Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

No Mystery by Terence Faherty

Terence Faherty has three series currently running in EQMM: that to which this new story belongs, following a Star Republic reporter; the tales featuring post-WWII Hollywood P.I. Scott Elliott; and the series that launched his career, starring former seminary student and sometime sleuth Owen Keane. The first Keane novel, Deadstick, was translated into Italian in 2009. In 2011, there will be two new Scott Elliott novels: Dance in the Dark (Five Star Press) and The Hollywood Op (Perfect Crime Books).

That the story of the levitating rocks in Yellowwood State Forest had been reported first by a Bloomington paper, the Herald, didn’t bother E.N. Boxleiter, my editor. He considered our employer, the Star Republic, to be Indiana’s newspaper of record. Nothing that happened in the state, not even a gubernatorial election, was really official until the Star Republic mentioned it, in Boxleiter’s view. Other papers’ headlines were only slightly better than anonymous notes.

The headline from the Herald was a simple one: “The Yellowwood Mystery.” The accompanying story was a little more complex. It described how a man named Gordon Guilford, who was hunting deep in the Brown County woods, had discovered a large “boulder” high in a chestnut tree. Forty-five feet off the ground, in fact. This had aroused the hunter’s curiosity, naturally enough, and he’d returned with friends the next weekend. They’d located the original stone and while getting slightly lost on the way back to their car, they’d stumbled across a second example, this one in a sycamore tree. Since then, a search of the area by state conservation personnel had turned up three more high-rise rocks, for a total of five.

A Department of Natural Resources spokesman was quoted as estimating the average weight of the stones to be four hundred pounds. He also insisted, a little defensively, that the stones had been placed very recently. Otherwise, the forest’s civil-service caretakers would certainly have noticed them first.

The article was accompanied by a photograph that clearly showed a large rock high in a tree. The photo’s caption, like the story, called the rock a boulder, but it was actually a flat slab wedged into the tree at the point where the trunk split into multiple branches. The slab sat perpendicular to the trunk, giving it the look of a crow’s nest on a sailing ship.

Several explanations for the phenomenon were given, ranging from the impossible — that the trees had lifted the rocks as they grew — to the highly unlikely — that the slabs had been blown into the trees by a passing tornado. UFOs were mentioned, if only to be dismissed. The dismissing was done by the Brown County sheriff, who thought the flying stones were more likely the work of “kids mixed with beer.” Though why they’d done it and how they’d done it the sheriff couldn’t say.

His scepticism was seconded by a professor from Indiana University, Kevin Karnes, who was described as a “hoax buster” by the Herald’s reporter. Karnes scoffed at the idea that the rock placements were supernatural or extraterrestrial. He went on to predict that the hoaxers, whoever they were, would be “caught and soon. The mystery will turn out to be no mystery at all.”

Professor Karnes was the man Boxleiter had arranged for me to interview. I gathered that my editor was at least as intrigued by the hoax buster as he was by the Yellowwood mystery. “Get his autograph,” was how Boxleiter expressed it.

I visited the IU campus at Bloomington on a mild day in early December. Karnes’s office was in the Physical Sciences Building, which was on the same hill as the massive football stadium and built of the same brown concrete. The professor’s second-floor office had a poster taped to the front of its open door. It featured a flying saucer with a line drawn through it below three large letter a’s. Beneath the saucer were the words “Alien Abductees Anonymous.”

I found Karnes seated at a desk in the comfortable space beyond the open door. He was reviewing some papers while a dark-haired young woman in a wildly oversized sweatshirt stood at his elbow. She looked up at me, smiled, and nudged the reading man. He looked up, too, processed the information, and said, “You’re the reporter.”

When he stood to shake my hand, I was surprised by his height or lack thereof. I’d been deceived by the size of his head, which wouldn’t have been out of proportion on a basketball center. His regular features were handsome enough to remind me of Boxleiter’s joke about the autograph.

Karnes introduced the woman who now stood a respectful step behind him as his graduate assistant, Gennetta Jones. Jones wasn’t given any lines in the scene. I soon learned that, around Karnes, few people were.

“The Yellowwood business is on the Internet already, did you know that? A UFO website, of course. Encounters close dot com, or something like that. It’s listed right after a story on strange cases of dog amnesia in Wisconsin. And there’s a link to a site that claims the pyramids were built using a ‘lost science’ of levitation. I’ve personally participated in several demonstrations showing how large stone blocks can be moved around using a whole lot of manpower and ropes and pulleys. We conducted one at a limestone quarry over in Bedford last year. Last May, wasn’t it, Gennetta?”

The dark-haired woman, whose striking eyes were also very dark, nodded, though Karnes hadn’t paused for a reply.

“But people still cling to mumbo jumbo like levitation. They think that just because a task seems difficult to them, it must be impossible to accomplish without supernatural aid. Now they’re talking about levitation in connection with these tree stones. I guess some Egyptian priests wandered into the Yellowwood Forest.”

Before we wandered into the forest ourselves, I wanted to know how Karnes had gotten into hoax busting. I was just able to squeeze the question in.

“Via Egypt, coincidentally,” he said. “You’re about the right age. Do you remember all the pyramid nonsense that was going around back in the seventies? Not just levitation, but how the Egyptians had selected the pyramid shape because it focused mystical energy. How you could sharpen an old razor blade by leaving it in a pyramid overnight. That kind of thing.

“When I was an undergraduate, I had a roommate who accepted all that manure uncritically, just because it was in a book. It showed me how vulnerable people are to cons like that, especially people who aren’t trained in the sciences. It’s almost as though the human race has a genetic flaw, a fatal weakness for mystery. I’ve dedicated my life to attacking that weakness head-on.”

The woman behind him stirred slightly. She didn’t cough or look at her watch, but Karnes got the message.

“Right, Gennetta. We have to go if we’re going to visit the forest and get back in time for my two o’clock lecture. But before we head out, take a look at this map.”

He pointed to a cork board that hung on one wall of the office. Pinned to it was a large map of Yellowwood Forest with such notable landmarks as Scarce of Fat Ridge and Sour Water Creek prominently identified. Three red pins had been stuck in the map just above Yellowwood Lake. They formed a straight line running due north.

“The red pins show the first three stones they found,” Karnes said. “We call them the red line. Just to the east is an incomplete second line, the green line.”

He indicated two green pins to the right of the red ones. One was due east of the northernmost pin in the red line. The other was across from the southernmost red pin.

“You can see that the middle pin in the green line is missing. That should be where the rock lifters perform their next feat of prestidigitation, assuming they haven’t been scared off by all the publicity. The need to complete a pattern is a common weakness of hoaxers. It’s what will trip up these rock people. We’d better head out now. Who’s going to drive?”

We decided that I’d follow Karnes’s Range Rover in my Chevy, in case I wanted to head straight back to Indianapolis. I said goodbye to Gennetta Jones, who was minding the store, and we set out on the short drive northeast to the forest.

Another advantage of driving two vehicles was the break I got from Karnes’s voice. Unfortunately, we still had a hike ahead of us after we’d parked near Yellowwood Lake. It gave the professor plenty of time to tell me about his most recent triumph. He had investigated some crop circles that had appeared in a field of winter wheat near Hopewell. I remembered the case, though I hadn’t had a chance to check out the circles myself. I even remembered the solution, but that didn’t stop Karnes from describing it proudly.

“It turned out to be the work of the farmers who owned the field, two brothers named Happe. Alonzo and Albert. They’d read about the crop circles in England and decided to fake their own. So they could bilk gullible tourists, probably. It doesn’t matter how many of those crop circles are exposed as fakes; people still want to believe in them. Even some so-called scientists. There were a couple of guys from Ball State who were convinced they were detecting electromagnetic abnormalities in the Happes’s field.

“Electromagnetic abnormalities,” he repeated with disdain. “You can find those anywhere if you look hard enough. They’re the scientific equivalent of staring at a bowl of pudding so long you think you see the Virgin Mary.

“I came down pretty hard on the Happes. Did my best to humiliate them. To serve notice that their kind of fakery won’t be tolerated in my part of Indiana.”

If I’d had a map handy, I would have asked Karnes to point out his part of Indiana, perhaps using colored pins. He descended a little from his pedestal without my prodding.

“Not that I really accomplished very much,” he said. “The faithful are always ready to stream to the site of any new miracle. Look at this path we’re following. It wasn’t here the first time I came out. It’s been worn since by the curious and the credulous. There’s the first rock, about fifty yards dead ahead.”

I could just make it out through the leafless trees. At that distance, the brown slab looked like one of the wooden platforms placed in trees for deer hunting, though this would have been an unusually tall tree stand. As we drew closer, I saw that it would also have been an unusually thick one. In shape, the flat stone resembled an arrowhead, its two long sides about four feet in length and the shorter base three. It looked to be four to five inches thick. It had been placed so that each side was supported by a healthy branch.

“They matched the stone to the tree with some care, but as you can see, there’s no shortage of sandstone rocks lying around. Or of suitable trees, of course.”

Getting one of the plentiful rocks into one of the convenient trees had still been an impressive feat. I asked Karnes how he thought it had been done.

“With an old-fashioned block and tackle, it wouldn’t be as hard as you might think. A hundred years ago, every Hoosier farm boy knew how a block and tackle worked. Now that knowledge is lost, at least as far as the average undergraduate on my campus is concerned. Thanks to television, they know more about tractor beams and magic crystals. A bad education is a kind of slavery.”

I flirted with the ranks of the disenfranchised then by saying something admiring about the way the stone lifters had managed to form one perfectly straight line and part of another.

“No great trick,” Karnes said dismissively. “Not with GPS, the Global Positioning System. With a hand-held GPS, you can make any pattern you want. The urge to form a pattern is what always trips these bozos up.”

He’d said something similar back in his office. I asked him what he meant.

“It’s not enough for the average hoaxer to do this stuff randomly. They have to impose a pattern. That tells me that the motive isn’t just to baffle people. It’s to suggest that there’s an underlying intelligence behind these phenomena and, by extension, behind the universe itself. The need to believe in something big is a fixation for these guys. Their anti-rational cast of mind makes them the natural prey of a scientist like me.

“And as I said earlier, their pattern, whatever it is, is also the hoaxers’ Achilles’ heel. It suggests where they’ll strike next, like the gap our guys have left in the green line.”

I asked him if he had the gap under surveillance.

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t answer that,” he said. “I don’t want my arrangements to end up in the Star Republic.”

Karnes offered to show me one of the other rocks, but I’d seen enough. Neither of us said much on the march back to the cars. He was saving his voice for his afternoon lecture, and I was thinking about my next stop.

It turned out to be Hopewell, a small farming town just far enough south of Indianapolis to have been spared the promotion to bedroom community. Something about the way the rock mystery had been more or less laid on Karnes’s doorstep made me think the people behind it might have a bone to pick with the professor. That made me think in turn of the Happes, the notorious crop-circle forgers. The men Karnes had gone out of his way to humiliate.

I located the Happe farm without too much trouble. I found the brothers in the shadow of a barn, changing a tire on a pickup. They were both big men, both in their sixties, both dressed in heavy boots and overalls and canvas jackets. The one who answered to Alonzo wore a brown ball cap on what appeared to be a hairless head. Albert, who must have been the family fashion plate, sported a hat of red and black plaid. They both looked down at their muddy boots when I mentioned Karnes.

“That guy,” Alonzo said. “He said we did the crop circles to cheat people out of money.”

“We didn’t,” Albert clarified.

I asked for their real motive.

They looked at each other and shrugged.

“We read about them,” Alonzo said.

“You can’t understand something just by reading about it,” Albert said.

“You’ve got to do it yourself,” Alonzo said.

Albert gestured toward the old truck. “Take it apart and put it back together.”

I pointed out that the Happes had allowed people to think their crop-circle experiment was something else.

“That was part of understanding it,” Alonzo said, and Albert nodded.

When I asked them if they’d heard about rocks finding their way into trees down in Brown County, the brothers looked at each other again. This time I thought I saw a small smile pass from one weathered face to the other.

“Nope,” Alonzo said.

“Why ask us?” Albert added.

I pointed upward to a beam that extended outward from the peak of the barn’s roof. Hanging from it was a heavy pulley block and several ropes. It was an example of a block and tackle, the device Karnes had mentioned. This one was used to lift heavy objects into the barn’s loft.

“That’s nothing,” Alonzo said. “Lot of those around.”

“No great trick to using one,” Albert said. “We could teach somebody in an afternoon.”

They shared another smile and returned to the tire project.

“Karnes is probably missing something simple,” Alonzo said as I turned to go. “College people are like that.”

“Probably something right under his nose,” Albert said.

I was so convinced by then that the old men were involved in the Yellowwood mystery I almost warned them not to place the last stone. Instead, I thanked them for their time and went off to interview a likely accomplice.

I obtained the address and phone number of Gordon Guilford, the hunter who had first discovered the rocks, from the Bloomington Herald. Guilford lived near Fruitdale, which was about midway between the Happe farm and Yellowwood State Forest. I drove to his house without calling ahead.

I’d realized, perhaps belatedly, that the Happes’s plan required that their handiwork in the forest be discovered and reported. Otherwise, Karnes would never have been called in and their elaborate joke would have remained incomplete. The brothers wouldn’t have left the discovery to chance, either, as that might have taken years. They would have arranged it.

All of which meant that Gordon Guilford knew more about the business than he’d told the Bloomington paper. At first, it seemed he would tell me even less. When I presented myself at his double-wide trailer, press card in hand, he came very close to shutting the door in my face. That was my impression, anyway, based on a guilty widening of his dark brown eyes and a nervous twitch of the hand that held the door. Then he gathered himself and asked me in.

Guilford was a grizzled gentleman only a little taller than Karnes. His trailer’s front room was nicely furnished and very neat. There were no hunting trophies on display, no deer heads or hides or gun cabinets. All of the room’s personal touches were dedicated to the game of golf or to family. An example of the latter stood on a table next to my chair, a faded color photograph of a woman who might have been Guilford’s sister, posed with her husband and two doe-eyed children. I’d never seen the sister before, but she looked quite familiar.

My conversation with Guilford was brief. Without my prompting him, he repeated, almost word for word, the story the Herald had reported. I asked him when he’d been hunting, and he named a weekend in late October. I remarked that the leaves must have been beautiful, and he said they had been. I said it was lucky he’d been able to see the rock with the leaves still on the trees. He shrugged. I asked what he’d been hunting, and he said deer, though squirrel would have been a better answer, as he would have had an excuse for looking up into the treetops, a place deer seldom hid. As I stood to go, I asked what gauge of shotgun he preferred, twelve or twenty.

Guilford said twenty, making the mistake many people who don’t hunt make about shotguns, the assumption that the larger number means a larger gun. I happened to know that a twenty gauge was a bird gun, something that would barely get a deer’s attention.

I didn’t ask Guilford about the Happes. My thinking had progressed considerably as a result of my brief stop at the trailer. After saying goodbye to the grizzled man, I pointed the Chevy in the direction of Indiana University.

Kevin Karnes’s Range Rover was back in its parking space, but the hoax buster wasn’t in his office. Gennetta Jones, graduate assistant, was. She’d discarded her tent-size sweatshirt, revealing a T-shirt that was much more becoming. More interesting, too, since it bore the legend “Question Authority.”

Jones told me that Karnes was still at his lecture. I said I was there to see her. She stared at me. When I’d had my fill of that, I asked her why she was setting stones in trees in Yellowwood Forest.

“How did you find out?” she asked.

I gave her the short answer, which was that I’d recognized her picture in Gordon Guilford’s trailer. She was one of the little children in the family photo I’d seen there. I’d realized that after first mistaking the woman in the picture for Gennetta. It had actually been Gennetta’s mother, at about the same age Gennetta was now.

“I guess I shouldn’t have used Uncle Gordie,” the assistant said. “I don’t want to be in the newspapers. Not yet.”

I told her that would depend on her story.

She shrugged. “I did it to get back at Kevin. He used me for sex last summer and then dumped me. Turns out he uses all his assistants for sex. I didn’t like it, so I worked up a little puzzle for him.”

I asked her why she hadn’t just reported Karnes.

“For what? Getting tired of me? This way is better. I’ll get my doctorate in the spring. Then I’ll give the Yellowwood story to the school paper. The laughing will be so loud, you’ll hear it in Indy.”

I asked her how she’d managed the thing.

“Putting the rocks in the trees wasn’t hard. I had some help. I recruited some of the other women from Kevin’s past.”

After she’d received a crash course in block-and-tackle theory from the Happe brothers. When I ran that guess by Gennetta, she nodded.

“The Binary Brothers, I call them. I met them during that crop-circle thing. They’re sweet old guys. Kevin never understood them. He sees the need to be part of something larger as a weakness. Especially if your mind tells you the larger something can’t be true. People used to call that faith. Kevin feels sorry for people like the Happes. I feel sorrier for him. He doesn’t believe there’s any mystery in the world. But every person you meet is an incredible mystery. Kevin can’t see that.

“He thinks he can solve anything with his instruments and gadgets. He’s got infrared cameras out there waiting to record whoever puts the last rock up.”

I asked her how she planned to get around them. She smiled at me in a way that told me I’d missed a clue.

I looked at the map with the colored pins and saw what I should have seen much earlier in the day. Stepping over to the map, I traced the red line with my finger. Then I drew a line from the upper green pin to the center red one and from there down to the lower green one. The pattern was already complete. The pins formed Karnes’s redundant initial, the letter K.

I asked Jones when the professor would spot that.

“Never,” she said. “It would mean admitting that he was wrong. Besides, it’s right under his nose. You never see what’s right under your nose.”

It was the phrase Albert Happe had used. The farmer had been referring to Karnes’s assistant, I now knew. Albert might have thought, as I did, that Karnes was a fool not to have recognized the mystery that was Gennetta Jones.

That wasn’t the safest thought for a married man to have, so I wished her luck with her degree and headed north.

Copyright © 2011 by Terence Faherty