Tom smiled sweetly. “This is what I love about you, Em. You’re a regular sponge for pertinent information.”
I couldn’t help but preen slightly over that compliment. When it came down to cases, I really did want Tom’s approval. “Thanks. So that’s what I did, I tried to find out where the political bodies were buried, but I also learned what I could that would apply to that idea of approaching the project like a crime scene. Clearly one of the crimes is against nature: We’ve gone and put too many people in a very dry place, and they’re having a hard go of it. So they drain the lakes and rivers for irrigation, leaving a big pan of silt that’s charged with whatever mine drainage and so forth might have fed into it. Then they drive some goats out into the remaining vegetative cover and tear it up, and more soil—with its load of raw sewage and any other germs and spores that might be hanging around—gets sucked up by the wind.”
Tom said, “So we humans are again despoiling our own nest.”
I pondered that. “Yeah … but it’s not that simple, Tom. We’re not separate from nature. So the crime is against ourselves, and nature has a hand in it, by the bare facts of climate change over the past ten or fifteen millennia. I don’t know … it just seems that there are a few more terms in the equation than just ‘we screwed up.’” I sighed, frustrated by the sense that there was a thread hanging in the middle of the logic picture. “And then there’s this whole anthrax bit.”
Tom spoke softly. “About which Miles Guffey has been screaming for years.”
I looked sharply at him. “You mean you’ve know about him right along?”
Tom’s eyes had grown dark with something akin to sympathy, an unusually candid look coming from him. “Yes. You’ll recall that while I still worked for the FBI, I made it my business to know as much as I could about threats to homeland security. Everything from simple tricks like loading a bunch of fertilizer and fuel oil into a rental truck and blowing up a government center in Oklahoma to the more sophisticated stunts, like the threat posed by weapons-grade anthrax. Talk about pissing in our own nest: It was our guys who developed the supervirulent strains. Then we were stupid enough to sell some of them to our so-called friends. But it takes sophistication to know how to handle it without getting hoisted by your own petard. So yes, I made it a point to keep track of smart people who take an interest in anthrax.”
I let the knowledge that Tom had known all about Miles Guffey trickle down through my mental sponge and see what it grabbed hold of.
Tom spoke again. “I want to go to Kennedy with you tomorrow.”
That surprised me. “You taking time to be a tourist?”
He avoided my question by asking another one. “What’s this Waltrine character driving?”
“A government vehicle, no doubt.”
Tom winced at the memory of driving such stripped-down models. “Tell her I’ll drive her there in regal comfort. Faye, will Nancy loan us a car?”
“Anything as long as it’s a Mercedes,” she sighed. “And if the air-conditioning is working, if you want me to come.”
I said, “I’ll have to check this all out with Waltrine. Rumor has it she drives like she’s shot from a gun, so I’ll give her a call and suggest we get an earlier start than she’s planned on. We have to be there at eleven.”
Faye gasped, “Eleven?” Then she looked at her husband through her eyelashes and sang, “To-om, it’s a hundred and fifty miles to Kennedy. Three hours minimum, and that’s if you go ballistic and manage to catapult yourself over all the traffic in Orlando.”
“Orlando?” I said. “Isn’t that where Jack’s mother lives? Maybe we should stop and see her.”
Tom shook his head. “Not a good idea, Em. Don’t you think Jack would want to be the one to introduce you?”
Faye continued whining about the early hour. “You don’t really want to get up that early, do you?”
I said, “What’s going on, Faye? You didn’t seem to mind getting up early yesterday.”
“That was for flying.” Suddenly she sat up. “Hey! Do you want to fly over there?”
Tom shook his head. “I need a car when I get there.” Faye pursed her lips coquettishly. “We could rent one at the airport over there … . Come on, I came down here to party, and you two are being a couple of workaholics.”
Tom said, “No, flying’s no good. I want to talk to this Waltrine Sweet, then take a little dogleg and look at another location.”
“Oh, bother,” said Faye. “Chasing other women already, and I’m not even tacked down with a squalling infant yet. What kind of bomb are you going to save for my postpartum depression?” She arched her back and stretched, rolling her growing breasts and full-moon belly with sensuous grace. It was quite a show: She’d been out sunbathing, so her body was nicely browned and liberally oiled, and her pregnancy had turned her nipples big and brown, and there was a lovely brown stripe running right down the center of her roundness. Clearly pregnancy agreed with her, and I hoped that the griping was a gratuitous bid for extra attention while she kicked back and enjoyed herself liberally. But I wasn’t sure. She seemed to be rocking between long naps and spates of pushing herself too hard, by turns giving into the pregnancy and then defying her growing dependency on Tom.
Tom smiled, eyeing his bride with lascivious pride. “I keep trying to tell you, Faye, that you look better to me with every new ounce of baby fat.”
I stood up. “I think I’ll go phone Waltrine,” I said, and hustled out the door before things could get to where they were quickly going.
– 17 –
I phoned Waltrine. She was happy enough to accept Tom’s offer to drive when I told her she’d be riding in a Mercedes Benz, but she did first inquire about the quality of the sound system, chasing her question with a simple statement: “I like good boogie.” She also informed me that a geologist from Florida’s state geological survey—not to be confused with the U.S. Geological Survey, which was federal—would be coming with us. He had busted a spring in his state vehicle while rocketing out of a quarry carrying too heavy a load of high-quality calcite crystals that had “accidentally” fallen into the back of his vehicle. He thought he’d come along to look after the state’s interests in the space program while he waited for the spring to be repaired.
When she discovered that there would be that many people in the car, Faye opted out, saying she had an appointment with a chaise lounge and a bottle of suntan oil.
That night, when the insomnia set in, I turned to Miles Guffey’s contribution to my reading stash, a slim trade paperback entitled, The Garden of Their Desires: Desertification and Culture in World History. It echoed Tom’s words regarding the importance of the equality of women to the health of a culture, drawing a correlation between the drying climate, the subjugation of women, and the growth of patriarchal societies that thrived on raiding and wars as a means of acquiring resources. I finally drifted off to sleep, my mind a jumble of thoughts that whirled at the edge of connecting the steaming Floridian night, desert dust, terrorism, and my missing lover.
Eight-thirty the next morning found us cruising along on Interstate 4 east of Tampa in a light green, late-model Mercedes 500L listening to some excellent blues on the CD player. Waltrine sat up front with Tom playing disc jockey, and I sat in back with a terribly blond gentleman in blue jeans named Scott Thomas, who was entertaining us with a running travelogue of the scenery we were passing, geologist-style. “We’re rising over a series of terraces,” he was saying, referring to a geological term for stairsteps in the terrain.
“What terraces?” I inquired, glancing about for any break in the topography and seeing none. The ground was monotonously flat. “Am I looking in the right place?”
Scott made a smooth swipe with his hand. “I’m talking about old wave-cut terraces, paleoshorelines. They’re subtle, just a few feet rise over many miles, but they’re there. It takes a special eye.”
I laughed. “I guess so.”
Scott said, “Sea level ha
sn’t always been where it is now. Back in Miocene or Pliocene time, it was up 300 feet, and all but a few square miles of Florida was underwater. Imagine just a couple little islands between us and the east coast, and another one way up north, almost into Georgia?” he said, falling into the Southerner’s habit of making statements sound like questions. “That was all there was of peninsular Florida sticking out of the ocean. But there were still-stands in sea level as the sea came in and went out, so the waves worked a little harder at some of the elevations’ cutting terraces.”
I laughed. “This is indeed subtle. The only breaks in topography I can see are the freeway ramps leading up to bridges.”
Scott said, “Yeah, we get a lot of flat jokes poked at us.”
Waltrine turned in her seat and looked at us. “When my daddy heard I was moving to St. Petersburg, he said, ‘Honey, on a clear day you can stand on the hood of your car and see Jacksonville.’”
“Ha, ha, ha,” Scott enunciated, deadpan. “Oh, quick, Waltrine, looky up ahead by Orlando there: Can you see Mickey Mouse’s ears? Oh, wait, I forgot we’ve got a hundred miles to go yet. We’ve got to allow for the curvature of the Earth.”
Waltrine said, “Hasn’t anyone explained to you that the Earth is flat? Of course, nothing is as flat as Florida.” She swung around and pantomimed panning the horizon with a sailor’s spyglass. “Oh, isn’t that cute! I can see Mickey’s little bitty asshole, too.”
“Why, Waltrine, I hadn’t taken you for a Flat Earther.”
“I take my membership in the Flat Earth Society very seriously. Tomorrow I intend to testify in front of Congress against evolution. So beam me up, will you, Scottie?”
Scott said, “With pleasure will I put a beam in you, O goddess of my heart,’cause there’s nothing flat about you!”
Waltrine stuck out her chest and pouted. “Discrimination ! Sexual harassment! I’m a-gonna sue you, big fellah!”
“Rowf!”
“Meow!”
Tom glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.
I said, “Rock-head humor meets the biologist’s avid interest in sex and feces, Tom. You’ll get used to us.”
“You rock jockeys are so earthy,” Waltrine drawled.
“Bite me,” Scott countered, then fell back into his travelogue as if no diversion from purely intellectual pursuit had occurred. “So now we’re getting into the sand dunes,” he said.
“Sand dunes?” I inquired. “Where?”
He pointed to the barely undulating topography that now stretched away from both sides of the road beneath a ragged forest of scrubby pine trees. “All through there,” he said.
“I don’t see any sand dunes. I can see that it’s not quite as billiard-table flat as everything else I’ve seen so far, but you call those dunes?”
“Well, they’re very old sand dunes. Pleistocene. Completely grown over.”
“Oh, so you mean the soil is very sandy, because at one point there were dunes, but now it’s all worn down and covered with trees.”
“Yeah. But not just any trees. Those are scrub pines and turkey oaks, and other plants that thrive on relatively sterile sands from the old dunes.”
“Subtle, like you say.”
“Yeah, Florida is all about subtlety.”
I asked, “What’s beneath the fossil sort-of dunes?”
Scott answered, “Right here? Phosphatic sands and clays of the Hawthorne Group, say about a hundred feet, and below that, thousands of feet of limestones and dolostones.”
“And what about the rest of the state?”
“Mostly limestone. We do a lot of limestone h’yar. Some limey sandstones. Some sandy limestones. It’s really cool.”
“But flat,” I said.
Waltrine said, “You’ve got to love flat.”
Scott raised one eyebrow one millimeter and said, “Opposites attract.”
I said, “I hear that all that limestone is riddled with holes. Like a huge concrete sponge.”
Scott chuckled. “Never thought of it like that. But yeah, that rock’s full of water, all right. Some wonderful aquifers. The springs are fantastic. Excellent diving.”
Tom broke into the conversation. “So you’re into scuba?”
My ears pricked up, wondering where he was trying to steer the conversation.
Scott said, “Sure. I love to dive. I like diving the sinkholes best.”
“Sinkholes?” Waltrine snorted. “You talking sweet nothings again?”
Scott said, “No, Waltrine, the limestone dissolves in the waters that percolate through the ground. Sometimes it makes a large cavity near the surface, and its roof collapses. One morning you get a little hole opening up on the surface, and then wham, it’s a hundred feet across by lunchtime. One up in Winter Park was 300 feet across and ninety feet deep. Now, that was a sinkhole. Ate an auto shop and four Porsches.”
Waltrine said, “No, that is sinful.”
Tom glanced at me in the rearview mirror as if asking for help guiding the conversation.
Making a guess at what he was driving at, I said, “I think Tom’s wondering about the impact of all the traffic we hear about in the news. Small-plane crashes and such.”
Scott snorted. “Oh, you’re talking about fishing for square grouper. When those drug planes go down in the ocean, or the go-fast boats have a little altercation with some sort of solid object out there, like maybe the Coast Guard, the bales of marijuana come floating ashore. Some beachcombers make a good living picking it up.”
Tom said, “I thought smuggling had slowed down a bit.”
Scott said, “No, if anything, it’s up. Ever since 9/11, the homeland security guys have had their hands full watching for terrorists, and they don’t have as much time and budget to spend on the dope smugglers.”
Tom asked, “Where is this mostly? Off the Gulf Coast?”
Scott shrugged. “Both coasts. Off the Gulf side it’s mostly planes going down, but off the Atlantic shore, it’s the go-fast boats from the Bahamas. They can make it in from one of the out islands in just over an hour. It’s nothing. Sometimes they put the load on a boat, set it on autopilot at high speed, and then jump overboard as the thing takes off. They swim back to their island, and the boat runs itself ashore on the barrier islands along the Atlantic coast. I suppose they have tracking devices on them and schedules so they can tell their pals on the mainland where to find them, but the idea is that with the value of the payload, the boat is expendable, and if it’s intercepted, they’re off scot-free.”
“What if the boat hits someone’s house?” I asked.
“Most of the way up and down, there are no houses immediately on the waterfront,” Scott replied. “Y’all wouldn’t want to build there. Y’all’d get taken out by the first hurricane.”
I glanced at Tom. He was steering the car with his left hand and had his right arm draped across the back of the seat, the fingers relaxed, all just ho-hum casual. He had to already know the answers to these questions. So then, why was he asking them?
Scott’s attention was once again on the scenery outside the car. “Okay, now we’re getting into another whole topography.” He pulled out another map, this one delineating the geomorphic provinces of Florida, the whole state broken up into chunks marked “Gulf coastal plain,” “Ocala karst district,” and so forth. He tapped a finger on it. “We’re coming off the Lake Wales Ridge now.”
“A ridge?” I asked. “Where?”
Waltrine said, “You missed it, with that nosebleed you got from the high altitude.”
I peered out the window, trying to connect what he had showed me on the map to what I saw. I saw no ridge. The pine trees and turkey oaks had given over abruptly to a dense stand of lanky trees—cypresses, I think—growing out of standing water. The trees were covered—no, the word is encrusted—with other vegetation. It was a vast expanse of green on green on green, the variety of shapes and sizes of foliage absolutely bewildering; the ground, or should I say water, a forbidding obstac
le course of roots and fallen logs. Shrugging off a chill of revulsion, I asked, “What’s with those trees? They look like they’ve grown green fur.”
“Epiphytes. Y’all never seen a swamp before, lady? But now, this is only one type of swamp. We have dozens of different kinds.”
The complex, looping swags of greenery whizzed past at seventy miles per hour, or should I say, we whizzed past them. But as we cruised onward, and Scott chattered on and on about what lay underneath the scenery, I slowly developed an appreciation—or at least a glimmering—of what he was trying to show me. Florida was indeed flat by my standards—500 miles long and 150 miles wide, and precious little of it rising more than a hundred feet above sea level—but that did not mean that the land did not vary. Swamp gave way to pine forest, and pine forest to pasture, and each vegetation type followed the geology. Scott had learned to observe it all just as clearly as I could see the big outcrops that were the rule rather than the exception in my part of the country. I began to appreciate his way of observing, and was impressed by the depth of experience that must have made it possible for him to see what he saw. But that’s the game in geology: repeated observations adding up to the experience necessary to sort out what at first seems hopelessly jumbled, or in this case, cryptically flat. “So you do geology by what’s growing on it.”
Killer Dust Page 15
