“Yeah.” Harry put the papers on the bed. “Mrs. Hogendobber and I only copied them. It’s not as if we obstructed justice.”
“Our sheriff wants to know everything. He’s a good sheriff.” She began reading again.
“Which one is that?” Harry’s knees cracked when she unbent to sit on the bed.
“November 4, 1851. Addressed to the President and Directors, Board of Public Works, from the Engineer’s Office of the Blue Ridge Railroad.”
“Too bad he couldn’t start with ‘Dear Honey’—think of the stationery it would have saved him,” Harry remarked. “I think that letter is about the temporary bridge built at Waynesboro so the men could haul materials over the mountains.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Wow. I can’t believe this. The original price of labor when the tunnel was contracted was seventy-five cents per day, and it shot up to eighty-seven and a half cents for some workers and even one dollar for others. Men risked their lives for eighty-seven and a half cents!”
“A different world.” Harry handed Officer Cooper another sheet, the overhead light casting a dim shadow on the policewoman’s blond hair. “This one’s interesting.” She started to read.
“November 8, 1853. He wrote a lot in November, didn’t he?” She read on. “‘. . . we were suddenly taken by surprise by the eruption of a large vein of water, for which we were obliged to take hands from their work, and set them to pumping, until we could obtain machinery for the same purpose, working by horsepower. This circumstance has been repeated several times during the year, successive veins of water having been encountered, until the body of water we have now to keep down amounts to no less than one and a half hogshead per minute, ninety hogshead per hour.’ ” She whistled. “They could have drowned in there.”
“Digging tunnels is dangerous work and this is before dynamite, remember. He created a siphon to evacuate the water and it was the longest siphon on record. Here’s another one.”
Mrs. Murphy grumbled under the bed. “I don’t feel like sleeping under the bed. Are they ever going to get it or not?”
“Beats me.” Tucker yawned.
“H-m-m.” Cooper squinted at the page. “December 9, 1855. Lot of technical stuff about the grades and curves and timbering the excavation.” She selected a more dramatic passage. “. . . some time in February, 1854, an immense slide from the mountain completely blocked up the western entrance, and, coming down as fast as removed, from a height of about one hundred feet, effectually prevented the construction of the arch at this end, until late in the fall of the same year.’ ” She turned to Harry. “How old was Claudius Crozet at this time?”
“He was born December 31, 1789, so he would have been just shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.”
“Enduring this kind of physical labor? He must have been tough as nails.”
“He was. He was a genius really. Politics cost him his job as First Engineer of the state, and twelve engineers couldn’t do the work of one Crozet, so Richmond had to eat humble pie and ask him back in 1831. This was long before he built the tunnels. Know what else he did?”
“Not a clue.”
“Brought the first blackboard to West Point. He taught there starting in 1816. Can you imagine teaching without a blackboard? America must have been primitive. The level of education was so low at West Point that he had to teach his class math before he could teach them engineering. It’s a wonder we didn’t lose the Mexican War.”
“Guess he raised the standard of education. Lee was an engineer, you know.”
“I know. Every good Southern kid knows that—that and Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign. And that ‘you all’ is plural, never singular, and that corn bread—How’d I get on this?”
“You’re wound up. All that sugar in Susan’s sauce on the veal.”
“Maybe so. This is my favorite.” Harry plucked a letter from the disorganized pile. “Crozet was being criticized in the newspapers both for the length of time the tunnels were taking and for their location, so he wrote to a friend: ‘Strange things are now going on, of which you may have seen some notice. Most scurrilous and unfair attacks directed against me have appeared in some papers, especially the “Valley Star.” Though few will notice such things, except with disgust, yet it is proper I should be informed of them, otherwise the seeds of slander may grow around me, without my having a chance to cut them off in time.’ He then asks his friend to send him clippings he might come across. He gave as his address ‘Brooksville, Albemarle.’ ” She kicked off her shoes and put down the letter. “The more things change, the more they stay the same. Try to do something new, something progressive, and you’re crucified. I don’t blame him for being touchy.”
“Do you think there’s treasure in one of the tunnels?”
“Oh—I’d like to think there is.” Harry curled her toes.
“Car! Car! Car!” Tucker warned and ran from under the bed to the front door.
“Cut the lights,” Officer Cooper commanded. “Get on the floor!”
Harry hit the floor so hard she knocked the wind out of herself and found herself nose to nose with Mrs. Murphy, who had started to wiggle out from under the bed.
Officer Cooper, pistol in hand, crept toward the front door. She waited. Whoever was in the car wasn’t getting out, although the headlights had been turned off. The living room light gave evidence that someone was home and Tucker was hollering her head off.
“Shut up.” Mrs. Murphy bumped the dog. “We know there’s a car outside. Cover the back door. I’ll take the front.”
Tucker did as she was told. Officer Cooper flattened herself beside the front door.
The car door slammed. Footsteps clicked up to the front door. For a long agonizing moment nothing happened. Then a soft knock.
A harder knock, followed with “Harry, you in there?”
“Yes,” Harry called out from the bedroom. “It’s BoomBoom Craycroft,” Harry told Officer Cooper.
“Stay on the floor!” Cooper yelled.
“Harry, what’s wrong?” BoomBoom heard Cynthia Cooper’s voice and didn’t recognize it.
“Stay where you are. Put your hands behind your head.” Officer Cooper flicked on the front porch light to behold a bewildered BoomBoom, hands clasped behind her head.
“I’m not armed,” BoomBoom said. “But there’s a thirty-eight in the glove compartment. It’s registered.”
Mrs. Murphy slunk behind Officer Cooper’s heels. If anything went wrong she would climb up a leg—in BoomBoom’s case a bare one—and dig as deeply as she could.
Officer Cooper slowly opened the door. “Stay right where you are.” She frisked BoomBoom.
Harry, on all fours, peeked around the bedroom door. Sheepishly she stood up.
BoomBoom caught a glimpse of her. “Harry, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
“Can I come inside?” BoomBoom’s eyes implored Officer Cooper.
“Keep your hands behind your head and the answer is yes.”
As BoomBoom entered the house, Cooper shut the door behind her, gun still cocked. BoomBoom had plenty she wanted to say to Harry but the presence of Officer Cooper inhibited her.
“Harry, I’ve ransacked Kelly’s office. Ever since you dropped by I’ve just gone wild and—I found something.”
35
Crumpled sheets of yellow legal paper, the penciled-in mileage numbers smeared, shone under the kitchen light. Harry, BoomBoom, Officer Cooper, Mrs. Murphy, and Tucker gathered around the old porcelain-topped table. Still leery, Coop kept her pistol in her hand.
“I checked the mileages of the trucks against the depreciation in Marie’s ledger. They don’t jibe,” BoomBoom pointed out. “Nor is there any accounting for this bill.” She produced a faded invoice for a huge amount of epoxy and paint resin. The bill was from North Carolina.