by Lynn Bohart
Lee didn’t hear the question because she had stopped breathing. “I found a report like this in Diane’s condo.”
“You’re kidding? Did it have Diane’s name on it?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“You need to get that piece of paper, Lee,” she said with earnest. “And find out what it is.”
“Can I keep this?”
“Sure.” Ruth took a marking pen and blotted out the name before giving it to Lee.
The pounding in Lee’s ears was loud enough to make her feel like she was at a nightclub. She got up and reached for the door handle, but was caught off-guard by the sight of a card pinned to a bulletin board right next to the door. Her eyes locked on four-lines of verse written in familiar, cursive handwriting.
“Who gave this to you?” Lee demanded, her head suddenly clear as glass.
“Martha,” Ruth replied, standing behind her. “She was an odd little woman. Meek and mild, I suppose you’d say. Most of the time you forgot she was even here, she was so quiet. But she liked to write limericks and left little notes for people in verse all the time. She gave me that to welcome me back on Monday.”
“Did she ever quote Shakespeare?” Lee asked, knowing the answer.
“Yes. But usually she wrote the verse herself.”
Lee stared at the card until she heard Ruth clear her throat. Lee looked up to see Maddox staring at them from across the room, a deeply satisfied grin on his face. Lee knew she should be unnerved, perhaps even scared, but something inside her had shifted with the realization that Bud Maddox was the one who had broken into her house and terrified her. With a firm set of her jaw, she stared back at the man she now believed may have killed not once, but twice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lee pulled in at the east entrance to the Green Valley Lumber Company a few minutes after two o’clock. After her conversation with Ruth, her mind was working overtime trying to figure out how she could regain entrance to Diane’s condo to find that sheet of paper. Also fighting for her attention were images of Maddox and the death of the lab technician, Martha Osgood. It was a miracle her mind cleared in time to prevent her from driving right through the yellow guardhouse barrier, but she slammed on her brakes half a second before the grille of her car broke it in two. A young man with wispy brown hair and a thin mustache came to the passenger side window.
“Good afternoon,” he said crisply.
“I’m here for a tour,” she said, wondering if he’d noticed she’d almost smashed through his barrier. “I’m with Twin Rivers Hospital.”
“Yes.” He consulted a clipboard. “You’ll be meeting with Mr. Gilman.”
He directed her to the Research and Development office, before returning to the guardhouse to lift the barrier. She managed to pull forward without mishap and find the right building. She parked next to a blue Ford pickup, but sat for a moment taking a few deep breaths to regain her composure before heading up to the second floor.
“There she is,” Jay Gilman offered amiably when she finally made an appearance. “Come on in, Lee.”
Gilman was a small man in his early forties, with round, dark eyes and thick, dark hair. A nervous energy punctuated every gesture, as if he were inhabited by another person trying desperately to get out. He nodded to a man who stood to his left.
“I assume you know Mr. Rupert?”
“Yes.” Lee greeted the photographer with a formal nod.
Gilman was already pointing to a second man who stood behind a metal desk. “This is Arthur Masterson. He’s our environmental specialist.”
Masterson was about thirty-five with a lock of bright red hair that flopped into a set of piercing blue eyes. He stood by passively, giving the floor to his boss.
“Arthur will take you on the tour,” Gilman rattled on. “I’m expecting a phone call, and Arthur knows the plant as well as anyone.” Everyone smiled and nodded. “We’re very excited you’ll be doing the article on our night shift. They don’t get much attention. So, now we need to get you guys into hard hats.”
Gilman turned and pulled two yellow hard hats from a shelf behind him and handed them over. Lee’s was too large and it slipped to one side. She pushed it back up with a snap, wishing she could be anywhere but here right now. She had things to do.
“And, here,” Gilman said, reaching into a drawer. He pulled out two small packets and handed one to Lee and one to Rupert. “Ear plugs – in case you need them. It gets pretty loud out there. Okay, follow Arthur and he’ll take good care of you.”
Lee thanked him and Gilman left. She and the photographer trailed behind their leader like a couple of kids on a field trip. They descended the stairs and sloshed across the yard, through sawdust and mud, to a building about a hundred feet away. Masterson stopped at a metal staircase that led up to an unmarked door.
“This mill only works the day shift, but the South mill runs twenty-four hours a day. If you choose the mill for the photograph, you’ll go over there tonight. The two plants are identical.”
Rupert towered over everyone else; he nodded without uttering a sound. Lee remembered that Sally had remarked once that Rupert preferred to deal in images rather than words. Watching him swivel his dark head back and forth taking in his surroundings, he looked like a human camera, mentally photographing his environment.
Masterson climbed the stairs and yanked open the door, releasing the dull roar of a working sawmill. The sounds of metal on metal, metal on wood, and the rattle and clank of moving chains created a crushing disharmony of noise. Lee momentarily cupped her hands over her ears to block it out and then remembered the ear plugs. She quickly opened the packet and stuffed one in each ear, before following the group onto a steel catwalk that jangled underfoot and swayed under the combined weight of three people.
Lee glanced through the steel grids to the floor below, thinking that wearing a dress would have been unthinkable. She looked out over the operating mill. It seemed that everywhere she looked, something was moving − sawing, flipping, or sorting. Conveyor belts ran in every direction. When a piece of machinery finished its job, multiple conveyor belts transported the wood or its byproducts to the next location. Lee was transfixed, momentarily forgetting the events from earlier that afternoon.
The group kept moving to a flight of stairs that led to a small structure mounted above the operation. It looked to be about the size of a studio apartment, with a front door and two windows looking out over the mill. Masterson stopped at the foot of the stairs, turned and yelled back at them.
“This is the filing room.”
Rupert had to lean down to shout in his ear. “What’s the filing room?”
“It’s where we repair and sharpen the saw blades,” he yelled. “Could be a good backdrop for the photo.”
Rupert nodded. They climbed the short staircase and entered through a single door. When the door closed, the blaring sounds of the mill were partially muffled, and Lee removed the ear plugs. Masterson motioned for them to come closer.
“This is what’s called a vibration-free room,” he announced, his hands making a wide arc to include the entire room. “We strive to achieve precision accuracy. The higher our accuracy, the more lumber we produce. In fact, we beat our competition by using thinner saws.” He walked over to a stack of ribbon-like saw blades that sat on the floor behind him. “See this saw tip? This is called stellite.” His fingers touched the point of a blade where there was a color differentiation in the metal. “It’s harder than steel, which means it’s harder than the saw blade itself. When it’s applied, it actually becomes part of the blade.”
Lee took a closer look at the band of dark color where the two metals had become one. She pointed this out to Rupert, but his thoughts were imperceptible as his dark eyes clicked away.
“These are band saws.” Masterson gestured to a set of blades that looked like large steel rubber bands. “The blade is wrapped around two wheels and then stretched tight with 35,000 pounds of pressure. It’s i
mportant that sawdust doesn’t build up down here in the gullet. If it fills up with sawdust, the blade will heat up.”
“And that’s a problem?” Rupert finally joined the conversation, putting a sick of gum in his mouth.
“Think of it like a rubber band. If you stretch the rubber band and then heat it, it will become limber. If the blade becomes limber, it will move through the wood like a snake. Not good.”
Masterson moved to the other end of the room, where a trap door opened to the floor below.
“Once the blades are sharpened, they’re lowered back into the mill from here,” Masterson pointed. “And here are the trim saws.”
He turned and they moved to another machine busy grinding a more traditional round saw blade. When the sharpener met the blade, it emitted a high-pitched metallic whine and shot off a ring of sparks. Lee walked past it and poked her head into a small workroom that sat off to one side. Just then, Masterson called her back.
“Let’s go back the way we came in,” Masterson offered quietly.
Re-entering the mill deafened Lee’s sensitive ears and she replaced the ear plugs. They crossed more catwalks until Masterson crowded them into a small room and closed the door, again shutting out much of the noise. A heavy man in overalls sat on a metal stool at the far end of the room staring at a computer. A large picture window extended the length of the room, reminding Lee of the surgical observation rooms in teaching hospitals.
“This is where it all begins,” Masterson explained. “The log comes in from the yard and goes through the de-barker. The de-barker spins around the log and scrapes the bark off as it travels through. The log then comes through the head rig just outside,” he said, pointing to his right. “It’s sent in here, scanned and sent to the saw.”
They looked out the window and saw a log as it was flipped up onto a turning chain and held. Something that looked like a short, covered bridge on wheels suddenly whizzed over it.
“Wow, what was that?” Lee asked in awe.
“That’s the scanner,” Masterson replied with a slight smile. “The scanner measures the log and decides how to cut each one.” He pointed to where the log was now positioned between two steel pads. “Those pads are called dogs. They’ll hold it in place while the log is sawed.”
As they watched, the log was carried through the saws and quickly cut into three pieces. The cut timber instantly fell onto a conveyor belt and returned to the area in front of the windows. In the blink of an eye, chains picked it up and transferred it to another set of conveyors moving in the opposite direction, while a second log took its place. The whole system reminded Lee of the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland.
“Where does the junk go?” Rupert inquired, his jaws working the gum in his mouth.
“The trim ends and edgings go to the chipper. I’ll take you down there in a minute. First, I want you to look over there.” He pointed to the left where an operator stood at a console, monitoring the timber as it left the saws. “He’s like a traffic cop. Boards that need additional cuts get diverted up here.” Masterson pointed to the far left where a set of irregular cut boards were moving more slowly up another set of conveyors. “Thinner boards go straight through.”
Lee looked back. The operator had stopped the conveyor and stepped out to reposition a board. He grabbed what looked like a long handled pick to move the board into its new position, reminding her of pictures she’d seen of loggers who skillfully rolled logs in the river.
“That’s called a picaroon,” Masterson offered, following Lee’s gaze. “It has an extremely sharp tip and helps move the wood in the direction they need it to go.”
“That’s got to be dangerous,” she mused out loud.
“Everything around here is dangerous.”
As he said this, a huge set of rollers appeared suddenly out of the framework like some fiendish monster in a cheap science fiction movie and pushed a board forward.
“Jeez,” Lee said in admiration. “This is pretty amazing.”
He smiled indulgently. “C’mon, I’ll take you downstairs.”
Masterson led them through a maze of ductwork and conveyor belts and down a cement staircase until they were at the back of the building. They crossed a small open area surrounded by large metal cylinders and climbed a short set of steps onto a platform, which opened up to the yard below. A large trough, filled with small pieces of wood, shavings, and sawdust, ran from right to left about two feet off the floor.
“This is called a vibrating conveyor. The sawdust falls through those holes at the bottom and is carried off to another building. Nothing goes to waste here.”
Three loud whistle bursts startled them, and an operator off to the side punched a button that made the trough begin to shake. While the sawdust fell through the holes, the larger wood products were left behind and moved forward until they disappeared over a ledge into something that thrashed and churned.
“That’s the chipper,” Masterson said to Rupert. “You wanted to know where the waste goes. Well, the chipper takes the waste material from the logs and does just what the name implies, makes them into chips.”
Lee remembered a groundskeeper at the hospital that had gotten his hand caught in a backyard chipper the summer before. She often passed him in the hallway and felt cold when she saw his bandaged arm, imagining how it must have felt. Watching this chipper now made her think bandages here wouldn’t be necessary, because there would be nothing left to bandage.
Masterson gestured for them to follow him back down the short staircase to where several lines of ductwork converged on the ceiling above. He turned to his right and led them under the pipes, around a few corners, to a metal ramp that zigzagged back up to the catwalks. The group left the building through an exit door and sloshed through the mud again to an adjacent wooden building. This building was connected to yet a third building by a conveyor chain above them. Lee thought the most important employee here had to be the guy who kept all these moving parts moving.
Masterson led them through a steel door where they found themselves in a cavernous room that resembled a large barn. In the far right corner was a huge pile of bark. A large crane sat in the middle of the room, connected to a platform above it.
“This is what we call the fuel house,” he explained. “We produce our own steam on the property to heat the kilns.” He pointed to the roof that was more than two stories high. “See that conveyor that crosses the building up there?”
Lee dropped her head back to see a large chain that ran across the roofline. Intermittent daylight flashed by as the chain moved and bark floated down from the roof onto the bark pile.
“That chain carries bark from the mill and drops it in here,” Masterson continued. “The rake,” Masterson gestured to the crane, “is hooked up to the rake carriage above.” He pointed to where the crane was attached to a platform that ran the width of the building. “The rake, or crane, is powered by hydraulics and can swing from side to side. The carriage, or the bridge it sits on, rolls up and back. And a boiler operator in the other building watches through a camera and can see when he has to move fuel around in order feed the chain.”
“Feed the chain?” Lee asked with distaste. For the first time she realized there was more than one chain attached to this building.
Masterson smiled. “Look over here.”
He moved over to the bark pile where a guard rail surrounded what looked like a conveyor belt that ran along the floor. It was actually a large-linked chain that sat in a shallow trough. The chain emerged from the center of the bark pile, picking up bark as it came, and moved across the floor.
“This is what’s called a drag chain, and if you watch, you’ll see how the big flights pick up the bark.”
“Flights?”
“Those pieces of steel attached horizontally to the chain. They’re indented slightly, so they’re like shallow cups. They hold the bark until the chain drops into that hole.”
He turned and pointed across the floor to his
left. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”
They followed the guard rail that surrounded the length of the chain, either to protect it, or to protect people from getting caught in it. The railing ran two-thirds the length of the building, until it ended at a small, two foot square opening in the floor. Lee’s gaze followed the chain where it emerged from the bark pile, until it dropped out of sight into the black hole.
“Where does it go?”
“The chain drops down, circles around and exits at the back of the building, where it loops around a spool and comes back in underneath the bark pile again.”
She peered over the guardrail in order to get a better view of where the chain disappeared into the floor.
“What happens down there,” she asked.
“When the chain drops down, the bark falls onto the boiler room chain, which runs underground to the next building. That’s where the bark is deposited into the boilers.”
Lee glanced to the roofline again. “So, one chain drops the bark in, another other moves it, and a third takes it out?”
“That’s right.”
“Amazing,” she said, thinking of how efficient everything was.
“Well, I’d hate to get caught in that,” Rupert said lightly, gazing into the hole in the floor.
“God, no kidding,” Lee agreed.
Masterson smiled. “Yes. It wouldn’t be good. Mainly because you wouldn’t fit very well.”
“I’ve never seen so many moving parts in my life,” Lee quipped. “This whole place is like an accident waiting to happen.
Masterson shrugged. “Actually, we have very few accidents.”
“Yeah, but when you do, I bet it’s a whopper,” Rupert whistled.
Just then, a loud beeping noise filled the room. Masterson took Lee by the elbow. “C’mon, we need to move.”
They quickly circled around the end of the guard rail and went up a short flight of stairs. A moment later, the sound of metal wheels forced Lee to look up. The rake carriage began to move along two metal tracks in the direction of the bark pile. As the platform moved, the crane moved with it, its big scoop bucket reaching out at an angle toward the pile. The bucket slid across the bark pile, depositing bark onto the chain.
