“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 the 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.
During the Q&A session at the end of the talk, Townes asked about Dr. Novak’s death, since the story — including the wild speculation about the “polonium” that had supposedly killed him — had been splashed all over the media. “I can’t really talk about that case,” I said, “since it’s still an open investigation. All I’ll say is that I’m saving a lot on my light bill these days, since I now glow in the dark.” The joke drew a few groans but a fair number of laughs.