If I had to say exactly how
long the police officer and I were lost in the woods, it would only be a guess.
Our wristwatches stopped working at some point during that long, hot day. The yellow
sun’s faint track through the dim sky was the only sign that the hours were
ticking off the clock.
When I was a kid, we called
this part of Claiborne the Sinks. It was a tract of dense, almost prehistoric
woods, on both sides of Limestone Creek, and back then I knew it so well I
could have navigated it blindfolded. For the better part of two centuries, the
Sinks had defied development, so the city treated it like a public park. In
reality, it was a spooky No Man’s Land that didn’t attract many visitors.
There were all sorts of weird
tales about the Sinks, and most of them had to do with long dead Spanish
explorers and the Indian mounds you could find there if you knew where to look.
Decades ago, the Army Corps of Engineers cut a few narrow hiking trails through
these woods, and a few concrete picnic tables and benches could be found here
and there in the undergrowth. Nowadays, about the only thing that made it seem
like a true park was the paved jogging trail that ran along its southern edge.
It wasn’t long after daylight
when the police officer – I later learned that his name was Sgt. Bill Friemann –
ordered me to put his handcuffs on. He said there was an unidentified corpse up
the hill, and he’d found me holding a loaded handgun and standing over the
belongings of Dr. Albert Gruner, who was presumed dead. Friemann wasn’t about
to take any chances with an armed suspect.
Now that I look back on everything
that happened, I was fortunate that Friemann hadn’t cuffed me himself. He probably
would have cuffed my hands behind my back, but when he tossed me the cuffs, I fastened
them around my wrists with my hands to the front. If I’d been cuffed behind the
back, someone else would be telling you this story.
Once the cuffs were on, he
made sure they were tight and then he marched me in the direction of the other officers
who were out by the highway to the south. We were about 300 yards from the
blacktop at that time. To this day, I still don’t know how we got lost, but we
did.
Friemann got embarrassed when
we realized that we’d lost our way. It was then that we realized that something
wasn’t right. He tried over and over to raise the other officers on his walkie-talkie,
but no one answered. Eventually, his radio began to chirp every few seconds, a
warning that his battery was almost dead.
We tried everything we could
think of to draw attention to ourselves. We yelled on and off all day, so much so
that we grew hoarse. Friemann blew on an old traffic whistle he carried in his
pocket. He even fired three rounds into the air from his service revolver, but
did so only once to conserve ammo.
We listened for responses and
for other clues as to which way to go. It was weird. Sometimes we’d hear normal
sounds – birds, insects, a car’s engine in the distance, the sound of wind in
the treetops. Once I thought I heard a train. Other times, there was nothing,
just eerie silence, as if we were the only two people in the world.
It didn’t take long for
fatigue to set in. Neither of us had any food or water, and it became hot and
humid as the hours passed. Sweat poured down our faces and soaked our clothes. Friemann
had an easier go of it because he was able to push his way through the
undergrowth without having his hands cuffed. I asked him again and again to
remove the cuffs, but he refused.
The sun began to descend, and
the first signs of twilight set in. Had we really spent an entire day lost in
the woods? It seemed impossible that we hadn’t stumbled onto the main highway,
the jogging trail or even Limestone Creek to the north? Time didn’t feel right.
In my mind, I knew that we’d spent all day in the woods, but it didn’t seem
that long, as if time had been compressed.
A short time later, the sun set
and darkness took hold of the woods. Friemann clicked on his flashlight. “We
need to find a place to stop for the night,” he said. “The rescue squad has got
to be out here looking for us.”
We made our way up an incline
and the ground leveled out. Up ahead, in the dim beam of Friemann’s flashlight,
I saw something familiar. Friemann groaned at the sight. We walked up to a
large ash tree. It was there that I saw the familiar shape of my backpack along
and Dr. Albert Gruner’s belongings.
Friemann swore loudly. “We’re
right back where we started,” he shouted, frustrated. He sat down hard at the
base of a nearby tree. Long tassels of moss dangled near his head. “I’m done
walking. We’ll stay here for the night.”
My hands had been cuffed all
day. My wrists were chaffed and sore. Narrow rivulets of blood flowed from dozens
of small cuts that I’d received in the underbrush. I held up my cuffed hands. “Will
you take these off?”
He shook his head. “Hell no.
I don’t know what’s going on out here, but the last thing I’m going to do is
remove those restraints.” An owl hooted in the distance, and Friemann clicked
off his flashlight to conserve what remained of the battery.
(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.)
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