We decided that I’d follow Karnes’s Range Rover in my Chevy, in case I wanted to head straight back to Indianapolis. I said goodbye to Gennetta Jones, who was minding the store, and we set out on the short drive northeast to the forest.
Another advantage of driving two vehicles was the break I got from Karnes’s voice. Unfortunately, we still had a hike ahead of us after we’d parked near Yellowwood Lake. It gave the professor plenty of time to tell me about his most recent triumph. He had investigated some crop circles that had appeared in a field of winter wheat near Hopewell. I remembered the case, though I hadn’t had a chance to check out the circles myself. I even remembered the solution, but that didn’t stop Karnes from describing it proudly.
“It turned out to be the work of the farmers who owned the field, two brothers named Happe. Alonzo and Albert. They’d read about the crop circles in England and decided to fake their own. So they could bilk gullible tourists, probably. It doesn’t matter how many of those crop circles are exposed as fakes; people still want to believe in them. Even some so-called scientists. There were a couple of guys from Ball State who were convinced they were detecting electromagnetic abnormalities in the Happes’s field.
“Electromagnetic abnormalities,” he repeated with disdain. “You can find those anywhere if you look hard enough. They’re the scientific equivalent of staring at a bowl of pudding so long you think you see the Virgin Mary.
“I came down pretty hard on the Happes. Did my best to humiliate them. To serve notice that their kind of fakery won’t be tolerated in my part of Indiana.”
If I’d had a map handy, I would have asked Karnes to point out his part of Indiana, perhaps using colored pins. He descended a little from his pedestal without my prodding.
“Not that I really accomplished very much,” he said. “The faithful are always ready to stream to the site of any new miracle. Look at this path we’re following. It wasn’t here the first time I came out. It’s been worn since by the curious and the credulous. There’s the first rock, about fifty yards dead ahead.”
I could just make it out through the leafless trees. At that distance, the brown slab looked like one of the wooden platforms placed in trees for deer hunting, though this would have been an unusually tall tree stand. As we drew closer, I saw that it would also have been an unusually thick one. In shape, the flat stone resembled an arrowhead, its two long sides about four feet in length and the shorter base three. It looked to be four to five inches thick. It had been placed so that each side was supported by a healthy branch.
“They matched the stone to the tree with some care, but as you can see, there’s no shortage of sandstone rocks lying around. Or of suitable trees, of course.”
Getting one of the plentiful rocks into one of the convenient trees had still been an impressive feat. I asked Karnes how he thought it had been done.
“With an old-fashioned block and tackle, it wouldn’t be as hard as you might think. A hundred years ago, every Hoosier farm boy knew how a block and tackle worked. Now that knowledge is lost, at least as far as the average undergraduate on my campus is concerned. Thanks to television, they know more about tractor beams and magic crystals. A bad education is a kind of slavery.”
I flirted with the ranks of the disenfranchised then by saying something admiring about the way the stone lifters had managed to form one perfectly straight line and part of another.
“No great trick,” Karnes said dismissively. “Not with GPS, the Global Positioning System. With a hand-held GPS, you can make any pattern you want. The urge to form a pattern is what always trips these bozos up.”
He’d said something similar back in his office. I asked him what he meant.
“It’s not enough for the average hoaxer to do this stuff randomly. They have to impose a pattern. That tells me that the motive isn’t just to baffle people. It’s to suggest that there’s an underlying intelligence behind these phenomena and, by extension, behind the universe itself. The need to believe in something big is a fixation for these guys. Their anti-rational cast of mind makes them the natural prey of a scientist like me.
“And as I said earlier, their pattern, whatever it is, is also the hoaxers’ Achilles’ heel. It suggests where they’ll strike next, like the gap our guys have left in the green line.”
I asked him if he had the gap under surveillance.
“You’ll pardon me if I don’t answer that,” he said. “I don’t want my arrangements to end up in the Star Republic.”
Karnes offered to show me one of the other rocks, but I’d seen enough. Neither of us said much on the march back to the cars. He was saving his voice for his afternoon lecture, and I was thinking about my next stop.
It turned out to be Hopewell, a small farming town just far enough south of Indianapolis to have been spared the promotion to bedroom community. Something about the way the rock mystery had been more or less laid on Karnes’s doorstep made me think the people behind it might have a bone to pick with the professor. That made me think in turn of the Happes, the notorious crop-circle forgers. The men Karnes had gone out of his way to humiliate.
I located the Happe farm without too much trouble. I found the brothers in the shadow of a barn, changing a tire on a pickup. They were both big men, both in their sixties, both dressed in heavy boots and overalls and canvas jackets. The one who answered to Alonzo wore a brown ball cap on what appeared to be a hairless head. Albert, who must have been the family fashion plate, sported a hat of red and black plaid. They both looked down at their muddy boots when I mentioned Karnes.
“That guy,” Alonzo said. “He said we did the crop circles to cheat people out of money.”
“We didn’t,” Albert clarified.
I asked for their real motive.
They looked at each other and shrugged.
“We read about them,” Alonzo said.
“You can’t understand something just by reading about it,” Albert said.
“You’ve got to do it yourself,” Alonzo said.
Albert gestured toward the old truck. “Take it apart and put it back together.”
I pointed out that the Happes had allowed people to think their crop-circle experiment was something else.
“That was part of understanding it,” Alonzo said, and Albert nodded.
When I asked them if they’d heard about rocks finding their way into trees down in Brown County, the brothers looked at each other again. This time I thought I saw a small smile pass from one weathered face to the other.
“Nope,” Alonzo said.
“Why ask us?” Albert added.
I pointed upward to a beam that extended outward from the peak of the barn’s roof. Hanging from it was a heavy pulley block and several ropes. It was an example of a block and tackle, the device Karnes had mentioned. This one was used to lift heavy objects into the barn’s loft.
“That’s nothing,” Alonzo said. “Lot of those around.”
“No great trick to using one,” Albert said. “We could teach somebody in an afternoon.”
They shared another smile and returned to the tire project.
“Karnes is probably missing something simple,” Alonzo said as I turned to go. “College people are like that.”
“Probably something right under his nose,” Albert said.
I was so convinced by then that the old men were involved in the Yellowwood mystery I almost warned them not to place the last stone. Instead, I thanked them for their time and went off to interview a likely accomplice.
I obtained the address and phone number of Gordon Guilford, the hunter who had first discovered the rocks, from the Bloomington Herald. Guilford lived near Fruitdale, which was about midway between the Happe farm and Yellowwood State Forest. I drove to his house without calling ahead.