Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  “You’re wrong about one thing,” he said. “Yes, the dust was thick on the floor of the painted room. Goldsby and his people have made enough progress at the foot of the stairs to know that the room to the left is blanketed with dust, too. But the stairs? They weren’t nearly so dusty.”

  “Are you saying somebody swept them?” Faye pictured Kaayla ordering her housekeeping staff to sweep this space that no hotel guest would ever see.

  “No, not at all. It’s just that the stairwell seems to have had a very slow water leak. Or maybe the water condensed off those cool plaster walls and collected on the floor over a period of years. The brick stair treads were covered with a light skim of dust that had been wetted and dried over and over. Goldsby says that people could have walked up and down those stairs without leaving evidence, easy.”

  Faye wasn’t sure whether she thought that this was significant, but she mentally filed it away for later.

  “I suppose you have agents working in the newspaper archives?” she asked.

  “Yes. Because, despite what a lot of people want to think, the FBI is not stupid.”

  “I didn’t think you were. But do you mind if I take a look in those archives, too? They may have historical photographs of downtown Oklahoma City from the years when those underground rooms were occupied. I would dearly love to find another entrance.”

  “You and me both, but people have been looking for years.”

  “None of them were the FBI. And none of them were me.”

  He laughed out loud and said, “Well, that’s true. I’ll pay for a few hours of your library time. You may already know this, but you don’t have to go work in The Oklahoman’s archives. Their back issues are digitized all the way back to 1901. You can access what you need from a computer in the comfort of your own hotel room, and I want you to. There are just too many people in this command center so, and I mean this kindly, please get out.”

  Faye rose to leave.

  “Go find something that a lot of people have been trying to find for years. Something about you makes me think you can do it. That’s why I hired you.”

  * * *

  True to Ahua’s word, Faye’s computer took her straight to 1969 while she was sitting in the comfort of her own hotel room. There, on the front page of the April 9 edition of The Daily Oklahoman, was a headline saying:

  Hidden Chinese City? Maybe So, Maybe No.

  Accompanying the article was the picture she’d already seen on her phone, showing a man in a suit shining a flashlight on an old oil cookstove.

  The discovery of a world beneath downtown Oklahoma City had been front-page-and-above-the-fold news, and coverage had continued for more than a week. Older residents had shared their memories of the underground community, some of them confirmed observations and some of them rumors. One reporter, skeptical about their oral histories, said that if every rumored entrance had been real, it would have been impossible to walk down the street without falling into the catacombs below.

  Faye learned cool details, like the fact that the ceiling sockets in some of the newly uncovered rooms had still held light bulbs. One writer said that explorers had found a map of the United States on one wall. She imagined immigrants studying it to learn the shape of their new home.

  None of the few published pictures depicted the room that Alonso Smith would eventually fill with color. Faye looked carefully for the small metal door, but failed to find it. No matter how many times she reread the 1969 articles, she wasn’t able to find a useful clue that she could tie to the bombing.

  She clicked back to the first article about the discovery of the underground chambers, published on April 9, 1969. At the very top of the front page, above the headline about the hidden Chinese city, was a headline reading:

  Other Indian Schools No Better Than Chilocco

  It detailed an investigation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs into the conditions at the schools that Sly, Cully, and many other indigenous people had attended. Investigators had found abuse at some schools, as well as a widespread lack of the most basic tools of education—paper, books, and chalk.

  Faye thought of Joe’s grandfather sending Sly away to boarding school because he thought his intelligent son deserved an education, and she burned with anger. What could he have accomplished if someone had helped him reach his potential? How different would her husband’s growing-up years have been?

  Cully, too, had left his family for a promise that was never kept. Both he and Sly had made their way in the world without even a high school diploma to open a few doors for them.

  The thought of Cully’s high school diploma made her think of the reason he’d lost it. Sly had said that he ran away from boarding school a year before he would have graduated. Cully had consistently avoided speaking of this past. Maybe Angela was the reason.

  This reticence on the subject of Angela had been risky, because it had kept Cully from being straight with the FBI. This made him look bad.

  Would Cully and Angela’s escape from boarding school have made the papers? Maybe. Two missing teenagers would have been noteworthy, or so it seemed to Faye. She didn’t know the name of his school, but she knew that his extended family still lived well east of Oklahoma City. She wasn’t at all sure if The Oklahoman would have covered their disappearance, but it was the newspaper of record for the state. She might as well start there, then branch out to the Tulsa World and then to smaller newspapers to the east, if need be.

  What year would Cully have graduated? Faye didn’t even know how old he was.

  But the internet did. In the twenty-first century, celebrities were entitled to no privacy whatsoever. A quick web search for “Cully Mantooth birthday” brought her the date she needed—March 11, 1945. Presuming he would have graduated at eighteen, as most Americans do, he would have been a seventeen-year-old runaway at Eastertime in 1962.

  She typed “runaway” into the search box and chose a time window from March 1, 1962 to April 30, 1962, planning to refine the search with Cully’s name, but there was no need. Six articles popped up and all of them were about Cully and Angela, whose last name was given as Bond.

  The first headline said, “Teenage pair runs away from tribal boarding school,” and it asked for help in finding them. Two photos, obviously taken for the school yearbook, accompanied the article.

  Angela had been heartbreakingly thin, with huge dark eyes and a tight-lipped smile. Black hair, parted in the center, framed her heart-shaped face. She wasn’t beautiful but she looked easy to love.

  Joe had been a part of Faye’s life for so long that she had forgotten how young he had been when they met, how very young they had both been. Joe had left Oklahoma at about this age. When she met him at twenty-five, he had looked startlingly like his distant cousin Cully at seventeen. He looked more like Cully than he looked like his own father, and Faye had always thought that Joe took after Sly. Looking at Cully’s photo felt like time travel. One moment, some part of her believed that she was looking at her husband’s square jaw, soft eyes, and broad shoulders. Then in the next moment, she recognized the age of the photo and knew that she couldn’t be looking at Joe.

  What had happened to this boy and girl when they disappeared in 1962?

  She scrolled forward through the later articles. There were a few mentions, very brief, saying that there had been no news on the disappearances. As the articles’ dates proceeded through April, she found more of the same. Until she didn’t.

  On the last day of April in 1962, the body of a young woman washed ashore on the banks of the North Canadian River. In the years since then, the stretch of the North Canadian that rolled through downtown Oklahoma City had been renamed the Oklahoma River, a name that the city’s boosters thought more appropriate, considering that it lay a thousand miles south of the Canadian border. But in 1962, it was still called the North Canadian from its source in New Mexico to the poin
t where it merged with the Canadian River in east Oklahoma.

  The North Canadian was, and still is, a shallow stream that winds through sandbars and, in parts of Oklahoma, brilliant red clay. During the dry summers, a very old joke circulates, with the punch line being that Oklahoma was the home of the only river that needed to be mowed.

  The stretch through Oklahoma City, however, is deeper than it used to be. It has been altered over the years, time and again. It has been deepened and straightened. The water that falls on the city’s mostly paved urban area is now diverted to the river through an underground network of storm sewers, one of which Faye knew intimately. The water that discharges from those sewers converts the urban stretch of the river into a rampage after Oklahoma’s notoriously violent thunderstorms.

  The woman’s body was found in 1962 on a sandbar in a river that was still shallow and sandy. She was found east of the city, caught in twiggy undergrowth that hung down from its banks into its shallow water. It was hard to say how long she had been there, given the limits of 1960s forensic science, but her flesh was largely decomposed. Her fingerprints were a thing of the past and her facial features were obliterated.

  The article reporting the discovery of the corpse mentioned the two runaways, Cully Mantooth and Angela Bond, speculating whether Angela had been found and whether Cully’s corpse might be nearby. Or whether Cully might have had a hand in her death.

  Faye’s hand went to her phone and dialed Ahua’s number by feel. There was a lot about the disappearance of Cully and Angela that she didn’t know, but now she knew one critical fact. She knew why Cully might be so reluctant to tell the FBI much of anything.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Faye sat in the command center with Ahua, who was shaking his head. “Why haven’t my people already brought me this information?”

  “Why would they be focusing on Cully? Is he a suspect in the bombing? Seriously? A major suspect? I can’t imagine that he is. Yeah, his mother lived in the underground community and he didn’t tell you about it, but what does that really have to do with anything? Why would he come back from Hollywood after all these years to blow up a hotel sitting on top of the community where his mother lived?”

  Ahua shrugged, which she supposed was as close to saying, “Yeah, your cousin’s probably not a homicidal bomber,” as she was going to get. She figured that advocating for the innocence of her distant relative had put her about five minutes away from being fired from this consulting job, so she kept talking while she still could.

  “I think your agents missed this information on Cully because they have more important things to do than snoop into the history of a man who did not set off that bomb. Besides, I knew something they didn’t when I sat down to do my research. My father-in-law told me details about exactly when Cully ran away that helped me narrow the search.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I figured out that the things he told me were really important about five minutes ago, and here I am. Look what happens when I search The Oklahoman for Cully’s name.”

  She typed in a search string—“Cully Mantooth”—but left the date open. Then she hit the enter key. A list of articles filled the screen. Faye pressed the down arrow key and held it down while fifty years of movie notices, reviews, and feature articles scrolled by.

  Gesturing at a half century of press coverage rolling over her screen, she said, “It would take a team of persistent agents a very long time to sift through all that information and find Cully’s name in an article about a woman’s body being found downriver from Oklahoma City.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Ahua said. “But I have felt all along that there was something off about that man. I still do. And there’s something I don’t understand. Maybe the people investigating that woman’s death hit a dead end in 1962, because nobody knew where Cully was. But why didn’t they go after him five years later when he became a star? Everybody knew where he was then.”

  “Because they knew by then that the dead woman wasn’t Angela.”

  Faye pulled up an article from May 1962.

  Dead Woman Found in River Still Unidentified

  The text of the article stated that Angela Bond’s stepfather had viewed the body and confirmed that it was not his missing daughter. Though badly decomposed, the skin on its upper back was sufficiently intact to show a large birthmark. The article included a photo of Angela in a bathing suit that confirmed her stepfather’s statement that she had no birthmark on her left shoulder blade.

  “I called the police department and asked if that body was ever identified,” Faye said. “The answer was no.”

  “Did Angela ever show up?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t have a happy life somewhere. Maybe she’s still living that long, happy life. If Cully hadn’t gone on to be famous, we wouldn’t know what had happened to him, either. Sometimes, runaways disappear. Sometimes, they’re leaving a life so terrible that nobody would want to go back to it.”

  Ahua scanned the last article again, the one where Angela Bond’s stepfather denied that the unidentified body was hers. “I get it that they were unhappy at boarding school, but why didn’t they just go home?”

  Faye scrolled back to the first article about the runaways. “Cully’s parents were dead. This article says that they died in a car crash a few months before he took off. From what I know about his extended family, I feel sure they would have taken him in, but maybe he didn’t believe it. As for Angela’s mother and stepfather, it’s hard to say. Maybe they just didn’t get along.”

  “I hear what you’re saying. You think it’s unlikely that he bombed that hotel, and maybe you’re right, but there’s still something that man isn’t telling me. I can tell. I want to find out what it is.”

  “You do that. But first let’s talk about Alonso Smith.”

  “My people did a much better job of getting information on Smith out of the newspaper archives than they did on running down what Cully Mantooth was doing in 1962. Smith does actually appear to be his last name. It’s a good thing that Alonso isn’t so common.”

  “What about Lonnie Smith? Did you find anything under that name?”

  “Nothing useful. There was a minor league baseball player here in the eighties named Lonnie Smith. He showed up in the sports pages quite a lot until he got traded away, but he’s not the same guy who turns up under the name Alonso. And, trust me, the ball player’s not the guy we’re looking for. It’s gotta be the yo-yo that sometimes went by Alonso, because he’s a real piece of work. Or he was, if we presume he was the bomber and I think we should.”

  Faye was disappointed. She was really liking the idea of tracking down the bomber by following the career of a late-twentieth century minor league baseball player. She imagined him being traded from one team to another, moving from city to city as he aged and his skills declined…

  Ahua snapped her out of that fantasy by saying, “We know where Lonnie-Smith-the-baseball-player is. He’s alive, so he’s not our bomber. Alonso Smith, however, disappears from the public record in the mid-1990s. And he does some nutty things before he goes.”

  He pulled up an article in a small-town newspaper detailing a 1995 encounter between Alonso Smith and an attendance officer for the Cashion Public Schools in Kingfisher County. The officer was following up on a report that Smith had one or more children of school age who were not in school and who had no letter on file certifying that they were being homeschooled. Witnesses had reported four or more children living with Smith, but the school system had no records on any of them.

  The article also mentioned previous altercations at Smith’s property. He had threatened trespassers. His wife, Sandra Smith, had called for help more than once, citing domestic violence, each time changing her mind before help arrived, saying something like, “Never mind. Everything’s fine now.” None of those reports had mentioned childre
n on the property.

  The attendance officer looking for truant students had reported that Smith was confrontational, denying that he had any children, then launching into what the article called a ‘ten-minute lecture on the evils of bringing children into this misbegotten world,’ delivered while his wife stood silently by his side. More concerning to Faye was his statement that if he did ever have children, he wouldn’t “trust the Satan-followers running the county schools to come near them.”

  “Do you think he had children that he was hiding?” she asked Ahua.

  “The attendance officer said that there were six chairs and a table on the house’s front porch, plus a porch swing, which seemed like a lot of places to sit if Smith and his wife were the only two people living there. He said that they didn’t seem like people who had a lot of money for extra furniture. The reporter rendered her opinion that they also didn’t seem like the kind of folks who entertained a lot of company.”

  “You gotta love small-town reporters. They call it like they see it.” Faye scanned the article. “It doesn’t say where these people lived. Were they so far out in the country that they could really hide their children?”

  “Kingfisher County has fifteen thousand people spread out over about a thousand square miles, and that’s including some towns. You could hide a lot of children in the spaces between those towns, if you were so inclined.”

  “Do you think he did?” Faye said, thinking of the bodies of three boys, found in a room with walls covered with the signature of Alonso “Lonnie” Smith.

  “Cashion is half an hour east of here. I’ve got people on the scene looking for that attendance officer and the house where he saw Alonso and Sandra Smith. Let me show you something else interesting. It was in the bomber’s hip pocket, so my brilliant and patient evidence technicians had to piece it together.”

  He pulled up a series of photographs that showed several small scraps of paper. Their edges were frayed and singed, and they were stained with something brown that was almost certainly Alonso Smith’s blood, but some of the words written on the fragments could be read.