Dead of Night

10

Detective Heller climbed over the stair railing. Frieda began to follow, but I touched my hand to her shoulder.

I wanted to go next.

I didn’t know what we’d find, and I wanted to be in a position to shield the lady if something nasty was waiting up there.

What we found, though, was the opposite of nasty. It was a lesson about the strange little man whom I was beginning to admire.

Florida was up there. The delicate peninsular oddity that European discoverers called the “Flowered Land.” It was the state as if seen from a space capsule, reproduced as a diorama. Maybe the same intricate, three-dimensional model that Tomlinson had seen at that save-the-planet rally.

My pal was right. An exceptional work.

“How beautiful,” Frieda whispered, all three of us staring. “So this is what he did up here all alone.”

I said, “This kind of precision… meticulous. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Thank God, they didn’t do too much damage.”

The Russians had been here. Cabinets were opened, contents scattered. Dust streaks showed they’d moved the diorama, maybe to look under it. Not easily done. The thing was huge. Dominated the upstairs.

Jobe had knocked out all but load-bearing walls. The room was raw-beamed, high-ceilinged, open as a warehouse. It was a big space that echoed. Later, I would pace it: approximately twenty-five yards by twenty yards. The diorama took up most of it.

He’d painted the floor a vivid, Gulf Stream blue to represent water. Then he’d constructed a scaled-to-size likeness of the state, shore to shore, from the Panhandle to Key West, all in interlocking sections. I paced this, too: seventy feet long, not counting the scimitar chain that represented the Florida Keys. At the middle, near the Lake Okeechobee area, the model was a little over twenty-five feet wide.

This was a museum-quality replica work built of wood, wire, paint, clay, natural stone, sand, and earth.

Peninsular Florida is about four hundred miles long and a hundred fifty miles wide. I did the rough calculations in my head. Approximately two inches equaled one mile. It gave Applebee room to include unexpected surface features.

At first glance, the detail was remarkable. It got better. There was a pan-sized magnifying glass mounted on a nearby trolley. I switched on the light, lowered the convex lens, then stared awhile before giving a low, soft whistle. “You need to look through this.”

Tomlinson was right. This was art. The magnifying glass changed the aspect from a satellite view to what you might see flying over in a Cessna. What seemed to be beaded mosaics were actually micro-sized communities, bricked downtowns, shopping centers. Cars were half the size of a rice grain, yet so exacting that Applebee must have used surgical instruments. Diminutive wire trees-cypress, mangroves, gumbo-limbos, and oaks-the river systems, sinkholes, lakes, pine uplands, cities, military bases, train lines, baseball stadiums, and strands of royal palms were meticulous. This might have been a miniature world, populated by a miniature race.

Some landmarks were larger than scale. Near Orlando, he’d built a tourism icon disproportionately big: the Disney World castle, spires, and flags in place. Had Frieda not explained her brother’s love-hate feelings, it would’ve seemed absurd.

The castle dominated the region-maybe a symbol of perfect order in the little man’s orderly and private world.

Or maybe a symbol of something he detested.

The model could have been created only by someone with a hydrologist’s eye for the interlinking of water. The man knew the fragility of a biota that was floored with porous limestone, dependent on moving water.

Kneeling, I said to Frieda, “Look underneath. It has layers, like a wedding cake. Everything built on tracks, so it can be viewed in sections. There’s a pump system, too.”

Heller helped me slide away a portion of the top. The region’s substrata lay exposed.

Florida sits on a skeleton of prehistoric sea creatures and corals, karsts topography. It’s a honeycomb of caves, underground rivers, and permeable limestone. The diorama showed sections of the state’s three main aquifers. The depths were labeled incrementally from one hundred feet to three thousand feet.

I’d read about the complicated interlinks; here they were easily seen. Every water source served as a conduit to another. Drop a gallon of red dye into a sinkhole near Cross Creek, or Gainesville, and a red bloom might reappear days later, and several hundred miles away, in some inland lake near Miami. Or Florida Bay off Key Largo. Or Marathon-the dye jettisoned from the inner earth by subterranean current.

Applebee’s creation was a three-dimensional schematic. Plastic tubing replaced rock corridors. Aquifers were walled with Plexiglas. He’d elevated everything off the floor to hide the complicated pump system beneath.

I found the switch, and the pumps were soon making a pleasant, burbling hum as water circulated throughout the model, re-creating flow patterns below and above the ground, including the slow, pan-flat drainage of water from lakes of the Kissimmee Chain into the Everglades.

That caused me to think of exotic parasites.

“How long you think it’d take a man to build something like this? A couple years?” Heller was impressed, but his tone was also saying, A nut case, man. A kook.

Frieda said, “My brother? When he got into something-a project, an experiment-nothing else existed. He’d stay up forty-eight hours working nonstop. Seventy-two hours-whatever it took. But even for him, lots and lots of hours.”

I said, “This needs to be preserved. Maybe Gainesville, the Florida Museum of Natural History. They have good people there.”

The woman was nodding. “Or the Smithsonian.”

She was standing in what would have been the Gulf of Mexico, at the Florida Panhandle, near Tallahassee. I realized that I, too, had drifted automatically toward my home. I was standing above Sanibel and Captiva islands, still using the magnifying glass, charmed by the micro-sized docks of Dinkin’s Marina, and the pinhead-sized stilt house that represented my home.

Like certain salmonidae, humans tend to gravitate to the place of their origin.

Applebee hadn’t included all the marinas in Florida-impossible-but he’d included my little island, larger than scale.

I was touched. I remembered Frieda saying that he’d read my papers. He was a fan. It could have been the sort of flattery that we all indulge in from time to time. But the man had included my home in his intricate vision of Florida, so maybe it was true.

The woman stooped, touched her finger to a watery area southwest of Tallahassee. “Unbelievable. Doc, you’ve been to Apalachicola?”

“My favorite oysters.”

She was staring at the tip of her finger, then held it out to me. “Miniature oyster bars. Real shell flakes. He probably had to use a surgical microscope.”

I told her, “That’s what I was thinking.”

We both glanced around. No microscopes. No lab, no tools. No work station, either.

“The house has a third floor and an attic,” she said.

Detective Heller said, “Mind if we take a look?”

Jobe’s workshop and lab were up there, and the Russians had made another mess. Piles of wreckage, everything scattered. There were broken microscopes, files, computer discs, plus vials, test tubes, cabinets, and aquaria all smashed or ransacked. Same with shelves that had been filled with power tools, jeweler’s tools, chemicals, and hundreds of bottles of hobbyist oil paint, glue, books, manuals-all left torn, broken, or leaking on the floor.

The little man had been working on a second diorama. It was Central Florida, from Orlando to the lower fringe of the Everglades. The Disney Castle was waist-high, a couple of yards wide. A theme park complex was built around it, including lakes, islands, restaurants, buses, parking lots, and miniature paddle wheel boats.

The Russians had been rougher on this model. They’d busted open the castle, all of the larger buildings. The destruction seemed more of a violation because, through the broken roofs, we could see that the interiors were as detailed as the exteriors. Each and every room was painted, appointed, furnished.

“This guy-your brother-he really got into this stuff.”

The detective’s tone said again-a kook-but also that it was kind of cool.

“I’ve got a bunch of nieces and nephews, so I’ve been to Disney World more times than I wanted. The inside of these buildings, your brother has them nailed perfect. Like he shrunk them down itty-bitty.”

He was moving from venue to miniature venue, inspecting. Looking into drawers, under piles of wreckage. Doing a thorough search of his own-my read.

“No offense, lady, but why’d he screw around, waste his time on something like this?”

I interrupted. “Whoever made this mess didn’t think it was a waste of time. Why so much damage? They didn’t have to tear the place apart.” I said it tactfully, hoping he’d correctly interpreted the mayhem in this room. It had a frantic quality. Whatever they were after, finding it was important enough to risk prison-even for murder. The object was valuable… or incriminating.

Why else pour syrup into a computer? Break so much valuable equipment?

Heller didn’t seem interested. He continued poking around-a bloodhound sniffing. That was the impression. Or maybe he had that low-key city guy in the sticks style: Sounding dumb was a way to play it smart.

“Look’a there,” he said, pointing at tiny green boats on a miniature lagoon. “I’ve been on that ride. My sister’s kid, it’s her favorite.”

Frieda was staring across the room at something. “That’s the Magic Kingdom. It used to be his favorite; dioramas there, too, so maybe that’s where Jobe got interested. Each diorama represents a different country.”

She began walking away. “Earlier today, I told Doc that my brother hated to travel. I guess he did all his traveling at the Magic Kingdom.”

When she told us the name of the ride, that inane music came back into my head.

What had grabbed Frieda’s attention were dozens of pencil sketches tacked to the wall. Several were rough studies of what, at first, I took to be faceless, noseless sketches of Mickey Mouse viewed from many angles. The sketches had a geometric quality, as if someone had taught a machine to use a pencil.

They were unsigned.

The adjoining wall was papered with computer-generated images. Charts of South Florida, arrows to illustrate water flow vectors. Graphs representing outflow from Lake Okeechobee, month by month. Cross-sectional water tables showing elevations of bedrock or sand. Diagrams on grid paper, labeled, “The Effects of Altered Hydrology on Sugar Retention Areas.”

Incongruously, there were also the likenesses of two easily identified singers, and also a female actress-her brother’s favorite entertainers, Frieda said.

A woman, too. Several of her. Attractive in a feral way, high cheeks, pointed chin. Blond? Couldn’t tell. I wondered if it could be the woman who’d been beating him, but decided it was unlikely. There was warmth in the woman’s expression.

Applebee showing a glimpse of his human side.

Frieda was there, too; a child with a handsome face and pigtails. Beside her was Jobe-a self-portrait created by what looked to be thousands of dot-sized zeros.

Or were they?

Sniffling, trying to hold back tears, the woman said, “When we were kids, he couldn’t color between the lines. It embarrassed the heck out of him. I’m surprised he ever picked up a pencil again.”

She was studying the likeness of a large man, thick glasses atop his head, leaning over a microscope. It took me a moment to realize that it was me.

“This is from a photograph I sent him. Do you remember when I took it? You were visiting the lab in Tallahassee. Jobe always asked how your work was going. I sent him a photo just in case you two ever met.”

I found it more than peculiar. The woman sensed my uneasiness, explaining, “It’s like with the singers and the actress. He was a fan. Plus, who knows, maybe he saw you as a normal version of himself. Two guys obsessed with water, but you were the sociable version. We all live vicariously through others at times, don’t we?”

I told her, yes, most of us do.

I’d been studying the tiny zeros; decided they weren’t zeros after all.

“Take a closer look,” I told her. “What do you see?”

She looked for a moment, then turned. “They’re not dots like I thought. It’s that damn cartoon mouse again. Reduced, then computer-generated thousands of times. Round face, two round ears on top. So childlike.”

Heller said, “Like a kid, yeah. A thing for Disney.” His tone created more distance, saying, Weirdo. “If you find out anything about that missing computer? You call me pronto. Okay?”

I was studying the facsimile of my own face. The pupil of my right eye was darkened by hundreds of the micro-sized symbols. An oval absence of symbols created a glint in my left eye.

Heller was right. Weird.

But, an hour later, as Frieda and I sat over lunch at a Kissimmee restaurant, I interrupted myself in midsentence. Snapped my fingers, saying, “Hey… wait a minute. Those idiotic Mickey sketches. I just realized something. We’re wrong. They’re not images. They’re symbols.”

I asked the waitress for pencil and paper, then slid into Frieda’s side of the booth.

“I feel like a dope not thinking of this,” as I drew a large circle in the middle of the paper. Atop the circle, I drew two smaller circles, like ears.

She looked at it for a moment. “Sorry, pal. Maybe I’m too upset for my brain to work. What I see is that cartoon mouse again.”

“Nope. You told me your brother had a love-hate relationship with Disney. Which is why I don’t think it’s the mouse. Watch.”

On the largest circle, I wrote: “O-2”

On each of the smaller circles, I wrote: “H+1.”

I touched the pencil to each. “Pretend you’re looking through some futuristic electron microscope. The mouse’s face is a single, large-charged oxygen atom. Its ears are positively charged hydrogen atoms, each tilted at an angle. The degree of the angle is a little over a hundred degrees. I remember that from high school biology.

“It’s this shape-the cartoon shape-that causes one end of the molecule to be negative, the other positive. If the atoms were arranged to look like anything but Mickey Mouse, the molecule couldn’t adhere to its fellow molecules. Which means it couldn’t take fluid form. If the atoms weren’t arranged precisely as they are, there’d be no life on Earth.”

The woman was puzzled for a moment, but then a smile came to her face. “I can see it now. Water. It’s the atomic model for water.”

“I should’ve realized it right off.”

“Yes! That’s why Jobe used it over and over. It’s not that damn mouse, it’s a water molecule. Should we call Heller and tell him?”

I wasn’t impressed by the man. Nor was she. On the drive into town, Frieda had told me there was something about the guy that made her uneasy.

“No, don’t call him. I met the county medical investigator. I’ll let her know.”

Frieda said it again, grinning. “Water.”

I felt good. Pleased because the Mickey Mouse fascination had seemed inane.

I liked Applebee again.

“You called it his refuge. That’s what he was sketching: a mathematically correct likeness of water. With me, it’s bull sharks and tarpon. I do the same thing. If I sit down and doodle, they’re what I draw.”

The woman was pleased, reflective, as she said, “He was such a dear, private person, my brother. What kind of people would hurt someone like him?”

The image of the Russian woman, belt in hand, came into my head. I heard the belt snap against flesh. Heard the quality of her voice: She liked it, causing pain.

I shrugged. “No telling.”

But I was thinking: People who are abnormal. Someone dangerous.