8.4 (2012)

by Peter Hernon

  “I’ve sent you a package,” he said without any introduction or greeting. “A videotape and some computer disks. I’ve also sent you a key to my office. My papers are there. I want you to study the material and do what you think best.”

  “Doctor, what’s the matter?” Holleran said. His voice sounded weak, far off. Something in his tone immediately put her on edge.

  “I have pancreatic cancer, Elizabeth. It’s terminal. Please watch the video. It will explain everything. It’s very important that you do this as soon as possible.”

  The news stunned her. She hadn’t known that Prable was sick.

  “Doctor, where’s Joanne? Let me talk to Joanne.” Holleran knew and liked Joanne Prable. She’d taught English literature at Berkeley. A warm, good-humored woman. She and her husband were inseparable.

  Prable didn’t answer. Holleran heard his heavy, irregular breathing.

  “Please put her on the telephone.”

  “Read and study all the materials,” Prable said. “Promise me that.”

  “I promise, doctor. Now please put your wife on the line. Let me talk to her.” Afraid he was going to hang up, she wanted to keep him talking. She sensed that something was terribly wrong.

  “I can’t do that, Elizabeth,” Prable said after another long pause. “My wife is dead. My dear, beloved Joanne. She wanted me to do it. Begged me to do it. Oh, dear God, and I listened to her.”

  NEAR KENTUCKY LAKE

  JANUARY 9

  11:05 A.M.

  ATKINS DROVE BACK TO THE BLACKTOP AND followed the road signs toward Kentucky Lake. He’d noticed a boat marina when he passed near the lake earlier that morning. He wanted to get directions and maybe a cup of coffee. After what he’d just seen, he figured he could use a good jolt of caffeine.

  He didn’t know what to think about the horde of rats. They were like frightened lemmings charging for the nearest cliff. He’d heard of rats moving in huge packs but had never seen anything that remotely compared with what he’d just witnessed. It was going to be at the top of the list of things to tell Walt Jacobs.

  He and Jacobs went back a long way, since their days together in graduate school at Stanford. Jacobs had gone to Memphis after spending a few years in California with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the federal agency responsible for studying earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and all manner of seismic hazards. Atkins, who’d just turned forty-two, was with the USGS’s disaster response team. It was his job to visit the sites of severe quakes and examine their effects. He’d just returned from a month-long trip to Peru, where a magnitude 7.3 quake had leveled several villages in the Andes. The terremoto had triggered landslides that wiped the villages off the mountainsides. A couple hundred people had died, most of them in crudely built masonry homes that fell on them while they slept.

  A few days after dropping off his report at USGS headquarters in Reston, Virginia, Atkins had flown to Memphis. Jacobs had invited him to visit what geologists called the “New Madrid Seismic Zone.”

  Atkins was looking forward to the meeting. They had a lot to talk about, especially Jacobs’ concern that conditions were ripe for a potentially serious earthquake in that part of the country. Shaped like a gigantic hatchet, the fault line extended roughly 140 miles along the adjoining state lines of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. It passed through parts of five states and crossed the Mississippi in three places.

  Jacobs had faxed him a map that showed the fault with striking clarity. It was clipped to a notebook that lay open next to Atkins on the front seat. As he drove, he glanced at the map again. He still couldn’t believe it.

  The map showed seismic activity that had occurred in the heart of the Mississippi Valley over the last twenty years. The dots represented the locations of earthquakes over an eight-state area, most of them small, usually less than a magnitude 2 or 3. The hatchet or hammer shape of the fault showed clearly, a darkening where the dots were so thick they overlapped. The handle crossed the boot heel of Missouri and extended into Arkansas. The blade crossed the corners of northwestern Tennessee, southwestern Kentucky, southeastern Missouri, and southern Illinois.

  Little known to most Americans, it was one of the most active faults in the world and had produced three of the largest earthquakes on record in North America. The village of New Madrid in the Missouri boot heel was the epicenter for the quakes that struck between December 16, 1811, and February 7, 1812. Thousands of aftershocks had rippled across the Mississippi Valley.

  Based on damage reports, all three earthquakes measured a magnitude 8 or greater on the Richter scale.

  Atkins found that a little short of staggering.

  He was going to meet Jacobs later that day at Reelfoot Lake to discuss the situation. Located forty miles away in northwestern Tennessee, the big lake had been created by the New Madrid earthquakes. Atkins had always wanted to see it.

  Along with the scientific data that concerned Jacobs, there’d also been reports of strange animal behavior in the fault zone. Hogs running wild in their pens. Cows butting into each other. Horses slamming around in their stalls. And now rats.

  Partly as a favor to his friend and partly out of his own curiosity, Atkins agreed to check out some of the reports before their meeting. Jacobs had given him a list with four or five names, all people who’d called to say their animals were acting up.

  Atkins had been trying to find one of these farmers when he got lost on that remote stretch of country road near Benton.

  The Chinese had long relied on animals to provide warning signs for earthquakes. In one famous example, in February 1975, a magnitude 7.3 quake hit the city of Haicheng. More than ninety percent of the homes collapsed. Earlier that same day, officials had warned the population that a big quake was imminent. Despite bitter cold, most people moved outdoors. Only a couple hundred people died, and this in a country where it was common for bad quakes to kill thousands. The Chinese partly based their prediction on reports of unusual animal behavior.

  Atkins had always been skeptical about using animals as earthquake predictors. And yet the phenomenon interested him and was hard to discount. Maybe animals could sense subtle changes, say, in magnetic fields or feel pressure building up in other unknown ways.

  After his encounter with the rats, Atkins was willing to admit he’d been scared, but he still wasn’t ready to believe the rodents somehow sensed an earthquake was imminent and were scurrying to get away. He wasn’t about to make that kind of intellectual leap. Some other explanation for what he’d seen was possible, but he could talk that over with Jacobs.

  He reached Kentucky Lake shortly after 11:00 A.M. He still had plenty of time to drive fifty miles into neighboring Tennessee for their meeting.

  THE lake was impressive. Set between steep, forested ridges that had once formed a spectacular valley, it was 135 miles long, the largest reservoir in the world. There were actually two lakes, separated by a slender finger of land about three miles wide that was called, appropriately, the Land Between the Lakes. The other reservoir, Lake Barklay, was only slightly smaller than Kentucky Lake. Both had been created in the 1930s when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Tennessee River. Roughly 170 miles from St. Louis to the northwest and 140 miles from Memphis, the lakes were a popular tourist attraction.

  Admiring the view, Atkins understood why. He turned off the road at the marina, which was near the northern end of the lake. A small bait and tackle shop and a restaurant were on a floating dock that formed a T in the water.

  After parking in a gravel lot, Atkins descended a flight of wooden steps to the dock. He entered the empty restaurant and took a stool at the counter. Moments later a middle-aged woman with striking red hair entered. She wore a gray-and-black-checked flannel shirt and was wiping her hands on her jeans.

  Surprised to see a customer, she apologized. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you pull up. I was out back checking the bait tank.”

  Atkins ordered coffee and a piece of cherry pie. Th
e sign behind the counter said it was homemade.

  “I guarantee you’ll like it,” the woman said. “I baked it this morning.”

  Atkins guessed she was in her early to middle fifties. She had an attractive face and a warm, engaging smile.

  He introduced himself, and the woman reached across the counter and shook his hand. “I’m Lauren,” she said. “Lauren Mitchell.” Serving the coffee and pie, she asked what brought Atkins to Kentucky Lake. “Don’t take this as an insult, but you don’t exactly look like you came here to fish,” she said.

  When he explained that he was a geologist with the USGS, Lauren’s face brightened.

  “Everybody’s been talking about all the weird stuff the animals have been doing,” she said, freshening his coffee after he took a few sips. “Personally, I don’t believe in that. You usually hear the cockamamy animal stories after the quake, not before. This time it’s different.” She wiped up some spilled coffee with a white towel. “Do you think we’re gonna have one?”

  Taken aback by her blunt question, Atkins said, “I don’t know.”

  “You live in these parts, you get used to the ground shaking and the animal stories,” Lauren said. “We usually get a shaker once, maybe twice a week. Nothing really big although we’ve had those, too. I remember a magnitude 5 we had six or seven years ago not too far from here. Rocked this boat dock like a bobber.”

  Atkins mentioned the rats he’d just seen. The memory still made the back of his neck tingle.

  Lauren stared at him over the counter, her dark green eyes narrowing. “That’s a new one,” she said. “That’s one for the books. You hear all kinds of stories out here in the country, especially about earthquakes. It’s part of the local folklore. Heck, when I was a little girl, my grandpa told me stories about the big one back in 1896. How the ground shook like jelly. How waterspouts opened up in the fields. How the dogs were barking in the middle of the night just before the ground started shaking. You hear all kinds of queer stories. But I’ve never heard anything like the one you just told me.”

  “Have you noticed anything unusual?” Atkins asked. He liked Lauren. She was salt of the earth just like his mother and her people. Farmers mainly from upstate New York. Real people without any pretensions, people who liked to work with their hands and who had roots that went a long way back.

  “You mean have I seen any animals doing crazy stunts? No, nothing like that. But I’ll tell you one thing—this lake sure has been acting up.”

  “What do you mean?” Atkins swiveled in his stool, so he could look out through the curtained windows at the lake. It was three or four miles wide, the far shore shrouded in haze.

  “It’s been real choppy,” Lauren said. “We’ve been getting waves running two and three feet. I can’t ever recall anything like that before. Some days you’d think it was the ocean with a storm blowing.”

  “How long has it been like that?” Atkins asked.

  “A month or so,” Lauren said. “It’s quiet right now. But yesterday afternoon, it was kicking up whitecaps like I’ve never seen. This dock gets bumped around pretty bad in rough water. Come spring, I’m gonna have to retighten all the couplings.”

  Moments later, Atkins heard footsteps pounding on the gangplank that connected the dock with the shore. The door slammed open and a young boy ran in, carrying his backpack.

  “Grandma, you’ve got to see this,” he said excitedly. “They’re all dead.” Then he turned around and ran back outside.

  “Bobby, what’s the matter with you?” Lauren asked, calling after him and stepping from behind the counter. She turned to Atkins. “That’s my grandson. His mom and dad were killed in a plane crash just after he was born. My son was his father. It was a rough time. My husband died about then. I’ve raised Bobby myself. He’s twelve.”

  Atkins watched him out the window. The boy was tall for his age, almost six feet. A good-looking kid. He wore a blue jacket, jeans, and red Reeboks.

  “You’ve got to see this,” Bobby shouted from outside. “They’re dead.”

  “What’s dead?” Lauren asked. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Puzzled, she and Atkins went for the door.

  “There must be hundreds of them out there,” yelled Bobby. He was so excited and breathless he could barely get the words out.

  “Bobby Mitchell, come here this minute and tell me what in the world you’re talking about.”

  The boy looks scared, Atkins thought.

  “Here, see!” He brought over a plastic bag and emptied the contents on the decking—half a dozen good-sized frogs and a three-foot-long bull snake, all frozen stiff.

  “What on earth … ?”

  “They’re down by the lake, Grandma. You’ve got to see.”

  He was pulling her by the hand. Lauren slipped her coat on and started to follow him.

  “You mind if I tag along?” Atkins asked. He wondered what the boy had seen.

  “No, come on,” Lauren said. “This is one time when I could use some company.”

  They crossed the gangplank and climbed a short flight of wooden steps to the parking lot. Hurrying along a tree-lined path, they followed the boy along the shore of the lake.

  “They’re over here,” he said.

  Lauren and Atkins followed him down a narrow trail that descended steeply to the water.

  “This is one of his favorite places,” Lauren said over her shoulder. “In the nice weather he likes to sit on the rocks and eat his lunch and fish.”

  They could barely keep up with the boy. The lake was lapping against the rocks that lined the shore.

  “When it gets choppy, you can’t even see those rocks,” Lauren said. “It was like that yesterday. It sounded like the surf out here.”

  When they got closer to the water, Atkins stopped in his tracks.

  “Grandma, look at them!”

  As far as Atkins could see, the curving shore was littered with the frozen bodies of frogs. There were hundreds of them. All of them dead, along with a number of snakes. A big blue racer lay curled up in some brush. Atkins guessed it was at least five feet long. And frozen stiff.

  “Here’s one,” Bobby said. He stood by the edge of the water. “It’s still alive.”

  Atkins went over to look. A frog was struggling out of the mud. It managed to pull itself out and make two or three feeble hops before it stopped moving.

  Atkins had no idea what was happening. Frogs and snakes hibernated during the winter. But something had awakened them and driven them up out of the ground.

  He saw more frogs emerging from the muck. The shore was covered with dead or dying frogs.

  Lauren took her grandson by the hand and started pulling him away.

  “Grandma, no. I want to watch. What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, wishing to God she did.

  She looked at Atkins. The playful flicker that he’d noticed in her eyes back at the boat dock had disappeared. Her sharp stare was deadly serious.

  “Maybe this man here can tell us,” she said.

  Atkins swept his eyes along the shore, taking in the numbing sight, trying to make sense of it. He didn’t know what to say.

  LOS ANGELES

  JANUARY 9

  7:00 P.M.

  BEFORE SHE LEFT POINT ARGUELLA, ELIZABETH Holleran called the police from the trailer at the dig site. She described her disturbing conversation with Otto Prable and her fear that something might have happened to his wife. Then she told Jim Dietz where she was going in a few hurried sentences, jumped in her car, and headed for Los Angeles. She went straight down Highway 101, often pushing the speed over eighty.

  Elizabeth kept thinking about what Prable had told her and his strange, almost frightened voice. It was uncharacteristically faint, a whisper.

  She made the trip in less than two hours, arriving at Prable’s secluded home at dusk. Four police cruisers and an unmarked blue van were in the driveway. The home was in Parkside, an upscale
neighborhood just north of Beverly Hills.

  Elizabeth noticed that her hands were trembling when she got out of the car and walked to the front door of the sprawling ranch house. She’d been there a few times before. Prable frequently hosted parties for his grad students, who gathered to drink beer and eat cold sandwiches on the rear deck, which cantilevered off the side of a bluff and offered a sweeping view of the Santa Monica Mountains.

  Elizabeth felt light-headed. She put a hand against the wall to steady herself.

  A detective in plainclothes met her at the door. A sergeant from homicide. He looked in his mid-fifties, heavyset and balding, with a pockmarked face.

  “Miss Holleran, I want to thank you for calling us,” he said. “Why don’t you come inside and sit down, and we can talk.”

  Elizabeth followed him into the living room. It was as she remembered it, wide and spacious with a double fireplace. A row of small, hand-painted ceramic dolls stood on the mantel. Native American dolls. Joanne Prable had collected them on their many trips to New Mexico.

  Elizabeth heard men’s voices in another part of the house.

  “Can you please tell me what’s happened?” she asked. “I don’t think I can take this much longer, not knowing.”

  The sergeant nodded as if to say he understood. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt that looked too small for his thick arms. His neck bulged at the tight collar. “They’re both back in a bedroom,” he said. “The woman, Mrs. Prable, was shot once in the head. The man, I assume it’s her husband, is lying in bed with a plastic bag over his head. It looks like he swallowed some pills first. There’s an empty bottle of Seconal on the floor. One-hundred-milligram tablets. You can go back there in a couple minutes. I’d advise against it, but if you think you can identify them, it’d be a help.”

  Elizabeth sat there, fighting the urge to scream. It was what she’d feared ever since Prable had called her.

  “Could you tell me about the Prables?” the sergeant asked. He had a deep, yet gentle voice. “Do they have any relatives we could call?”