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.