“It wasn’t Bill. It was the guy who pimped Marla to you-Gareth Rogers. Everyone knows about Bill, what he’s like. Gareth used his… tastes to manipulate him.”
Jeremy Tripp looked at me like he didn’t expect anything but lies. “Go on.”
I took the two brackets out of my jacket and put them on the table in front of him. “Once I knew about the video I did some looking around. I found one of these on a tree where we did it. I’m pretty sure it’s what the camera was attached to. The other one I got from Gareth’s father’s workshop.”
Jeremy Tripp looked at it and snorted. “Does it have his name on it?”
“It’s custom made. You can’t buy them anywhere. His father does piecework for a fittings company. They’re part of a batch he made. Plus he and Gareth live at the lake, they own the cabins there.”
“Could have been the father by that logic.”
“He’s in a wheelchair.”
“Still doesn’t mean it was Gareth. Someone else could have gotten hold of one. You, for instance.”
“There’s more.”
I nudged Marla. She cleared her throat and tried to look him in the eye but failed and dropped her gaze to the surface of the table.
“It was supposed to be just another trick. Gareth wanted me to get Bill to watch me having sex with someone. He said it had to be in a certain part of the forest and his name wasn’t to be mentioned. I’d tricked with Bill once or twice a long time ago and when I put it to him he jumped at it. But I didn’t know it was going to be filmed. Gareth never said anything about that.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
“I was Pat’s friend. She used to come to my house. Why would I make a video of myself screwing in front of her husband?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that my sister killed herself because of a video of you two. Therefore, you had a hand in killing her, and that’s a little wrinkle I just have to iron out.”
Marla leaned back in her chair. There was nothing else she could offer. I spoke again.
“You’re not fixing anything if you have the wrong people. What about motivation? What do we gain from it? I’ve been out of town for eight years. All I care about is scraping a life together-”
“Bill owns the warehouse you use-perhaps you wanted a rent reduction.”
“We hadn’t even started the business when the video was made. Jesus Christ! Look, Gareth made it because he needs a proper road built up to the lake and he was going to use the video to blackmail Bill into lobbying it through with the council. He told me this himself three days ago. And believe me, he’s more than capable of blackmail. He hates Bill’s guts because when Bill sold him the cabins he told him that the council was just about to put the road in. That would have meant a ton of business and Gareth and his father would have ended up rich. But the road never happened, Gareth’s father tried to kill himself and got crippled instead, and Gareth’s blamed Bill ever since. He thinks the road was just some bullshit Bill concocted to offload the cabins. If anyone has a reason to make the video it’s Gareth.”
For several moments Jeremy Tripp stared off across his garden. Then he started flipping through the pages of his magazine. “I’ll talk to Bill.”
After that he ignored us and Marla and I left.
Two days later, in the early afternoon, Stan and I were back at Empty Mile after our Plantasaurus day had finished. Marla was at her job in town and Rosie was out cleaning houses. The weather was still warm enough for it to be pleasant outside, so I sat with my brother on the stoop and we drank cans of soda and ate corn chips. Stan had made himself a small pouch out of the end of a sock and fixed it around his neck with the gold chain my father had given him. He kept his moths in it now and several times a day he’d tip them out onto his palm to “reconnect.” He did this once while we were sitting on the stoop, turning out the insects like an addict with a drug, self-conscious but unable to stop himself.
We chatted idly for a while and crunched chips and took swigs of our drinks, then Stan, who had been staring for several minutes at the line of trees that hid the river, frowned.
“Johnny, don’t you think it’s weird how when you get inside the trees there’s that part where they’re scrawnier than everywhere else? I think it’s weird how the trees are different there.”
Maybe some buried part of my brain had recognized the same thing and been turning it over beneath the threshold of consciousness. Maybe it was just that I was relaxed enough at that moment for some particular synapse to fire and connect the dots. Whatever it was, Stan’s phrase, the particular words he’d used, made me suddenly wonder if I possessed the key to the puzzle of my father’s purchase of Empty Mile after all. The trees are different…
I got up and went around to the shed at the back of the cabin where we stored firewood and the things we didn’t need inside. My father’s wooden trunk was there in a corner under a tarp. I opened it and found the folder in which I kept everything that had anything to do with the Empty Mile land. In it, among other things, were the journal pages, the land deed, the papers transferring ownership to me… and the original of the black-and-white aerial photograph my father had had framed and with which he’d been so pleased.
I took the photo out and turned it over. On the back, in my father’s handwriting, I read the words Stan had so closely mimicked: The trees are different. I looked closely at the front of the photo and found the tiny rectangle that was the roof of our cabin. From there I could trace the sweep of the meadow across to the edge of the trees that filled the semicircle the Swallow River made as it bent around Empty Mile.
After squinting at these trees for several moments I saw something I hadn’t noticed before, something running horizontally through the semicircle. A shadow, a ghost, an impression… stretching from the end of the rock spur to where the curve of the river straightened again downstream-something that looked like the memory of a pathway or a channel. This was what the inscription on the back of the photo referred to. This was where the trees were different.
For a long moment this smudge on the landscape held my eyes while a sharp fizz of excitement rose within me. I could see a reason for the land now. I could see why my father had mortgaged his house to buy it. It was a crazy Hardy Boys adventure reason, so far beyond the run of ordinary life that it was hard to take seriously. But it worked. It made sense.
I found an envelope in the trunk and slipped the aerial photograph inside it. I put the rest of the papers back in their folder and closed the trunk. I was about to leave the shed when I changed my mind and went back and opened the trunk again. After a minute of rummaging I found what I was looking for-the photo of my father in front of the roller coaster in San Diego. I’d been carrying the one of Marla around with me since I’d found it. I took it out now and compared the two. There was no doubt. Everything about them indicated they’d been taken on the same day-the color of the sky, the light, even the poses looked like a quick change between photographer and subject. I folded the two pictures together and put them in my wallet and went back outside.
I didn’t tell Stan what I thought I’d found on the aerial photograph, but asked him instead if he wanted to go exploring. He jumped to his feet immediately and he and I spent the next hour walking alongside the rock wall that formed the northern boundary of the meadow. We moved away from the river, back into the forest behind the cabin. When we’d gone about half a mile the edge of the wall began to soften and turn from a sheer face to a steep slope that was broken here and there with runnels and ledges. Another half mile later the slope, though still steep, became climbable and Stan and I sweated and scrambled and hauled our way up it. At the top, when we could breathe normally again, we turned and headed back along the ridge of the spur in the direction we’d just come.