AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” I said. It might have been the first time we’d ever said something as formal as “Goodbye” to each other. Awkward as it felt, I hoped it would be the last.
* * *
I was still slightly off-balance as I walked into the library and back toward the Reference Desk. The chair was empty, but the telephone receiver was out of its cradle and the HOLD light was blinking, so I hoped Isabella had just stepped away to look up the answer to a caller’s question. “I’ll be right with you,” said a voice behind me, and a gray-haired woman I didn’t know stepped behind the desk, lifted the phone, and pressed the blinking light. “He was born November 13, 1955,” she said. “In St. Joseph, Missouri. Yes, I believe that was the eastern end of the Pony Express route. You’re quite welcome. Glad I could find that for you.” She smiled as she hung up the phone. “Can I help you?”
“I was actually looking for Isabella,” I said.
“She’s not in today. Is there something I can help you with?”
“It’s not a reference question,” I said. “I’m…I’m a friend of Isabella’s. I was just going to say hi.”
I saw recognition register in her eyes. “Oh, of course,” she said. “Yes. Well, she was in earlier, but then she had to leave rather suddenly. Apparently her father has fallen quite ill.” After she said it, she looked uneasy, as if she wasn’t sure she should have divulged this information to me; if I didn’t already know, was I authorized to know? Report Suspicious Activity, I thought, and imagined the librarian phoning the TIPS number.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Thank you. Sorry to bother you.” As I left the library and climbed the hill to my truck, part of my mind was feeling concern for Isabella; another part was spinning in surprise and confusion. I knew so little about her. She’d said something about her grandmother and the Graphite Reactor, but it was a passing mention we’d never circled back to. It had never occurred to me to ask about her parents. Or maybe I simply hadn’t had a chance yet. We’d flirted over photos and food; we’d shared the excitement of the search for the uranium bunker; we’d shared a night of passion. But what I knew about her was slight compared with what I didn’t know. Isabella was a bright, beautiful enigma.
CHAPTER 35
Despite what I’d said to Miranda about heading straight home from Oak Ridge, I drove to campus instead. I parallel-parked between a pair of concrete pillars under the stadium, then wandered upstairs to the departmental office to check my mail and messages. “Well, I’ll be,” said Peggy. “You are alive. I’d just about decided you were dead.”
“Just missing in action,” I said. “Speaking of MIA, could you call up Joe Cusick at CILHI for me?” Joe was a former student of mine; after earning his Ph.D., he’d gone to work for the U.S. Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. The lab’s official name had changed recently — to J.PAC, which stood for something I couldn’t remember — but I still thought of it by the old acronym, CILHI, pronounced “SILL-high.” I’d served on CILHI’s scientific advisory board for several years early in Joe’s tenure there, and I was always glad for an excuse to call or, better yet, pay a visit.
“You think he’d be at work already? It’s six hours earlier in Honolulu, you know.”
I checked my watch; it was 1:45 P.M. in Knoxville; 7:45 A.M. there. “He gets up with the chickens,” I said. “He’ll be there.”
I ducked into my seldom-used administrative office, through the doorway that adjoined Peggy’s office, and dumped the mountain of mail on the conference table that butted up against the front of the desk. “It’s ringing,” said Peggy. “Do you want me to go ahead and switch it to you?”
“Please,” I said.
“Uh,” grunted a voice two rings later. “Yeah…. Hello…. This is Joe Cusick.” It was not the voice of a man who’d gotten up with the chickens — not unless it had been a long, rough night in the coop.
“Good morning, Joe,” I said sunnily. “It’s Bill Brockton. Did I catch you before your coffee kicked in?”
“Woof. Give me just a second here,” he said. “Bill. Hey there. Haven’t had coffee yet. I’m in Cambodia. It’s, I dunno, two in the morning here.”
“Oh hell, Joe, I’m sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten that the number we had on file for him was a satellite phone. “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you eight hours from now.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” he said, sounding more alert now. “I’m used to this. Happens all the time. I’ll be snoring again five minutes after we hang up. I can fall asleep on a dime; I’m famous for it. Go ahead.”
“Okay,” I said, “if you insist. But what are you doing in Cambodia?”
“Looking at some bones in the hills near the Vietnamese border,” he said. “Supposedly an American pilot who crashed here in ’68 or ’69. If we can identify him, that’d leave only another seventeen hundred and fifty MIAs in Southeast Asia. What’s up? What can I do for you?”
“I’m hoping CILHI might be able to help us ID a World War II soldier,” I said. “His skeleton just surfaced in Oak Ridge. He was shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave out on the DOE reservation.”
Even though he was half a world away, our conversation bouncing off a satellite orbiting thousands of miles high, Joe’s whistle came across clearly. “So this was murder, not KIA,” he said.
“Probably not killed in action,” I agreed. “Not a lot of enemy combatants in Tennessee.”
“Did you find his dog tags?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “No dog tags, no driver’s license. A wristwatch and the buttons off a pair of army-issue coveralls. Oh, and a really thick stack of papers. We’re wondering if he might’ve been spying.”
“If somebody caught him spying, wouldn’t they have turned him in, either before or after they shot him?”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “The picture in Oak Ridge is a little murky.” I told him about Novak’s bizarre death, and
the film in the freezer, the additional body we’d found when the pool was drained.
“And I thought Southeast Asia was complicated,” he said. “Well, if this soldier was shot and buried on the sly, he’d have been reported AWOL pretty quick. And if he didn’t turn up in a month, he’d have been flagged as a deserter. We’ve got a database at CILHI that lists deserters. Let me call the office and have somebody take a look. So this was in Oak Ridge, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s?”
“Actually,” I said, “we think he was killed in 1945 or early 1946. He was buried sometime after a uranium bunker was built — that was in ’44—but before a tree started growing in ’46.”
Joe laughed. “Well, that should narrow down the list of potential deserters,” he said. “I’ll ask somebody to take a look and give you a call. Let me know how it all turns out.”
“Thanks, Joe. ’Preciate you. Sorry I woke you. Safe travels. Sleep fast.”
Two hours later, Peggy forwarded a call from Pete Rossi, an investigator at CILHI. “Our database turned up two deserters in East Tennessee in the summer of 1945,” Rossi said. “One was a guard from Camp Crossville, a prisoner-of-war camp up on the Cumberland Plateau where German and Italian officers were held. The guy from Camp Crossville was caught in Kentucky three months later and court-martialed. He claimed he was AWOL, not a deserter, and said he was gonna report back once his mama got well. He must have been convincing at the court-martial, because he got off with a two-year sentence and a dishonorable discharge.”
“And the other deserter?”
“The other was a corporal named Jonah Jamison,” said Rossi. “He was assigned to the Special Engineer Detachment — the military unit associated with the Manhattan Project — and posted to the Clinton Engineer Works. Never caught; vanished without a trace.”
“Clinton Engineer Works,” I said. “That was the army’s name for the Oak Ridge complex. That’s got to be our man.”
