Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  And if that sounded tough, so be it.

  It was a tough business.

  It was a bleary-eyed August Jorgensen who climbed out of bed the following morning, slipped into the same clothes he’d worn the day before and got behind the wheel of his truck. Sitting next to him on the drive to the Smythe Residence, Jake shot him a sideways once-over and snorted. Over the years, he’d grown used to the same-clothes-as-yesterday routine and the two-day stubble; Jorgensen cared little about clothes and often went a week or more without shaving. No, thought Jorgensen, the snort must be a reaction to the odors. In his haste to get back to Kurt Meisner’s bedside, he’d completely forgotten to wash his face, shave, or even brush his teeth.

  “Sorry, old boy,” he told the dog. “This is what it must be like to grow old.”

  The ride took fifteen minutes, the wait to see Meisner the usual hour. Hurrying up was evidently not high on the list of protocols at the Smythe Residence for Seniors.

  By the time Jorgensen was led to Room 238, someone had gotten Kurt Meisner up out of his bed (which was now freshly made) and placed him in the chair. At least Jorgensen assumed that someone had done those things; he couldn’t imagine that Meisner possessed the strength to do them for himself.

  “How are you feeling?” Jorgensen asked, once the two of them had been left alone.

  Meisner shrugged.

  “You had a bit of a coughing spell there,” Jorgensen reminded him, “right before I left yesterday.”

  “Oh, that. I’m all right, thanks. Sit down if you like. I’m sorry . . .” He motioned vaguely, as his voice trailed off in midair.

  Jorgensen took it as an apology for the lack of furniture in the room. He found a spot on the edge of the bed and lowered himself onto it. It gave him a profile view of Meisner, though no eye contact: The other man’s gaze was directed out the window, just as it had been the day before. But unlike the first day, when Meisner’s right hand had been hidden under his blanket until the last moment, today it rested on the arm of his chair, the arm closest to Jorgensen. And it was still missing two fingers. More than once during his sleepless night, Jorgensen had thought back to their parting handshake. Was it possible he’d only imagined the missing fingers? He’d played the scene over in his mind, again and again, trying to feel the deformed hand in his own, trying to recreate the strange sensation of the stub - Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown - until the only thing he’d known for sure was that he couldn’t be sure at all.

  Now, at least, he could see for himself. He could be sure.

  By this time, Jorgensen had had an entire night, and half a morning, to frame his next question. He’d thought up a hundred opening lines and rehearsed a dozen little speeches, without once settling on a satisfactory way of wording it. So now, for lack of anything better, he simply came out with it. “That’s you in the picture, isn’t it?”

  Meisner seemed to think a minute, then nodded.

  “Carrying your daughter’s body.”

  Another nod.

  “Before she was found.”

  This time, nothing. Perhaps Meisner hadn’t heard him; Jorgensen knew he himself had trouble picking up conversation when he wasn’t looking at the speaker’s mouth. Then again, Perhaps Jorgensen was getting close to something, uncomfortably close. “Do you happen to know who drew the picture?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me why he seems to be looking up at you? Could he have been lying down, do you think, or kneeling?”

  A sideways shake of the head.

  “What, then?”

  Meisner’s words came slowly, deliberately, as though it caused him physical pain to recall and recount the memory. But recount it he did. “He was standing in the hole,” he said.

  “The hole?”

  “The grave he’d dug.”

  Jorgensen had heard the words, and he was trying to digest them, but a loud pounding in his temples made it all but impossible for him to think. It took him a moment to recognize the pounding as his own pulse, his own heartbeat. He closed his eyes and rubbed the sides of his head with the palms of his hands. He had the sensation that he was standing on the edge of some great abyss, and that at any moment, the ground at his feet might give way, causing him to plunge downward. He opened his eyes and lowered his hands, reached down with them for support, felt the bed beneath him, took a deep breath. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why are you there? Why are you in the picture?”

  Slowly, very slowly, the man in the chair began turning his head. By the time his face had swung fully around, Jorgensen could see there were tears running down both of his cheeks. No sound, no sobbing, no wrenching. Just two steady, unchecked rivers of tears.

  “Boyd Davies buried your daughter. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he didn’t kill her.”

  “No.”

  A chill ran up the length of Jorgensen’s spine. He suddenly felt light-headed, thought he might actually faint. He gripped handfuls of blanket with each of his hands, fought to anchor himself, to find solid holding ground. He should have slept last night, he told himself, should have had breakfast, should have showered. This was far too important for him to be confused about, to miss. He tried talking another deep breath, but the light-headedness persisted, and now tiny black dots appeared and began dancing before his eyes. Get a hold of yourself, he told himself. Don’t let this opportunity slip away because you’re old and tired and can’t think straight. Say something. Anything.

  “So,” he said, forcing the word out, letting the sound of his own voice reassure him, convince him that he could do this. “So,” he said again, more assertively. “So it was you that killed her?”

  Meisner stared at him for a while, then smiled one of his fleeting smiles. “Is that what you think?” he asked.

  The black spots were still there, now rising and falling, but he no longer felt faint. “I don’t know what to think,” Jorgensen confessed. “I very much wish you’d tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I’m one of Mr. Davies’s lawyers, that’s why. Because I’ve been asked to speak for him on some obscure, technical issue that even I, who was once a lawyer and a judge, have been having trouble understanding. And now all of a sudden it occurs to me that my client might be completely innocent. So I, as his lawyer, have to-”

  “He’s not completely innocent,” said Meisner. “He helped me bury her, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did,” Jorgensen agreed. “But last I checked, not even the Commonwealth of Virginia executes grave-diggers.”

  “Does that mean I’m safe, too?”

  “That,” said Jorgensen, “depends.”

  “Depends on what?” The tears had dried, leaving twin vertical stains where they’d run down Meisner’s cheeks. His look was less emotional now, more calculating. “I wasn’t a lawyer or a judge,” he said. “Me, I was just a dumb tobacco farmer.”

  “It depends,” said Jorgensen, “on what you did. If it was you who killed her, I’m afraid I can’t tell you you’re safe, as you put it.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” said Kurt Meisner.

  “Then you’re safe.”

  “How about helping to bury her? How about not telling the truth, lying, covering up for - you know - for whoever did do it? How about all those things?”

  “It’s been sixteen years,” Jorgensen said. “For all of those things, the statute of limitations has run out. Even if they wanted to prosecute you, they couldn’t. It’s too long ago.”

  “That’s what the law says?”

  “That’s what the law says.”

  “You wouldn’t lie, now, would you? You know, to help the boy?”

  “I might,” said Jorgensen. “But I’m not.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right. The others said pretty much the same thing.”

  “The others?”

  But if Kurt Meisner had heard, he gave no sign of it. He’d swung his head away, and his gaze was once again fixed
on the window. Although to Jorgensen, it didn’t look as though he was focusing on the things that were outside, as much as he was on the things that had been, sixteen years ago.

  Wesley Boyd Davies, if you listened to Kurt Meisner tell it, had been nothing but a nuisance. He hadn’t worked, he hadn’t gone to school, he hadn’t even helped his mother out with chores. Not like Meisner’s own children, who from the time they’d been old enough to walk and talk were required to do their share, whether in the fields, around the house, or both. Farming - at least the grim business of trying to run a small family tobacco farm in the soil-poor hill country of southwestern Virginia - was something that required everyone to pitch in. The Davies boy never would have survived in the Meisner household, no way. Instead of having provided a helping hand, he’d have been nothing but a mouth to feed.

  “Had he been an animal born in the wild,” Meisner observed, “he woulda just died off, leaving more food for the stronger ones to survive. Ain’t that a fact?”

  Jorgensen was prepared to admit there might be some truth to that. He had his own thoughts on the wisdom of tampering with natural selection, but he didn’t want to go off on any tangents, certainly not now, not with Meisner on the verge of telling him what had actually happened sixteen years ago. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Go on.”

  Farming was a tough life, Meisner explained again. You woke up before the sun, worked all day, and pretty much collapsed after supper. The problem was that a schedule like that didn’t leave you much time to spend with your family. Sure, you might work beside them in the fields for hours at a stretch, but that didn’t mean you were conversating. And it didn’t mean you knew what was new at school, or what was really going on with them.

  What was going on with Kurt, Jr., was that he’d just turned sixteen. He’d shot up six inches over the past year, had developed a man’s pair of shoulders, and had suddenly started to notice girls. “All them hormones jumpin’ around in his body. That testerone stuff, you know. It can be a problem.” Meisner’s solution was to keep young Kurt as busy working as he possibly could. “I figured if I wore him out real good, he’d be too tired to get into trouble when he was outa my sight.”

  He figured wrong.

  The only thing was, almost all of the girls young Kurt noticed proved off-limits to him. As soon as the school day ended, he was expected to rush home and get out in the fields. Evenings, a strict nine o’clock curfew effectively deprived him of a social life. And weekends, except for two hours out for Sunday services, it was back to the fields. The pretty young girls who flirted with him at school or winked at him in church raised his testerone level to the boiling point, but because of the demands the farm placed on his time, the poor boy had no outlet for the strange and discomforting stirrings going on inside his body.

  No outlet, that was, except for his sisters.

  Katrinka was just a year younger than Kurt, but she was a solidly built fifteen-year-old who took after her mother and was fully capable of defending herself. When her brother made crude advances toward her - once exposing himself, another time lifting her sweater and grabbing her breasts, she slapped his face and let him know in no uncertain terms that if he did anything like it again, she’d go straightaway to their father. At least that’s how she related the incidents to Kurt, Sr. Only it took her more than two years to get around to it. By that time, it was too late for her younger sister.

  Ilsa was only eleven at the time, and small for her age, at that. Unlike Katrinka, she was hopelessly outmatched by her brother, physically and in every other way. However he may have approached her, she must have been helpless to defend herself.

  “I have no idea what, you know, what actually went on, or how long it went on for,” Meisner told Jorgensen. “Maybe there were signs, but my wife and I, we never saw any, not even when we looked back after.”

  After.

  “How did it end?” Jorgensen asked.

  “Peter found her.” Peter was the other son, thirteen at the time. He’d been walking home from school, cutting through the woods, when he’d entered a small clearing and all but stumbled over Ilsa’s body. At first, he thought she was asleep. But when she wouldn’t answer him, he rolled her over. Her lifeless face brought a scream from him, the last sound he’d make for three days.

  He ran and found his father in the barn, and - literally unable to speak - began tugging at him. Meisner, annoyed at being distracted from whatever task he was doing, raised a hand as if to strike Peter, and might have done so. But at that instant, he saw the wild expression on the boy’s face and knew something was terribly wrong. With Peter leading the way, the two of them took off, Meisner with a shovel in his good hand.

  “Why a shovel?” Jorgensen asked.

  “I happened to be using it when Peter ran into the barn. I don’t remember if I just held onto it, or if I figured I might need it. At that point, I didn’t know what had frightened my boy. For all I knew, it mighta been a bear, a mountain lion, an escaped convict, anything. I guess I didn’t want to be empty-handed, is all.”

  They ran all the way to the clearing - or at least to the edge of it. There Peter stopped abruptly, and would go no further. Kurt Meisner slowed to a walk, and continued. A hundred yards away, there was something on the ground. From fifty yards, he could see it was a person. From twenty, that it was a young girl. At ten, Meisner dropped to his knees, crawling the rest of the way on all fours. When he reached the spot, he stared in disbelief and horror at the two things on the ground in front of him.

  The first was the body of his youngest child. Her head was thrown back as if her neck had been broken. Her eyes were wide open, but her pupils weren’t visible, and where the whites of her eyes should have been, there was bright red. Her dress was pulled up above her waist, and there was blood on the front of it, where it would have covered the part where her legs came together.

  The second thing Kurt Meisner stared at was also on the ground, ten or twelve feet from Ilsa’s body. Meisner recognized the second thing almost as easily as he’d recognized the first. It was a work glove. Not just any work glove, though. It had reinforced stitching and a real leather patch on the palm. And on the cuff, it said, wrangler ii. It was one of a pair he’d given Kurt, Jr., for his sixteenth birthday.

  For the next five minutes, Kurt Meisner fought back waves of sobs and tried desperately to regain control. When finally he could trust himself enough to speak, he turned to face Peter. The boy was still at the edge of the clearing, his arms hugging a tree trunk.

  “Go home,” Meisner told him. “Go home and go to bed. You’re sick. You never saw this. Understand?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Understand?”

  A nod.

  “Go!”

  Peter gradually loosened his grip on the tree, turned, and then ran off toward the house.

  “And?” Jorgensen asked.

  “And he never said a word. Ever.”

  For what seemed to him to be a long time, Kurt Meisner continued to kneel beside his daughter’s body. No matter how hard he tried to come up with explanations that someone other than Kurt, Jr., had killed her, he couldn’t. Gradually, his sorrow gave way to anger, an emotion he was more familiar with. But even as his anger simmered, another reaction was occurring in him: a parent’s natural inclination to protect his child. And in the end, that was the inclination he yielded to.

  Summoning the strength to push himself up from the ground, Meisner picked up the glove and stuffed it into his belt. Next, he lifted the body of his daughter and carried it deeper into the woods. He didn’t stop until he got down to the edge of a stream that ran through the forest nearby. His first thought was to lay Ilsa in the water, face down, to make it look as though she’d drowned. But he knew that wouldn’t fool anyone, not with the red eyes and the blood on the dress.

  Then he remembered the shovel.

  He walked back to the clearing and retrieved it. He even had the presence of mind to look around for ot
her evidence that might point to his older son. Finding none, he brushed leaves over the area where Ilsa’s body had lain, and used a branch to cover his own tracks - the way he’d seen Indians do it in Westerns - as he made his way back to the stream.

  The ground by the stream was damp and soft, and at first, the digging was easy. But then, as he began hitting rock, the going got tougher.

  “Did you really think you could hide her body so it wouldn’t be found?” Jorgensen wanted to know.

  “Think? I wasn’t thinking,” said Meisner. “I just did what I did, cause I didn’t know what else to do. All I knew was, I’d lost a child, and I wasn’t about to lose another one. Can’t you understand that?”

  Jorgensen allowed that he could understand that.

  Meisner kept digging. He was a farmer, used to hard work, but the rocks and stones wore him out, and he was forced to rest from time to time. “The stream must’ve changed course over the years,” he explained. “It was like I was dredging up a river bottom.”

  He was maybe a foot and a half deep when he suddenly sensed a shadow looming over him. He spun around, grasping the shovel in both hands, ready to do battle with whatever man or beast had sneaked up behind him.

  It was Boyd Davies.

  Meisner let out a little laugh, much as he had at the time, sixteen years ago. Of all the people he knew on the face of the earth, he’d been surprised by the only one his secret would be safe with. Boyd didn’t even look at him; Boyd never looked at anyone. Nor did he look at Ilsa’s body, lying nearby. In fact, he gave no sign that he’d noticed it at all. Instead, he stared at the stones Meisner had dug out of the ground and piled at the edge of the hole, and the stones still remaining in the hole.

  Meisner decided it was safe to ignore the boy (even though Boyd was twenty, Meisner would always think of him as a boy), and he resumed digging. But his arms were heavy by that time, and he felt like each shovelful of wet dirt and rock might be his last. It was right around then that he decided to put Boyd to work. “I figured if I could trust him to watch,” he explained now, “why couldn’t I trust him to dig?”