“There is one other place the ring might be,” I said. The woman was excited to hear this. “You know she was eaten by her dogs,” I said. She gasped; apparently she had not heard this minor detail. “If you could get someone to collect all the dog crap and sift through it, there’s a chance they’d find that ring.” She thanked me profusely and hung up. Two days later, a Williamson County deputy appeared in my classroom with a bag containing thirteen pounds of dog turds. The deputy looked quite unhappy, so I assumed he’d been the one assigned to collect the…evidence. His countenance brightened considerably when I told him that every single turd would have to be carefully squeezed between the fingers of my students. Misery really does love company, I concluded when I saw him grin. Once he was gone, I sent the bag of dog crap to be X-rayed. There was no ring to be seen, though I did notice a tangle of undigested panty hose in the bag—containing another toenail snagged in one stocking foot. “Next time you see your dog looking at you with love and devotion,” I concluded, “remember, he might be thinking about a snack.” The Rotarians laughed and clapped.
During the Q&A session at the end of the talk, Townes asked about Dr. Novak’s death, since the story—including the wild speculation about the “polonium” that had supposedly killed him—had been splashed all over the media. “I can’t really talk about that case,” I said, “since it’s still an open investigation. All I’ll say is that I’m saving a lot on my light bill these days, since I now glow in the dark.” The joke drew a few groans but a fair number of laughs.
As I was packing up my slide projector afterward, an elderly man who’d been sitting near the front of the room approached. “I worked in Oak Ridge during the war,” he said. I was surprised; he had some years on him, but he looked strong and vigorous still.
“Didn’t they have child-labor laws back then? You don’t look old enough to have worked in Oak Ridge during the war.”
He ignored the transparent flattery. “I was in charge of security,” he said, and my head snapped up. Funny: you see a ninety-year-old at a Rotary Club luncheon, you tend to see him just as some old codger with a lot of hours to fill. You don’t tend to look at him and think, I bet this guy once helped guard atomic secrets at the world’s biggest military project. I didn’t say that, of course; I just said, “That was a big job. Must have been tough.”
He shook his head. “Sure beat the hell out of dying on some Jap-infested island in the Pacific,” he said. “I knew I’d live to see the end of the war. And we were working on something that was supposed to help end the war, so I figured I was probably in the best-defended place on earth. I felt like a lucky guy.” I nodded.
“Did you know what you were protecting?”
He shrugged. “We didn’t talk about it,” he said. “One of the MPs did, and a day later he was gone, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They sent him to the Pacific. They didn’t dare send him to Europe, because they didn’t want to take a chance that the Germans would capture him and get some information out of him. Poor bastard was probably dead three months later.” He hesitated, studying me closely, as if to determine whether I was trustworthy. “By the summer of ’45, I had a pretty good idea what they were building. But I kept my mouth shut, because I wanted to stay right here.”
We chatted a bit more, then he excused himself. Townes, who’d been talking to several power-suited women, came over to carry my slide carousel to the truck. I said, “Do you know that guy I was talking to? He was in charge of security in Oak Ridge back during the war.”
She smiled. “You might say I know him,” she said. “That’s Bill Sergeant. He spent twelve years spearheading Rotary International’s global campaign to eradicate polio. There’s a statue of Bill downtown in Krutch Park.”
On the way back to campus, I detoured through downtown and parked—briefly—in front of a fire hydrant beside Krutch Park. Seated in the southwest corner, a strong-limbed child perched on his lap, was a life-size bronze statue of a lucky, modest old codger.
CHAPTER 13