“That was ten years ago.”
“You wouldn’t be any less dead if it happened yesterday.”
“I don’t owe you that much.”
For a moment Gareth looked closely at me, then, as though he had lost interest in the subject, he lifted his hands and smiled. “Hey, just thought I’d say it, you know? I thought maybe you were thinking along the same lines. Forget about it. I tell you one thing that puzzles me, though. Vivian’s Vivian and that’s bad enough, but why the fuck should Tripp care if the road gets built or not?”
I shrugged and didn’t answer. But of course I knew. Jeremy Tripp had begun to move against Gareth, the same way he’d moved against me and Marla, attacking from a distance through something each of us held dear.
As far as I was concerned Gareth deserved everything he got. But it was still strangely frightening to know that I had begun something which might well destroy the only hope he had for the future.
CHAPTER 27
Jeremy Tripp called first thing next morning and spoke without preamble.
“Bill Prentice has confirmed what you said about Gareth Rogers, that he believes he was swindled over the proposed road to the lake.”
“Does that mean you’ll leave us alone now?”
“It means more than that. This shift of focus has made Plantagion redundant. As a gesture of recompense I’d like to hand over our customers to you. And our stock of plants. Gratis, of course.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was an offer that would save Plantasaurus, that would raise it from certain failure and catapult it into the ranks of stable and sustainable businesses.
“Well, of course, we’d be happy-”
“Good. I’ll have the plants delivered to your warehouse tomorrow. And I’ll call you in a day or so about the customer agreements. How is your brother, by the way?”
“He’s good.”
“His girlfriend cleans my house, I think. Rosie. It must be profoundly affecting for someone in his condition to have a relationship.”
“It’s very important to him, yes.”
There was a brief silence on the line while Jeremy Tripp digested this. Then he hung up.
It seemed that in the space of five minutes Plantasaurus had gone from certain ruin to potentially being more successful than we could have dreamed. That was, of course, if Jeremy Tripp was genuine. But looking at it logically I saw no reason for him not to be. He’d attacked us because he believed we’d made the video that drove his sister to suicide. Now that he knew someone else had made it he had no reason to continue persecuting us.
I went outside. Stan was dancing with Rosie on a flat patch of ground in front of the cabin. He had a radio balanced on the porch railing. It was tuned to a station that played jazz and swing.
Despite the illusion their dancing created, that Stan was happy and without care, I knew there was another, much larger part of him that was troubled and frightened-the moths and his increasing reliance on Rosie’s company were clear evidence of that. So it was good to be able to tell him that Jeremy Tripp and Plantagion were no longer a threat to us, that the success of Plantasaurus was virtually guaranteed.
Stan hugged Rosie and let out a whoop.
“I told you, Johnny! I told you! I knew power was going to come across.”
He lifted his moth pouch from the throat of his shirt, opened it, and held it to his nose. He inhaled deeply and his eyelids fluttered.
“I can feel it coming into me. I’m breathing it in, Johnny. Wow, what a great day!”
It was in the spirit of this newfound optimism that I decided to see if I could make the day even better. It had been two days since Stan and I had climbed to the top of the spur, two days since I’d discovered what I thought was the secret of Empty Mile, and the need to know if I was right had now reached a point where I could no longer put off doing something about it. So, around midday, after we’d finished what little Plantasaurus work we had, I used my phone and made an appointment and took Stan on a drive.
The Bureau of Land Management office in Burton was a storefront conversion that ran back through the ground floor of a ’50s building made from shiny, burnt-purple bricks. There were two women behind computers in the room that opened off the street and one of them pointed us down a short corridor when I asked to see Howard Webb, the man whose name was on the business card Rolf Kortekas had given me. We passed a couple of doors as we made our way to the rear of the building. They had frosted glass panels in their upper halves and the light that came through them made me think there was no one in the rooms behind them.
The door at the end of the corridor was the same as the others except that the blurred nimbus of an electric light showed through the frosting. We knocked and went in.
Howard Webb was a small man with dark hair. He sat behind a wooden desk that looked like it had been thrown away by the local school years ago. There were windows behind him and it was bright in the room, but still he had a lamp burning on his desk. It was angled over a spread of black-and-white photographs. At his direction Stan and I dragged two hard chairs away from a wall and as we set them in front of his desk I saw that the photographs he was looking at had been taken from a plane. We made our introductions and he reached over the desk and shook our hands. Stan coughed nervously when it was his turn. Howard Webb leaned back in his chair.
“You’re lucky to catch me. This office is mainly an administrative station-permits for land use, that sort of thing. I’m only really here when there’s a survey in the area. You said on the phone that you have a picture you want me to look at?”
I handed him my father’s aerial photograph. “I was wondering what you could tell us about it.”
He looked at the picture for a moment, then set it down and typed the serial number in its bottom right-hand corner into a laptop that stood on a small table beside the desk. He read the screen for a moment then turned back to us.
“It’s a place outside Oakridge. We did an aerial survey of the area a year ago. How’d you come across it?”
Stan shifted in his seat. “Uh-oh, Johnny.”
Howard Webb glanced at him uncertainly. “There’s nothing wrong with you having it. I just meant that they don’t really find their way out into the world with any sort of prevalence…” His voice tailed off on the last word, as though he was uncertain Stan would understand its meaning.
Stan looked embarrassed and said quietly, “My dad had it.”
“Oh. Was he developing land in the area?”
“He was a real estate agent.”
Howard Webb frowned and looked at the photo again. Then he turned it over and read out what was written there. “The trees are different…” He repeated it to himself and smiled. “I remember this picture. Your father sold real estate in Oakridge. Yes, I remember him. We met at his office back in the middle of April when I was researching the area. He asked me if I had any photos he could have for his office. And I remember particularly because, a few days after I’d given him some, he asked me exactly that-why the trees were different.” Howard Webb looked at me and squinted. “How is he?”
“Well, we’re not really sure right now. He may be off on a midlife crisis.”
The surveyor was momentarily confused, but evidently decided it would be indelicate to probe further. “Oh, well, he seemed like a nice man. Do you know what he meant, about the trees?”
“I can see something in the photo, but I’m not sure what it is.”
“Okay, look here.”
Stan and I stood up and leaned over the desk as Webb pointed at the photo with the tip of a pencil.
“So, most of what you can see is typical topography for the area-forest, river, a collapsed spur. But there’s something else a little more interesting here too. The trees we’re talking about are here.”