The Fog Has Excellent References

How it begins

Ellen Foster's contract described the fog as reassuringly ordinary.

She had never seen weather requiring references before.

The retirement estate manager met her at the gate with a brochure, a visitor badge and the assurance that residents were delighted. Behind him, fog covered the lower lawns so evenly it looked rolled from a spool.

'You'll be recording visibility,' he said.

'Among other things.'

'Nothing alarming.'

'That depends on the visibility.'

He did not enjoy the answer. Ellen had spent enough years taking measurements to recognize a client who had already selected the result.

Roger Bell waited beside a wheelbarrow with one handle missing.

'You here about the weather?' he asked when the manager left.

'That's what they call it.'

'Then perhaps you can find my spades.'

He showed her a locked shed. Four clean outlines marked the wall where tools should have hung. Nothing else had been disturbed.

'They go missing when the fog comes,' he said.

Ellen looked across the lawn. A small cart moved through the gray without making the sound its wheels should have made on gravel.

'Who is that?'

'If I could see, I'd have stopped asking.'

She set up a visibility marker beside the path. The air smelled faintly sweet. Not smoke. Not the wet mineral scent she expected after the night's rain.

From the nearest cottage, a resident waved an envelope.

'They say my garden ornaments were damaged by the atmosphere,' the woman called. 'Is that a real expression?'

Ellen walked toward her. The fog stopped at the path in an oddly straight edge. On the other side, the grass remained dry.

She bent to take a photograph.

The estate had hired her to certify a landscape. Somebody seemed to have prepared it as carefully as the brochure, right down to the places residents were not meant to see.