“If you don’t think so,” she said, “we’ll split the tab.”
She tugged a handful of napkins from the dispenser huddled against the wall—they were small, flimsy napkins, better suited to dabbing a crumb of crumpet off a powdered cheek than to soaking up grease and sauce—and swabbed the table with them. Then she reached into a shoulder bag and pulled out a magazine whose cover proclaimed it to be the ORNL Review. I’d seen an issue or two of it; it was published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it contained a mix of articles—some breezy, others way over my head, technically—that summed up what a billion dollars a year would buy these days, in the science-and-energy department. Your tax dollars at work, I always thought when I ran across the magazine. Better in Oak Ridge, and better in the cause of science, than in a lot of other places and ways I could think of.
She opened the magazine, and I saw a print of the Novak photo tucked into the pages. She rotated the magazine and the photo toward me, keeping the photo positioned over the one page of the spread—keeping me in suspense, I guessed. That was okay with me; I was enjoying this. It felt like a dance—the closest thing to dancing I’d done since Jess, whom I’d loved and lost less than a year before.
“So this, obviously, is your picture,” she was saying. “Not a lot to go on. Woods and a hillside and a barn. Doesn’t narrow things down a lot here in East Tennessee.” I shook my head sorrowfully, signaling that I knew the cause was hopeless—that it would take a miracle or a genius, or both, to solve this enigmatic puzzle. “I’ll pretend not to notice that you’re mocking me,” she said. I laughed, and so did she. “Anyway. I kept looking at this after you left, and thinking I’d seen that barn before. Of course, anytime you stare at something long enough, your mind plays tricks on you, right?” I nodded, not teasing this time, because I realized I’d been staring at her, and my mind was playing some tricks on me at this very moment. “So. I have some regulars—patrons who like to hang out in the Oak Ridge Room. Old-timers, mostly, people who lived through the stuff that’s archived on the shelves. It’s an easy trip down Memory Lane.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m fascinated, and it’s not even my history.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, one of my regulars—oh, stop,” she scolded, kicking me slightly under the table for wiggling my eyebrows—“one of my regulars used to be Ed Westcott, the photographer who took all the pictures in those notebooks. His job was to document it, capture the Manhattan Project on film, for posterity. Unlike anybody except maybe General Groves or Colonel Nichols, Westcott could go wherever he wanted, see whatever he wanted, and photograph whatever he wanted. Pretty amazing, when you think about it. He had a stroke a couple of years ago, and he has trouble speaking, so he doesn’t get to the library much anymore. But he’s lucid, and he emails. So I emailed your picture to him. I also sent it to Ray Smith, who writes history columns about Oak Ridge history for two newspapers. I figured if anybody might recognize that barn, it’d be either Ray or Ed.” She paused and leaned back so she could study my reaction to what she’d said so far.
Or maybe she was just leaning back so the high school kid could set our drinks on the table. My Coke came in a paper cup; her beer arrived in a frosted-glass mug. Evidently Big Ed or his successors had considered beer to be higher than Coke on the beverage chain. She hoisted the mug in my direction, so I raised my cup to toast. “To historical detective work,” I said, and we tapped the glasses together. The paper cup did not produce a particularly satisfying sound or feel, but the gesture still felt celebratory. “And was either of these regulars of yours able to shed light on the mystery of the barn?”