makes contact with you, or…” He shrugged, and didn’t say any more, but it was plain enough he meant:… or the body turns up.

After Patterson had gone I went upstairs to Stan’s room. He was sitting on the corner of his bed, crying quietly. His head was bowed and he didn’t look up when I came in. I sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulders. After a long time he cried himself out and his breath shuddered through his heavy body.

“I saw him through the window. I didn’t want to come down.”

“It’s okay.”

I told him what the detective had said. When I’d finished he said solemnly, “Dad’s dead.”

“Yes, I think he must be.”

“Does it feel weird to you, Johnny? That there’s just you and me now? It feels like we’re in the sea and there’s nothing holding us in the right place anymore. Like everything around us is empty.”

“Yeah, it’s weird.”

“Remember that night at the beach, when you were showing me the stars?”

When I had just turned sixteen and Stan was nine our parents took us on a short summer vacation to Santa Barbara. One warm night Stan and I lay on the beach after dark and looked up into the sky and I pointed out the few constellations I knew and told him how a planet didn’t twinkle and how sometimes you could see satellites moving against the backdrop of stars. And Stan had been lost in thoughts of infinity and dreams of what might be out there, and I felt his wonder and shared it, and in sharing had been drawn so close to him that it seemed we became for those moments almost part of each other, seeing with the same eyes, feeling together the vastness of the universe passing through us…

“Yes, I remember.”

“I wish we could be back there.”

Stan’s voice slowed and a little while later he started to drowse. I laid him on the bed and pulled the covers over him even though the sun was still high outside and the room was warm. I went downstairs and made a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table and thought about that night in Santa Barbara.

It was a memory I had cherished through all my years apart from Stan. My mother and father had both been alive then, Stan had not yet slipped beneath the dark waters of Tunney Lake, and I had still to spiral from my own good graces. It seemed a memory like that should have led to a better life for Stan and me, should have been part of a lifetime of events that were equally as cherished. In the kitchen that day I felt that I had thrown something away, that I had been granted some magic opportunity but had chosen to waste it.

In the evening the phone rang. I knew it would be Marla but I didn’t answer it. Stan slept without waking until the following morning and I was left alone with my own terrible thoughts.