by Dudley Lynch
Quite nice.
I was headed for the four-lane arterial that leads up the hill to the turnoff into my neighborhood, the one where all the drama had started yesterday evening. Only this time, I’d be turning left at the top of the hill, not right. I was not going home but to the University of the Hills. I didn’t think glancing in the rear-view mirror several times as I went up the hill was being paranoid. This time, I saw nothing that caused me any concern.
The university’s big granite sign marked its entrance. The Whosoever Rock, as students had called it for generations. I sped past the sign and steered for the new Bible Building. With its dazzling bluish plate glass exterior, it was impossible to miss.
I needed to talk to someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things past and present at Hills-U and I knew that would be Dr. Malachi Jepp Rawls. Three decades of Old Testament students had called him “the Prophet.” His specialty was the book of Ezekiel. I’d considered him a friend as long as I’d known him. Maybe even a mentor. He’d told Helen I could have the first appointment after lunch.
Watching Dr. Rawls walk toward me had always been a unique sight. It was like watching a diminutive “weave artist” advance with a walking stick. Or a mercurial peewee football player parry and feint in the backfield. He was only about five-foot-four, which made his damaged leg all the more obvious. He’d had polio as a child.
He walked to the door to welcome me. Stuck out one hand and waved me to a chair with the other. “Saw you on TV last night.”
In his office, the Prophet had a hat rack that I’d always admired. An elegant wood sculpture affair. The carver had chiseled the shape of a lush, leafy vine into the surface of a six-foot-tall butternut pole about three-and-a-half inches through and through. Like Jack’s beanstalk, the sensuous design started at the bottom and wound its way to the top. On every visit to my friend’s office in the past sixteen years, the first thing I’d done was park my Stetson on the rack’s uppermost peg, the one angled toward his office window.
But not today.
The hat pole had been moved from beside the door to the end of his desk. Now, it was protruding into one of the few open spaces in his floor plan. This disrupted the traffic in the room, particularly for the Prophet himself. To get to his chair, Malachi had to walk out and around the hat pole.
This wasn’t the only anomaly.
The venerable, taupe-colored trench coat he favored on nippy days for the entire time I’d known him was hanging from one of the hat pegs. Not its usual place. Usually, you could expect to find it hanging from a hook at the end of one of his floor-to-ceiling book shelves.
The new arrangement seemed a bit awkward. It looked like he wanted his coat within easy reach.
I gestured toward the hat rack. “Practicing a little feng shui?”
I thought he might chuckle, but he didn’t offer so much as a smile. “There’s a loaded pistol in my coat pocket. I decided that was better than sticking it in my belt. That’s too visible when you don’t have a license to carry.”
For an instant, we stared at each other like two birds that had spotted a worm at the same time. Then our gazes went elsewhere.
I felt like I was watching a movie in fast-forward. It started with my friend being placed in a jail cell on gun violation charges. Malachi’s eyes seemed to focus on the badge pinned to my shirt. After an interval, he decided to see if the conversation could be rewound. At least to the point before he’d tossed it off the bridge.
“You know, I’ve never been to the old Huntgardner house. Not once. Always found it strange that he would isolate himself so. But then, maybe not. He had an obsession with darkness, as you probably know. It seemed all consuming. I told him one time that he should write a physics textbook for blind people.”
“What’d he say to that?”
“Laughed. Said that was his life calling — helping his students understand what the dark can tell you if you don’t get blinded by the light.”
“So you knew about his Trinity story?”
“Puzzled by it is more accurate. I came to Hills-U in the late ’70s. Back then, he babbled about his little parable, as he called it, at every opportunity. In his lectures, speeches, interviews, conversations. Then one day, he just stopped. If someone else brought it up, he’d change the subject. He even quit letting the university use it to promote the physics department.”
This gave me the opening I was looking for. “So can you think of any reason why his Trinity story would get ten people killed at a house he built to chase the darkness?”
Dr. Rawls’s eyes were casting shadows again. That left me nonplussed.
I hadn’t entered the Prophet’s office expecting that he would have anything to hide. To my knowledge, he’d never lied to me, so it wasn’t my intention to build a house of cards that could trip him up.
Was it the way I’d phrased my question? Had it suggested more than I’d realized? Did he think I was trying to make him take ownership of a theory for this crime and reveal more than he wanted to say?
Or all of this?
I repeated the question in my mind: Can you think of any reason why his Trinity story would get ten people killed at a house he built to chase the darkness?
Watching Malachi, I decided to change my own ground rules. My own expectations. I was going to adopt a different strategy. See where things went.
With no hat rack in easy reach when I’d walked into his office, I’d hung on to my Stetson. The hat had been resting in my lap. I stood and used it to gesture toward his hat rack. “Mind if I get rid of this?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I went over and hung it on the top peg.
My move could be read in one of two ways: I had switched to being more aggressive, or I was planning to stay awhile. I didn’t wait to sit back down before asking my next question. “When was the last time you saw Professor Huntgardner?”
My friend’s eyes blinked in rapid succession. Several times. Five, six. I counted them like the FBI agent said he did when he was interviewing the Oklahoma City bomber. I knew the Prophet was about to lie to me.
“Just a guess.” More rapid blinking. “Do you know when he retired? I probably saw him at the faculty reception that year.”
“Did you ever share any students?”
“I’m sure we did. We both taught classes required for freshmen.”
“Did any of your students ever tell you there was something weird about his interests?”
Malachi leaped at the chance to be sarcastic. “Oh, sure. Here I was, a guy who’s obsessed about a book in the Bible full of incoherent visions, kaleidoscopic churning wheels, and desiccated bones. Just the person you’d pick to complain about a guy who was nuts about finding out why most of the universe is in the dark.”
By now I was taking notes. “Universe in the dark?”
“You’ve not heard of the dark energy and dark matter thing?”
“Well, I’ve heard the terms.”
“How about Stephen Hawking?”
“I tried to read A Brief History of Time. About all I remember is his catty quip. The one about needing a research accelerator as big as the solar system and thinking he probably wouldn’t be able to get it financed in today’s political climate.”
“Then you probably don’t remember what he said about dark energy and dark matter.”
I saw a chance for a little cuteness myself. “No, I’m still in the dark.”
If Dr. Rawls saw any humor in that, he kept it to himself. Or perhaps he was just excited about his opportunity to enlighten me. “We have decent explanations for only about five percent of the energy density of the known universe. Sixty-eight percent is dark energy, whatever that is. The rest is dark matter, whatever that is. Dr. Hawking said this darkness was the missing link in cosmology.”
“Professor Huntgardner was interested in this?”
At this p
oint, I could see my learned friend’s sense of self-preservation catch up with his desire to come across as super-informed. “Well, that’s what some people said.”
This time, I was stunned into silence. I tried not to imagine how I looked as my mind trotted out three new suspicions about Dr. Malachi Jepp Rawls.
One, I now doubted he was the open book I’d always believed him to be. He had to be harboring secrets. They might be important secrets. Secrets that could push to the heart of the crimes I was trying to solve.
Two, I had reason to suspect the emotions he was feeling had him close to panic. He was trying to hide them. But his mouth had turned down. His forehead had developed deep furrows. And his eyes couldn’t seem to find anything to focus on — they were flitting back and forth around the room.
If he didn’t outright know the reason for the ten murders in that madman’s enigmatic old brick house, it seemed like he had strong suspicions. And letting on that he suspected anything was making him as nervous as a germaphobe in a garbage dump.
Three involved my other hunch. My suspicion that the words in my question that had spooked him were these: “in a house he built to chase the darkness.”
I was preparing to revisit all this with the Prophet when my phone rang. It was Helen. The urgency in my assistant’s voice made it clear I needed to steer straight for the office.
Chapter 20
Helen wasn’t sitting in her chair. The throne, as she referred to it, was occupied by a kid. His stuffed backpack sat abandoned at one corner of her desk, so I was guessing he’d come to the courthouse straight from summer school.
He was in his mid-teens and had sandy hair that looked a little like an abused Brillo pad. I couldn’t tell about his smile because I wasn’t seeing one. He and Helen, who was standing to his left, were transfixed by whatever they were watching on her computer screen.
She gave me one of her urgent “You gotta see this!” looks. “It’s gone viral.”
I sought more information. “What’s gone viral?”
“On Twitter. My nephew can show you.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. “Tommy, meet Sheriff Luke.”
Still no smile. Serious kid. But polite. At least he glanced up, nodded, and said, “Howdy.” Since he didn’t remove his hand from the computer mouse, I didn’t offer to shake it.
Of course, I knew about Twitter. The omnipresent Pony Express of cyberspace. The me-and-thee online social networking service that limited you to writing 280 characters in any given message. But if you knew how to execute the launch, it allowed you to send that message flying off to a jillion different people, or at least a few hundred, at the speed of light.
I’d been hoping for months to get at least a half-time social media person for the office. But it hadn’t happened yet. Until it did, I’d been depending on my usual salvation: Helen. But I had the feeling that whatever was going on now had arrived on her radar screen with the aid of the young man sitting in her chair.
Tommy looked up at his aunt. “This tweet here doesn’t make any sense —” He stopped speaking, swiveled his chair in my direction, and pointed back at the computer screen. “That’s what they call those messages, Sheriff. Tweets. Like bird chirps. Because they are short.”
I nodded. “Thanks for that.”
The tweet was from someone calling themselves @donthinkzebras. It said, “Why isn’t Sheriff McWhorter telling anyone about the anthrax?” It was being retweeted frequently.
I didn’t bother to look at Helen. My whole body was telegraphing my consternation. Anthrax! We’d never had a case of the dread bacterial disease in Abbot County, much less had anyone die from it. At least, not to my knowledge.
“When was that tweet made?”
Tommy pointed at the screen. “Six minutes ago.”
“Have there been others?”
“Loads.” He used the power-scroll wheel on Helen’s computer mouse until he spotted what he was looking for. “The first tweet using the #DOAFlagler hashtag appeared thirty-three minutes ago.”
Again, I needed more information. “What else have they been asking?”
Helen signaled that she wanted to be the one to reply.
She said the first tweet had sounded casual, although, she added, it may not have been. It could have been a red herring. Or a sick joke. This was the one with the #DOAFlagler hashtag. That tweet had asked if anyone else in Flagler had been approached by FBI agents asking if they’d received any unexpected packages with white powder on them.
“What happened next was like Chinese firecrackers. One tweet after another. Someone said they hoped Flagler wouldn’t turn out to be another Bhopal. Another tweeter asked about evacuation plans for the county. People started speculating about where the anthrax could be coming from.”
Looking over Tommy’s shoulder, I saw that someone named @vengeanceisours had just posted a message. “Remember polio, Flagler! It took your kids once & anthrax will do it again!”
Helen froze, then leaned forward to catch my eye. She suggested that this conversation be adjourned to my office.
Tommy said he would do some checking around to see if he could find any other internet interest in Flagler and anthrax.
* * *
Helen rediscovered her voice first. “I don’t believe Abbot County has had a case of polio in . . .” Her eyes angled toward the ceiling. “I don’t know — fifty years. Probably more.”
I knew that the dread polio virus had always been a master of ambush. Capricious to a fault about when and where and who and how it struck. When it did, it segued into an even more cruel, fickle creature.
Most of those infected felt like they had a mild case of the flu and quickly recovered. Only a handful of the victims — and they were nearly always kids — became paralyzed, usually in their legs, sometimes for life. An unfortunate few lost the ability to breathe because their chest muscles were paralyzed. Most of those victims died appalling deaths.
More than anything else, it was polio’s diabolical whimsy that had made it one of the most feared diseases of the twentieth century. Texas had been an epicenter in America for the contagion. And Flagler, for reasons no one had ever adequately understood, had been an epicenter for the disease in Texas.
Helen’s knowledge of how all this had affected Abbot County was much more vivid and extensive than mine. After all, she’d been born in one of the worst years of the Texas polio epidemic: 1952.
“My parents were too frightened to let us go outside. When people who had polio in the family came to see us, they had to stay on the porch. We couldn’t go to church, either. Our church canceled its worship services when the news really got bad and people started dying. The swimming pool was closed too. And the picture show — unless we went to the drive-in.”
I kept nodding, and she kept remembering.
“Airplanes were spraying everywhere and fogging machines in the alleys. Spreading DDT. I remember that because it stank so bad. Sometimes people wouldn’t roll down their car windows — didn’t matter how hot it was outside. Some wouldn’t even use the telephone. They thought polio germs might crawl through the phone lines.”
A peculiar look seized her face. She raised one corner of her mouth in a half-smile and started to sing softly with her West Texas twang.
She sang about getting rid of the housefly and the mosquito. Because they carried a bug that could make you terribly ill. About keeping the garbage can covered and not drinking from the creek. About eating sanitary food and keeping your utensils clean. And taking care to wash your hands and brush your teeth after every meal. All because this was how polio would be beaten.
She looked embarrassed, especially when she saw her nephew staring at her through my office’s glass outer wall.
“I’d forgotten I knew ‘The Polio Song.’ When I was a girl, we sang it around the house — my sisters and me — more times than I care to remember.
A guy named Red River Dave wrote it. Sang it over WOAI, San Antonio. It stayed on the radio for years. My mother taught it to us. She thought it would improve our hygiene. Make us safer.”
“Dr. Rawls caught it, you know.”
He and I had discussed this several times. How excruciating the muscle spasms and the treatments had been.
His doctors, like most doctors, had little idea how to treat infantile paralysis, as it was often called. So, several times a day, they’d wrapped his legs in old woolen army blankets soaked in hot water. They thought the heat and the dampness from their hot packs would help relax his rigid muscles. He said he’d go to his grave remembering the itching and the pain from the heat — and how bad the stench was. The torture went on for months and months, even on hot days. All this in an era with little air-conditioning.
The good news, he’d conceded, was that he hadn’t needed to be placed in the dread iron lung.
Malachi said these clunky devices looked like miniature versions of a Jules Verne submarine. They were big enough that a person could be laid on their back in one, with portholes for attendants to reach through. They saved lives by alternating the pressure of the air around a stricken person’s chest. Lowering the chest, then allowing it to rise, then lowering it again, unceasingly, around the clock.
I hadn’t thought of that conversation with Malachi in a long time.
Any other time, I’d have been swift to get the Prophet on the phone. Remind him of our chat about polio. And ask how serious this threat about anthrax sounded to him. But after the conversation I’d just had with him in his office, a concern of a different kind was worming its way into my mind.
I’d not doubted some of the tweets Helen, Tommy, and I had read came from citizens with genuine concerns. But the whole discussion had an undercurrent to it that felt like manipulation. Like disinformation. Squirrelly.
I had no trouble putting exact words to what I was feeling. “Like somebody was trying to throw the dice so they’d turn up snake eyes.”
