Thornton reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded handkerchief, which he knotted into a ball. I was puzzled, until he said “Good boy” and tossed the handkerchief onto the ground in the direction of the gadget’s probe. Suddenly I glimpsed a streak of movement at the edge of my vision. Moving at lightning speed, Cherokee swooped in, grabbed the handkerchief, and began ripping it to bits.
Miranda burst out laughing. “Holy crap, that was fast,” she said. “Serves you right for being a smart-ass.” Thornton just flashed her that grin again, bigger and more sheepish than ever. Miranda turned to me; it might have just been the effect of the chilly breeze, but her cheeks looked pink. “Does this mean it’s our turn to look now?”
“I think it does,” I said. I tapped the two Oak Ridge detectives on the shoulder as Miranda and I started toward the truck. “You guys mind giving us a hand?”
They followed us to the back of the truck and I handed a rake and galvanized-metal bucket to each of them. Miranda grabbed the two shovels, and I carried a large plastic bin containing smaller items: evidence bags, trowels, rubber gloves, a tape measure, a compass, a handheld GPS unit, a topographical map, my digital camera, a clipboard, pens and Sharpie markers, and a blue plastic tarp. I spread the tarp near the area we were about to excavate, and we laid the rest of the gear on it.
I began, as always, by taking pictures—several wide shots at first, showing the entire area, the vehicles, and the group of people. Then an inspiration hit me, and I took several shots of the fallen tree, the small valley, and the concrete silo, reproducing Novak’s perspective as closely as possible. The comparison photos would be an interesting addition to the file, I thought. An interesting footnote to Oak Ridge history. An interesting thing to show Isabella over pizza. Next I took tighter shots of the fallen tree, the area near the base of its trunk, and the orange survey flag Arpad had stuck in the ground. Miranda switched on the GPS unit, held it over the flag, and pressed a button to save the latitude and longitude coordinates. I found it amazing that a three-hundred-dollar gadget, about the size and shape of a calculator, could home in on satellites hovering thousands of miles overhead, pinpointing and remembering this precise location on an isolated hilltop: an electronic X marking a tiny spot on a big planet. I marveled at the technology, though I still didn’t entirely trust it. That’s why we had the compass and tape measure: in addition to marking the site on the topo map, Miranda would draw a more detailed sketch of the search area, showing the dirt road, the fallen tree, and the excavation, with compass directions and measurements—the diameter of the excavation, for instance, and how many feet west of the trunk the dog and the sniffer had alerted.
I had tried to talk Miranda into letting me bring one of the other graduate students in her place—I worried that the burns on her fingers hurt, and I feared she might damage them—but she insisted on coming. “I’ll wear an extra pair of gloves,” she said, “and it’ll be fine.” I hoped she was right.
After I’d taken a dozen or so photos and Miranda had sketched the key landmarks of the site, we began to rake the leaf litter off the soil. When the big tree had been ripped from the earth, long ago, its roots had torn a crater in the ground, six or eight feet in diameter and several feet deep. Gradually, though, the crater had filled as dirt fell from the edges, rainwater trickled down the sides, and decades of leaves swirled into the hole and crumbled into dust. By now all that remained was a slight, subtle hollow—with a sixty-foot tulip poplar growing from it. If not for the massive oak trunk touching one edge of the rim, the low spot would have seemed simply a slight, random variation in the surface of the ground. By excavating carefully, I hoped Miranda and I could work our way back to the original, deeper contour of the hole, as a starting point in our quest for whatever might lie at its center. It wouldn’t be easy, though.
“So,” said Miranda, “that tree sure is in the way. Wonder what we could do about that pesky tree?”
“Just a thought,” said Emert, picking up on the sly tone and the elbow-in-the-ribs emphasis, “but I’m thinking chainsaw. If only we had a chainsaw right about now.”
They laughed; Roy and Arpad and the ORNL guard looked puzzled, so Emert told the chainsaw story. “Go ahead,” I said. “Rub it in. But next time your heart is breaking, don’t expect sympathy from me.”
Roy spoke up. “I feel your pain, Doc. I’m pretty attached to my Husquevarna. Matter of fact, it’s in the back of the truck. If you promise not to steal it, I might be willing to share the love.”
The Husquevarna wasn’t as nice as the Stihl—it didn’t feel quite as solid, somehow—but it sliced through the eight-inch trunk in a couple of minutes. I cut the tree at about waist level, first, then—once it was down—cut the stump almost flush with the ground. I thanked Roy for the saw, handed it back, and then picked up the three-foot length of trunk and carried it to my truck. Emert asked, “You running low on firewood?”