Body Farm 04 - Bones of Betrayal (9 page)

“Oh please.” It was the stage whisper again, surprisingly loud in the silence that had followed the minister’s big finish. I saw a few heads turn in the direction of my elderly seatmate; one of them was the minister’s. A look of confusion and anger flashed across his face, then he regained his composure and directed us to a closing hymn. The words were printed in the program, which everyone but me seemed to have received. We stood to sing, feet scraping and throats clearing, as the organist played a stanza to acquaint us with the melody.

The music sounded quaint and prim, like something from another century. I’d never considered myself much of a singer, so I didn’t much mind that I couldn’t sing along. I did feel slightly
self-conscious, though, to be standing amid the singing throng with my mouth closed and my hands empty. I felt a gentle nudge at my right elbow. My neighbor extended her program slightly toward me. She gripped the lower right corner of the page between a bony thumb and knuckle, her skin papery and blue-veined. She gave the program a slight twitch to indicate that I should take hold of the lower left corner. The paper certainly didn’t require both of us to hold it up; rather, the paper was a sort of bridge, a bond, between two strangers jammed together on a wooden pew. It was an oddly intimate gesture. Two strangers bound, by a link and a story, to a brass urn and the ashes within, which had once been Leonard Novak. Together we sang.

As the words of the hymn sank in, I decided to cut the minister some slack for his overheated delivery. The beginning of the song fit with his “divine spark” image, and the ending—well, I decided it took some guts to close an A-bomb scientist’s funeral with an antiwar plea.

I halfway expected to hear a snort or feel a cynical elbow in my ribs at the song’s earnest goodheartedness, but I never did. And as the final notes died away, I glanced to my right and saw that the woman beside me—the same woman who had said “Oh, please” just moments before—had tears on her cheeks.

As the service ended, I turned to her. “Thank you for sharing your pew and your program with me.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “You’re Brockton, aren’t you?” I nodded, surprised. “You’re the guy that watches the bodies rot?”

I laughed. “You do have a way with words. How’d you know? Do I smell that bad?”

“I saw your picture in the
Oak Ridger
a couple of days ago. Here, let’s go out the back door. I don’t want to have to shake the preacher’s hand—it would just embarrass us both.” She steered me through a door that led through a cluttered vestry and out into the thin sunshine. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. Fifty yards ahead of us, walking down the steps and away from the chapel, I saw Jess Carter, my dead lover. I thought I saw her, at any rate: I saw a striking woman wearing Jess’s black hair and Jess’s lithe body, walking Jess’s walk. Then she turned her head enough for me to see that it was not Jess. Of course not: it had been nearly a year since Jess was murdered; I had attended her memorial service in Chattanooga, had seen her ashes buried in a churchyard, had nestled a granite plaque to honor Jess in the ground at the Body Farm, where her corpse had been taken by her killer. How
could it possibly be Jess walking ahead of me down a hillside in Oak Ridge?

I felt a tug at my sleeve. My elderly companion was studying my face shrewdly. “You look like you just saw a ghost,” she said.

“I thought I did,” I said. “Or hoped I did. Sorry. You were saying something about the newspaper.”

“Oh, nothing important. Just that I saw your picture in the story about Novak. By the way, I gather that when you came to fetch the body, you left a souvenir behind, in about eight feet of water.” Her eyes were dancing as she pointed a crooked finger at the swimming pool, a hundred yards downslope from where we stood.

“They wrote about my chainsaw?” I meant to sigh but it came out as a laugh. “I wish they’d hurry up and drain that pool.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” she said.

“Oh, it’s starting to warm up,” I said, although I noticed that the rectangular opening I had cut in the surface had refrozen. “It’ll probably thaw out enough to drain in another couple of days.”

“It’s not just the ice,” she said. “It’ll be a miracle if the drain still works. That whole place is falling apart.”

Even from this distance, the inn’s peeling paint and sagging roof were easy to see. So was the murky ice. “It has seen better days.”

“Haven’t we all,” she said, “haven’t we all. That crumbling hotel pretty much sums up Oak Ridge, and all of us who’ve been here since the creation. We used to be young and smart and important—crossroads of the world, at least the world of atomic physics. Look at us now. The glory days are long gone. In a few more years, that hotel will be dust. And so will all the famous
people who sat on the porch and figured out how to build the bomb fifty years ago. No, sixty years ago. No, sixty-five, dammit. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence—they’ve been gone a long time. Novak was one of the last. They don’t seem to make them like that anymore.”

“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.”

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 collection.”

“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.