Friday, June 14, 2019

Eli McMorn & the Strange Case of the Missing Professor – Chapter 7


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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