Heller added, “If we didn’t find any useful prints here-after the mess they made?-I doubt if they were dumb enough to leave them on a hot boat.”
They’d torn the house apart. Files ransacked, cabinets and bookshelves overturned. They’d smashed the hard drive to Applebee’s desktop computer, then poured some kind of syrup into it.
They’d been looking for something.
In Jobe’s office, next to the study, Frieda compared the various power cords, kicked around the rubble, before deciding his laptop computer was missing.
“It was a Mac,” she told us. “A PowerBook. Silver.”
The Russians hadn’t been carrying a laptop when they ran.
Heller said, “His computer’s missing. That could be important. I don’t suppose you know how he backed up his information?”
Disks, minidrives, floppies. There were none among the wreckage.
“No, he never backed up anything. His memory was so good”-Frieda tapped the side of her head-“he kept everything up here.”
Heller said, “Which maybe could make it more valuable. Depending-see what I’m saying?” He looked around the room, as if the computer might materialize. “Where you suppose it disappeared to?”
The woman told him, “Maybe somewhere else in the house.”
10
Detective Heller climbed over the stair railing. Frieda began to follow, but I touched my hand to her shoulder.
I wanted to go next.
I didn’t know what we’d find, and I wanted to be in a position to shield the lady if something nasty was waiting up there.
What we found, though, was the opposite of nasty. It was a lesson about the strange little man whom I was beginning to admire.
Florida was up there. The delicate peninsular oddity that European discoverers called the “Flowered Land.” It was the state as if seen from a space capsule, reproduced as a diorama. Maybe the same intricate, three-dimensional model that Tomlinson had seen at that save-the-planet rally.
My pal was right. An exceptional work.
“How beautiful,” Frieda whispered, all three of us staring. “So this is what he did up here all alone.”
I said, “This kind of precision… meticulous. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Thank God, they didn’t do too much damage.”
The Russians had been here. Cabinets were opened, contents scattered. Dust streaks showed they’d moved the diorama, maybe to look under it. Not easily done. The thing was huge. Dominated the upstairs.
Jobe had knocked out all but load-bearing walls. The room was raw-beamed, high-ceilinged, open as a warehouse. It was a big space that echoed. Later, I would pace it: approximately twenty-five yards by twenty yards. The diorama took up most of it.
He’d painted the floor a vivid, Gulf Stream blue to represent water. Then he’d constructed a scaled-to-size likeness of the state, shore to shore, from the Panhandle to Key West, all in interlocking sections. I paced this, too: seventy feet long, not counting the scimitar chain that represented the Florida Keys. At the middle, near the Lake Okeechobee area, the model was a little over twenty-five feet wide.
This was a museum-quality replica work built of wood, wire, paint, clay, natural stone, sand, and earth.
Peninsular Florida is about four hundred miles long and a hundred fifty miles wide. I did the rough calculations in my head. Approximately two inches equaled one mile. It gave Applebee room to include unexpected surface features.
At first glance, the detail was remarkable. It got better. There was a pan-sized magnifying glass mounted on a nearby trolley. I switched on the light, lowered the convex lens, then stared awhile before giving a low, soft whistle. “You need to look through this.”
Tomlinson was right. This was art. The magnifying glass changed the aspect from a satellite view to what you might see flying over in a Cessna. What seemed to be beaded mosaics were actually micro-sized communities, bricked downtowns, shopping centers. Cars were half the size of a rice grain, yet so exacting that Applebee must have used surgical instruments. Diminutive wire trees-cypress, mangroves, gumbo-limbos, and oaks-the river systems, sinkholes, lakes, pine uplands, cities, military bases, train lines, baseball stadiums, and strands of royal palms were meticulous. This might have been a miniature world, populated by a miniature race.
Some landmarks were larger than scale. Near Orlando, he’d built a tourism icon disproportionately big: the Disney World castle, spires, and flags in place. Had Frieda not explained her brother’s love-hate feelings, it would’ve seemed absurd.
The castle dominated the region-maybe a symbol of perfect order in the little man’s orderly and private world.
Or maybe a symbol of something he detested.
The model could have been created only by someone with a hydrologist’s eye for the interlinking of water. The man knew the fragility of a biota that was floored with porous limestone, dependent on moving water.
Kneeling, I said to Frieda, “Look underneath. It has layers, like a wedding cake. Everything built on tracks, so it can be viewed in sections. There’s a pump system, too.”
Heller helped me slide away a portion of the top. The region’s substrata lay exposed.
Florida sits on a skeleton of prehistoric sea creatures and corals, karsts topography. It’s a honeycomb of caves, underground rivers, and permeable limestone. The diorama showed sections of the state’s three main aquifers. The depths were labeled incrementally from one hundred feet to three thousand feet.
I’d read about the complicated interlinks; here they were easily seen. Every water source served as a conduit to another. Drop a gallon of red dye into a sinkhole near Cross Creek, or Gainesville, and a red bloom might reappear days later, and several hundred miles away, in some inland lake near Miami. Or Florida Bay off Key Largo. Or Marathon-the dye jettisoned from the inner earth by subterranean current.
Applebee’s creation was a three-dimensional schematic. Plastic tubing replaced rock corridors. Aquifers were walled with Plexiglas. He’d elevated everything off the floor to hide the complicated pump system beneath.
I found the switch, and the pumps were soon making a pleasant, burbling hum as water circulated throughout the model, re-creating flow patterns below and above the ground, including the slow, pan-flat drainage of water from lakes of the Kissimmee Chain into the Everglades.
That caused me to think of exotic parasites.
“How long you think it’d take a man to build something like this? A couple years?” Heller was impressed, but his tone was also saying, A nut case, man. A kook.
Frieda said, “My brother? When he got into something-a project, an experiment-nothing else existed. He’d stay up forty-eight hours working nonstop. Seventy-two hours-whatever it took. But even for him, lots and lots of hours.”
I said, “This needs to be preserved. Maybe Gainesville, the Florida Museum of Natural History. They have good people there.”
The woman was nodding. “Or the Smithsonian.”
She was standing in what would have been the Gulf of Mexico, at the Florida Panhandle, near Tallahassee. I realized that I, too, had drifted automatically toward my home. I was standing above Sanibel and Captiva islands, still using the magnifying glass, charmed by the micro-sized docks of Dinkin’s Marina, and the pinhead-sized stilt house that represented my home.
Like certain salmonidae, humans tend to gravitate to the place of their origin.
Applebee hadn’t included all the marinas in Florida-impossible-but he’d included my little island, larger than scale.
I was touched. I remembered Frieda saying that he’d read my papers. He was a fan. It could have been the sort of flattery that we all indulge in from time to time. But the man had included my home in his intricate vision of Florida, so maybe it was true.
The woman stooped, touched her finger to a watery area southwest of Tallahassee. “Unbelievable. Doc, you’ve been to Apalachicola?”