Empty Mile (34 page)

So late in the year the weather was too cold for people to be swimming and there were only two vehicles in the parking lot. Gareth and David’s bungalow looked closed and without movement, though a weak column of smoke rose vertically into the air from its chimney. Beyond the bungalow and the cabins the wooden jetty caught my eye. The small rowboat that usually lay upturned at its end was missing.

I looked across the water and saw the boat empty and drifting, about as far from the beach as it was possible to get—out near the sheer rock wall that held back the land on the opposite side of the lake. There was nothing around it, no desperately flailing swimmers, no churned and broken water.

I moved my gaze quickly back to the beach, wanting to find Stan and Rosie sitting cuddled together waiting for me to find them and solve the problem of their crashed car. But they weren’t there. The beach was deserted except for two elderly couples standing at the edge of the water. I started to look beyond them, further up the beach, but there was something wrong. The old people were not admiring the stillness of the water or enjoying the thin autumn sun on their faces. They were pointing and shouting and looking desperately about them. I knew then where Stan was and I ran across the grass and the coarse sand to the lake.

One of the women spoke to me first. She appeared to be in her seventies. The weathered skin of her face was drawn tight with worry.

“Two people just drowned.”

“A man and a woman?”

“Yes, yes! We saw them out there and they were rowing and then both of them just stood up and jumped into the water. They didn’t even try to swim.”

The man standing next to her interjected, “They were holding hands when they jumped.”

The woman nodded rapidly. “They were on the surface for maybe a minute, then they went under and they didn’t come back up. We couldn’t do anything. We’re old. We couldn’t do anything.”

The two men nodded and made noises of agreement. The other woman was crying.

“How long?”

One of the men shook his head gravely. “They went under at least ten minutes ago. We called the police. There was no one else here.” He gestured uselessly with the cell phone he was holding.

I did the only thing I could do, a thing I couldn’t stop myself doing. I took off my clothes and swam out to the rowboat. It was a distance of almost two hundred yards and I was not a strong swimmer and when I got there I was gasping and had to hold on to the side of the boat to rest.

What I was doing was futile. The boat would have drifted and there was little chance I was close enough to where they entered the water to make an effective search. And even if I was, the lake here was more than fifty feet deep and they had been under far, far too long. But when I had my breath back I dove beneath the surface of the cold water and swam down as far as I could, stretching my eyes wide to see, groping about me as the light grew dimmer. I found nothing, touched no trailing limb, no waterlogged torso. I surfaced and dove down again, and again, and again, until the world became a tumbling storm of white bubbles and dark water and a terrible hunger for air.

I was so weakened that I would certainly have run into trouble, but at some point the police arrived and two officers swam out and dragged me back to shore.

There were three police cruisers there, pulled up on the grass at the edge of the beach, and while my rescuers dried themselves, their colleagues took statements from the elderly couples and then from Marla and me. When they were finished with us they went over to the bungalow and questioned David, but he had been in the barn out back and had no idea anything had even happened.

The Oakridge police had no resources to make a search of the lake themselves, and because there was no question that Stan and Rosie could still be alive, they shut the scene down until a dive team could be brought up from Sacramento the following morning. The couples were allowed to go, crime scene tape was strung across the entrance to Lake Trail to close it to the public, and a cruiser was posted there as backup.

Marla and I, however, were far from finished for the day. We had to take the police out to Empty Mile and explain why a dead body with a bullet hole in it was lying on the ground in front of our cabin. And how it connected to Stan and Rosie’s drowning.

One of the detectives who joined the uniforms at Empty Mile was Patterson, the lead officer on my father’s disappearance. There was, I think, some cynicism in his surprise that I was now part of a murder investigation, but the fact that Millicent confirmed she’d seen Stan shoot Gareth and that Marla and I had had nothing to do with it didn’t leave him much option but to accept the version of events we gave him.

The business of the crime scene—the recording of evidence, the videoing of the surrounding area, the photographing of the body, the repeated questioning—took until the middle of the afternoon. Then, around three p.m., Marla and I and Millicent, so shattered by the loss of her granddaughter that she had to be helped to stand by one of the officers, were taken to the Oakridge police station to give formal statements.

The police had a confirmed culprit, or at least they would have when they could raise him from the bottom of the lake, and we weren’t treated as suspects. The only finessing Marla and I had to do concerned Stan’s motivation for the shooting, but this was simple enough. In a private moment at the lake before we told them about the shooting we’d agreed to say that Gareth had sexually propositioned Rosie a number of times and that it had finally pushed Stan over the edge. We said nothing at all about Jeremy Tripp.

The statements took about an hour and a half and when they were done we were driven back to Empty Mile. The cruiser dropped us at Millicent’s house and Marla and I helped her up the steps and put her to bed where she lay staring at nothing, her hands loose and forgotten on top of the covers. Marla made tea but Millicent didn’t want it and after a while it seemed that we were out of place there, intruders on her misery, and so we excused ourselves and left her alone, lying in the slowly darkening room, without family now in the whole of the world.

Marla and I were silent on the walk across the meadow, dreading the conversation both of us knew we had to have.

Gareth’s body was gone from in front of the cabin. In its place there were small traces of police activity—strips of marker tape, empty evidence bags, some small yellow plastic stakes hammered into the ground to show where the body had lain. There was birdsong in the air with the approach of evening, but rather than soften the scene about us it made the place seem forlorn and abandoned as though, along with the corpse, the police had taken away with them whatever it was that had made the cabin and the land around it feel welcoming and lived in.

Marla went through the door with her head bowed. She walked straight to the couch and sat down and started talking before I’d finished taking my coat off. Her voice was flat, but there was relief in it as well, as though her words carried from her some poison that had been progressively corroding her system.

“When you came back to Oakridge Ray wanted to start fresh with you, to build a better relationship. But he thought the affair he’d had with me was something so terrible he wouldn’t be able to do this if he kept it hidden from you. The evening it happened, he came to my house and told me he was going to tell you what we’d done.”

Marla looked desperately at me. She had a small handkerchief in her lap and was shredding the thin material with her fingernails.

“I thought if you knew, we’d be finished. All I wanted was to be with you. It was all I ever wanted. And you’d just come back and I saw everything I thought I was going to have with you being taken away again. I begged him not to say anything, to just let it stay in the past. But he wouldn’t. He kept saying he had to tell you. Over and over. And I was going crazy. I was begging. But he wouldn’t change his mind. And then I pushed him. That’s all. I just pushed him on the chest, just to make him stop. Just a push … I didn’t mean to kill him. I didn’t even want to hurt him. I just wanted him not to tell you.”

Marla paused and sobbed and then with an effort gathered herself and spoke again.

“We were in the kitchen and he fell. I don’t know why. It shouldn’t have happened, he should have just stepped backwards. But he didn’t. He fell and hit the back of his head on the edge of the counter. I tried to revive him. I did CPR … I’m so sorry, Johnny. I’m so sorry.”

“But his car was found out at Jerry’s Gas. I don’t understand.”

“When I saw he was dead I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Gareth. He was the only person I could think of who’d help me. He came around and we waited till two in the morning then we drove Ray’s car out to Jerry’s to make it look like he’d run out and hopped a bus somewhere. It was a stupid idea but it was the only thing we could think of to lead the police away from Oakridge.”

Marla stopped again. She looked drained and utterly exhausted.

“What did you do with his body?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Gareth said it would be safer if I didn’t know.”

“You don’t know where his body is?”

“Gareth took it away. I don’t know what he did with it.” Marla started to cry again. “And you know what the crazy thing is? The most fucking insane thing of all time? It didn’t need to happen. Ray’s death, the things I had to let Gareth make me do afterwards … None of it had to happen. Because when you found out about the affair you didn’t leave me. You didn’t even stop loving me. What I’d been so frightened of turned out to be … nothing.”

For a long time I sat there and watched Marla and tried to muster some sort of anger toward her, but the plain truth was that I couldn’t make my father’s death more important to me than keeping her.

My father had been a good man, a man who knew right from wrong and lived according to this knowledge. He had been, perhaps, just as lost as I was, just as bewildered by the world and uncertain of his path through it. And in the terrible face of the universe he had been as innocent as all good men are. But he had not loved me. Or, if he had, his emotional distance, his stifling of all tender expression, had made it seem that he did not. Throughout my life he had been a cipher, an acquaintance, someone who bore me none of the forgiveness of true affection.

It seemed, toward the end, that he had wanted to change this. There had been the expensive presents he’d given Stan and me, the trust he’d shown by putting Empty Mile in my name, the need to come clean about his affair with Marla and, finally, his attempt at persuading Gareth to stop pimping her.

He must have seen even the smallest of these moves, even the shallow intimacies he attempted on the evenings after dinner as we sat at the kitchen table, as monumental efforts of engagement. To me, though, looking back across them now, they were small sad beacons in the gloom of our relationship, flickerings of what might have been if he had only cared more and sooner. And while I would treasure them they were too few for a lifetime and they had come too late to change my belief that he was essentially someone I did not belong to.

But Marla loved me. We were free now of Gareth and my father and Jeremy Tripp. We could be free, even, of Empty Mile if we wanted. We had a chance to build a life together, a chance for Marla to make real her aching dreams of emotional security. I believed her when she said my father’s death had been an accident. I had no doubt about it at all. But I think even if she had killed him with malice and planning my decision would have been the same.

What were we after all? Two killers who weren’t killers. Two guilty people who had never planned for guilt. In a way, perhaps, we canceled each other out. Neither of us, given what each of us had separately done, was fit ever to find or want another partner. So love was enough and forgiveness a concept that did not apply. We were as we had become, two people whose lives could no longer be matched against the usual measures of what the world considered right.

And if nothing else, she was alive and my father was dead. There was nothing I could do for him, but I still had a chance to make up for the unhappiness I had sentenced Marla to when I left Oakridge eight years ago.

So, that sad, dreadful evening I told her I loved her and we went to bed and clung to each other as the darkness came. I understood now so many of the things that had puzzled me about her—how Gareth was able to manipulate her, to make her strip naked for him in our cabin, to prostitute herself to Jeremy Tripp. She had said it was because she was frightened he would tell her employers about her hooking past, but the real threat he held over her, what gave him the power to make her do anything he wanted, was the fact that he knew she was responsible for my father’s death.

Her terrible depression and her need for physical punishment made sense. She had been living not only with the guilt of having killed the father of the man she loved, but also with the daily fear that she would be exposed for it. Gareth’s presence at Empty Mile must have made her life a living hell, knowing as she did that at any moment he might choose to drop that one fatal comment. It was no wonder that she had protested so strongly about him being there, or that she had been initially so reluctant to tell Jeremy Tripp that Gareth had made the video that drove Patricia Prentice to suicide. She must have thought it would provoke him to retaliate against her by revealing the truth about my father’s disappearance.

That it had not, made me realize how much Gareth must still have loved her. It had been a twisted, cruel love, but he had kept the secret of my father’s death for her even though he must have longed to use it to break up our relationship. And his revelation of it as he died had not been a last vindictive twisting of the knife but, as he had said, a gift to Marla. He knew that I had to be given the opportunity to forgive her, because without this forgiveness she would never be able to live beyond her guilt.

I could not sleep that night. My grief for Stan lay over me like a thousand miles of stone. Around two in the morning I got up and went outside.