What the Fog Left

The inquest was held in the courthouse at Quillon on the twenty-first of November before a jury of eleven, of whom I was examined as a witness for four hours, and the findings were, first, that Ambrose Vandermeer died on the twentieth of October of cardiac arrest following extreme fright, at a place and time contrived by Emmett Scully; second, that Denny Roux died on the first of November of wounds inflicted by an instrument, namely an animal, directed by the said Emmett Scully; and third, that Emmett Scully died on the third of November by misadventure on the Drumble, the said misadventure having been occasioned by his own deliberate act. Mr. Penhale of the coast road, who had walked up the hill with me on the first morning, was examined for twenty minutes and said exactly what he had said to me on that hill, and the jury asked him to say it twice.

The jury added a rider, which the county has framed, and which is the only thing I have ever seen produced by a public body that says the true thing: THE DEATH OF EMMETT SCULLY WAS CAUSED BY THE GROUND OF MERCY COUNTY, WHICH HE KNEW BETTER THAN ANY MAN LIVING.

The estate took the better part of a year. Cole Vandermeer is his own man and I am not going to pretend to write out his affairs; what I will say is that he withdrew the application for probate in the county court in March, in a hearing of nine minutes, and that the withdrawal was made because the trust had found in the estate's own papers a petition of the superior court of 1911 and a set of cancelled letters of administration, and because Cole Vandermeer went to a lawyer in the city and asked a single question, which was whether the man in the ground at Quillon had been, in law, the lawful heir of Harrow Reach. The lawyer answered him in three sentences and charged him for one. The man in the ground might have been the lawful heir of Harrow Reach; no court could now say that he was; and if he had left a child, the child would have had a case, and he had left no child. What that settled was the title. Six weeks of an autumn's inheritance had become a house with a question standing on it, and the question would stand there for as long as there was a Vandermeer to hold the land.

Then Cole did the thing that this county is going to be arguing about for fifty years, which is nothing. He did not sell to the trust. He did not fence the Drumble, and he did not drain it either, or not all of it; he dropped the survey, and he built instead two hundred yards of a raised crossing in stone and steel across the middle of the bog at the point where the old line ran, so that a person can walk from the road to the southern fields in weather without going off the flags, and he gave the maintenance of it to the county. The western half of the Drumble he leased for ninety-nine years for one dollar a year to the field station at Ashfrith, with a condition written into the lease by a lawyer who charged him four thousand dollars, and the condition is that the station's permit must remain in the name of a person resident in the county and not in the name of any corporation, and that the station's accounts must be filed with the county every year, which is the only clause of any lease I have ever read that is directed entirely at a dead man.

Wren Ashcombe runs the station, under a contract that the district attorney's office approved in a memorandum of six pages. She resigned nothing and hid nothing. She testified twice, and the county did not charge her, and my own view, which I gave when asked and which nobody in the courthouse wanted, is that a woman who spends three months being frightened and one evening being clever has done a great deal less harm in the world than a county that spent a hundred and forty years writing 'heart' on certificates and calling it a family curse. Cole Vandermeer has never once, in my hearing, spoken her name with anything but an entirely ordinary courtesy, and I have no idea what either of them feels about the other and I have not asked, because the one thing I am certain of, from four weeks of standing between two people and a bog, is that the difference between a mystery and a piece of gossip is whether the answer would help anybody.

The east wing has been cleared. The laboratory that a Vandermeer built in the 1890s to prove that the family's bad luck was in the water was inventoried in December by a hazardous-waste contractor out of Eureka, who took away four drums of reagents that had stood on those shelves for a hundred and thirty years, and charged the estate nine thousand dollars for it, which I am told is the only bill that house has ever paid on the curse. Cole has kept the room. He has put a bench back in it and a set of drainage drawings, and when I was last up there he was in it at eleven at night with a county engineer, arguing about a culvert.

Dr. Willa Cray, in December, did the thing she had been waiting twenty-two years to do, which was to write to every living descendant of Josiah Vandermeer's line she could find, nine people in four states, and tell them in plain writing what runs in their blood and what to ask their physician for. Six of them answered. Four of them were tested and three of them have the gene; the youngest is nineteen and lives in Oregon and had been told all her life about the family's bad luck and had never once been told about a cardiologist. Willa Cray is seventy-one, and has said to me twice that she will not retire until the girl in Oregon has a monitor and a plan, and she will not say it a third time because she says it is bad luck.

Hollis Nord was charged with hindering prosecution, and with a second count of aiding the escape of a convicted man that the district attorney's office added in order to make the first one hold and then let fall. He pleaded guilty to the first. The sentence came down in the courthouse at Quillon on a wet morning in February, and I heard it the way the county heard it, from the corridor: the district attorney came out to us and said, in the flat voice of a man who has just signed something he does not like, "Two years, all suspended, three hundred hours, and he keeps the job, because the man he hid is dead and the man he works for asked for it." The second count was dropped on the recommendation of that office, after a letter from a woman in Quillon whose greenhouse Hollis Nord had repaired for nothing after the storm of 2019.

Freya Nord left him in January and is living with her sister in Eureka.

Denny Roux was buried in the county cemetery outside Quillon, in a plot that seven people in that town paid for between them, and there were seven people at the grave and one of them was his sister, and when it was over she took his work boots out of a canvas bag and set them down on the earth and left them there. The sexton, who told me about it, said that he had never seen anybody do that and had not known what to say, and that the boots were gone by the following week.

Corinne Ellis kept her two acres. Cole Vandermeer bought the mortgage out of the estate on the day the probate was closed, at four per cent, on the same terms, and with one variation: the plants for the garden at Harrow Reach are still supplied for nothing, forever, and the side agreement says so in writing, in the old man's own words, cut out of the old agreement and pasted into the new one whole. She has not slept well since October; she came up to the house in February and stood in the hall and said one sentence to Cole, which was, "I wrote the letter and I meant it for the two of you to talk," and Cole said, "I know exactly what you meant," and she has come up most weeks since.

Deputy Marshal Nadia Ozer was made a sergeant in March. She has a file on her desk to this day, twelve centimetres thick, and a photograph she took herself at close range on the path in the fog, which she shows to nobody, and which she has told me twice she intends to be buried with. I have the same thought about one photograph of my own, that of a smear of luminous paste on the ribs of a dead dog, and the only useful thing I have ever been able to say about it is that I have looked at it more than I have looked at any of the living people in this story, and that I do not think that says anything good about either of us.

Ronan Varley sent his final account in February, a single sheet, typewritten, with the arithmetic of his fee at the bottom and a note in his own hand at the top which said: 'You may tell them the dog was painted. Do not tell them it was only a dog.' He was paid, at his own insistence, four hundred dollars less than the figure on the sheet, and the difference, he wrote, was "for the four days I spent building a case on a stolen boot." I have not seen him since. He is in the city, above the print shop on Balboa, and he is, as he was, the only man I know who is content to be right in writing and wrong out loud.