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I had plenty of time to ponder these things as the Cherokee bored east on Interstate 40, traversing the broad valley of the French Broad River. Then, just before I-40 plunged into the heart of the Appalachians, Williams whipped the Jeep down an off-ramp, skidded left onto a county road, and began threading curves that made a corkscrew seem straight by comparison.
The road had a solid yellow center line, but Williams drove as if both lanes were his alone, wandering from one edge to another. “Is this one way?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t, but hoping he might take the hint and stick to the right lane.
“One way?” He laughed easily. Now we were in his territory, not mine. “Naw, but you got to straighten these curves or you’ll never get where you’re going.” By way of demonstration, he took both hands off the wheel, and the Jeep barreled straight ahead for a hundred yards, while the center line whipsawed beneath us. “It’s easier at night, when you can see the other cars coming.” He drifted left to hug the inside of a tight curve. “Unless they got their lights off. One or two nights a year, we get a bad head-on wreck long about here.”
I switched to pondering that for a minute, but as the road grew more tortuous, my pondering shifted to another alarming topic: how many more curves could I take before I threw up? Not many, I realized, as sweat began beading on my forehead and premonitory saliva filled my mouth. I rolled down the window and thrust my face out into the bracing air, panting like a dog. It helped, but not enough to offset our continuing roller coaster ride. I pulled my head back inside. “Listen, I hate to do this,” I said, “but I’ve got to ask you to stop. I’m getting really carsick.”
He looked startled, as if he’d never heard anything so ridiculous. Carsick? On this fine road? It was the look a camel might give a parched human in the Sahara. Thirsty? Didn’t you drink some water just last week?
A pained expression worked its way from his mouth up to his eyes; then he shook his head once. “Sheriff said he needs you right away. Reckon we better keep on a-keepin’ on. Just hang out the window there and let fly if you need to.”
As if on cue, I did. Flecks of vomit spattered the gold star painted on the door. I pulled my head back in. “It’s not that simple,” I rasped. “It isn’t just vomiting. I’ve got Ménière’s disease — vertigo — and I’m about thirty seconds from getting a dizzy spell that’ll last for days. Trust me, if that happens, there’s no way I’ll be able to do whatever the sheriff needs me to do.”
He cursed under his breath, but he hit the brakes and we crunched to a stop on the shoulder beside the tumbling Little Pigeon River. Two minutes later, we were under way again. This time, we kept to our side of the blacktop, and the tires had ceased to squeal. That’s because this time I was driving.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Williams muttered. “Sheriff’s gonna be mad as hell.”
“Not as mad as he’d be if I had to lie down in a dark room for three days,” I said. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.” I rolled down the window to dispel the acrid scent of vomit.
Ten minutes later, we rounded yet another curve, and suddenly — for the first time since we’d dived off the interstate — I could see for more than a hundred yards ahead. The road ran straight and level for half a mile, bringing us into Jonesport, the county seat. The town occupied what must have been the one patch of level ground in all of Cooke County.
Hunkering in the center of the town square was the courthouse, a two-story structure that appeared designed to repel a military siege. Laid up in thick slabs of rough-hewn granite, its façade was broken by only a few small windows, all of them barred, and by a mammoth ironclad door that could have shrugged off a medieval battering ram. I’d seen prisons that were flimsier. Prettier, too.
“That’s a mighty stout courthouse you’ve got there,” I observed.
“Old one burned down back in the twenties,” he said. “Fellow was in jail, his kinfolks was trying to get him out. There was a shootout, then a fire. Reckon they didn’t want that kind of thing happening again.”
“Fellow get away?”
“No sir, he didn’t. First he caught a bullet, then he burned up. Thing is, he shouldna oughta been in jail in the first place. It was a goddamn frame-up from the get-go.”
“You take a strong interest in local history,” I said.
“That piece of it, anyhow. Fellow was my granddaddy.” He pointed. “Park here.”
As I eased the vehicle into a diagonal slot in front of the courthouse, I sensed a presence beside me. I glanced out my open window and saw a khaki-clad belly hanging over a pair of olive-drab trousers; a .38 dangled from a gun belt. Then a face leaned in at the window. “Williams, what in holy hell is going on here?”
I thought it best to speak right up. “Sheriff Kitchings? This is one smart deputy you’ve got.”
Both men stared at me in astonishment. I plowed ahead, full speed. “I got sick as a dog on the way up here. I was on the verge of passing out when your deputy remembered an article he’d read about motion sickness. Asked me if I’d be willing to try driving a spell, see if that helped.” Kitchings looked from me to Williams and back again. “Fixed me right up. Lucky thing, too — if it hadn’t, I’d’ve had to lay under that tree over there for a week till my head quit spinning.”
I could see a question forming in the sheriff’s mind — something about his deputy’s medical library, I suspected — so I shifted gears before the discussion could take a bibliographic turn. “Sheriff, I don’t remember having you in any of my anthropology classes at UT,” I said. “Should I?”
He blushed and shook his head, suddenly a student being quizzed by a professor again. “Uh, no, sir, I never got around to taking anthropology. I did come to your class once, though. The time you showed slides of that fireworks explosion.”
An illegal fireworks factory in southeastern Tennessee had gone up with a bang one day, hurling thirteen people — in half a hundred pieces — through the roof of the barn where they were mixing gunpowder with pigments. It was a gruesome accident, but it was also a fascinating forensic case study, a homespun mass disaster. Before showing slides of the carnage to my classes, I always warned students a week in advance that the pictures were horrific, and I gave them the option of skipping class — that one class out of the whole semester — without penalty. Invariably, the day of the slide show, the lecture hall was jammed — standing room only, including dozens of students who weren’t even taking the class. The first time it happened, I was surprised; after that, I knew to expect it. If I were smarter, I’d have charged admission every year, then retired early and rich.
“That was an interesting case,” I said. “I think we finally got everybody put back together right, but when we first stacked up all those arms and legs, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to.”
Williams was safe now, I guessed, so I cut the small talk. “What can I do for you, Sheriff? Your deputy here said it was mighty important, but he didn’t say what it was.”
“There’s a body I need you to look at.”
“I kinda figured that. Is it in the morgue?”
“Morgue?” He snorted. “Doc, the closest thing we got to a morgue up here’s the walk-in beer cooler at the Git-’N’-Go.” He and Williams shared a laugh at the image of a body laid out atop cases of Bud Light. “The body’s still where we found it at yesterday.”
The look of alarm on my face made him smile. “Don’t you worry — another twenty-four hours in that place ain’t gonna hurt it none.” He winked across me at Williams, and Williams laughed again, this time not so much at what Kitchings had said as at what he hadn’t said. Williams laughed with the relief of a child who’d come home from school expecting a whipping and gotten a cookie instead. At that, I smiled, too.
CHAPTER 3
“Okay, boys, saddle up and move out.” Kitchings swung a leg over his mount, and Williams and I did the same. I hit the ATV’s starter button and the Honda engine purred to life. They’d offered me a choice: double up w
ith Williams or ride solo. I’d ridden with Williams once today, and I hadn’t much liked it, so I opted for a machine of my own.
I had never driven an all-terrain vehicle before, but I’d seen kids tearing along highway shoulders and across fields on them, so I figured there couldn’t be much to it. There wasn’t, at least on flat ground. The throttle was a lever on the right handgrip that you pushed with your thumb, just like the Honda jet ski I rode once at a colleague’s lake house on Fort Nasty.
The sheriff’s ATV had a hand brake for the front wheels and a foot brake for the rear — just like the English three-speed bike I pedaled to campus back during my own graduate student days. So far, so good. The gearshift was an oddly placed pair of buttons on the left handgrip — my first few shifts lurched comically — but after a few uneventful laps of the courthouse parking lot, the sheriff seemed satisfied that I’d make it back in one piece from wherever it was we were headed.
The serpentine road we’d taken into Jonesport was a superhighway compared to the track we followed out of it. It started out as a lane of gravel, turning off the highway a half-mile south of town. The first time we crossed the river, we did so on a sagging wooden bridge. The next four times — or was it five? — that we forded it, the current piled up against the balloon tires of the ATVs. Before long the single lane of gravel gave way to a pair of parallel ruts, and soon those turned into a single muddy gully. Our progress, as we lurched and fishtailed upward, was excruciatingly slow — which was the only thing that kept me from getting sick again. The ATV had seemed simple to handle on the road. On the trail, it was a whole different beast. Keeping my balance and maintaining control required half-sitting, half-crouching, in a posture that I could tell was going to send my academician’s thighs and buttocks into fits of agony. But every time Kitchings and Williams looked back to see how I was faring, I gave a quick thumbs-up, trying not to look completely clumsy and panic-stricken as I made my grab for the handlebars again.
Gradually a limestone cliff reared out of the mountainside, and the trail, such as it was, edged close to its base, at times running beneath overhangs framed by towering hemlocks and glossy rhododendrons. At one such overhang the officers slowed, turned toward a cleft in the rock face…and then plunged into the bowels of the earth. I sucked in my breath, gritted my teeth, and plunged in after them. Okay, I didn’t actually plunge — crept, more like it — but I fol lowed. The key point is, I followed, finding the switch for the headlamp just as the last glimmer of daylight dwindled behind me.
The floor was surprisingly smooth and level — dry sand in some places, packed mud in others. The headlights of the ATVs fell away into nothingness, which told me we were in a huge subterranean chamber, the blackness so thick you could almost touch it. Then, after a distance that I had no way of estimating, glistening walls began closing in upon us, and we entered the bed of a subterranean stream. It was a foot deep, perhaps six feet wide, and straight as an arrow, following some precise crease in the layers of bedrock. When the passage widened again, Kitchings and Williams turned the vehicles up out of the streambed and stopped. They killed their engines and cut the lights, so I did the same, and we sat in utter darkness.
No one said a word. The water gurgled softly past. My ears adjusted to the quiet, as my eyes might have adjusted to dim light, had there been a single photon to latch on to. Gradually I began to hear another sound underneath the stream’s noise, a sound that was musical, haunting, and human: unmistakably, I heard the laughter of small children.
“Do you hear…?” I began, but I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the question.
“The kids. Yeah.” It was Kitchings. “Spooky, huh? I’ve been told two different things by people who know this cave. One is that it’s just some weird echo from the stream. The other is that it’s the spirits of Indian children.”
He must have sensed my confusion, because he continued, “This cave is on land that was sacred to five separate tribes. Even when they were at war, they could mingle here in peace. Powerful magic, they say. When I’m out in the daylight, I believe in the science. When I’m in here in the dark, I believe in the spirits.”
He flipped on a flashlight, and when he did, the laughter died in midnote. Opening a cargo box bolted to the rear of the ATV, he fished out three powerful lanterns and a jacket that read “D.E.A.” in big letters across the back. “Here, you better put on this heirloom drug-bust jacket, Doc; you’re liable to catch pneumonia in here.” I waved it off, but he handed it to me anyhow. “I’d hate to be remembered as the sheriff who killed Dr. Brockton,” he said. As I put it on, I realized I was already shivering.
We trudged up the side of a sloping basin, ducked into a side tunnel, and soon emerged into another chamber. The rest of the cavern had been a dull grayish-brown, but these walls sparkled — practically blazed — with the fire of millions of crystals. Quartz, I guessed, though they seemed as brilliant as diamonds. A mammoth stalagmite, also sheathed in crystals, filled one side of the chamber.
A narrow cleft separated the stalagmite from the wall. Kitchings nodded toward the crevice and played his light over the opening in a go-here sort of way. I edged my way in. It was a tight fit — I wondered how the sheriff had wrangled his beer belly through it — but then it opened up into a small, glittering grotto. Laid out on a rock shelf along one side was a body — the most remarkable human corpse I’d ever seen. I stared, and blinked, and stared again.
The sheriff had been right. A day — or a month, or even a year — would have wrought little change in the striking corpse laid out on a rock shelf in that glittering grotto.
I had seen adipocere many times before. The term is Latin; it translates literally as “grave wax,” and that pretty much sums up what it is and where it’s found: a greasy, tallowlike material that forms when fatty flesh decomposes in a damp environment. Bodies buried in damp basements or crawl spaces under houses often have adipocere on them; so do floaters — bodies found in Tennessee’s abundant lakes and rivers — with most of the adipocere centered along the floater’s waterline. But the dozens of basement bodies and floaters I’d seen bore scant resemblance to the specimen laid out on the stone ledge before me. At first glance the corpse had appeared shrouded in adipocere, but as I studied it, I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t a surface coating, but something much rarer. The body’s soft tissues had been completely transformed into adipocere — almost as if Madame Tussaud had placed a waxen mummy here as a private exhibit for me alone. The clothing had apparently crumbled away, its residue incorporated into a dark layer that began at the corpse’s neck and continued all the way down to the rotting leather at the soles of the feet.
The Smithsonian possessed a similar corpse, that of Wilhelm von Ellenbogen, who had been dug up in the course of moving a cemetery more than a century ago. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia — home to some of the most bizarre medical and forensic oddities on the planet — had his female counterpart, whom they nicknamed “the Soap Lady” because of adipocere’s chemical kinship to soap. But those were misshapen and repulsive compared to the eerily preserved corpse before me. It was not an image of repose, mind you — the eyes stared blindly and the mouth gaped in an eternal scream — and yet despite the grotesque expression, there was something oddly beautiful about it.
I started forward, then caught myself and called out, “Have you all been in here?”
“Just far enough to see the body. Didn’t want to disturb the scene before you got a chance to look at it.”
“Good man. I wish more of your colleagues would be so careful.”
I took out the 35-millimeter camera I’d brought with me from Knoxville. Early in my career, one of the smartest cops I ever worked with gave me a piece of advice that sounded equally apt for crime scene photographers and ruthless bank robbers: “Shoot your way in and shoot your way out,” he said, and I’d been doing it ever since. Standing in the opening to the crystalline grotto, I started with wide shots from eye level, to establis
h the scene as a whole. Then I squatted down and shot across the floor of the cave at a low angle — another photography trick he’d taught me — to cast shadows that would throw footprints into sharper relief.
The flash was too quick and bright for me to see what it was getting, so I played the flashlight beam across the floor. The unevenness made it hard to tell for sure, but I thought I saw prints leading toward the body. I zoomed in on what seemed to be the best ones and fired off shots from several angles. Then I turned my attention and my lens toward the body.
I approached, slowly and circuitously, taking photographs every time I moved more than a few feet. I’d started with a fresh roll of 36 exposures — slides, as always, because a carousel tray was easy to carry into a classroom or a courtroom, and the film’s resolution was still far better than any digital image. You could project a good slide on a movie theater screen and it’d still look crisp; try that with a digital image and it would turn into some murky Impressionist rendering of a crime scene shrouded in fog. Besides, the one occasion when I’d tried using a digital camera, every picture I snapped erased the one before, so I left that crime scene with just one photo, a close-up of a stab wound. But I had read that the last Kodak carousel slide projector had rolled off the assembly line a year or so back, so I knew my nondigital days were numbered. “Progress, hell,” I muttered.
“What’s that, Doc?”
“Sorry, just talking to myself in here. Y’all come on back.”
They squeezed through the crevice into the grotto. Williams, who was skinny as a stray dog, slipped through easily. Kitchings required considerable time and effort. He turned sideways, his arms raised, for the first part. Then, when he reached the narrowest part of the passage—“Fat Man’s Squeeze,” the gap would be called if this were a commercial cave tour — he reached down, cupped his hands under his belly, and squished it upward like some gargantuan breast in a cyclopean Miracle Bra. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist: I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.
