“A year ago? That’s a long time for Gareth to wait around. Plus he doesn’t get anything material out of it. What if the video was a blackmail attempt that went wrong? Gareth might have thought he could pressure Bill into pushing the road through with the council.”
“I don’t think Bill has that sort of power. The Resource and Development Committee has to vote on things like that.”
“Which he’s on.”
“He’s the head of it but there are six other members.”
“Surely he could influence them to some extent.”
“Maybe.”
Marla didn’t sound convinced.
“Well, whatever the deal is, Gareth’s up to something. And it’s more than just Bill or Pat. All these connections between him and my father keep cropping up. Like at the Elephant Society-Chris Reynolds, the first thing he remembers about them is their interest in the history of Empty Mile. But Gareth’s never said a thing about it, and I gave him plenty of opportunity today. The sample thing too-if he and my father had panned gold somewhere and were excited enough about it to get it assayed, wouldn’t you think he’d have mentioned it by now? And on top of that he won’t shut up about wanting to buy Empty Mile.”
We sat outside for a while longer, then we went in and dragged Stan away from the TV and had dinner.
The rest of that evening was spent lugging furniture around, wrapping things in newspaper, and packing cardboard cartons with Marla’s possessions. Marla was throwing away a lot of stuff and at one point after it got dark I made a few trips out to the dumpster with black plastic bags filled with papers and junk she no longer wanted.
The sides of the dumpster were high enough that I had to heave the bags up and half throw them into it. I misjudged my swing on one of them and caught it on a corner. The bag split open and a small avalanche of papers spilled out onto the grass next to the road. I was tired and for a moment I felt like just walking away from the mess, but I knew that any small breeze in the night would blow the papers into the road. So I bent and gathered up armfuls of old brochures, magazines, bills, and credit card statements and stuffed them back into what was left of the bag. Halfway through the pile I saw, poking from between the pages of an old computer manual, the corner of a photograph.
I was vaguely interested to see what sort of picture Marla might be throwing away so I pulled it out to look at it. I got a whole lot less vague when I saw what the photo was of-Marla, posing in front of the entrance to a wooden roller coaster, beside a sign with San Diego painted on it. A quick-fire vacation snap on a standard-size print. Nothing remarkable about it. Except that it was a duplicate of the photo I’d found in my father’s trunk a few weeks back. Marla was posing instead of him but the place and the framing were the same. And from what I could remember even the light and the color of the sky behind the wooden framework matched.
In the photo Marla looked a couple of years younger than she was now. She was laughing as though the person behind the camera had just made a joke.
It could have been a coincidence. By some amazing twist of fate they might both, at different times, have gone to San Diego. They might both have had a photo taken on the same spot. But they hadn’t. It wasn’t a coincidence. I knew it as I looked at the picture. The photos were too similar.
So, what, then? A vacation together. Perhaps my father had had a real estate convention to go to and had taken Marla along as a thank you for her occasional help with Stan. If it had been anyone other than him I might have suspected the photo was evidence of an affair, a dirty weekend away from the eyes of Oakridge. But not with my father. It couldn’t have happened.
Yet as I stared at the photo in the spill of light from the porch behind me I couldn’t help feeling the small cold feet of suspicion patter along some dark and deep-buried corridor within me. Why had neither my father nor Marla ever mentioned taking a trip so far from Oakridge? Surely it should have come up in conversation at some point. Unless there was a reason to hide it.
I could ask Marla, of course. But what if there was something there? Back in the years when I was away. It dawned on me that if there was, I didn’t want to know anything about it. That kind of emotional mother lode was something I just wasn’t equipped to handle. And, too, after her role in the forest sex session with Bill, which I knew she already felt terrible about, divulging an affair with my father might be more than she could safely bear.
So I folded the photo and put it in my wallet and cleaned up the rest of the spilled papers. In bed that night, Marla curled herself against my back, her arms tight around my chest, as though she could not stand to have even an inch of space between us.
Before work the next day Stan and I drove over to Empty Mile. I wanted to compare the soil in the sample the assayer had given me with that around the supposed fence post holes my father and Gareth had dug.
We stopped at the cabin to pick up a spade then headed on down the meadow and into the trees until we came to one of the holes. Stan stood over it and frowned.
“That’s a really neat hole. It’s too thin for a spade.”
“He did it with a fence post digger.”
Stan crouched down and peered into it. “There’s no water.”
He lay on the ground and reached into the hole with his arm.
“I can just touch the bottom.”
He brought up several handfuls of earth and piled them next to the hole-a loose mixture of sand and gravel. I opened the plastic sample bag and took a handful out and dropped it next to the mixture on the ground. There seemed to be no difference between the two.
As I was closing the bag I felt Stan tug my sleeve. I looked up to see him pointing at a small bush a few feet from the hole. It had dull gray-green leaves and I didn’t know what sort it was but on the dusty earth around it there was a scattering of small pink petals; some of them had drifted to the edge of the hole. Stan prodded the sample bag.
“Same flowers, Johnny.”
When we pulled up at the Plantasaurus warehouse later in the morning it looked the same as it always did. The day was fine and the sky was clear and we were all set for a solid day’s work. As we got out of the pickup, though, we saw that the corrugated metal of the sliding door was buckled around the lock and that the door itself was open a couple of inches. We had always been very careful about locking up because of our plant stock and it was immediately obvious to both of us that we had had an intruder. Inside, it was more obvious still.
Our stock of large plants-the weeping figs, dracaenas, yuccas, etc.-had all been perfectly healthy the day before. Now, they were either dead or very rapidly dying and the air in the warehouse smelled strongly of bleach.
When Stan saw the sad ranks of trees he started running on the spot, pumping his arms and making a kind of high whining noise through his nose. I felt an overwhelming tiredness. And anger. But mostly I just wanted to sit down and cover my face and not think about Plantasaurus ever again. I knew I couldn’t do that, though, not while Stan still had such a heavy emotional investment in the business, so I held him and calmed him instead, and then we got down to the task of figuring out what had happened. It wasn’t particularly difficult.
We traced the smell of bleach to the plastic-wrapped cylinders of soil in which each of the affected plants stood.
It was something we’d seen before, of course, the day Jeremy Tripp had so angrily returned the plants we’d installed in his house, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out he was responsible this time too. It was a bad blow. We had Plantagion competing against us, and now we’d lost the stock that should have seen us through to the end of the month. I thought about sitting Stan down and explaining how bad our chances of keeping Plantasaurus going were in the face of such opposition. But before I could muster the nerve, he looked across at me from where he’d been poking at a dead kentia palm and said we’d have to order a new shipment of plants right away. After that, I knew he wasn’t going to listen to anything I might say about winding down the business.