She reached down, and without taking her eyes off my face, she slid the blurry photo off the magazine. I looked down and there it was, printed on the page. Set against a hillside was a simple, windowless wooden barn with a tall, thin silo at one end. I was not looking at a photograph; I was looking at an illustration, something like an architectural rendering. As I read the accompanying story, I heard myself saying “hmm” and “hmm” repeatedly. The “barn,” I read, was not a barn at all, though it was carefully designed and built to look like one. It was the camouflaged entrance to an underground storage bunker for bomb-grade uranium-235, the precious product Beatrice had helped sift from tons of uranium-238. The entire quantity of U-235 Oak Ridge produced during World War II would have fit easily—lethally, but easily—into a couple of shoe boxes. But producing that U-235 had required hundreds of scientists, tens of thousands of laborers, and hundreds of millions of scarce wartime dollars. The nation—though only a handful of people knew it—had bet hugely on this roll of the scientific dice. Small wonder, then, that General Groves wanted to hide it well.
The silo beside the barn was actually a guard tower of reinforced concrete, the article explained. Looking closely at the illustration, I saw windows—bulletproof glass, the text noted—tucked beneath the silo’s overhanging metal roof. Beneath the windows were small slits in panels of thick steel: firing ports for machine guns.
I picked up the scan of Novak’s photo. The quality was terrible, but not so terrible as to keep me from seeing that the proportions of the building and the silo were the same as those of the uranium bunker. The perspective was different, to be sure—the illustration had been drawn from a ground-level perspective, while Novak’s photo had been shot from somewhere above, looking down through a gap in the trees. But the similarity was unmistakable. Even the silo’s roof—an odd, octagonal hat of a roof, rather than the round dome found atop most silos—was a dead-on match.
Our food arrived, so I scooped up the magazine and the print. The two aluminum platters filled the tabletop. The sauce was steaming, the cheese was molten, and the wedges of pizza were immense. After he’d set down the trays, our server handed us two plastic forks, flimsier than I’d ever seen before, and two tiny paper plates—saucers, really—for the massive, messy slices of pizza. Big Ed, I thought, is up there somewhere, and he’s laughing at us.
And that, too, was okay with me.
WE DEPARTED LADEN WITH LEFTOVERS, the boxes heavy and already beginning to sag from the grease as we crossed the street and walked into the parking lot adjoining the football field. I had rolled up the photo and the magazine, which she told me to keep, and tucked them in a hip pocket. I didn’t feel authorized to tell her details, but I said there might be someone buried near the spot where the photo was taken.
“I knew it,” she said.
“How?”
“Dead people are your thing,” she said. “They’re what you do. They’re what you care about. If you’re going to this much trouble, it’s for a dead person.” On their face, the words might have seemed like an insult or an accusation, but there was nothing in her tone to suggest she’d meant them that way. They were simply how she saw me, and the assessment was accurate, if un-sentimental.
“And what’s your thing? Books?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. I have a master’s in history, actually; I did my thesis on the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge.”
“Did you grow up in Oak Ridge?”
She shook her head. “Louisiana,” she said.
“What got you interested in Oak Ridge history?”
“A family connection,” she said. “My father. And my grandmother.”
“Was she one of the calutron girls separating uranium at Y-12?”
“No,” she said. She hesitated. “She was involved with the plutonium part of the Manhattan Project. The work they did at the Graphite Reactor.”
“Physicist? Chemist?”
She shook her head. “Nothing that fancy,” she said. “Listen, I should go. Thanks for the pizza and the company.”
“My pleasure,” I said. “On both counts. Where are you parked?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I live just up the hill. I’m walking.”
“Let me drive you,” I offered. She shook her head.
“There’s a shortcut through the football field,” she said. “It’s close, and I like the walk.”
“Then I’ll walk you home. I’ll carry your pizza, since you don’t have any books.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” she said. “Oak Ridge is very safe. Well, except for the occasional bizarre murder.”
I laughed. “At least let me walk you partway. Till we get past the dark place where the monsters lurk.” I tugged gently at the pizza box.
She relented, and we ambled up a paved ramp to the level of the football field. At the far end of the field she angled upward onto a footpath that led to another large, grassy field. Like the football field, this one was also nestled in a natural bowl, but this bowl was surrounded by trees rather than grandstands. The lights of 1940s-vintage houses shone through the barren trees. “This is a practice field,” she said. “The football team does workouts here; soccer leagues use it, too.” At the far end of the practice field, the woods closed in tightly. “Watch your step,” she said. “There’s a deep hole there. A big storm sewer starts there. Runs under the fields and all the way down the hill to the Turnpike. You fall in there, we might not find you till the spring rains washed you out near the Federal Building.”
I peered down into the darkness but I couldn’t see much. “You been spelunking in there? Sounds like you know your way around.”