At the office door, before I went out, I thought of something and stopped. “Do you know who my father’s accountant was?”
Rolf laughed pleasantly. “You won’t get mad at me if I tell you your father was not so very smart when it came to money? If any man should have had an accountant it was him. But he didn’t. Again, as far as I know. But you work with someone, you get to know these kinds of things. He didn’t have an accountant.”
CHAPTER 23
On the street outside Marla’s house there was a small rented dumpster half full of the things she was throwing away. Inside, the house had taken on a feeling of desolation. The living room was piled with the furniture she was going to get rid of in her own yard sale, the bedroom my father and Pat had used was crammed with the things she wanted to keep, and all over the house there were open cartons in various stages of being filled. Everywhere was sad and too bright and devoid of the welcoming comfort that for ten years had made the place a home.
While Stan watched superhero cartoons on a TV Marla hadn’t yet disconnected, she and I sat in the small garden behind the house with bottles of beer and caught the last of the afternoon sun.
I told her about going to Burton and up to the lake, and I showed her the two metal brackets-one from the tree, one from David’s workshop. She took them from me and sat with one in each hand, staring dully at them, her head bowed as though the metal’s touch had somehow drained her energy. I explained what I thought they meant.
“You can’t buy them anywhere, Gareth’s father is the only person who makes them. Gareth must have taken one, hammered it onto the tree, and attached the camera to it before we got there. Then he probably just turned it on and left. Those things run for like two hours. What I can’t figure out is how the hell he knew where we were going to be. Would Bill have told him? He picked the spot, after all.”
Marla didn’t say anything. I was so preoccupied with trying to solve the puzzle that I hardly noticed.
“But that doesn’t make sense. Bill and Gareth don’t even speak, and Bill would never let Gareth get that sort of power over him. But then we come back to how Gareth could possibly have known where to put the camera.”
I groaned and ran my hands over my face.
“It has to be Gareth, but how? How the fuck did he know where we’d be?”
Finally Marla raised her head and I saw that there were tears on her cheeks. When she spoke her first words were so quiet I could hardly hear them. “Gareth knew because he was the one who chose the place. He told me I had to take Bill there.”
“What are you talking about? Bill led us there.”
Marla shook her head. “I told him it had to be that place behind the rock or we wouldn’t do it. He knew where to go because back when I was hooking, when I first started, before Gareth or anything, we’d both been there. Together… I just let it look like he was leading the way.”
“You fucked Bill Prentice?”
Marla stood abruptly, took two steps away from me, bent at the waist, and threw up on the grass. She stayed like that for a while, clearing her throat and wiping her mouth, then she straightened and turned back to me.
“It was a long time ago. You know I have this stuff in my past. Please don’t be a bastard about it.”
Her hands were shaking and her crying, which had been interrupted by her throwing up, started again. I took a deep breath and tried to force the image of Bill on top of Marla out of my head. Then the deeper meaning of what she’d said hit me.
“Gareth picked the place? So the whole thing was a setup?”
“I didn’t know anything about the camera, I swear. I swear, Johnny.”
“Well, what the fuck, then?”
She took a breath and tried to calm herself. “During the time I was hooking in Burton I went with Bill a couple of times. Once over there and once at that place at the lake. That was it. I didn’t want to be doing it with somebody from where I lived so I cut him off. A long time later, when I had my job and Gareth was pimping me in Oakridge, I mentioned having been with Bill to him. No reason, it was just conversation, but it meant he knew about our connection. And one day, a little while after you got back, he told me I had to get Bill to watch you and me having sex. And he told me it had to be at that place up at the lake and that he had to know beforehand when it was going to happen. And I couldn’t mention anything about him to Bill. I had no idea why. I mean, it was fucking weird, but in the end it was just one more installment of Gareth’s madness. There was nothing I could do about it anyhow. You didn’t know about my past then and Gareth said if I didn’t do it he’d tell you I’d been a hooker. I was so scared of you finding out. I thought you’d never want anything to do with me again and I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t take losing you a second time. So I did what he said and I didn’t ask questions. But I promise you, I absolutely promise, I didn’t know it was going to be filmed.”
“How do you get some guy to want to watch you having sex with someone else?”
“It wasn’t hard, you know what he’s like. I’d never bumped into him at work before because our offices are in different buildings, but it wasn’t hard for me to find an excuse to take a file over to him. He recognized me right away and started offering me money for sex. I told him I didn’t do that anymore but if he wanted just to watch I could arrange something. He jumped at it. And I… I made it all look like a chance meeting so you wouldn’t know.”
“If Gareth wanted something incriminating on video why didn’t he just get you to fuck him?”
“Because Gareth’s a sick bastard and whatever he was up to, it would have tickled him to have you involved somehow. He hates you just as much as he hates me.”
“But I might not have wanted to do it.”
“Then it wouldn’t have happened. But I knew you would. And so did Gareth. I’m so sorry, Johnny. I could cut my heart out.”
Marla had stopped crying but her face was swollen and she looked tired and incredibly sad. She stood in front of me as though she was waiting to be executed.
I could have hated her for dragging me into something so sordid, I suppose. But I didn’t. I was angry that I’d been used in someone else’s plan. I was angry with Gareth for making Marla do it. But I wasn’t angry with her. How could I be? As she’d said, I knew she had these things in her past. And I knew that I had played a role in creating that past. But even if I had not felt some measure of responsibility for how life had turned out for her, I could not have hated her the way she looked then. The need for this relationship with me, the utter necessity of it for her, was just too plain on her face.
So instead of shouting and accusing, I held her in the sunlight of that fading afternoon, in the small garden of the house she loved so much and was soon to leave, and tried somehow to absorb back into myself the seeds of damage my selfishness had sown eight years before. Later, we sat down again and finished our beer and talked about Gareth and the video.
“So the question now is why? Why did he do it?”
Marla shrugged. “It can’t be anything related to us. What do we have to lose? We don’t have reputations to worry about and we were hardly being unfaithful to anyone. I do know that there was bad blood between Pat and Gareth, though.”
“I didn’t know they knew each other.”
“She used to have this dog, this big Lab that went everywhere with her, never on a leash, a bit old and dopey. She loved that dog. About a year ago Gareth was pushing his father around Old Town and it started barking at the wheelchair, really frightened the old man. Which was a big mistake, because a couple of days later Gareth ran it over with his Jeep. It was an ‘accident,’ of course, but…” Marla shrugged. “Pat knew he did it on purpose and she hated him for it.”