by Ray Deeg
The inside hallway was a grayish green, even more grim than the building’s facade. The floor tiles were cracked and coming apart. The place hadn’t been cleaned in forever. Graffiti covered the cinder-block walls and parts of the metal stairwell. It wasn’t ugly, actually, but it alluded to a truth: this place had been discarded. There wasn’t anyone with a vested interest in maintaining it. There were no families here; no one respectable could live like this. The fluorescent light hummed a depressing violet blue, an audible tone perfectly engineered to chase dreams and ambition far away. The residents who remained would never escape this emptiness; to accept this place as home was to reject the outside world as a place of hope and abundance. Tom could feel the concentrated sadness trapped here. He took the lead position and knocked on the apartment door indicated by the directory.
“Just a second,” a female voice shouted from inside.
Just then, Tom’s phone vibrated. It was a text from Heckie. Randall Evans shot and killed a fellow agent while being taken into custody. He’s on the loose. The bureau’s looking for him, but be careful. He’s looking for the machine, and you.
Tom took a deep breath and turned his phone toward Gwen, who cocked her head sideways. She didn’t need to say a word; her expression said it all. Tom quickly responded to Heckie as the apartment door opened.
A smiling woman appeared. She had graying blond hair and thick glasses. She wore an awful fluorescent pink top over a white button-up shirt and blue jeans. Tom guessed she was in her fifties. “Hi, I’m Anna,” the woman said.
“My name is Gwen Pierce, and this is Tom Hartger,” Gwen responded.
“She usually goes to bed at eight-thirty,” the nurse said as she moved aside to allow the strangers to enter the dark apartment. The air was warm and stale, and an uncomfortable smell lingered. “You aren’t debt collectors, are you?” the nurse suddenly asked.
“No, nothing like that,” Tom answered quickly. “I’ve spent my life working in technology, and I understand that Everett had a real technological prowess. I’m sure you know he passed a few months back. Again, we’re just hoping Mildred can answer some questions.”
The nurse nodded and led them to the living room, where an old woman sat on a couch. She was watching the news on a small television—coverage about the particle collider test scheduled to take place in a few hours. She was wearing a long, dark nightgown and fuzzy slippers. She was impossibly thin. Her hair was silver, and she wore a nasal cannula connected to a small green tank resting on a miniature dolly. A slight hissing sound could be heard. The living room was small and untidy, with magazines, Styrofoam cups, and prescription bottles covering every surface. The smell inside was overpowering, nearly nauseating. The half-eaten source of the stench could be seen in a bowl on a TV tray next to the old woman.
“Mildred, you have some visitors who would like to speak with you,” the nurse said as she turned the television off and removed the bowl of Medicaid gruel.
Gwen smiled at the woman as she sat down on the chair Anna indicated. The woman was staring back now. “Hello, Mrs. Dempsey. My name is Gwen, and this is my good friend, Tom.”
“Nice to meet you, dear,” the old woman said in a soft but steady voice. “Just call me Mildred.” She struggled to push herself upright.
“Thank you, Mildred. Both Tom and I were sorry to hear about Everett’s passing.”
Tom chimed in. “I’m very sorry. Thank you for seeing us tonight. The reason we’re here is that after your husband’s death, many—”
“Ex-husband,” the woman said.
“Ex-husband, of course,” Tom replied. “After his death, many of his possessions went to auction and were sold off. One of the items that’s become something of an enigma to us and others too is a machine. I believe it was kept at his home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, but we think it might have been created in Tuxedo Park, New York. I was wondering if you knew anything about the machine, or whether you could tell us a little about Everett and his work.”
The woman’s eyes didn’t match her frail body or wrinkled skin. They were dark blue and clear as water. When her gaze met Tom’s, it was obvious that she was all there—and then some. “He slit his wrists,” the woman said. “I always knew he would take his own life; I just knew it. Death didn’t scare him; he was just that kind of man. There was something fearless in his heart. And the cancer would have taken him anyway. Everett was a mysterious man, been through so much in his life.
“Yes, the machine; that insidious thing. You’re correct—it was from the Tower House laboratory in Tuxedo Park. He stole it, you know. That was a long, long time ago.”
Tom’s eyes widened.
“Everett and I were both born in Tuxedo Park; that’s how we met. We were destined to get married, and our divorce was just as certain. That machine was his obsession for many years. He tinkered with it all the time, but it never worked. He had some wild ideas about what it might do, but nothing ever came of it. He was missing some key parts and was always trying to track them down—just like the FBI was always trying to track him down. He even used a fake name when we traveled.”
Tom was aching inside but nodded politely.
“Everett loved gadgets of all types—he was a real inventor.” The old woman stopped talking and took in a few deep breaths, holding the transparent air tube closer to her nostrils. The room fell silent except for the slight hissing. “Everett was an electrical engineer by training,” she continued. “But he could build anything, and he loved machine shops. He helped build all sorts of things throughout his life. Are you looking for one of his model trains?”
Tom was taken aback by the question, and a flash shot through his mind. He remembered playing with his new model train in the basement alone. He had become fascinated with the lead wires, and his insatiable curiosity—also known as foolishness—led him to push his finger into the transformer where they coalesced. His arm became frozen, and he felt the fast, stinging vibration of current passing through his body. He became a statue, stiff and unable to move, but he was completely aware of everything happening. He could only stare at his finger in the box and wonder what might happen next. Eventually his young body gave out, and all went black. An electrical fuse had blown, and he’d shocked himself badly enough that he’d lost consciousness. When he came to, he was alone in the basement, and for the first time in his life, he felt acutely aware of himself in the world. He had a sense that there was something more, something hidden. He never told anyone about that, not even his mother. He remembered that metallic, electric smell in his nostrils as current passed though the model’s circular track. He remembered how it had hummed, and how the track had sent tiny shocks through his fingers when he touched them. There was something about those tracks.
“A model train?” he asked, rejoining the room.
“Sure. Everett’s passion was building model trains. He was fascinated with trains.”
Tom heard the faint echo of a train’s horn in his mind. He saw that patch of coagulated plaster in the corner of the ceiling just above his childhood bed, the light shining in from the hallway again.
“When we were kids, Everett spent hours sitting at the Tuxedo station, waiting for trains to pass. He was obsessed. He got into building models when he was about twelve or so. There was a period in Everett’s life when he made a tidy living building model trains.” Mildred pointed to a bookshelf. “Anna, let the man see that picture in the photo album.”
The nurse retrieved the album and flipped through the pages, stopping on a photo of a young man wearing a gray-and-white striped engineer’s cap. He was standing in the middle of an elaborate train set. “That’s Everett in around 1955. That’s the year we got married,” Mildred said.
The man in the photo smiled while the people around him admired his work. As Tom took it in, the model immediately became familiar. The size, landscaping, and the train itself were different from his own model, but the trees, the buildings, the people, and the scale were nearly ident
ical. Tom thought about that afternoon so long ago when his dream had dissolved into real life and he’d found himself being carried into the basement by his grandfather. He remembered seeing that incredible miniaturized world and wondering if he was dreaming.
“You know, it’s funny,” Tom said, staring at the photo. “My grandfather gave me a model train very much like this one, so I can understand Everett’s obsession with trains. Did Everett make his living building models?”
The old woman took another deep breath. “Not right away, dear. After college, Everett was recruited by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. They were hiring anyone with an engineering degree right out of school. In those days, they couldn’t get people in fast enough—that was the height of the war, in 1942. Everett worked at the Westinghouse Bloomfield lamp plant filling orders for—oh, what was that name? Oh yes, the Tuballoy Project. Tuballoy was the code name for enriching uranium for programs related to the Manhattan Project,” Mildred continued in a matter-of-fact tone. Tom blinked a few times in reaction to her words. “It wasn’t known then, but Tuballoy was the first supplier of enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes, it was the project to build the first atomic bomb,” Tom replied.
“That’s right, dear.”
Gwen raised her eyebrows, hanging on the woman’s words.
“That first batch of uranium came from the Westinghouse Bloomfield lamp plant. That’s about the time Everett and I started dating. I had no idea what he was working on. It was top secret back then, and everyone was sworn to total secrecy. It was declassified years after the war, but we were all so proud of Everett’s contribution.”
A flurry of thoughts swirled in Tom’s mind. It was all too coincidental. Tom thought about the stock market crash and the strange flashcards they had discovered in Loomis’s safe. Mildred said Everett had done work for the Manhattan project, and so had Alfred Lee Loomis. Rudy had told them that Robert Oppenheimer had stayed with Loomis, too. Oppenheimer was the father of the Manhattan project and while visiting New Hope Monty had told them George Westinghouse was on the committee that awarded Tesla the prestigious Edison Medal. Tesla had a deep friendship with George Westinghouse, the founder of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation—where Everett had worked.
Tom’s heart rate was elevated. There was so much he wanted to understand, and he wasn’t sure where to start, but he wanted to maintain a level of calm for the old woman’s sake. “Did Everett ever mention the name Alfred Lee Loomis?” he asked.
“Well, of course,” Mildred replied, staring at Tom as if he had two heads. “Mr. Loomis was our neighbor in Tuxedo Park growing up. My father was rich back then.” The old woman leaned forward and began to whisper, as if telling a secret. “But money, she comes and she goes—and that money went a long time ago.” Gwen grinned, and the woman giggled. “We weren’t the only ones. The great crash of 1929 decimated Tuxedo Park. Maintaining second, third, and fourth homes became a burden, and a few of our neighbors sold. One of them even went so far as to burn his house down for the insurance money. That was Colonel Frank Browne-Keech: they called him the Prometheus of the stock market—rather ironic considering the arson, don’t you think? An investigation revealed that he’d paid his chauffeur to douse the place in kerosene. It was a lovely Tudor Revival, just down the street from ours. Keech died a few weeks before his trial—committed suicide. He threw himself onto the Lexington Avenue subway tracks.”
“That’s a real tragedy,” Gwen said. “You mentioned being neighbors with Mr. Loomis?”
“Yes, the house I grew up in was just next door to the Loomis carriage house. Oak Mews, it’s called, just down the hill from Split Rock Manor. Everett and I were friends with Mr. Loomis’s son, Henry. Henry Loomis was a year older than Everett, but they’d spend hours at Split Rock and the Tower House laboratory tinkering with machines and causing all sorts of trouble. Everett got to meet many of the scientists who worked at the lab. Looking back, I’m sure it was that exposure that gave Everett his fascination with science. That’s why he became an engineer.
“After Henry Loomis joined the navy, Everett remained close to the Loomis family. As a matter of fact, Mr. Loomis was one of the heads of the Manhattan project. That’s why Everett was cleared for service on Tuballoy. Mr. Loomis wrote a personal letter of recommendation to the people at Westinghouse…
“I’m sorry; I do ramble. Yes, the trains. Everett made a tidy living building trains after Tuballoy; his models are legendary. That was all he did from about 1946 until he started his own company in 1957. He kept building models as a hobby, but eventually he focused mostly on his patent business. Everett had his life at Empyrean, and I was doing work for the Red Cross.”
CHAPTER 46
TOM SAT LISTENING to the old woman. Her words played over and over in his head. Everett had his life at Empyrean. Mildred had only said it once, but Tom heard it at least three times. “I’m sorry,” he said, cutting the woman off. “Did you say Empyrean, as in Empyrean Ventures?” Tom suspected he was being pranked.
“Yes, Empyrean Ventures. That’s a company Everett founded. It works with patents and such,” Mildred replied.
A burning sensation shot through Tom’s body. He felt weak and confused. He felt guilty, but he didn’t know why. He could hear Phillip’s strange half-face laugh. Tom suddenly felt as if he should conceal his identity, as if his motives were somehow sinister.
Mildred perked up, catching a second wind. “Yes, that was an exciting time. They were young and had all sorts of ideas about what the future would be and how it would work. And you know what? They were right about a lot of it. But Everett didn’t have much time for me anymore, and when we couldn’t have children, we drifted apart. We didn’t officially get the divorce until 1980. But he built model trains throughout his life. He became a rich man, too. Me, not so much,” she said, glancing around the dingy apartment.
Tom took a deep breath and then asked the question causing the pressure in his heart. “Do you know the name Phillip Hartger?”
“Well, of course. Phillip was Everett’s business partner,” Mildred answered impatiently. “They were best friends growing up in Tuxedo Park.”
Tom’s mind was racing again. He could hardly believe his ears, yet it fit perfectly—like a missing puzzle piece. Gwen reached over and held Tom’s hand.
“Phillip and Everett were childhood friends,” Tom repeated in a cracking voice.
“Naturally,” the woman responded, not realizing the shock her words were causing. “When they were kids, they did odd jobs at the Tower House lab, cleaned up the place. They worked for Mr. Loomis—well, they did until the accident.”
Tom was staring at the floor now. He could sense what was coming.
“What kind of accident?” Gwen asked.
“There was an explosion and a fire. Phillip was badly burned, disfigured. That boy lost half his face and a whole arm. I was eight when it happened, so around 1932. Everett and Phillip were eleven or twelve. It was a scary thing, and a sad time for everyone. G-men came around asking questions, but Mr. Loomis and one of his scientists came around, too. They spoke to the people in the park and asked them not to talk about anything. They told my mother that there had been a lot of misinformation going around, that she might be placing herself and me in danger by speaking to anyone. My mother told me all about it when I was older, around 1936. That was about the time Phillip came back from rehabilitation. But that poor boy, his face was just gone. People made fun of him, too.”
Tom was numb, thunderstruck. The woman’s words were shocking but completely logical and somehow familiar. Everything she uttered fit perfectly, and there was no doubt in his mind that he was hearing the truth. Everyone’s life is a series of emerging truths, a continuous stream of realizations that often sting our ego. But listening to the old woman speak was less like catching up with an old friend and more like hearing a horrific secret: it all sounded like an urban legend written by a mad
man. Tom could imagine the madman’s unsteady hand feverishly writing, pressing down with such force that his words were etched into the wood underneath the paper, leaving a permanent memorial. He saw the lab; a young, terrified Phillip; and a terrible explosion. The pain must have been unbearable, and the aftermath worse. Tom didn’t like to think about it. He kept it in the closet with the door shut tight. But here, in Mildred’s shabby living room, he began to realize that hearing the truth and suffering horribly was better than hearing lies and marching into oblivion wearing a dumb smile.
“Yes, Phillip Hartger. Now that’s a name I haven’t thought of in some time,” the woman continued.
Tom made eye contact with the nurse, who shifted uncomfortably. Tom knew he wasn’t a good liar, and he knew it was obvious that Mildred’s words had affected him.
The nurse crossed her arms over her chest and pressed her lips together tightly. “What did you say your last name was, again?” the nurse asked Tom.
Mildred looked at the nurse and then back to Tom. Gwen nodded subtly. Tom pushed out the words. “Hartger. My name is Tom Hartger. I’m his grandson. Phillip was my grandfather.”
“His grandson,” Mildred said, with a puzzled look in her eye.
The expression on the nurse’s face went from confused to suspicious to disappointed. Tom’s answer sounded like a confession. “Why didn’t you just tell me this was about your grandfather?” the nurse asked, her voice chastising.
Tom lifted his hands, as if to show there was nothing up his sleeve. “I had no idea Everett knew my grandfather—none at all. I only asked about Phillip because you mentioned Empyrean Ventures. I’m the CEO at Empyrean, and I had no idea that Everett was Phillip’s partner.”
Mildred looked confused. The tension in the room was thick and awkward. The nurse stood up. “Look, it’s late, and Mildred needs her rest. It would have been best if you’d been up front about your connection to her ex-husband. I should just say that she doesn’t have anything. She didn’t get a cent when Everett died; they’ve been divorced for decades—”