Eli McMorn: The Strange Case of the Missing Professor - Part I

It all began when I received an unexpected package. The newsroom intern in charge of our mail just left it on the floor outside my office. When I arrived at the newspaper for the night shift, there it sat, no return address.

I unlocked my office, sat the package on my cluttered desk and closed the door behind me. I used my pocketknife to cut the tape keeping the cardboard box closed. The florescent light over my desk flickered as I opened it.

The only thing in the box was a thick manila folder held closed by a pair of large rubber bands. I spent the next hour studying its contents. I spread most of it out on my desk to help make sense of it all.

The folder belonged to Dr. Albert Gruner, an old biology professor who’d been the subject of a front-page story about a week before. He’d gone missing and police thought he was probably dead. His car was found abandoned near the river. Loved ones feared that he may have fallen into the river and drowned.

Later, his wife issued a $10,000 reward for information about his disappearance, but up to that point, the reward had gone unclaimed. Police had all but ruled out kidnapping and robbery. More than likely, he’d wandered too close to the river in the dark and had fallen into the murky waters. Some whispered that it was suicide.

The contents of the folder, however, told a stranger, different story. It contained notes on unusual lights, local legends, moon phase calendars and river readings. There were also observation logs, indicating that the professor had gone to the river over and over again.

Behind my desk, I kept a shelf of reference books, including detailed maps of the riverfront. When I checked the place where the professor had been making observations, I determined that it was a short walk from where his car was found. However, despite my best efforts to take all of it in, I could never determine exactly what Gruner had been up to.

I grabbed a copy of the previous day’s edition and reread the story about the reward. It confirmed something I’d wondered about. Tracking dogs had lost the man’s scent well short of the river’s edge. The story even contained a quote from police saying the man appeared to have “disappeared into thin air.”

My old rucksack sat in the corner. I placed it on my desk and did a quick inventory. Flashlight, poncho, bottle of water, caffeine pills, wooden stakes, mallet, etc. Everything I needed for a field trip. I stuffed the manila folder inside and zipped it up.

I flipped off my office lights, closed the door and locked it. The newsroom was mostly empty, and the few people that were there didn’t even look up from their laptops as I crossed the room. I recalled hearing a vacuum cleaner running in some back office as I took the stairs down to the garage.

Minutes later, under the weak glare from my truck’s interior light, I checked the professor’s map once again. “X” marks the spot, I thought. I put my truck in gear and drove out into the night with thoughts of that $10,000 reward and a good story running through my mind.

(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)