Body Farm: Bones Of Betrayal Part 5

I checked my watch. "I should probably head on over there," I said. "I think they close at five, and it's nearly four now."

"Go," he said. "Thanks for playing courier. Let me know what develops." Art and I groaned in unison.

As I walked out the front door, my eye was caught by a small flash of white in the bushes beside the porch. Bending down for a closer look, I saw that it was a wadded-up sc.r.a.p of paper. I stuck my head back in the door. "Guys? This is probably nothing, but you might want to check it out." Emert came out, inspected the crumpled paper, and asked the tech to bring tweezers. The detective plucked the paper from the shrubbery, took it back inside, and laid it on a small table just inside the door, beside a handful of unopened mail. Wielding the tweezers gently, he teased open the wadded paper. Thornton, Art, and I gathered around and leaned in to look. As the paper unfolded, the inked squiggles became letters, and the letters became words.

The words read, "I know your secret."

CHAPTER 10.

IT WASN'T OFTEN THAT I ATTENDED THE FUNERALS of people whose remains I had examined. For one thing, I usually had no sense of connection with them, despite my strange intimacy with their bodies and bones-despite the fact that in most cases, I had handled the very framework of their physical lives. In Novak's case, I had not actually handled his bones; only Garcia had been unfortunate enough to have close, prolonged contact with Novak's remains. Yet at the moment when I realized that Novak had exposed Garcia-and, to a lesser degree, Miranda (and even me) to gamma radiation-the flash of knowledge and concern and fear had seared me with something as emotionally powerful as the radiation, involving me in this case in a unique and powerful way. I wanted to help catch whoever had murdered Novak-a.s.suming it really was a bizarre murder, rather than an even more bizarre suicide. More to the point, I wanted to help catch whoever had put my friends Eddie and Miranda at risk, even though that was surely not intentional. What was the military euphemism for unintended casualties? Collateral damage. Eddie Garcia's bone marrow and hands, and Miranda's fingertips-if Sorensen's worst-case medical scenario unfolded-might be considered minor collateral damage by a killer. But by my heart's reckoning, those would be grievous losses.

The other factor that had drawn me to Oak Ridge for Novak's funeral was anthropological fascination. As a physical anthropologist, I'd spent years handling the most basic and tangible remnants of human beings: their bones. Human culture, though-the structures built not of calcium or muscle or bricks and boards-had taken a backseat in my mind, except for the dark corners of culture where murder lurked. I knew, for instance, that men were partial to guns as their murder weapons, whereas women seemed to prefer knives or poison (although those traditional gender preferences appeared, in recent years, to be blurring). I knew that h.o.m.os.e.xuals often engaged in "overkill"-excessive and shocking violence, far beyond what was needed to end a life-if murdering a partner. I had learned that if a child was abducted by a s.e.xual predator, the odds of finding the child alive plummeted after twenty-four hours. The rich drama of healthier human culture, though, had largely played out beyond my field of view, since my field of view was generally filled by images such as the mark left by a knife as it sliced through a rib, or the pattern of fractures radiating through a skull that had been hit repeatedly with a baseball bat.

Years before, I had taken graduate school courses in cultural anthropology. I had journeyed with Franz Boas-figuratively speaking-as he explored the fluid boundaries and social units of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s and early 1900s. I had peered over Margaret Mead's shoulder as she had researched the casual s.e.xual couplings of teenagers on the South Pacific island of Samoa in the 1920s. But the unique cultural creation that was Oak Ridge-a small, secret, authority-dominated enclave where tens of thousands of young men and women were treated almost like worker ants in an anthill, except for a handful of military and scientific leaders who possessed the social status and secret knowledge traditionally reserved for an elite caste of high priests: I had never peered at Oak Ridge through the inquiring lens of an anthropologist.

Now, the odd case study that was Oak Ridge all but consumed me. In the handful of days since I had cut a physicist's body from the ice of a murky frozen swimming pool, Oak Ridge had come to occupy most of my waking thoughts and more than a few of my dreams, and one of the things I found amazing was that it had taken so many years-and such a dramatic turn of personal events-to trigger my fascination. It was impossible to live in East Tennessee without knowing that Oak Ridge had played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. It was almost as widely understood that in the decades that followed Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki, Oak Ridge had helped harness atoms for peace, in the form of nuclear power and radioisotopes for medical research and treatment. Beyond those superficial bullet points, though, I had never bothered to read much or think much about the opening chapter in the history of Oak Ridge. As I considered it now, I marveled, again and again, how profoundly this tiny city had changed not just the nation but the entire world. Talk about a lever and a place to stand: nuclear energy was about as long and strong as a lever could get-I suppose a poet might argue that love or hatred could be stronger, but as a scientist, I would find that argument somewhat abstract and unconvincing-and Oak Ridge had been the fulcrum, the fixed point around which the lever of the atom had swiveled to move the earth.

Oak Ridge wasn't the only Manhattan Project installation, of course. There was also Los Alamos, New Mexico, where hundreds of physicists and other scientists devoted themselves to turning theoretical physics into deliverable bombs. And there was Hanford, Was.h.i.+ngton, where mammoth reactors-scaled-up versions of Novak's reactor in Oak Ridge-cranked out the bomb-sized quant.i.ties of plutonium. But Oak Ridge was the biggest of the sites, and everything Los Alamos and Hanford did was built on the foundation of Oak Ridge. That alone made the city a fascinating specimen.

But there was more. There was the whole heroic and heartbreaking backdrop to Oak Ridge's creation behind the veil of secrecy: there was World War II. I wasn't born until a decade after Germany and j.a.pan surrendered, so I knew only what I'd read and heard and seen, and that was only a small smattering of the historical record and archival images and firsthand stories. But from what I knew, it truly embodied the best of times and the worst of times; the best of mankind, and the cruelest and most depraved.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the n.a.z.is as they implemented the madness of Hitler's "Final Solution." But tens of millions more had died, too-another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting-a dreadful toll, to be sure-American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war's total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as j.a.pan's armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and b.l.o.o.d.y eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, ma.s.sacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And how did the hundreds of millions of grieving survivors carry on in the face of such sorrow?

As my truck topped the rise and dropped once more into the valley where Oak Ridge sprawled, I looked at the place with new eyes. Against a global backdrop of unrelenting, apocalyptic death, this small place, which to modern eyes might look haphazard and provisional and ordinary, had been the focal point of the biggest, most complex, and most urgent endeavor the world had ever known. That endeavor was all the more amazing considering that it was accomplished without the world's knowledge. Until that knowledge had burst, brighter than a hundred suns, above two cities in j.a.pan.

LEONARD NOVAK'S FINAL RESTING PLACE was barely a stone's throw from his death scene. The funeral was held in the United Church-called the Chapel on the Hill by every Oak Ridger I heard refer to it-the small, historic church perched on the hillside just above the Alexander Inn. It seemed a fitting place to memorialize one of the pivotal scientists of the Manhattan Project. Although Novak had long since retired, and although Emert had said the scientist wasn't a churchgoer, the parking lot beside the church was packed, and even the faded asphalt down beside the derelict hotel was filling fast, with more than a few spots occupied by television news vehicles. Novak's retirement had been a quiet, almost obscure one, according to Emert, but his bizarre death had thrust him squarely into the posthumous spotlight.

I parked in front of the old hotel and made my way up a sidewalk and a long flight of steps to the front door of the chapel.

One of the first public buildings erected during the city's wartime construction boom, the Chapel on the Hill had done its part for the war effort by hosting services of multiple faiths and denominations. Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Jews-they'd all held weekly services here during the war, each group distributing their prayer books or hymnals just before their appointed hour in the building, then gathering them up again at the end of the service. Church buildings often sit empty and idle most of the time, but not this one. During the war, it would have been hard to find an hour of the day when someone wasn't preaching or praying or practicing on the church's pump organ. I would like to have seen a time-lapse video-one compressing a week's worth of comings and goings into, say, sixty seconds-just to watch the church's doors open and close, the building rhythmically inhaling and exhaling streams of wors.h.i.+pers.

The chapel's interior was packed; three television cameras rested on tripods at the back, and every seat seemed taken. I scanned the pews, seeking any open s.p.a.ce, but I didn't see one. In a moment, though, an usher came up the center aisle from near the front of the church and motioned me forward. There were no rows reserved for family-Novak had been married, briefly, as a young man, the newspaper obituary had said, but he had no children-and I found myself shoehorned into the front row, in a slot better suited to someone half my size. The elderly man on my left-I guessed his age at seventy-pretended not to notice me, even as he drew himself in tightly and scooted, fussily but with no noticeable increase in room for me, away from me. To my right, an even older woman-she must have been eighty or more-nodded slightly as I sat down, then surprised me by turning to speak to me. In a stage whisper that could probably have been heard three rows back, she said, "Well, thank G.o.d somebody here is under sixty. We'll be lucky if three or four of us don't kick the bucket during the service." I wanted to laugh-she might be old, but she seemed sharp and funny-but I managed to limit myself to a smile, since laughter didn't seem to suit the setting or the occasion.

There was no coffin; instead an unadorned bra.s.s urn rested on a simple wooden altar. Within hours after the FBI had whisked the iridium source out of Knoxville, Garcia had phoned the state medical examiner's office and they had sent a pathologist from Nashville to complete the autopsy so that Novak's body-which was not getting any fresher-could be removed from the morgue and cremated. It had taken three people-Garcia, Duane Johnson, and Dr. Sorensen-to convince the Nashville pathologist that Novak's radiation-ravaged body was no more hazardous than any other corpse. I had heard Johnson explaining the physics of it over the phone. "Think of the gamma source like a really strong magnet sitting on your desk," he had said. "There's a powerful energy field emanating from it-a magnetic field surrounding the magnet, gamma radiation around the iridium-192. If the magnet's too close to your computer, your hard drive is gonna be toast. If the gamma source is too close to your body, well..." He'd trailed off then, probably regretting his use of the word "toast," given our concerns about Garcia's hands. "Anyhow," he went on, "once you get rid of the source, it's gone. There's no smear of magnetism lingering on your desk, waiting to trash your new hard drive; there's no radioactivity in the sink or the cadaver."

In the end, though, it was probably not the magnet a.n.a.logy that rea.s.sured the nervous Nashville pathologist, but Sorensen's offer to a.s.sist in the morgue. It was one thing to say, "It's perfectly safe"; it was another to say, "I'll stand with you while you do this." And for Sorensen, I realized, partic.i.p.ating in the remainder of the autopsy was probably an interesting opportunity to learn more about the specific effects of a lethal dose of gamma radiation.

The body had been cremated by my friend Helen Taylor, in one of the gleaming furnaces at East Tennessee Cremation Services. Helen, too, had seemed nervous about handling the body. Taking a cue from Sorensen, I offered to bring the remains out personally; she thanked me for the offer, but said it wasn't necessary. In my head, I knew the remains-and now the cremated remains, or cremains-were perfectly safe. Still, something spooked me about that bra.s.s urn on the altar. It was not what was in the urn that spooked me, I gradually realized, but what was in me-some kernel of superst.i.tion in my heart, some fear germinating in a dark corner of my psyche. Fear for Garcia and Miranda, perhaps. A sense of bad karma in the air, or spiritual fallout drifting down from the past.

I shook off my thoughts and focused on the lectern, where an ancient man was telling a story about Novak's absentmindedness, which apparently was legendary. "And so we put this lead brick in his briefcase, to see how long it would take him to notice it. He never did. Carried the d.a.m.n thing around for months." He laughed, and the congregation laughed with him-enjoying his enjoyment, including the naughtiness of saying "d.a.m.n" in a church. One of the few consolations of old age, I thought: you can say pretty much anything you want, even outrageous things, and people let them slide, or even find them charming. Beside me I felt a slight s.h.i.+ft, then noticed my seatmate jotting a note on her program. She finished writing, then nudged me and held the note toward me with a twinkle in her eye. "Not true," the spidery script read. "It was Richard Feynman who lugged that lead brick around, and it was in Los Alamos."

I smiled. I liked her. She seemed both witty and slightly subversive. Her face said eighty, and so did her handwriting, but the note-pa.s.sing spoke of a mischievous schoolgirl.

After the ancient colleague told a few more anecdotes-some lighthearted, some more serious-a minister took the podium to put Novak's life and work in a philosophical and theological context. He talked about science and discovery-about Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci-whose given name Novak had shared-and Copernicus and Darwin. He reminded us that curiosity was what had called our primordial ancestors out of the sea and onto dry land. I suspected the aforementioned Darwin might have debated him on that; I didn't remember reading much about curiosity in The Origin of Species. But this was a sermon, not a lecture, so I took it with a grain of scientific salt. The minister went on awhile about the quest for knowledge being a hallmark of humans. "The divine spark," he called knowledge. "There is no brighter spark than atomic energy," he went on-the transition to Oak Ridge, and to Novak, at last. He told how Novak had guided the construction and operation of the Graphite Reactor; how he'd created plutonium within the crucible of the reactor; how he'd mastered the steps needed to separate and purify this new element. "Un-locking the power of the atom," he said dramatically. "The fire at the core of the universe. Like a twentieth-century Prometheus, Leonard Novak stole fire from the G.o.ds." I heard a small, sharp exhalation from the woman beside me; it sounded surprisingly like exasperation. "Stealing fire from the G.o.ds," the minister repeated, his voice rising as he got swept up in the mythology. "A bold theft. A world-changing theft. A perilous theft. The gift of fire; the curse of fire." He surveyed the congregation, and stretched forth his arms as if to encompa.s.s us. "May we-those of us who dwell in the light and warmth of that Promethean fire"-he now raised his hands toward the ceiling, and the chandeliers glowing there, presumably powered by nuclear energy-"may we acquire the wisdom to harness that fire for good. Always, only for good." He stood silent, his arms still aloft.

"Oh please." It was the stage whisper again, surprisingly loud in the silence that had followed the minister's big finish. I saw a few heads turn in the direction of my elderly seatmate; one of them was the minister's. A look of confusion and anger flashed across his face, then he regained his composure and directed us to a closing hymn. The words were printed in the program, which everyone but me seemed to have received. We stood to sing, feet sc.r.a.ping and throats clearing, as the organist played a stanza to acquaint us with the melody.

The music sounded quaint and prim, like something from another century. I'd never considered myself much of a singer, so I didn't much mind that I couldn't sing along. I did feel slightly self-conscious, though, to be standing amid the singing throng with my mouth closed and my hands empty. I felt a gentle nudge at my right elbow. My neighbor extended her program slightly toward me. She gripped the lower right corner of the page between a bony thumb and knuckle, her skin papery and blue-veined. She gave the program a slight twitch to indicate that I should take hold of the lower left corner. The paper certainly didn't require both of us to hold it up; rather, the paper was a sort of bridge, a bond, between two strangers jammed together on a wooden pew. It was an oddly intimate gesture. Two strangers bound, by a link and a story, to a bra.s.s urn and the ashes within, which had once been Leonard Novak. Together we sang.

Let there be light, Lord G.o.d of hosts, Let there be wisdom on the earth; Let broad humanity have birth, Let there be deeds, instead of boasts.

Within our pa.s.sioned hearts instill The calm that endeth strain and strife; Make us thy ministers of life; Purge us from l.u.s.ts that curse and kill.

Give us the peace of vision clear To see our brothers' good our own, To joy and suffer not alone, The love that casteth out all fear.

Let woe and waste of warfare cease, That useful labor yet may build Its homes with love and laughter filled; G.o.d give thy wayward children peace.

As the words of the hymn sank in, I decided to cut the minister some slack for his overheated delivery. The beginning of the song fit with his "divine spark" image, and the ending-well, I decided it took some guts to close an A-bomb scientist's funeral with an antiwar plea.

I halfway expected to hear a snort or feel a cynical elbow in my ribs at the song's earnest goodheartedness, but I never did. And as the final notes died away, I glanced to my right and saw that the woman beside me-the same woman who had said "Oh, please" just moments before-had tears on her cheeks.

As the service ended, I turned to her. "Thank you for sharing your pew and your program with me."

"You're welcome," she said. "You're Brockton, aren't you?" I nodded, surprised. "You're the guy that watches the bodies rot?"

I laughed. "You do have a way with words. How'd you know? Do I smell that bad?"

"I saw your picture in the Oak Ridger a couple of days ago. Here, let's go out the back door. I don't want to have to shake the preacher's hand-it would just embarra.s.s us both." She steered me through a door that led through a cluttered vestry and out into the thin suns.h.i.+ne. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. Fifty yards ahead of us, walking down the steps and away from the chapel, I saw Jess Carter, my dead lover. I thought I saw her, at any rate: I saw a striking woman wearing Jess's black hair and Jess's lithe body, walking Jess's walk. Then she turned her head enough for me to see that it was not Jess. Of course not: it had been nearly a year since Jess was murdered; I had attended her memorial service in Chattanooga, had seen her ashes buried in a churchyard, had nestled a granite plaque to honor Jess in the ground at the Body Farm, where her corpse had been taken by her killer. How could it possibly be Jess walking ahead of me down a hillside in Oak Ridge?

I felt a tug at my sleeve. My elderly companion was studying my face shrewdly. "You look like you just saw a ghost," she said.

"I thought I did," I said. "Or hoped I did. Sorry. You were saying something about the newspaper."

"Oh, nothing important. Just that I saw your picture in the story about Novak. By the way, I gather that when you came to fetch the body, you left a souvenir behind, in about eight feet of water." Her eyes were dancing as she pointed a crooked finger at the swimming pool, a hundred yards downslope from where we stood.

"They wrote about my chainsaw?" I meant to sigh but it came out as a laugh. "I wish they'd hurry up and drain that pool."

"Don't hold your breath," she said.

"Oh, it's starting to warm up," I said, although I noticed that the rectangular opening I had cut in the surface had refrozen. "It'll probably thaw out enough to drain in another couple of days."

"It's not just the ice," she said. "It'll be a miracle if the drain still works. That whole place is falling apart."

Even from this distance, the inn's peeling paint and sagging roof were easy to see. So was the murky ice. "It has seen better days."

"Haven't we all," she said, "haven't we all. That crumbling hotel pretty much sums up Oak Ridge, and all of us who've been here since the creation. We used to be young and smart and important-crossroads of the world, at least the world of atomic physics. Look at us now. The glory days are long gone. In a few more years, that hotel will be dust. And so will all the famous people who sat on the porch and figured out how to build the bomb fifty years ago. No, sixty years ago. No, sixty-five, dammit. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence-they've been gone a long time. Novak was one of the last. They don't seem to make them like that anymore."

"So you knew him?"

"It was a long, long time ago," she said, "but yes, I did. There's a story in it. Would you like to hear it sometime?"

"I believe I would," I said. "I'm guessing you spin a pretty good story."

"Come see me," she said, "and we'll find out."

She dug around in a small pocketbook and fished out a pen. Folding the photocopied program from the memorial service in half to make it stiffer, she wrote her name, address, and phone number and handed the paper to me.

"Beatrice Novak," the name read.

My eyes widened. She smiled slightly. "I was married to him," she said. "Once upon a time."

CHAPTER 11.

I WASN'T READY TO LEAVE OAK RIDGE YET-I WANTED to steep myself a little longer in the sepia-toned sense of history Novak's funeral had stirred up-so I drove past the strip malls lining Oak Ridge Turnpike and turned in at the American Museum of Science and Energy, a blocky, mud-colored brick building beside the police station. The sidewalk outside the building was edged with spiky components from coal-mining machines and oil-drilling rigs. Inside-through a doorway bordered by barbed wire and a replica of a World War II sentry post-a series of photos and videos and doc.u.ments told the story of the Manhattan Project. One display panel featured scratchy footage of Albert Einstein, instantly recognizable from the wild mop of fuzzy white hair, captured on film writing a letter. Alongside the video monitor was an enlarged copy of the letter Einstein had sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939, voicing concern about Germany's atomic-energy research and recommending that the United States embark on a quest to build an atomic bomb. Although it would be two years before much would happen, Einstein's letter had planted a seed, and-at least in historical hindsight-was part of the bomb's scientific pedigree.

What interested me most in the darkened room, though, were the wartime photos doc.u.menting the creation and wartime years of the town that came to be known as Oak Ridge. In three short years, a handful of rural settlements-family farms, country stores, rustic schoolhouses-was transformed into the biggest scientific and military endeavor in the history of the world.

An elderly museum docent wandered through, possibly because I looked like an unsavory character, but more likely because I was the only visitor and the docent was bored. "These photos are amazing," I said.

"They have copies of all of these, plus a lot more down at the library," he said. "In the Oak Ridge Room, which is the local history collection. If you're interested, it's worth a look. It's in the Civic Center, just down the hill." He pointed toward the back wall of the room, and I remembered seeing a pair of buildings, linked by an outdoor plaza and a fountain, set in a park below the police station. I thanked him and resumed wandering through the displays, which culminated in a short black-and-white film on the flight of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber that lumbered aloft from an airfield on the island of Tinian in the predawn hours of August 6, 1945. Many hours later and ten thousand pounds lighter, the Enola Gay returned to Tinian, having dropped a single bomb on Hiros.h.i.+ma, j.a.pan. Almost as an afterthought, the film included a brief segment on the decimation, three days later, of Nagasaki by a second atomic bomb. Two entire cities had been reduced to rubble, and many thousands of people vaporized, in the blink of an eye. And although the bombs that destroyed Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki were small-scarcely firecrackers, compared to the ma.s.sive hydrogen bombs developed during the 1950s and 1960s-the images of unprecedented devastation weighed on my heart.

Wandering out of the darkened history room and into the brighter light of the lobby, I lifted a hand in goodbye to the docent. "We have other exhibits," he called after me. "Nuclear power, petroleum, renewable energy, neutron research."

"Another time," I said. "Today, I'm in history mode." I pushed through the gla.s.s doors, pa.s.sed the mining and drilling machinery, and ambled down the long, gentle hill toward the Civic Center and the library. In the foreground was an outdoor stage topped by a gleaming white tent of some high-tech architectural fabric. Far off to one side was another, smaller pavilion of some sort, this one a rustic structure framed of wood timber. Curious, I decided to take a closer look. The structure's gabled roof and heavy beams reminded me of a j.a.panese temple, and as I drew near, I saw an immense bell-long and cylindrical, rather than wide at the base-suspended from the trusswork. Beside the bell was a plaque. FRIENDs.h.i.+P BELL, the words read. It had been cast in j.a.pan in 1993, the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Oak Ridge. A SYMBOL OF THE FRIENDs.h.i.+P AND MUTUAL REGARD THAT HAVE DEVELOPED BETWEEN OAK RIDGE AND j.a.pAN OVER THE PAST FIFTY YEARS, it went on. FRIENDs.h.i.+P MADE SO MUCH MORE MEANINGFUL BECAUSE OF THE TERRIBLE CONFLICT OF WORLD WAR II WHICH OAK RIDGE PLAYED SUCH A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN ENDING. I was particularly struck by the plaque's final words: THIS BELL FURTHER SERVES AS A SYMBOL OF OUR MUTUAL LONGING AND PLEDGE TO WORK FOR FREEDOM, WELL-BEING, JUSTICE, AND PEACE FOR ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD IN THE YEARS TO COME. Oak Ridge had come a long way, I reflected, turning my steps toward the library.

The library, like its companion building, was a contemporary structure-1970s, I guessed-made of poured, putty-colored concrete topped by bands of clerestory windows. The forms for the concrete had been lined with rough-sawn vertical boards, and the grain of the wood was etched into the concrete. Maybe it was just the reflective mood I was in, but I liked the notion that the wood's contribution-brief but important-had been captured for posterity in the structure's very bones.

Inside, I stopped at the circulation desk to ask about the local history room. "Yes, the Oak Ridge Room," said the young woman at the counter. "It's right back there." She pointed toward a back corner of the building. I thanked her and headed that way.

The room had been part.i.tioned off from the main area by gla.s.s walls and gla.s.s doors. Inside, I saw br.i.m.m.i.n.g bookshelves, tall filing cabinets, flat map drawers, and a shelving unit crammed with fat, black binders. If it was local history I was hungry for, the Oak Ridge Room appeared to offer an all-you-can-eat buffet. I took hold of the handle of one of the gla.s.s doors and tugged. It rattled but did not open. I tugged on the other door's handle. Nothing doing.

"Try pus.h.i.+ng," said a female voice behind me. I pushed. Still nothing. "Oh. I guess the lock works after all," said the voice. I turned and saw a woman with black hair and laughing eyes. "Sorry," she said. "I couldn't resist. You looked so serious." I stared at her, and her amus.e.m.e.nt turned to concern. "Really, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to offend you. I just thought-"

"No, no," I said quickly. "It's not about the door. The door...the door thing was funny. It's just that for a second there, you reminded me of someone." The librarian-Isabella Morgan, according to a plastic nameplate pinned to her sweater-was the woman I'd glimpsed earlier in the day; the woman who made me think I'd seen a ghost. "Weren't you at Dr. Novak's funeral?"

She looked startled. "Yes," she said. There was a pause, and then she added-awkwardly, I thought-"speaking of local history." I introduced myself, and told her about cutting Novak's body from the ice of the swimming pool. "Oh right," she said. "Your picture was in the Oak Ridger. You're the one with the chainsaw."

I laughed. "Actually, I'm the one without the chainsaw, as everyone keeps reminding me. Anyhow, I've gotten interested in the city's history. I was hoping to browse around in the Oak Ridge Room for a bit."

She reached into a pocket of her sweater and pulled out a key. "Browse away," she said. "Anything in particular I can help you find?"

"Hmm. Well, a guy up at the museum said you've got a whole bunch of World War II photographs. Might be fun to look through those, if they're easy to get to."

She pointed to the shelves of fat three-ring binders. "Easiest thing in the room to find," she said. "It's a remarkable collection."

"From the ones I saw in the museum," I said, "it looks like the photographer started snapping pictures before the Army even set foot here."

"Just about," she said. "It's almost like he wanted to show how the prophecy came true."

"The prophecy? What prophecy?"

"You don't know about the prophecy?"

"I guess not," I said. "What prophecy?"

"Around 1900," she said, "a local mystic predicted the creation of Oak Ridge and the role the city would play in World War II."

"Some hillbilly a century ago knew about uranium enrichment and plutonium production? So that's where Fermi and Oppenheimer and Einstein got the idea?"

She smiled. "Well, he didn't go into details about the physics and chemistry," she said. "John Hendrix was his name; he was a preacher who was considered a bit of a crackpot. He also drank a bit, they say."

"Helps the sermons flow more trippingly off the tongue," I said. "Or gives you more knowledge of sin, maybe."

"The story goes," she went on, "that John Hendrix heard a voice telling him to sleep in the woods and pray for forty days and forty nights."

"That's a lot of praying," I said.

She nodded. "On the forty-first day, he emerged and told some people at a little country store that he'd had a vision." She took down a well-worn book-Back of Oak Ridge-and opened it to a page near the front. "Here's what he said: 'There will be a city on Black Oak Ridge'-that's the ridge where all the World War II housing was built-'and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock's farm and Joe Pyatt's place.'" I was about to ask who Sevier Tadlock and Joe Pyatt were, but-as if reading my mind-she held up a finger to shush me. "He said, 'A railroad spur will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville, and then branch off and turn toward Scarboro. Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion, and the earth will shake.' But here's the best part, where he talks about Bear Creek Valley, where the Y-12 Plant was built: 'Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be.'" She paused just long enough to let that sink in, then read one more line: "'I've seen it. It's coming.'"

She closed the book slowly, then looked at me over her gla.s.ses, her eyebrows rising to ask, Well?

To my surprise, the words had sent a bit of a s.h.i.+ver along my spine. By this stage of my life, I had become a bit of a skeptic when it came to matters of metaphysics. I dealt in scientific and forensic facts-grim facts, at that-and the comforting words of organized religion ignored a lot of suffering. My faith had also been pretty thoroughly undermined by the unmerited suffering and death of my wife Kathleen a few years before. Nevertheless, I had to admit that occasionally I encountered phenomena that science seemed unable to explain. This prophecy appeared to be another of those.

"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 doc.u.mented 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 gla.s.s 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 Friends.h.i.+p 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."