“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.”
I hoped that the future would prove John Hendrix to be as accurate on that last point as he’d already been on the others.
CHAPTER 12
THE MORNING AFTER THE FUNERAL, I WOKE UP FEELING more energetic than I had in days. Maybe that was because I’d gotten a solid night’s sleep, uninterrupted by needles jabbing me for blood. Or maybe it was because I’d had a nice dream about the librarian in Oak Ridge. I got to campus by seven, stopped off in the bone lab to leave some notes for Miranda, then spent a couple of hours grading the first Human Origins test of the semester.
At eleven Peggy called. “Don’t forget the talk you’re giving at lunchtime.”
“Which talk I’m giving at lunchtime?”
Even through the receiver, her exasperated sigh carried clearly. “Rotary Club.”
“Oh, the Rotary talk,” I said. “Sure. I remembered. You had me worried for a second there. I was afraid maybe you’d double-booked me.”
“I am never the one who double-books you,” she said tartly.
At eleven-thirty I left campus and drove to the Marriott. The Marriott was an architectural oddity—a concrete wedge that looked like a cross between a Mayan pyramid and a misplaced hydroelectric dam—perched on a hill above the river. Townes Osborn, who had booked me for the talk, was waiting at the entrance when I arrived. Despite her questionable taste in luncheon speakers, Townes—who ran a prominent advertising agency—was the only woman ever elected president of the Knoxville Rotary Club.
After the Rotarians lunched on orange-glazed chicken breast and rice pilaf and whatever vegetable medley was the current fashion among civic groups, I showed slides from a case I’d worked near Nashville some years ago. The Williamson County Sheriff’s Office had received a call expressing concern about a well-to-do middle-aged woman who lived alone in a mansion on thirty or forty acres. She hadn’t made the trip down the driveway to the mailbox in more than a week, said the observant neighbor, and although her car was parked at the house, she wasn’t answering the phone. A deputy was duly dispatched to check on the woman. She didn’t come when he rang the bell, but the door was unlocked, so he turned the knob and opened it to call out to her. When he did, the woman’s three large dogs—two German shepherds and a collie—bolted past him and into the yard.
The woman was nowhere to be seen—at least not in recognizable human form. The story, as we quite literally pieced it together, was this: The woman, who had a serious heart condition, had died, and with no other source of sustenance available, her dogs had eaten her body to stay alive. Combing the house, my students and I found only the cranial vault, the well-chewed shafts of a few long bones, and one painted toenail—just one—which the dogs had turned up their noses at for some odd reason. As the Rotarians chuckled, I thought about the shipwrecked man eating what he believed to be albatross. The dog story had a bizarre postscript: a couple of weeks later, a woman called me from a Nashville bank to ask, “Did you happen to find a seven-thousand-dollar diamond ring in that house?” I did not, I assured her. The bank, it seems, had insured the ring, and if it couldn’t be found, they’d have to pay the sum to the dead woman’s estate.