I had the aerial photo ready at the side of the couch. I passed it to Marla. She looked at it blankly. “I don’t see anything.”
Stan laughed. “That’s because it’s a secret river.”
Marla looked levelly at me. “A secret river?”
“It’s true. He was all excited about this photo a couple of weeks after I got back to Oakridge. He had it blown up and he hung it on the wall in the living room. It’s part of a Bureau of Land Management survey. He wouldn’t say what the big deal was, but it was obviously important to him. This is the original print. He wrote something on the back.”
Marla turned the photo so she could read my father’s cryptic: The trees are different.
“Today Stan and I took it to the guy my father got it from. He’s a BLM surveyor.”
Marla squinted closely at the front of the photo again. “I still don’t see anything.”
“Look here.”
I traced the pale line through the trees for her and continued it to the river on the other side of the spur.
“You can see the trees don’t grow quite as strongly. The BLM guy said this is the original course of the river. It used to run pretty much straight, see? Then the front of this spur here, which is the cliff that runs down the side of the meadow, collapsed and forced the river into the curve it makes now. The part that got cut off gradually filled in over the years and things started to grow on it. If you go up high enough, though, you can still see it.”
Stan nodded enthusiastically. “See, Marla, a secret river. It’s been like that for hundreds of years and nobody knew ’cause they never went high enough to see it.”
“And Ray thought it was full of gold?” Marla’s voice was droll.
“Well, it makes sense. The gold they found in the Gold Rush had built up over thousands and thousands of years. If just a few hundred years ago a river changed course, the new part of it probably wouldn’t have time to build up much gold at all. Once my father read Millicent’s journal he knew Empty Mile wasn’t empty from having been mined out. And that meant there was a possibility the gold was somewhere else. You heard Chris Reynolds say how rich the Swallow River was. Some people made fortunes, and they were competing with thousands of other men wherever they went on the river. So imagine if you own a whole stretch of it and you’re the only person who gets to mine it. I mean, gold’s like over nine hundred dollars an ounce now. And my father did actually do a bit of testing before he bought the land. I told you about the assayer in Burton, about how he took some samples there. They came from this buried riverbed. Plus it explains why he was so adamant about me not selling the land after he put it in my name. It didn’t have anything to do with something his accountant told him, because Rolf Kortekas told me he never had an accountant.”
“And what about you? Do you think there’s gold there?”
Marla’s question made me pause. I’d been so focused on figuring out what was going on with the land that I hadn’t really thought about whether or not I actually believed there was gold on it. I had my father’s faith in what he thought he’d found-but he didn’t have a great track record when it came to making money-and I had the small sample of gold from the assayer in Burton. It wasn’t much.
“I guess the only way to know is to dig some more holes.”
“And if you find something, then what? You can’t dig up a whole river with a spade.”
Stan chimed in, “I’ll help you, Johnny. I could dig a whole bunch of holes.”
To Marla I said, “Doing it on any sort of scale is obviously going to cost money-clearing the land, digging out the riverbed, processing the pay dirt, if there is any. And right now I don’t see how we could finance it. Maybe if Plantasaurus picks up with these new customers we’re supposed to be getting from Jeremy Tripp we could try and raise a small loan for some exploratory work. Until then it’s just us and a spade.”
Stan opened the pouch of moths around his neck and put the opening over his mouth and nose and took a few deep breaths. Then he closed it and blinked rapidly.
“We could all be millionaires. This is the power working. Hey, Johnny, do you think we could buy Bill’s garden center and open it up again? That’d be so cool. And me and Rosie could have a big wedding out there and everyone would see how great we are.”
“Right now we don’t know anything for sure. Don’t get too worked up about it just yet.”
“I need to get some more moths. I gotta get more power to make it come true.”
“Stan!”
“Okay, Johnny. Shutting down.” Stan pretended he was turning a key on the side of his head. “Brain off… But it would be cool, wouldn’t it? A secret river full of gold, and we’re the only ones who know about it!”
He went off to his room. Marla stood up tiredly. “It sounds a bit farfetched, Johnny.”
She went into the kitchen area and while she fixed herself something to eat I sat by myself turning Stan’s last words over in my head. Were we really the only people who knew about the possibility of gold on the land?
At every major turn along my father’s path of discovery Gareth seemed to have been hovering in the shadows like some dark ghost. He’d been at Millicent’s when my father first saw the journal and at the Elephant Society with my father when the lecture on how a river can change course was given. He’d even been with my father when the BLM guy explained what the aerial photo showed. And he’d been at the assayer’s, as well. It wasn’t a huge leap, then, to figure he knew just as much as my father had.
But he’d never mentioned anything more than that he’d been friends with my father, that they sometimes went to Elephant Society meetings together, and that one day he’d helped him drill a few “fence post holes.” Not a thing about any gold. Why was that? Did he figure it would make it easier for him to buy the share of Empty Mile he seemed so anxious to acquire? Or was it something else, something about his connection with my father, something tangled up in all those steps they’d taken together, that he didn’t want me to know about?
CHAPTER 28
Any moves we might have made to mine ourselves some physical proof of a million-dollar mother lode at the bottom of the meadow were forgotten during the following week as it became increasingly apparent that Jeremy Tripp had lied, and I had made a dreadful mistake.
I’d been so desperate to eke out the existence of Plantasaurus for Stan’s sake that, despite Tripp’s past history of antagonism toward us, I’d acted on his promise of free plants before it had actually been fulfilled. I’d canceled the plant shipment we had scheduled and used the money instead to pay the quarterly insurance premiums that had fallen due on the business-warehouse contents, pickup, and the personal liability we had to carry in case we dropped a planter on someone.
It was only after I had committed the money to these areas, of course, that the first bubbles of suspicion began to surface. Our own stock of plants was depleted and when two days had passed and the shipment from Jeremy Tripp still hadn’t arrived I was forced to call him. He was immediately apologetic and cursed himself for forgetting. He asked if we could wait another day while he arranged a truck. I didn’t really have a choice, so I told him we could, but when I hung up I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were never going to see those plants. Jeremy Tripp was not a man to be apologetic.
Later, in town that day, while Stan and I were doing maintenance on a couple of our contracts, we saw both Plantagion vans making their rounds. It didn’t look at all like Jeremy Tripp was winding his business down.