Bones of Betrayal bf-4

by Jefferson Bass

  “So you knew him?”

  “It was a long, long time ago,” she said, “but yes, I did. There’s a story in it. Would you like to hear it sometime?”

  “I believe I would,” I said. “I’m guessing you spin a pretty good story.”

  “Come see me,” she said, “and we’ll find out.”

  She dug around in a small pocketbook and fished out a pen. Folding the photocopied program from the memorial service in half to make it stiffer, she wrote her name, address, and phone number and handed the paper to me.

  “Beatrice Novak,” the name read.

  My eyes widened. She smiled slightly. “I was married to him,” she said. “Once upon a time.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I wasn’t ready to leave Oak Ridge yet — I wanted to steep myself a little longer in the sepia-toned sense of history Novak’s funeral had stirred up — so I drove past the strip malls lining Oak Ridge Turnpike and turned in at the American Museum of Science and Energy, a blocky, mud-colored brick building beside the police station. The sidewalk outside the building was edged with spiky components from coal-mining machines and oil-drilling rigs. Inside — through a doorway bordered by barbed wire and a replica of a World War II sentry post — a series of photos and videos and documents told the story of the Manhattan Project. One display panel featured scratchy footage of Albert Einstein, instantly recognizable from the wild mop of fuzzy white hair, captured on film writing a letter. Alongside the video monitor was an enlarged copy of the letter Einstein had sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939, voicing concern about Germany’s atomic-energy research and recommending that the United States embark on a quest to build an atomic bomb. Although it would be two years before much would happen, Einstein’s letter had planted a seed, and — at least in historical hindsight — was part of the bomb’s scientific pedigree.

  What interested me most in the darkened room, though, were the wartime photos documenting the creation and wartime years of the town that came to be known as Oak Ridge. In three short years, a handful of rural settlements — family farms, country stores, rustic schoolhouses — was transformed into the biggest scientific and military endeavor in the history of the world.

  An elderly museum docent wandered through, possibly because I looked like an unsavory character, but more likely because I was the only visitor and the docent was bored. “These photos are amazing,” I said.

  “They have copies of all of these, plus a lot more down at the library,” he said. “In the Oak Ridge Room, which is the local history collection. If you’re interested, it’s worth a look. It’s in the Civic Center, just down the hill.” He pointed toward the back wall of the room, and I remembered seeing a pair of buildings, linked by an outdoor plaza and a fountain, set in a park below the police station. I thanked him and resumed wandering through the displays, which culminated in a short black-and-white film on the flight of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber that lumbered aloft from an airfield on the island of Tinian in the predawn hours of August 6, 1945. Many hours later and ten thousand pounds lighter, the Enola Gay returned to Tinian, having dropped a single bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Almost as an afterthought, the film included a brief segment on the decimation, three days later, of Nagasaki by a second atomic bomb. Two entire cities had been reduced to rubble, and many thousands of people vaporized, in the blink of an eye. And although the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small — scarcely firecrackers, compared to the massive hydrogen bombs developed during the 1950s and 1960s — the images of unprecedented devastation weighed on my heart.

  Wandering out of the darkened history room and into the brighter light of the lobby, I lifted a hand in goodbye to the docent. “We have other exhibits,” he called after me. “Nuclear power, petroleum, renewable energy, neutron research.”

  “Another time,” I said. “Today, I’m in history mode.” I pushed through the glass doors, passed the mining and drilling machinery, and ambled down the long, gentle hill toward the Civic Center and the library. In the foreground was an outdoor stage topped by a gleaming white tent of some high-tech architectural fabric. Far off to one side was another, smaller pavilion of some sort, this one a rustic structure framed of wood timber. Curious, I decided to take a closer look. The structure’s gabled roof and heavy beams reminded me of a Japanese temple, and as I drew near, I saw an immense bell — long and cylindrical, rather than wide at the base — suspended from the trusswork. Beside the bell was a plaque. FRIENDSHIP BELL, the words read. It had been cast in Japan in 1993, the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Oak Ridge. A SYMBOL OF THE FRIENDSHIP AND MUTUAL REGARD THAT HAVE DEVELOPED BETWEEN OAK RIDGE AND JAPAN OVER THE PAST FIFTY YEARS, it went on. FRIENDSHIP MADE SO MUCH MORE MEANINGFUL BECAUSE OF THE TERRIBLE CONFLICT OF WORLD WAR II WHICH OAK RIDGE PLAYED SUCH A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN ENDING. I was particularly struck by the plaque’s final words: THIS BELL FURTHER SERVES AS A SYMBOL OF OUR MUTUAL LONGING AND PLEDGE TO WORK FOR FREEDOM, WELL-BEING, JUSTICE, AND PEACE FOR ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD IN THE YEARS TO COME. Oak Ridge had come a long way, I reflected, turning my steps toward the library.

  The library, like its companion building, was a contemporary structure—1970s, I guessed — made of poured, putty-colored concrete topped by bands of clerestory windows. The forms for the concrete had been lined with rough-sawn vertical boards, and the grain of the wood was etched into the concrete. Maybe it was just the reflective mood I was in, but I liked the notion that the wood’s contribution — brief but important — had been captured for posterity in the structure’s very bones.

  Inside, I stopped at the circulation desk to ask about the local history room. “Yes, the Oak Ridge Room,” said the young woman at the counter. “It’s right back there.” She pointed toward a back corner of the building. I thanked her and headed that way.

  The room had been partitioned off from the main area by glass walls and glass doors. Inside, I saw brimming bookshelves, tall filing cabinets, flat map drawers, and a shelving unit crammed with fat, black binders. If it was local history I was hungry for, the Oak Ridge Room appeared to offer an all-you-can-eat buffet. I took hold of the handle of one of the glass doors and tugged. It rattled but did not open. I tugged on the other door’s handle. Nothing doing.

  “Try pushing,” said a female voice behind me. I pushed. Still nothing. “Oh. I guess the lock works after all,” said the voice. I turned and saw a woman with black hair and laughing eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t resist. You looked so serious.” I stared at her, and her amusement turned to concern. “Really, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just thought—”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “It’s not about the door. The door…the door thing was funny. It’s just that for a second there, you reminded me of someone.” The librarian — Isabella Morgan, according to a plastic nameplate pinned to her sweater — was the woman I’d glimpsed earlier in the day; the woman who made me think I’d seen a ghost. “Weren’t you at Dr. Novak’s funeral?”

  She looked startled. “Yes,” she said. There was a pause, and then she added — awkwardly, I thought—“speaking of local history.” I introduced myself, and told her about cutting Novak’s body from the ice of the swimming pool. “Oh right,” she said. “Your picture was in the Oak Ridger. You’re the one with the chainsaw.”

  I laughed. “Actually, I’m the one without the chainsaw, as everyone keeps reminding me. Anyhow, I’ve gotten interested in the city’s history. I was hoping to browse around in the Oak Ridge Room for a bit.”

  She reached into a pocket of her sweater and pulled out a key. “Browse away,” she said. “Anything in particular I can help you find?”

  “Hmm. Well, a guy up at the museum said you’ve got a whole bunch of World War II photographs. Might be fun to look through those, if they’re easy to get to.”

  She pointed to the shelves of fat three-ring binders. “Easiest thing in the room to find,” she said. “It’s a remarkable col
lection.”

  “From the ones I saw in the museum,” I said, “it looks like the photographer started snapping pictures before the Army even set foot here.”

  “Just about,” she said. “It’s almost like he wanted to show how the prophecy came true.”

  “The prophecy? What prophecy?”

  “You don’t know about the prophecy?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “What prophecy?”

  “Around 1900,” she said, “a local mystic predicted the creation of Oak Ridge and the role the city would play in World War II.”

  “Some hillbilly a century ago knew about uranium enrichment and plutonium production? So that’s where Fermi and Oppenheimer and Einstein got the idea?”

  She smiled. “Well, he didn’t go into details about the physics and chemistry,” she said. “John Hendrix was his name; he was a preacher who was considered a bit of a crackpot. He also drank a bit, they say.”

  “Helps the sermons flow more trippingly off the tongue,” I said. “Or gives you more knowledge of sin, maybe.”

  “The story goes,” she went on, “that John Hendrix heard a voice telling him to sleep in the woods and pray for forty days and forty nights.”

  “That’s a lot of praying,” I said.

  She nodded. “On the forty-first day, he emerged and told some people at a little country store that he’d had a vision.” She took down a well-worn book—Back of Oak Ridge—and opened it to a page near the front. “Here’s what he said: ‘There will be a city on Black Oak Ridge’—that’s the ridge where all the World War II housing was built—‘and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock’s farm and Joe Pyatt’s place.’” I was about to ask who Sevier Tadlock and Joe Pyatt were, but — as if reading my mind — she held up a finger to shush me. “He said, ‘A railroad spur will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville, and then branch off and turn toward Scarboro. Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion, and the earth will shake.’ But here’s the best part, where he talks about Bear Creek Valley, where the Y-12 Plant was built: ‘Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be.’” She paused just long enough to let that sink in, then read one more line: “‘I’ve seen it. It’s coming.’”

  She closed the book slowly, then looked at me over her glasses, her eyebrows rising to ask, Well?

  To my surprise, the words had sent a bit of a shiver along my spine. By this stage of my life, I had become a bit of a skeptic when it came to matters of metaphysics. I dealt in scientific and forensic facts — grim facts, at that — and the comforting words of organized religion ignored a lot of suffering. My faith had also been pretty thoroughly undermined by the unmerited suffering and death of my wife Kathleen a few years before. Nevertheless, I had to admit that occasionally I encountered phenomena that science seemed unable to explain. This prophecy appeared to be another of those.

  “He said that in 1900? Forty years before the bulldozers showed up?”

  “Somewhere around there. And he died in 1915, so it’s not like he saw it unfold, then stepped forward after the fact and claimed, ‘Oh yeah, I had a vision about this a long time ago.’ It’s been pretty well documented that he came out of the woods wild-eyed, talking about factories and engines and winning a big war.”

  “And the bit about Tadlock and Pyatt?”

  “Their farms straddled the little hill where the Manhattan Project headquarters was built,” she said. “During the war, it was a huge wooden building nicknamed ‘the castle on the hill.’ In the 1970s, DOE — the Department of Energy — built a concrete and glass building on the same site. So it’s still what Hendrix called ‘the center of authority,’ even today.”

  “And the railroad spur?”

  “Goes right past his grave,” she said. “Within a mile or so of the Y-12 Plant.”

  I nodded. “Sounds like Hendrix got it right,” I said. “A lot more specific than the psychics who call up the police and say, ‘I see a body in a dark, damp place.’ Did he predict the Friendship Bell, too?”

  She laughed — a musical laugh that reminded me of pealing bells — and I felt another tingle along my spine. “No, he didn’t look that far ahead,” she said, “though it seems like he should have, since he talked about great wars.” Seeing my puzzled look, she explained. “There was a big controversy about the bell,” she said. “The Peace Bell, most people call it. Some locals thought it was a slap in the face of everyone who’d worked on the Manhattan Project. Too much like an apology. There was even a lawsuit by some folks who claimed it was a religious shrine, and shouldn’t be on public property. The controversy seems to have died down by now, though.”

  “Maybe because most of the people who worked on the bomb are dying down, too,” I said. She gave me an odd, sharp look, and I wished I’d been more tactful.

  “If you need anything, I’ll be at the Reference Desk,” she said, pointing to the other side of the reading room. She left me flipping through photos of bulldozers and cranes and trucks mired to their axles in mud. But the image that most occupied my mind’s eye was the image of the black-haired, brown-eyed librarian reading me the prophecy of Oak Ridge and its role in winning “the greatest war that ever will be.”

  I hoped that the future would prove John Hendrix to be as accurate on that last point as he’d already been on the others.

  CHAPTER 12

  The morning after the funeral, I woke up feeling more energetic than I had in days. Maybe that was because I’d gotten a solid night’s sleep, uninterrupted by needles jabbing me for blood. Or maybe it was because I’d had a nice dream about the librarian in Oak Ridge. I got to campus by seven, stopped off in the bone lab to leave some notes for Miranda, then spent a couple of hours grading the first Human Origins test of the semester.

  At eleven Peggy called. “Don’t forget the talk you’re giving at lunchtime.”

  “Which talk I’m giving at lunchtime?”

  Even through the receiver, her exasperated sigh carried clearly. “Rotary Club.”

  “Oh, the Rotary talk,” I said. “Sure. I remembered. You had me worried for a second there. I was afraid maybe you’d double-booked me.”

  “I am never the one who double-books you,” she said tartly.

  At eleven-thirty I left campus and drove to the Marriott. The Marriott was an architectural oddity — a concrete wedge that looked like a cross between a Mayan pyramid and a misplaced hydroelectric dam — perched on a hill above the river. Townes Osborn, who had booked me for the talk, was waiting at the entrance when I arrived. Despite her questionable taste in luncheon speakers, Townes — who ran a prominent advertising agency — was the only woman ever elected president of the Knoxville Rotary Club.

  After the Rotarians lunched on orange-glazed chicken breast and rice pilaf and whatever vegetable medley was the current fashion among civic groups, I showed slides from a case I’d worked near Nashville some years ago. The Williamson County Sheriff’s Office had received a call expressing concern about a well-to-do middle-aged woman who lived alone in a mansion on thirty or forty acres. She hadn’t made the trip down the driveway to the mailbox in more than a week, said the observant neighbor, and although her car was parked at the house, she wasn’t answering the phone. A deputy was duly dispatched to check on the woman. She didn’t come when he rang the bell, but the door was unlocked, so he turned the knob and opened it to call out to her. When he did, the woman’s three large dogs — two German shepherds and a collie — bolted past him and into the yard.

  The woman was nowhere to be seen — at least not in recognizable human form. The story, as we quite literally pieced it together, was this: The woman, who had a serious heart condition, had died, and with no other source of sustenance available, her dogs had eaten her body to stay alive. Combing t
he house, my students and I found only the cranial vault, the well-chewed shafts of a few long bones, and one painted toenail — just one — which the dogs had turned up their noses at for some odd reason. As the Rotarians chuckled, I thought about the shipwrecked man eating what he believed to be albatross. The dog story had a bizarre postscript: a couple of weeks later, a woman called me from a Nashville bank to ask, “Did you happen to find a seven-thousand-dollar diamond ring in that house?” I did not, I assured her. The bank, it seems, had insured the ring, and if it couldn’t be found, they’d have to pay the sum to the dead woman’s estate.

  “There is one other place the ring might be,” I said. The woman was excited to hear this. “You know she was eaten by her dogs,” I said. She gasped; apparently she had not heard this minor detail. “If you could get someone to collect all the dog crap and sift through it, there’s a chance they’d find that ring.” She thanked me profusely and hung up. Two days later, a Williamson County deputy appeared in my classroom with a bag containing thirteen pounds of dog turds. The deputy looked quite unhappy, so I assumed he’d been the one assigned to collect the…evidence. His countenance brightened considerably when I told him that every single turd would have to be carefully squeezed between the fingers of my students. Misery really does love company, I concluded when I saw him grin. Once he was gone, I sent the bag of dog crap to be X-rayed. There was no ring to be seen, though I did notice a tangle of undigested panty hose in the bag — containing another toenail snagged in one stocking foot. “Next time you see your dog looking at you with love and devotion,” I concluded, “remember, he might be thinking about a snack.” The Rotarians laughed and clapped.