“John Richardson?”
I nodded and showed him my driver’s license.
“Ah, good. Nice to tie up loose ends. Would you mind signing?”
He opened a folder that had been wedged under his arm and took out a form for me to sign. When I handed it back he pushed the vial toward me and smiled. “Short and sweet.”
“What is it?”
Reginald Singh looked confused.
“The sample.”
“You didn’t read the report?”
“It’s a long story. My father disappeared a couple of months ago. I’m sort of tying up some loose ends of my own. You can call the Oakridge police department if you need confirmation.”
Reginald Singh looked mildly dismayed and shook his head. “Oh no, no, no. You have ID. Gold nine-thirty fine.”
“Excuse me?”
He tapped the vial with his forefinger. “We received a sample of concentrates-the mixture of black sands and fine gold that most placer miners can easily reduce their pannings to. The work request was to determine the purity of the ore it contained. There are a number of ways to do this-ion probe analysis, fluorescence spectrometry-but fire assay is simple, suitable for small samples, and more affordable for an individual prospector. It is considered to be as accurate as any other method. We performed this type of assay on your father’s sample. We determined the fineness-the purity-of this sample to be gold nine-thirty fine.”
“Which means?”
“Gold is always alloyed with a certain amount of silver and other trace metals. Gold fineness is based on a scale of zero to one thousand. So, after we had separated the metal from the black sands we determined, through our assay, that its pure gold content was in the ratio of nine hundred and thirty parts to one thousand. About average for California placer gold.”
I picked up the vial and turned it so that the light caught the small wafer of gold. “So this actually has silver in it too?”
“No, that is pure gold. After we do the fire reduction we dissolve the silver content by immersion in a 50 percent solution of nitric acid. Weighing the sample before and after gives the percentage of non-gold metal. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Well, I was wondering if you remembered anything about when my father was here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know really. Did he say anything about the samples, where he got them? Did he make any sort of comment about anything that stood out?”
“Oh, I didn’t meet your father, I performed the assay only. One of my colleagues took the work request. I can get him if you like.”
I said that would be good and Reginald Singh went back into the building proper. A minute later a younger man with blond hair that hadn’t been washed for a while came out and took his place behind the counter. Before he said anything he placed a large see-through plastic bag containing what looked like soil and gravel on the counter.
“This is yours too. I haven’t been here too long and when your father…?” He raised his eyebrows and I nodded. “When your father came in he had the sample you already got, which he wanted tested for purity, and this one,” he nodded at the bag, “which he wanted tested for content, like he wanted to know how much gold was in the whole thing. I accepted it by mistake. We don’t work on samples that aren’t at least refined down to concentrates. My fault, I’m sorry.”
“Do you remember him saying where the samples came from?”
“Thing about prospectors-they don’t say nothing about nothing. You find gold, you’re not going to tell anyone where it is. No, he didn’t say where he got it. That one,” he pointed at the bag, “looks like river gravel to me.”
“Did he say anything else… about anything?”
“All I remember is that he was with another guy, about your age. And I remember because a week or so after your father submitted the samples this guy came back and wanted to pick them up and get the report. But the only name on the work request was your father’s so legally we couldn’t tell him anything and we sure couldn’t give him the samples. He was pretty pissed off about it.”
I showed him the photo of Gareth on my cell phone. “This the guy?”
“That’s him.”
Out in the pickup I put the vial in my pocket and tossed the bag of dirt on the passenger seat. I made it back to Oakridge toward the end of the afternoon and picked Stan up from the warehouse. When he saw the bag of river gravel he was full of questions. I showed him the wafer of gold and spent the rest of the drive telling him about the samples and trying to contain his immediate assumption that my father had discovered a gold mine.
We were staying the night at Marla’s place, to have dinner and help her with the last of her packing before she moved to Empty Mile, but first I wanted to drop by the real estate office where my father had worked to thank them for the gift basket they’d sent. During the drive Stan sat with the larger sample on his lap and at one point he shifted it a little and smoothed the plastic against its contents. I heard him make a small sound of happy surprise and turned to see him pointing at several small faded pink petals mixed with the dirt.
The real estate office, like most of the other businesses in Old Town, was housed in a converted two-story wooden building that had probably been a private residence or some sort of store back in the 1800s. A large plate-glass window had been cut into the front and was filled with rows of photographs advertising properties in the Oakridge area. I knew Rolf Kortekas, the guy who owned the business, well enough to say hello to. He was a Dutchman who’d come to the States as a kid-an immigrant like my father. But unlike my father he had achieved a reasonable level of financial success. I left Stan in the truck while I went inside.
Rolf was the only one in the office that afternoon and when I walked in he stood up behind his desk and spread his arms.
“Johnny. My God, what can I say? Do you need something? Sit down, sit down.”
I told him I’d just dropped in to say thanks for the gift. We talked for a few minutes about my father and his disappearance and after that I asked Rolf if he had any idea why my father had bought the Empty Mile land.
“He was a good man, your father, I think. But I can’t say that I knew him well, even after all this time. I know he bought the land, but I have no idea why. Your father wasn’t a man who confided in others.”
The office was decorated to mimic a turn-of-the-century land office. The plank walls had been painted a muddy cream and hung with antique land documents. It had a nostalgic, comfortable feel and for a moment I gazed idly at its old-fashioned decorations and wondered if there was anything else Rolf could tell me.
I’d been staring at a set of three pictures on the wall behind him for several seconds before I realized what they were. Black-and-white aerial photographs. Different part of the landscape, but the same size, the same gray toning as the one my father had so proudly shown Stan and me. Rolf saw me looking at them.
“Bureau of Land Management. They had a project to photograph some of the land around here. Aerial cataloging. Helps them decide if they should move more land into government ownership, or if they have any they can get rid of because it isn’t of environmental significance. One of their surveyors was based in Oakridge for a while. We helped him out a little with local land knowledge, he gave us some prints in return.”
“When was that?”
“April. Your father was fascinated with them. I think he even went to see the man to talk about them.”
“Is he still in Oakridge?”
“No, he moves around, but he’s in Burton sometimes, I think. I have his card if you’d like it.”
Rolf rummaged through a drawer in his desk and passed me a business card for a surveyor named Howard Webb. I stood up to go. Rolf stood as well and leaned across his desk to shake my hand and tell me if he could help me out with anything to just let him know.