As I was packing up my slide projector afterward, an elderly man who’d been sitting near the front of the room approached. “I worked in Oak Ridge during the war,” he said. I was surprised; he had some years on him, but he looked strong and vigorous still.
“Didn’t they have child-labor laws back then? You don’t look old enough to have worked in Oak Ridge during the war.”
He ignored the transparent flattery. “I was in charge of security,” he said, and my head snapped up. Funny: you see a ninety-year-old at a Rotary Club luncheon, you tend to see him just as some old codger with a lot of hours to fill. You don’t tend to look at him and think, I bet this guy once helped guard atomic secrets at the world’s biggest military project. I didn’t say that, of course; I just said, “That was a big job. Must have been tough.”
He shook his head. “Sure beat the hell out of dying on some Jap-infested island in the Pacific,” he said. “I knew I’d live to see the end of the war. And we were working on something that was supposed to help end the war, so I figured I was probably in the best-defended place on earth. I felt like a lucky guy.” I nodded.
“Did you know what you were protecting?”
He shrugged. “We didn’t talk about it,” he said. “One of the MPs did, and a day later he was gone, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They sent him to the Pacific. They didn’t dare send him to Europe, because they didn’t want to take a chance that the Germans would capture him and get some information out of him. Poor bastard was probably dead three months later.” He hesitated, studying me closely, as if to determine whether I was trustworthy. “By the summer of ’45, I had a pretty good idea what they were building. But I kept my mouth shut, because I wanted to stay right here.”
We chatted a bit more, then he excused himself. Townes, who’d been talking to several power-suited women, came over to carry my slide carousel to the truck. I said, “Do you know that guy I was talking to? He was in charge of security in Oak Ridge back during the war.”
She smiled. “You might say I know him,” she said. “That’s Bill Sergeant. He spent twelve years spearheading Rotary International’s global campaign to eradicate polio. There’s a statue of Bill downtown in Krutch Park.”
On the way back to campus, I detoured through downtown and parked — briefly — in front of a fire hydrant beside Krutch Park. Seated in the southwest corner, a strong-limbed child perched on his lap, was a life-size bronze statue of a lucky, modest old codger.
CHAPTER 13
Three days after the morgue disaster, Dr. Sorensen had data from dozens of blood samples and urine samples, which he’d gathered to track lymphocyte levels and DNA damage in our cells. That data, combined with the incident timelines we’d compiled, helped him refine his initial estimate of our exposures. He’d been surprisingly close that evening in the ER: Emert had gotten “only” 18 to 24 rads; Miranda and I, 25 to 35 rads; and Garcia, 380 to 520 rads. The lymphocyte counts for everyone but Garcia had dropped only slightly, remaining well within the range considered normal. Garcia’s lymphocytes, however, had plummeted: at his first blood draw, his lymphocyte count was a robust 2,950, a number that corresponded to the nearly three billion white cells in every liter of his blood. Twenty-four hours later, it had fallen to 1100, and at the forty-eight-hour blood sample, it was hovering at 600. His bone marrow was dying, and his immune system was shutting down. According to Sorensen, Garcia was almost certain to develop acute radiation syndrome, probably a severe case. The unspoken subtext of “severe” was that he might not survive.
Garcia had been shifted to a reverse-isolation room — a “bubble” room, I’d heard it called — as even minor infections could prove fatal to him. The air was filtered and the room was pressurized so outside air couldn’t seep in. Still, Miranda and I made it a point to visit the hospital once or twice a day, waving to him through the glass window and talking to him on the intercom. The second morning of his ICU stay, we entered the unit and came upon Carmen Garcia, slumped in a chair in the hallway, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Miranda sat on one side of Carmen, I sat on the other, and we wrapped our arms around her as she wept. When her sobs finally stopped, she reached up and laid one hand briefly on Miranda’s cheek, the other on my cheek, and then she rose and walked toward the elevators. None of us had said a word. After she was gone, Miranda and I went to Eddie’s window. Switching on the intercom microphone and then kneeling down on the concrete floor, we put sock puppets on our hands and enacted a three-minute Punch-and-Judy routine, one that spoofed ourselves arguing in the bone lab about whether a mystery bone was from a human or a blowfly. Miranda’s sock puppet was a caricature of me, and mine was a red-haired sock version of Miranda. She dropped her voice half an octave and did her best impression of a pompous but clueless professor, while I affected a falsetto and sang the praises of Google and Wikipedia and left-wing liberalism. After it was done, and Garcia had called “bravo!” and pretended to applaud with his bandaged hands, and told us what attentive care he was receiving, we said goodbye. In the hallway, Miranda sank into a chair — the same chair we’d found Carmen in — and wept on my shoulder.
Emert and Thornton had both interviewed Novak’s former wife, the woman I’d met at the funeral, and both had come away empty-handed, they reported in a three-way teleconference. Emert was of the opinion that she had Alzheimer’s disease—“She kept asking me who I was,” he said, “and then talking to me like I was her son, saying ‘Mommy this’ and ‘Mommy that.’ She said she’d never heard of anybody named Leonard Novak.” Thornton hadn’t fared much better; she’d told him she used to know someone named Lenny, but she couldn’t quite remember where or when or how.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “That woman was sharp as a tack when I talked to her at Novak’s funeral. She was lucid, she was irreverent, she was funny. She even noticed that I got spooked for a second, when I thought I saw Jess. A woman I lost.”
“I think maybe the old gal’s sweet on you,” said Emert.
“I think maybe Emert’s right,” said Thornton. “And I think maybe you should see if you can get more out of her than we did. Find out what she knows about Novak, and who might have killed him, and why.”
“And what ‘I know your secret’ meant,” added Emert.
And so it was, after that conversation and a call to the phone number Beatrice had scrawled on the funeral program, that I found myself winding up Black Oak Ridge in search of her house.
I passed the house twice before I found it. It was set back off the street and down a slight slope, tucked amid hemlock trees and rhododendron bushes. It was a low, flat-roofed house with wide, overhanging eaves; judging by the clean lines, the ample windows, and the warm redwood siding, I guessed that it dated from the 1960s. It reminded me of the houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was famous for blending houses into their natural settings.
Stepping beneath them onto the flagstones bordering the front wall, I felt myself entering a zone of shelter, of sanctuary. The door — a large red slab flanked by narrow sidelights and shielded by a glass storm door — nestled within the corner of an L, and the roofline angled across the corner, creating a triangular porch at the entryway. The walkway and porch were bordered by low irregular terraces of river rock and creeping juniper. A small, artificial stream tumbled down the rocks and into a pool at the doorway. To reach the door, I crossed a huge flagstone — it must have weighed a thousand pounds or more — that bridged the pool. Now this, I thought, this is an entrance.