Depth of Field

by Brian S. Wheeler

  Owen faced a seething Principal Sherman after he opened the door and Kelly and Jenny rushed out of the darkroom. Owen swung the darkroom door closed and hurried to follow the principal to the office. Once again, he felt like the school miscreant trailing on Principal Sherman’s heels. He had plenty to worry about during that short walk – a mark on his permanent record, a review before the school board for his conduct with two senior girls, procedures started with the aim of revoking his tenure.

  But more than all else, Owen worried that some student would come across the darkroom and find its door unlocked. He feared some yearbook student, wanting only to develop photos of show choir, might find those prints drying upon the clothesline. More than all else, Owen worried that someone else was going to look at that face peering from the front window of deceased Mr. Turner’s home.

  * * * * *

  Owen hadn’t believed an afternoon standing at his classroom podium directing students through sentence diagramming could have passed so slowly. He was desperate for the final bell. He was desperate to return to the darkroom and retrieve those black and white photos taken of the Turner estate with the camera he had brought home on the weekend. He was desperate to get hold of those photos before anyone else peeked upon them and saw a face winking from the window.

  Principal Sherman acted just as Owen predicted. The man’s words had held much volume, but the man’s actions had once more proven empty. Owen was lucky to be summoned to the principal’s office on a day when Mr. Sherman’s secretary was sick at home with the flue, and so Owen knew nothing concerning his latest conflict with Roy Robison, nor being alone with Kelly and Jenny in the darkroom, would be entered into his permanent record. He knew Principal Sherman believed his position excused him from such menial labors as keyboarding.

  And besides, Owen knew Principal Sherman was a lot like water, in that the man always flowed along the path of least resistance.

  Owen skipped his routine duty of standing just beyond his door in the hallway following the last bell and instead hurried to the darkroom. His luck held for a bit longer, and there was no indication that anyone else had peeked upon the prints.

  Lance’s boiler room was suffocating warm when Owen detoured from hurrying straight home to take the time to visit his custodian friend and neighbor. He accepted a cold soda from Lance before showing his friend the print in which he had seen that ghastly face withdraw into the home’s shadows.

  Lance gave no indication of having seen anything. So Owen asked if Lance might be able to describe what Homer Turner looked like before his passing.

  The description failed to give Owen any comfort.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 5 – Shutter Dreams

  Owen sipped at another gin and tonic as he stared at the camera sitting upon his living room’s roll-top desk.

  He had burned all of the developed prints carried back from school over the gas range’s burner. It had set off the smoke detectors, and Owen had ripped out every one of the wailing sensors’ batteries while waiting for the prints’ oily smoke to diminish.

  There were no more prints to burn. Only the gin and tonic remained to distract Owen from brooding upon that pale face that had peeked upon him from a window. The next morning, however, would be a new school day, another wasted turn in an English classroom in a flat county’s consolidated school. It would not be best to depend on too many gin and tonics more to relieve Owen’s unease with that photograph. He would do better to just put his new gin and tonic down, when he knew Principal Sherman would have him on his shortlist of impossible faculty for the remainder of the week.

  Owen gripped the camera and more closely inspected its parts. He had missed it at the Turner estate auction, but he found a scratch notched into the aperture ring at a number Owen recognized would make the aperture very small, and so create a very deep depth of field in the final photograph. Owen twisted at the ring, but it refused to budge. He grunted, but the ring remained stuck. Evidently, he would be unable to adjust the aperture at all. The setting remained locked no matter how Owen tried to twist it, and it gave him the first indication that anything might’ve been wrong with the camera.

  He didn’t load a new canister of film into the camera. He touched none other of the camera’s dials. He didn’t peek again into the viewfinder.

  Owen didn’t wish to tempt any more phantom faces, and so he placed the cap back over the lens and kept his finger far away from the shutter button.

  He had found fault with the camera. The aperture ring was broken. If he took no more photos through that camera, then, Owen hoped, he might convince himself that the face he thought he saw retreating into that black and white photo had only been a strange kind of technical mistake, nothing more than a ghost for which his imagination had been responsible.

  It took several fresh gin and tonics before Owen was able to take that thought to bed.

  * * * * *

  Sleep proved fleeting that night.

  Nightmares plagued what slumber came to Owen. Visions of pale, misshapen faces peeking from the windows and doorways of crumbling buildings haunted his dreams. Owen Masters may have been a transplant to Flat Knob. Yet he knew as he tossed through his sleep that each of those faces, with their beady eyes peering upon him, belonged to a kin named Turner.

  He dreamed of the empty brick bank on the corner of Flat Knob’s Main Street. Its windows were not yet boarded. The soot of fire had not yet stained the brick. All of the bank’s glass had not yet been shattered. Owen’s eye drifted until it rested upon one of the building’s basement windows. And there laughed a pale and swollen face.

  Owen faced a three-story, Victorian manse painted blue after his dream vision shifted. He didn’t recognize the building as any he knew in Flat Knob. He couldn’t place where that building’s block rested. Music jangled from windows. Women dressed in sequined dresses of turquoise and crimson danced in windows flooded in golden light. Owen’s gaze lifted to a third story window, and a crimson curtain shifted to show another pale face leering at him with a smile crowded with jagged teeth.

  Owen moaned and turned upon his pillow. A slowly turning water wheel arrived in his dreams. A thick canopy of trees cast a mill’s gray, wooden walls into shadow. Owen listened to the mumble of a creek. Wind whispered through the surrounding timber. Crickets sang in the afternoon. He heard moaning rapture. He heard a cacophony of sighs. His eyes scanned the mill’s walls, and one more white face winked at him from the edge of a dark doorway.

  A new setting rose in Owen’s slumber, and the sleeper kicked at his bedding. The limbs of a giant tree fanned out before him. A crowd of men shouted below the tree’s canopy, waving rifles, spitting vulgarities. Owen followed that crowd’s attention, and he gasped at the figure swaying from a wide and sturdy branch. Even in his nightmare, Owen recognized how that corpse swayed from a broken neck. Powerless, Owen couldn’t turn away as that head lifted and leveled one more pale and swollen visage upon him, its eyes winking as Owen shouted for his nightmare to vanish. It was the most terrible face of them all.

  Owen jumped out of his sleep. Something made a sound in his home’s shadows, but Owen was too soon out of nightmare to recognize the source.

  He stubbed a toe and cursed as he shambled through the dark. Owen heard a click as he reached for a light switch. He froze. His heart raced. The noise quickly repeated.

  Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

  The clicking continued at a quickening pace as Owen summoned the courage to walk to the end of his dark hall. Reaching his trailer’s main room, Owen shouted as he pounded the wall and threw light into the chamber. He knew from where the clicking had come.

  The camera’s shutter silenced the moment light fell upon it. Someone, something, had rotated it in the night so that the camera looked out of the trailer’s front window. The lens cap rested on the carpet at the foot of the roll-top desk.

  Owen feared, no matter his winning bid, that the camera still belonged to Homer Turner.r />
  * * * * *

  Chapter 6 – A Ghastly Microfiche Machine

  Owen languished through several more school days. His nerves numbed from the week’s lack of sleep, and even Roy Robison found he had to push hard and dig deep to fire Mr. Masters’ temperamental nerves. Though Principal Sherman drifted all week next to his classroom, Owen decided to skip the annual teachers’ improvement day scheduled for that Friday. He didn’t care to listen to another football coach’s speech about motivation. He didn’t care to hear another paraplegic tell him how a healthy work ethic promised that a teacher could reach any child’s mind. Owen had no stomach to be belittled by speakers who had no more understanding, or appreciation, for his expertise than the students who mocked him.

  Owen instead visited the steel frame building that housed Flat Knob’s small library in addition to the town’s municipal offices and fire department. The part-time librarian was one of Owen’s ex-students, a girl who had steadfastly refused to read any of her English assignments during her time at the county high school. She sat behind the receptionist desk and frowned at her old teacher when Owen told her his request.

  “I’m sorry, Clare, but I’m just not going to find what I’m looking for on the Internet.”

  “What would you need that you couldn’t find on the Internet, Mr. Masters?”

  The irony that Clare Johnson worked at the municipal library was not lost on Owen.

  “I need to look at old issues of the county paper.”

  Clare rolled her eyes. “But I’m telling you, Mr. Masters, I’ve never seen a stack of papers anywhere in the library. And I’m responsible for cleaning every room in this place.”

  Owen forced himself to smile.

  “I need to use that machine behind your shoulder, Clare. That big, white and plastic machine in the corner of Mr. Peidmont’s office.” Owen pointed when Clare turned to look behind her. “That’s a microfiche reader, and there’s probably back issues of the county paper stored on film canisters kept in those cabinets next to the machine.”

  Owen sighed. If he could never entice Clare to read a thing in his classroom, how was he going to illuminate to her anything concerning the library sciences?

  “I’ll have to call Mr. Peidmont at home,” Clare sighed. “I hate doing it though, Mr. Masters. He hates being called in the morning.”

  “I really need that machine.”

  Owen was impressed by Clare’s persistence after Mr. Peidmont failed to answer her first call. He was amazed Clare cared enough to dial the number several times until Owen heard Mr. Peidmont’s voice mumbling at the other end of the phone.

  Clare looked up from the receiver. “Do you know how to operate it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Clare listened to the mumbling voice at her ear. “Alright, Mr. Peidmont. I’ll just leave the library keys with him then.”

  Owen felt proud when Clare handed him her set of keys and told him Mr. Peidmont gave him free reign of the library’s resources. Owen rarely felt any of the skills he had learned while earning a history minor at the state college ever did him any kind of good. But he smiled to have the opportunity to employ a little of what he had learned researching in that state school’s library as he scrounged through Mr. Peidmont’s office looking for microfilm.

  He wasn’t sure what he was in particular searching for as he loaded the first film roll into the microfiche reader. He was searching for any article that included either the names Turner or Raymond in the headline, or within a story’s opening paragraph. Clare left the library the minute her shift ended, leaving Owen alone to his investigation. He was on the hunt, and the hours passed quickly though Owen’s eyes itched from their effort.

  The most recent articles to catch Owen’s attention detailed the shuttering of Chandler Raymond’s plastics plant. There were editorials arguing that open world markets undercut the Flat Knob facility’s ability to generate profit. Editorials argued how tax policy hampered any entrepreneur’s effort to conduct a thriving business. But there were also editorials that claimed Chandler Raymond had mishandled the plant for years, arguing the plant’s founder had removed himself from the routine operation of his enterprise, that Chandler Raymond squandered funds at a time when the competition evolved and grew more efficient.

  Owen scrolled further back through the years. He found a black and white photograph on a front page of Chandler Raymond with city and state officials holding shovels for the plastics plant’s groundbreaking ceremony. There were editorials promising how the plant would bring employment, how the plant would help the county thrive as it not had since the days of the coal mines which attracted the first settlers to Flat Knob. There were reports Chandler Raymond shared displaying the plant’s early and robust profits.

  For a very long time, Owen saw nothing concerning the Turners.

  Owen went more than forty years into the past before finding the first mention of the Turner name. Several more stories concerned that family in the space of a year. A quick scan of the copy was enough to tell Owen that the Turners were not well regarded. One story detailed the shooting death of Ulysses Turner during a federal raid on an opium den hidden in the woods outside of town. Another story related how Hiram Turner had bled to death after a man had stormed into Hiram’s brothel and attacked Hiram on a mission to save Flat Knob’s men from such a den of villainy. Rawlins Turner died in the inferno that broke out in the basement of the Flat Knob bank, where it was no secret that Rawlin operated a casino beneath the bribed eyes of the local authorities. Worse of all was the story of Dr. Yancy Turner, who a lynch mob hung from one of the county’s largest trees when rumors erupted that Yancy supplied back-alley abortion services.

  All of those stories supplied large, black and white photographs for the front page of the county paper. Owen’s hands shook as he regarded those pictures. He recognized the face of Ulysses Turner, no matter that a bullet had shredded the right side of that face. Owen didn’t feel it was the first time he had looked upon the visage of Hiram Turner when he saw the grimace death had locked upon that corpse’s face. Though a number of shriveled and black corpses rested in the foreground of the photograph of the bank fire, Owen knew which of the burned bodies belonged to Rawlins Turner. And though one could not see the face of the body that swayed from the rope in one large, black and white photograph, Owen wouldn’t have needed any reporter to twist that hanged man to know that it was Yancy Turner’s features which faced away from the camera’s lens. He had seen all of those faces in his dreams.

  It was dark by the time Owen locked the library behind him. His day’s research only magnified his week’s obsession with the Turner name. He had hoped the research would have chased away that curiosity. He couldn’t believe how badly it had backfired. It was a very short drive from that municipal library building back to his home. Yet Owen never dimmed his bright headlights on the return trip, no matter how the opposing traffic blared its horns. It was a short drive across a short town, and still, Owen’s neck ached when he pulled into his trailer’s drive for all the times he had craned his muscles to peek into the backseat.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 7 – Feral Photo Albums

  Owen shared a table with Janice at Barb’s Diner and Truck Stop located in the empty map corner where the interstate highway cut through the county.

  “You need a toping off, Mr. Masters?”

  “Better keep it coming, Bridget.”

  Owen nodded at Bridget Koch. Owen had watched Bridget bust tables at Barb’s since she was thirteen. She was one of his ex students. She was twenty-one that morning, and she still looked a decade and a half older than Owen.

  There had been Saturday mornings when Owen feared Bridget, who called everyone else but him “honey,” might have put something other than just sugar into his coffee.

  Bridget glared at Owen as she poured coffee into his mug. “You look like crap.”

  “Thanks,” Owen forced himself to chuckle. “Your smiles keep pullin
g me out here to Barb’s.”

  Owen scanned the dining room and thought it another testament to the diner’s coffee that the establishment still earned the means to cover its electrical bill. Barb’s operated somewhere in the gray margin between clean and grimy. The patrons never seemed to change from one Saturday morning to the next – heavy, frowning men dressed in heavy coats no matter the season, men who silently stared at their plates of heaped hash browns and sausages, men who stared through Barb’s window at the flat landscape while they concentrated to keep their hearts pumping.

  Owen had never seen a semi truck and trailer turn into Barb’s gravel parking lot. He didn’t think the white truck out front that had been set on blocks for as long as Owen remembered counted for traffic.

  It was Janice and Owen’s practice to fill up on Barb’s coffee each Saturday morning while they scouted the day’s auction sales from the faux leather of one of the diner’s red booths.

  “She’s right, Owen. You look like you’ve hardly slept all week.”

  “How do you know? You haven’t peeked from your paper.”

  Owen knew Janice couldn’t be distracted from her weekly shopper. She stared at the neat, black and white display ads the auctioneers had delivered to advertise their weekend sales. She scoured through each ad’s listings and marked those items that caught her attention in her system of highlighter colors – yellow for antique furniture, blue for vintage advertising signs, pink for shop tools, green for collectible toys. Photographs of items the auctioneers hoped to feature never interested Janice. She was always looking for a lost gem in the fine print, and Bridget knew to keep the coffee warm when Janice squinted each Saturday morning at that weekly newspaper.