Empty Mile

CHAPTER 16

The next morning, after Marla had gone to work, I went outside and sat in the back garden and forced myself not to replay images of her lying underneath Jeremy Tripp. I spent a long time doing this before I turned to one of my other problems-how the hell I was going to hold on to the house.

Leaving would traumatize Stan and if there was any way to spare him the loss of his home I had to try and find it. The only solution I could see right then, and the one the bank seemed to favor, was to sell the Empty Mile land. But my father had made me promise not to do that under any circumstances. Why? What could be so important about a piece of land that he had plunged himself into debt again at the age of fifty-seven to buy it?

Stan and I had to meet a prospective customer at the warehouse that afternoon but everything else we had scheduled work-wise could be put off to another day. When I told Stan we were taking some time off he was dubious at first, but he came around pretty quickly when he realized it would involve seeing Rosie.

At Empty Mile the meadow had trapped the sun and crickets were singing in the long grass. On the porch of Millicent Jeffries’s house the smell of warm wood and dust was sweetened by a sprig of jasmine that stood in a jar of water on a sill outside an open window. The screen door was closed and on the other side of it the old woman stood peering at us through the mesh.

“I wondered who it was.”

“Stan and I thought we’d say hello.”

“I figured we’d see you at some point. Rosie wanted to visit after we read about your father but I told her to let you be for a while. Come inside.”

The front door opened directly onto a sitting room that occupied much of the front of the house. It was clean and smelled somehow as though everything in it had just been swept. The walls and the furnishings were pale and because the room was not large its surfaces were cluttered with the vases and knickknacks they held. But it was a pleasant place to be-the porch roof shielded its walls from the sun and there was a cooling movement to the air as it came in through the open windows.

Millicent sat in a chair with a creaking mechanism beneath its upholstery that allowed it to rock. She had been in the middle of some needlework and she picked up the hoop again and laid it on her lap and the dry ends of her fingers moved absently across a half-completed stitching of flowers. I sat on a couch but Stan stayed standing.

“Is Rosie here, Mrs. Jeffries?”

“She’s in her room.”

Stan looked uncertain.

“Go on, you can go through.”

Stan walked through a square arch in the back wall and a moment later I heard him tapping on a door. Millicent smiled gently at me.

“We were both sorry to hear about your father. What a mystery. He seemed like a decent man.”

“Yes, he was.”

“The police don’t expect to find him?”

“I don’t think so.”

Millicent nodded to herself. “Will you sell the land?”

“My father wanted me to keep it.”

“Well, it’s a pretty enough spot.”

“It is, but I’m kind of puzzled about what he was planning to do with it.”

Millicent shrugged. “First time I met him he was trying to get me to put my house on the market. Maybe when he saw the land he just fell in love with it. Maybe he didn’t have any plans.”

“When was that?”

“February. I remember because it seemed a silly time to be selling a house, but he said there were a lot of buyers in the market for vacation homes and he wanted to get it listed for spring when people started to buy. He said he could get me a good price. I told him to take a look and tell me where I could go on the kind of money I’d get for this place. Our water’s that rain tank out there, toilet’s another tank buried in the ground. He kept trying, of course, I suppose they have to, but he gave up when he saw I wasn’t going to change my mind. We ended up talking about gold, of all things.”

“Gold?”

“Yes, he and the young man he had with him were both amateur prospectors and it happens that one of my ancestors, an Englishman like your father, came to California in the Gold Rush and kept something of a journal about it. Your father asked to see it. He seemed very interested in the history of the area.”

“Who was the guy with him?”

“I don’t know, a friend, perhaps. He didn’t appear to be involved in your father’s business.”

“Does the journal say anything about this land here?”

“A little, I think. It’s been a long time since I even looked at it. It never interested me all that much.”

Stan and Rosie came into the room then. Rosie had her eyes on the floor, as usual, but as she moved to the front door she turned her head slightly toward her grandmother.

“We’re going for a walk.”

She headed on out of the house without stopping. Stan followed her closely. I watched them pass through the doorway and when I looked back at Millicent I saw that she had been watching me.

“You don’t have to worry, you know.”

“What?”

“About him getting her pregnant. I could see it in your face.”

“Stan hasn’t had much experience with girls. Any, in fact.”

“Rosie can’t have children. She had her tubes tied when she was sixteen. She was in a home for disturbed adolescents at the time and she was very withdrawn. No one knew what was going to become of her and they said the operation would be for the best because sooner or later one of the boys there was sure to get at her. I had to say yes. What else could I do? She couldn’t take care of a child.” Millicent stared at the needlework in her lap and after a long pause said, “It was for the best.”

She spoke the words firmly then shook herself.

“You wanted to know if the journal says anything about this place. You can read it yourself if you like. It’s over there.” She pointed to a small set of shelves beneath one of the windows. “The gray one on the end.”

I took the book she indicated. Millicent started her needlework again and while she pushed and pulled the needle and its bright thread through the disk of cotton I sat in that quiet pale room and turned pages that had been written a hundred and thirty years before I was born.

The book was covered with coarse canvas. In places the depressions in the weave still held a residue of its original green color, but mostly the covers were faded to a grubby shale. Inside, the first two-thirds of the book had been damaged by water and were unreadable. The remaining pages were covered in a precise hand that gave little slope to its letters. The name Nathaniel Bletcher was printed on the inside of the back cover-Millicent’s ancestor, I assumed.

The Gold Rush had had its start in January 1848 when James Marshall found traces of gold in a millrace he was building on the American River at Coloma for a would-be land baron named Joseph Sutter. California was relatively sparsely populated at the time but that all changed over the next year as news spread around the world that a man could get rich simply by scooping dirt out of a river. By 1849 fortune hunters were pouring into the state from every part of the world, most of them heading north for the streams and rivers on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Nathaniel Bletcher had been one of them.

With so many men competing for claims it became less and less easy to earn a decent day’s wage with each month that passed, let alone hit the big time. For some men the solution to this problem was to head further inland, beyond the already established diggings, in search of a river or creek that had not yet been discovered and worked by others.

From the journal it appeared Nathaniel Bletcher had been forced, eventually, to adopt this approach. He’d begun his quest for gold on the Feather River where he’d worked a claim for a month without success before selling it and moving on to the Yuba. He prospected this river for three months, moving steadily toward the junction with its south fork. Many of the diggings he passed through had been rich strikes, but he came on them too late to pan anything like the amount of gold he needed to make himself a wealthy man. And so, finally, he abandoned the Yuba, bought a mule and supplies, and walked north into the surrounding forest, determined to keep going until he found his own untouched river.

It took him nine days and even then what he first found was not what he had been hoping for. The bright line of water that guided him out of the forest was already named and known-the Swallow River. To his disappointment there were men there before him and they were panning rich deposits. But there were not many of them and from talking to them he learned that they were the first to reach so far up the Swallow.

He spent two nights on the periphery of this newborn mining encampment, but the lure of his own personal El Dorado was too strong and on the third morning he repacked his mule and struck off alone upriver.

Though California’s population exploded as a result of the Gold Rush it was by no means entirely unsettled beforehand. Places had been named, some of the land had been mapped. Settlers who had known nothing of gold had hacked homesteads out of the wilds and, here and there, small hamlets had formed.

I turned the pages of the journal that charted Nathaniel’s progress upriver, looking for a place name or the mention of a settlement in the hope that I might be able to pinpoint what part of the Swallow River he had journeyed along.

For several pages there was little, just the outline of four days’ slow travel. Immediately beyond the encampment of miners the riverbed had lost its gold-bearing floor of sand and gravel and its water flowed instead over flat rock and jumbles of boulders, terrain poorly suited for the collection of gold dust. Nathaniel’s entries on these days were weighted with despondency and he began to consider cutting his losses and returning to the encampment. On the fourth day, however, he made this entry:

March 15, 1849

At last! The river has grown a little wider and I am camped this evening beside a shoal of gravel that yields good color. From noon to dusk I took two ounces with my pan. The gold is not heavily concentrated, but it is here! It is here! The surrounding land provides good reason for optimism. Upriver, above the tops of the trees, I can see a tall formation of rock that is surely quartz-bearing. It is greatly eroded and can have shed its minerals nowhere else but into the river which it appears to border so closely. Ahead of me the river curves and I cannot see the lay of it but I feel that I am at the ragged end of a great deposit. And of the multitudes who scrabble over this country it is I alone who am here to mine it. What will tomorrow bring? I will journey further. If my luck is good I will find the belly of this lode. If my luck is good.

And the day after that:

March 16, 1849 Half a day’s travel and the same of panning. The dirt is richer and I feel an excitement of the kind the hunter must feel as he closes with his prey. I am near. I know it. Tomorrow, perhaps, just a little further along the river, my fortune will present itself. Though I was lucky enough tonight. As I prepared my supper a trapper happened across me. Praise God that I had stopped my work and that my equipment was stowed out of sight. He travels downriver with beaver pelts and dried meat and took me at my word, I think, when I lied that I was looking for land to homestead. I bought some meat from him and we shared the meal. I asked for a description of the river ahead. There is, he said, a landmark known to those who have traveled this way but a few hours from where I write-an unusual length of river, curved so roundly that it bears the name Cooper’s Bend, as if it followed one side of a giant barrel. The river is quite broad and slow here, he said, with a bed of gravel and sand. Though I am lonely for company I was glad when our meal was over and he left to continue his journey downriver for I could not have much longer contained my euphoria. The place he speaks of can be no less than what I seek. All things point to it. The form of the land about, the slowness of the river, the composition of its bed. What treasure must lie trapped within it! I will leave at first light. He seeks to trade with the men I encountered five days previous and he may mention my presence here. Miners are suspicious men and some of them perhaps will not believe a tale of homesteading.

This entry finished at the bottom of the last page in the book. I had become caught up in the narrative and I felt a pang of disappointment that the outcome of his quest had not been recorded. I held the book open in my hands for a moment, wondering what had become of the man, and as I did so I noticed jagged lines of paper along the inside of its spine. It looked like three pages had been torn out.

I put the book back on its shelf.

“The last few pages are missing.”

“Are they? I never noticed. But then, as I said, I haven’t looked at it for years.”

“What happened to him?”

She laughed. “What happened to your great-great-grandfather?”

“I don’t even know who he was.”

“Exactly. I know he was supposed to have been reasonably well off. Whether it came from gold or not I couldn’t say.” She looked tiredly about the room. “I know his money didn’t stick around too long, though. Our family’s been in this area since Nathaniel came up that river and I don’t think a single one of us ever was what you would call even comfortable.”

“Have you ever heard of a place called Cooper’s Bend? He mentions it in the journal.”

“Yes, though there aren’t many people still alive who know it by that name.”

“Where is it?”

“Right here. That piece of river at the bottom of your father’s land. That’s what used to be called Cooper’s Bend till folks took to calling it Empty Mile-after all the gold was mined out, I guess.”

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment. I’d come here hoping to find out why my father had bought the land. An old journal would have been an exciting place to discover the secret, but I had read nothing there that might explain the land’s importance to him. The only whiff of meaning came from the mention of gold, but what of that? Any gold there might have been in the Swallow River at Empty Mile, along with all the gold in all the other Californian rivers, was long gone.

Millicent smiled patiently at me. “Does any of that help? A couple of months after his first visit your father came back by himself and asked to read the journal again and then, not long after that, he and his friend showed up to dig some fence post holes.”

“I didn’t see a fence. Where did they dig?”

“Down in the trees at the bottom of the meadow. Made such a racket I went down to have a look. They had this thing like a big corkscrew with a gasoline engine that they held between them. Bored right into the ground. Looked like a crazy place to do it, right in the trees. I don’t know how they thought they were going to string wire through all that brush. But then, your father didn’t look too much like the practical type, and I don’t think they drilled more than a handful of holes anyhow.”

“When was this?”

“Three or four months ago.”

“And you don’t know who this friend was? You didn’t hear a name?”

“No. He was a redhead, the sandy type. Tall, thin.”

I took my cell phone out and brought up the photo Gareth had insisted I take of him. Millicent nodded.

“Yes, that’s him.”

“My father didn’t buy the place until a month ago. Why would he be digging fence holes on land he didn’t own?”

“Perhaps he was getting a jump on things.”

“Who owned the land before?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you show me where the holes are?”

Millicent went to the front door, pushed open the screen, and pointed to a spot in the trees at the bottom of the meadow.

“Go straight in from there, you should find them.”

I thanked her and walked down across the meadow.

The first hole I found was about twenty yards in from the start of the trees and I’d seen it before. It was the hole my father had stood pondering over the day he brought Stan and me to Empty Mile for the first time. By walking parallel to the meadow from this point I found two others.

Although I’d never put up a fence I guessed the holes were about the right diameter but everything else about them looked wrong. They were too widely spaced, at least twenty-five feet between each, and they seemed overly deep, they went down about four feet. And what was the logic of erecting a fence on uncleared land?

I left the belt of trees and walked back up the slope to take a look at the log cabin. It was reasonably large for that type of building and had three bedrooms. Through the window of one of these I saw Stan and Rosie. They were standing in the middle of an empty room. She had her arms around him and their faces were pressed together, kissing.

I knocked on the door of the cabin and waited. A few seconds later Stan and Rosie came out and I told him I had errands to run and that he could stay at Empty Mile while I took care of them if he wanted.

From Millicent’s place I drove straight to Tunney Lake. Marla and I had reached an unspoken agreement to act as though the night with Jeremy Tripp had never happened, but that didn’t mean I had the same agreement with Gareth.

He was sweeping the steps to one of the cabins when I pulled into the parking lot. He looked up from his broom as I approached.

“You took your time. I thought you’d be back last night.”

“She told me what you have on her.”

“Mmm… busted for hooking. Nasty.”

“You prick. Why would you do something like that?”

“Um… money?”

“You’ve got the other girls for that.”

“Johnny, I want to be friends with you. This thing with Marla, it’s between me and her. It’s part of our history.”

“You haven’t lived with her for ten years.”

“You’re pretty self-focused, you know that? So what if it’s been ten years? She took my fucking future. I mean, honestly, Johnny, can you blame me if sometimes I feel like treating her like a cunt?”

Gareth took a deep breath, sighed it out, and steadied himself.

“Look, you’ve been away a long time. And while you were away our lives went on without you, and maybe they got a bit twisted, I admit it. I know I shouldn’t still hate her so much, but sometimes… I don’t know, I just get fixated.”

“Blackmailing someone into prostitution is beyond fixated.”

“She was hooking on her own way before I ever got involved.”

“What difference does that make?”

For a moment I thought Gareth was going to puff himself up again but he nodded and seemed to let go of something.

“Okay, you and Marla are obviously back together. I wasn’t sure before, but things are different now, I can see that. You shouldn’t have your lover being forced to do other men. I actually thought about it a lot after you left and you’re right, it can’t go on.”

“So you’re saying, what?”

“I’ll leave her alone. Call it my gift to you. I won’t make her do it again. I promise.”

I wasn’t really sure what to say to this. I’d expected a prolonged argument, a screaming match, even a brawl. His about-face took the wind out me and I stood there just looking at him for a moment. Gareth laughed.

“Dude! I’m not a complete shit. What do you think, I’m going to be this evil force forever fucking up your life? Like every day it’s gonna be, Sorry, Johnny, but Marla’s got to work tonight? Come on!”

“He made me watch.”

“You watched? Oh, man, I’m really sorry. That must have been shitty. I had no idea that would happen. Look, I’m finished here. You want to hang around and have a beer?”

What I wanted was to meet up with Marla and tell her how I’d convinced Gareth to set her free. But for Marla’s sake, keeping Gareth friendly seemed like the smarter choice right then, so I said yes to the beer.

Gareth got the drinks from the kitchen in the bungalow and led me out to the barn. David, his father, was seated in his wheelchair in the far corner working on something with a drill press. He waved distractedly as we came in and kept on working. We sat in the large open doorway, facing back toward the house. At intervals, behind us, David’s drill whined against metal.

Gareth nudged me and made his eyes wide. “Hey, you hear about Patricia Prentice?”

“Stan and I were the ones who found her.”

“Really? Holy shit!”

“Stan was delivering some potted plants.”

“What’d she look like?

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Was she wearing clothes? Was it, like, a total mess?”

“She looked dead, Gareth, okay? Just dead.”

Gareth held up his hands. “Dude, just asking.”

“Well, fuck…”

“Okay, okay…” Gareth leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I’m glad you came up today, Johnny. I need someone to talk to. Something’s going on between that asshole Marla did last night and Vivian.”

“Jeremy Tripp?”

“Yeah.”

I knew damn well there was something going on-I’d caught her coming out of his shower-but there was no way I was going to get mixed up in it. Gareth shook his head sadly.

“I go around to see her and she’s coming back across the road from his place. I call her on her cell and she doesn’t answer, or she’s around there practicing archery. Archery, for fucksake! I mean, Jesus, man, I love her.”

He took a gulp of his beer.

“I can’t believe it, you know? Two women in my life, the only two relationships that have ever meant anything, and both of them turn to shit.”

“Why would Tripp pay for Marla if he’s seeing Vivian?”

Gareth shrugged. “He’s rich. Fuck, all I need is a little time to turn this place around, to get some decent money together, and I’d be able to keep her. I know I would.”

He looked away and cleared his throat, then changed the subject.

“How are you doing about your dad anyway?”

“We’re coping.”

“When I read the paper I felt bad. Ray was a neat guy. We got to be pretty good friends.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, about a year ago I was panning up near Malakoff and he was there too, on the same stretch of river. We started talking, we had the gold thing in common and I was your old buddy so we got along pretty good.”

“Oh? He never said.”

“Yeah, we used to meet up and go panning. Or we’d go to Elephant Society meetings together. I tell you, I was freaked when he disappeared. The cops didn’t find anything?”

“No. But I wanted to ask you something. Did you ever go out with him when he was working? When he was doing his real estate thing?”

“No.”

“Not outside Oakridge, ever? Looking for properties to market?”

“Why would I?”

“I was out at a place called Empty Mile. The woman who lives there said that when my father came out to try and get her to put it on the market he had someone with him.”

Gareth frowned and shook his head, then suddenly his face brightened. “Oh yeah! I know what you’re talking about. My Jeep broke down coming back from Burton. Ray was passing and gave me a ride, but first he had to go someplace for business. Empty Mile. But I wasn’t working with him, dude.”

“Did he have a particular interest in that land?”

“I don’t know. The woman didn’t want to sell, I remember that.”

“I mean the land below her house.”

“I don’t think so, it’s just a patch of land.”

“Did you know he ended up buying it? For himself.”

“Yeah, I heard something about that.”

“The woman said you were interested in a journal she had.”

“Oh yeah, that. It was really interesting. We both spent, like, an hour reading it. Do you think you’ll sell the land, after Ray’s will and everything gets sorted?”

“I could sell it now if I wanted, he put it in my name before he disappeared.”

“Really? How come?”

“Some tax dodge.”

“Interesting… You know, me and Dad have been thinking about getting a piece of land, something for the future. Maybe we could work something out.”

“You want to buy Empty Mile?”

“If you’re selling, why not? I’ve seen it, it’s just the kind of thing we’d be interested in.”

“I thought you guys were broke.”

“We are, but I could still raise the money on the equity we have in this place.”

“I’m not planning to sell.”

He looked disappointed. “Okay, promise me one thing. If you change your mind, give me first crack at it, okay? I’ll pay market value, I’m not asking for a discount or anything.”

After we’d had another beer, Gareth walked me out to my truck. As I got into it I remembered something. “What were the holes for?”

“What holes?”

“The ones you drilled with my father at Empty Mile.”

“Fence posts.”

“Really?”

“That’s what Ray said.”

“But they’re too deep. And they’re right in the middle of the trees.”

“Dude, I was just labor. Your father wanted a hand, he said they were for fence posts. Who gives a fuck? Remember what I said about selling.”

He turned and walked back into the bungalow. I drove to Empty Mile and picked Stan up and we headed to the warehouse for our appointment with what we hoped would be a new customer for Plantasaurus.

There was a high-sided rental van parked at the junction of the garden center driveway and the Oakridge Loop. Its engine wasn’t running and I got the feeling that it had been there for a while. There was someone in the cab but the light was such that I couldn’t make out more than a dim shape behind the wheel.

Stan and I passed it and went on up the driveway. We opened the warehouse and, as we had a little time before our prospective customer was due, Stan turned on the hose and started watering. We’d received our first shipment from the Sacramento wholesaler ten days before and it felt good to stand there and look at the plants, at the different greens of their leaves, shining under the spray of water, knowing that this miniature forest of trees and potted shrubs was ours, that we were in business and this was our stock.

When the watering was done we took several sample displays outside and placed them along the front of the warehouse. As we finished positioning the last of them a champagne Mercedes SUV pulled in from the road, crunched up the drive, and parked in front of us. Three well-dressed women got out, one of them was the customer we’d been waiting for-the owner of an expensive clothing boutique in Old Town. Her name was Cloris and she wanted plants for both her store and her house on the Slopes. The women gathered in front of the displays.

We all said hello and Cloris introduced her friends as fellow Slopes-dwellers who’d come along because they were interested in displays for their homes. Stan managed to shoot me a quick look without anyone seeing and I knew if he’d been able to get away with it he’d have made the sound of a cash register. I left it to him to explain about the various types of plants we used and the other options that were available if they didn’t like what they saw today. The women nodded and made approving noises.

While Stan was speaking I heard an engine start a little way off and half a minute later the van that had been parked at the side of the road raced noisily up the drive and slid to a stop behind the Mercedes. The women turned in surprise. Stan stopped his spiel and looked uncertainly at me.

Jeremy Tripp climbed out of the van and walked calmly around to the double doors at the rear of the vehicle. He paused there and nodded to the women.

Stan lifted his hand timidly. “Hello, Mr. Tripp.”

Tripp ignored him and addressed the women. “You might want to look at this before you waste your money.”

He opened the back of the van and began hauling out the planters we had installed in his house. He handled them with quick angry movements and let them fall heavily on the ground. When he was done he put his foot against one of the tub planters and tipped it over. The Yucca it contained broke rottenly, its trunk opening to show a center of soggy pulp. Its leaves, too, had shriveled from their usual tough greenness and were now empty skin, wet and darkly discolored. The other plants were the same, all blasted and dark and dead.

“Great service, guys.”

The women made small, anxious comments to each other as they tried to figure out what was going on. Stan stammered that something must have gone wrong, that the plants must have caught a disease, that we would replace them immediately…

Tripp snorted in disgust and climbed back into his van. Before he closed the door he paused and took a long look around the garden center land.

“You know, this site would be perfect for a small hotel. Say about thirty rooms. You ever thought of that?”

He made a tight U-turn and drove leisurely down to the road and away. Stan dropped to his knees and started inspecting the plants, pulling their limp carcasses from the soil and holding them up to the light. The women looked briefly at each other then got into their Mercedes. Cloris thanked us then quickly made her own U-turn and drove away before I could say anything.

“They’re not going to be customers, are they, Johnny?”

“Somehow, I don’t think so.”

“This is bad. They might tell someone else.”

“What do you think happened?”

Stan shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s too quick to be a disease. The only thing it looks like is too much insect spray.” I prodded a couple of the plants with the toe of my shoe but it was pointless, I didn’t know anything about the things plants died of. Some of the planters had fallen onto their sides and I bent down to right them, pushing the spilled soil back into them with the flat of my hand. As I did so I smelled something-an ammoniac, chemical tang. I lifted a handful of soil to my nose, then held it out for Stan to sniff.

“Smells like bleach, Johnny.”

“Yeah.”

I dug a sample from another of the planters. Same thing. The plants had been fed bleach.

Stan frowned. “Why would he kill his own plants?”

“Maybe someone spilled something when they were cleaning.”

“Rosie’s his cleaner. She’d never do anything like that, she’s careful.”

Stan was right of course. No one had accidentally done anything to these plants.

At the kitchen table that evening Stan seemed drained and serious. He ate quietly without any of his usual wise-cracking or horsing around. The matchbox in which he kept his moths lay next to his plate and occasionally he pushed it open and looked for a few moments at the insects inside. When he had finished eating he drank a glass of milk.

“Johnny, do you think Plantasaurus is going to work out?”

“Other than today I think it’s looking pretty good, don’t you?”

“It’s important now, Johnny. Really important.” He was silent for a moment, then he added, “Because of Rosie. I’ve got to make sure she doesn’t stop liking me.”

Later, when he was in bed and I was saying goodnight to him, he reached across to the nightstand for his matchbox. He was wearing his pajamas but he had his Captain America mask on. He pushed the box open slightly and breathed deeply from the opening and then said seriously, “When things get hard you need more power. If you don’t have enough everything starts to go wrong, like today. Maybe you should get a costume. You can have Superman if you want.”

“I’m not wearing a costume, Stan.”

“But we’ll get more power.”

“Listen to me, dude, this power thing is getting a bit tired.”

“That’s because you don’t believe in anything. You’re so upset all the time about things that have already happened you don’t think there’s anything good left in the world.”

“That’s not true.”

“The world’s a good place, Johnny, it is. Only sometimes you have to get extra power to help it along.”

I could see the subject was important to him so I didn’t push things any further. “Okay, but you’ll have to do it for both of us, ’cause I still ain’t wearing no costume.”

He smiled softly. “Okay, Johnny.”

After I left Stan I called Marla to see if she wanted to come over and spend the night, but it was late by then and she told me she couldn’t face the drive.

“I wouldn’t be much company anyway, Johnny. I feel like a pig.”

“You’re not a pig.”

“I’m disgusting.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re a good person.”

On the other end of the line Marla’s laughter sounded lost and a long way off. “Really?”

I thought about telling her of Gareth’s promise not to pimp her anymore but the way she sounded right then I didn’t think it would have much of an impact. Instead, I made a date to go to her place for lunch the next day. Then I told her I loved her and hung up.