Eleven Exposures

Chapter 1

It has been raining since Tuesday, the way it rains here in the fall — no weather in it at all, no wind, no thunder, just water coming straight down hour after hour until the beet field on the other side of the fence has gone the color of a wet dog. You back the county car up the field road the way you always do, left arm over the seat, mirror useless, and stop where the deputy's flashlight tells you to stop. KELL BROTHERS on the door. Same vehicle takes people to the hospital and takes them to the basement; whichever it turns out to be, you're the one who drives. She is twenty feet in off the fence line, face down in the beet tops, with the lateral running full about a yard behind her. Cal Hoeger stands with his coat over his head like a man waiting out a bus. The deputy says her name is Marva Kloos, she waits tables at the truck stop out on the state road, her ride never showed at eleven, and this looks to him like she went down in the mud and didn't get up. You have done ninety of these. You know the order: temperature, time, ground sheet, load her. Then you get down on your knees in the mud and put your light on her neck. You have this photograph twice already. September, in a bad flashlight, shot again to be sure — Ruby Aker in the Bly lateral, ruled accidental drowning. November, in daylight — Gail Renk, this same fence line, sixty yards north, ruled exposure. Three wraps. The knot carried around to the back. The skin gone that lace color in between. Nobody else has both of those pictures. Nobody else took the first one. Behind you the lateral is running an inch under its bank. Cal is looking at the sky and not at you. Orrin's headlights have turned off the section road and are coming up through the rain, and when he gets here he will ask what he always asks, which is whether you're ready. You have eleven exposures left on the roll, a bag of casting plaster that will not set in ground this wet, and your tape in your coat pocket. The deputy has hold of the far corner of the sheet, waiting on you. "Any time you're ready," he says.

Story details

Rural Noir · Institutional Failure · Serial Case · 1970s · Procedural Mystery

Sedge County, the fall of 1979: thirty miles of drained marsh held down by pumps and ditches, and it has rained since Tuesday. In September a girl came out of the Bly lateral and was ruled a drowning. In November another was found at the fence line of the Kesler field and ruled exposure. This morning there is a third woman sixty yards from the second, and you are the one backing the county car up the field road, because the only ambulance in Sedge County is a hearse and you drive it. You have no badge and no authority over anybody. You have a camera, a tape measure, casting plaster, and eleven exposures left. Out here the rain takes a scene in hours, so whatever you photograph, cast, bag or write down before it goes is the only version that will ever exist. Everyone who tells you the truth does it because of what you did for their dead. Nobody here is protecting the killer. They are protecting the last thing they signed.

What you preserve is the only version that will ever exist. Out here the rain and the pumps take a scene in hours: a print softens, a bank slides, a lateral tops and moves what was on it forty yards down. Anything you photograph, cast, bag, tape, measure or write down before it goes is the whole record from then on. The cost is that you buy your own film, plaster will not set in wet ground, and everything you keep, you keep off the books — in your truck, in the basement at Kell Brothers, where anybody who wants to know what you have can go and look.
Trust is an account, not a mood. People in Sedge County talk to you because of what you did for their dead — you drove them, you got the name right, you washed their mother's hands. Every specific thing you do for a family is a deposit and every question you ask is a withdrawal, and they know the balance to the penny. Nobody in this county owes the sheriff anything, which is why what you can get, he can't.
Only the record counts. What you know is worth nothing until it exists in a form the county recognizes: a coroner's inquest under oath, a signed statement, a submission the state lab will accept. Only Orrin Kell can call an inquest. Only Cal Hoeger can send anything to the lab. So every true thing has to pass through a man who would rather it didn't, and the way through is never an argument — it's arranging a room where saying no costs him more than saying yes.
The water runs on a schedule and the schedule is not yours. Gates, pumps, laterals: when the district drops a ditch, ground that was under water is walkable, and when it lifts one, ground you were standing on yesterday is gone. The schedule is written down, and the log is public at the district office. Knowing where the water will be tomorrow is the closest thing to seeing the future anybody here gets. The cost is that to read it, you have to ask the man who writes it.
You have no authority of any kind. You cannot arrest, search, compel, hold, or order anyone to stop. What you have instead is a reason to be everywhere: the county's ambulance and the county's hearse are the same vehicle and you are the one who drives it. That reason lasts exactly as long as everyone believes you are working. The day somebody decides you are investigating, Orrin takes the keys, and you are a stranger at every gate in the county.
Filed is nearly finished. Once a death certificate goes to the state, changing it means the coroner writing down that he was wrong, and every new one filed makes the one before it harder to touch. So the clock does not run toward solving it. It runs toward closing it — and the only thing that stops a file from closing is something you put in it first.