“Snow fencing?”
“If you brush paint or pigment on fabric—even a really, really light coat—it piles up on one side of the fibers,” she explained, “like snow drifting against a fence. Tough to avoid that. Then there’s the way the image jumps out at you when you look at the photo negative of it. More lifelike than the positive, but more ghostly, too. So it really is an interesting mystery.”
“Especially for an artist-turned-detective, like you.”
“Absolutely. Anyhow, sitting there in that classroom that day, seeing the slides and hearing about this mystery, I got cold chills—I thought I might even throw up—because all of a sudden I knew. At the end of the class, I went up and said to Randy, ‘I know how they did it.’ He laughed and said, ‘Yeah, right.’ So I went home that night, got my friend Tyler to come over and pose for me, and I did it.”
“Did what, exactly?”
“I made an image of Tyler, on fabric, that had all the characteristics of the Shroud. It was on a linen handkerchief. It had no brushstrokes, it didn’t soak into the fibers, and when I took a photograph and looked at the negative, it had that same 3-D effect and that same ghostly look.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “So sitting in a UT classroom one afternoon, you solved a mystery that was six hundred and fifty years old? How’d you do it—and why didn’t I pay more attention at the time?”
I could practically hear her shrug. “It wasn’t a murder case. And I was just a lowly student.”
“One thing I don’t get, Emily. I stayed up late last night researching the Shroud on the Internet, and everything I read—even recent stuff, with science in it—still claims there’s no way to duplicate that image. Have you ever sent your article to the people who say that?”
“Ha.” It wasn’t really a laugh. “I sent that article all over the place. I even demonstrated the technique, on camera, to a History Channel crew that was filming a documentary about the Shroud. The Shroudies—that’s what I call the die-hard believers—were incredibly hostile. I got hate mail: letters saying I was doomed to hell, letters calling me a Christ killer, letters threatening my life. So yeah, I’d say I described my work to some of the people who say that. And they were none too happy.”
“How’d you do it, Emily? Tell me about the technique.”
“Simple. Incredibly simple. Dust transfer. Medical illustrators use it all the time. I used it all the time, when I was a medical illustrator. You create the image on one surface, using charcoal or red ochre or—”
“Red ochre?”
“A pigment. Ferrous oxide—rust, basically. Ochre’s found in clays all over the world, in various shades. Red ochre—the best red ochre—comes from southern France.”
The hairs on the back of my neck twitched. “Southern France?”
“Yeah, somewhere down around Provence; I forget where. It was used in the cave paintings in France and Spain—fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand years ago. Dust transfer, too. Those paintings weren’t actually paintings; they were illustrations. They’d sketch the outlines of the figures—horses or bulls or whatever—with a burned stick, then rub on red ochre to add color.”
I’d thought I was excited when I first dialed Emily’s number; now, I was beside myself. I felt my hands shaking as I cradled the phone to my ear with one hand and took notes with the other. “And that’s how you made the image of your friend Tyler? You just rubbed dust onto the handkerchief?”
“Ah, no. It was a little more complicated than that. No snow fencing allowed, remember? So I added a step. I used a soft brush, dipped in dry, red-ochre powder, to dab an image of Tyler’s face onto a piece of newsprint. No outlines, just shading with dust; heavy in the high spots—the bridge of the nose, the eyebrows, and so on—and light in the low spots. I dabbed very gently, from different directions, so there wouldn’t be any strokes. Once I had a dense, smooth image, I laid the handkerchief on top and rubbed it with the back of a wooden spoon.”
“Like doing a brass rubbing?”
“Sort of, but much less pressure. So the cloth picked up only trace amounts of the pigment.”
“It wasn’t too faint to be seen?”
“You’d be surprised. It takes only a tiny, tiny bit of red ochre to stain the fabric. If you get it on your clothes, it’s tough to get out.”
“So you don’t have any trouble believing that an image created in this way could survive for hundreds of years?”
“Hell, I don’t have any trouble believing it could survive for thousands of years. Some of those cave paintings have been on the walls for thirty thousand years. The fabric of the Shroud, on the other hand: That I’m not so sure about. And if I remember right, Randy Bresee seemed doubtful that a piece of first-century linen could hold up this long.”