Aquifer: A Novel (16 page)

In addition to the soda fountain counter and the long shelves displaying merchandise, the drugstore also had two dozen booths and tables. Restaurant patrons could sit and enjoy all three meals of the day, selected from a large menu of dishes made to order, though barbequed pork ribs with sides of grits and cole slaw was the house specialty. Fried catfish and hush-puppies ran a close second.

Near the back of the eating area, nestled in the corner, was an old-fashioned mahogany phone booth with a folding door set with beveled glass in a wooden frame. The black, rotary-dial phone, did not seem the least bit out of place.

Various antiques adorned the high shelf that surrounded the perimeter of the dining area, anchored at the eight-foot level of the fourteen foot high walls. Five 19
^th
century ceiling fans, driven by a single continuous belt system, circulated the air. Interspersed among them were four large crystal chandeliers that were originally lit by gas jets. A few years following World War I they had been converted to electric lights.

Clayton spooned the last of his malt from the bottom of the tall glass with his long-handled sliver spoon. “This is one thing you can’t get back in St. Louis. I haven’t had an old-fashioned malt like this since I was a kid,” he reminisced.

But Larry’s attention was directed at the stack of photographs he had just picked up from the CD he had previously dropped off for processing. He quickly scanned through photo after photo of Tina at Alley Spring and Round Spring.

Clayton glanced at the pile as Larry riffled through them, “Snapshots! I see . . . preserving the moment. Stagnating time,” he said with a wry smile.

“Oh no, I’m fostering memories,” Larry protested.

“Life is nothing more than a dynamic continuum, a motion picture which . . .” but before Clayton could finish his sentence Larry broke in and finished it for him.

“Which is made up of a series of snapshots.”

“Come on, I’m just giving you a hard time,” Clayton grinned. “She’s a beautiful young lady.”

“And a scientist too. She’s completing her Ph.D. in biochemistry,” Larry added.

“I had no idea. Biochemistry? Let me see your photos.” Clayton began to shuffle through the stack of photographs. “These were all taken at Alley Spring weren’t they?”

“Yeah, it’s quite a spring . . . The tour guide said something though that’s caused me some reflection.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Well, this spring is supposed to produce 84 million gallons of water per day and it even spikes up to 1.7 billion gallons on occasions. But the tour guide said that though it is rare, the spring has been known to abruptly stop flowing. The water gets sucked back down into the tunnel which feeds it, leaving the spring basin dry for several hours. Then it comes back again in a rushing torrent. It’s really weird. What could cause that?”

“Well, no one knows for sure. It’s only been documented at Alley Spring twice in the last one hundred-fifty years,” Clayton handed the stack of photographs back to Larry. “On one of those occasions the Mississippi River reversed its course and flowed backwards, upstream, for several hours. This whole area is part of the New Madrid fault system, the most active earthquake area in the country. California gets the notoriety, but New Madrid is really the most active.” As he spoke, Clayton squeezed a lemon wedge into his glass of water, stirred it with a long-handled spoon, then paused while he took several swallows. He then continued. “This whole region averages an earthquake every two or three days, but they are very small. Only about one earthquake per year is large enough to be felt.” He took another drink from his water glass. “Some seismologists believe that the spring’s flow reversal is somehow connected with the magnetic polarity of the water molecule, accompanied by localized disruptions of the earth’s magnetic fields during earthquakes.”

Larry almost regretted having asked the question. He could tell that Clayton was just getting started and that if he didn’t change the subject quick Clayton would continue to spit out technical information for another half-hour. Quickly he glanced at his watch.

“Umm . . . if we’re going to get to that sawmill before quitting time we’d better get going,” Larry suggested.

“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go.” Clayton stood and headed for the cash register to pay the bill while Larry returned the photos to the envelope.

Leaving the drugstore, they got into the Hummer and headed north on Highway 19. As they drove, Larry quizzed his mentor. “So what do you think of the Chitwoods?”

“Well, they certainly weren’t what I had expected,” Clayton responded. “They’re an interesting family, a lot more lively than the one I had growing up.”

“You seemed to have a good time.”

“Yeah, I did. I enjoyed playing football with the boys.”

“So you do have something in common with them!”

“I don’t know that I’d go that far, but they’re good people. I’m afraid that I ruffled Opal’s feathers last night though,” lamented Clayton.

“Oh?”

“She doesn’t approve of our project.” At that point Clayton pulled the H-2 into the parking lot of one of the saw mill operations that dotted that portion of the Ozarks.

*

The whirl of the sawmill was heard in the background and the pungent smell of fresh cut pine, mixed with the earthy smell of oak sawdust wafted through the air. A twenty-five foot high sawdust pile rose from the forest floor, fed by a conveyor belt that emptied the loads brought by dump trucks from the cutting operations. Clayton and Larry knelt at the base of the sawdust pile, and Larry used a long digging pole to obtain samples from deep at its core. They filled several sample vials from varying depths and labeled them. The chemical analysis would be completed at the portable lab upon their return to the base camp.

From there the duo retreated to Sinking Creek, which flowed within 200 yards of the sawdust pile. As they began their trek downstream, Clayton noticed a man dressed in typical sawmill worker safety equipment standing on the crest of the hill near the sawdust piles they had just left. The man was staring at them and taking notes.

Clayton and Larry methodically moved downstream as they continued to monitor for pollutants. Larry hoisted a long pole with a thermometer and an extraction vial at the end. He dipped it into the creek about eight feet from shore, and passed the vial end to Clayton, who recorded the temperature, removed the vial and labeled it. He then attached another empty vial.

They took water samples every hundred yards for a mile downstream of the mill operations. As they pushed their way through the thick underbrush that grew along the stream bank, Larry struggled to keep up.

“So, why is this stream called Sinking Creek?” asked Larry.

“Well, the streambed eventually makes its way to the Current River, but the water never does, unless its flooding after a heavy rain.”

Larry glanced at the twenty-five-foot wide, three-foot deep stream beside them and incredulously asked, “There’s a lot of water there, where does it all go?”

“It just disappears. About a mile-and-a-half downstream the bed rock gets very porous and the water sinks into the gravel. The whole stream goes underground leaving the gravel bed as dry as a bone.” Clayton stepped over a log and pushed back some foliage as they continued their trek through the woods. “Not too far from Blue Spring is a cave, Fears Cave. This water enters the cave through a spring and becomes one of the many tributaries to the cave’s water source. Then it flows out the cave’s mouth and makes its way to Current River.”

“How can they tell that the water in this stream is the same water that comes out of Fears Cave?”

“Dye tracings. It’s really a pretty simple process.”

Larry knew better than to ask more questions, fearing that Clayton would explain in vivid detail every step of the dye tracing process.

They continued to collect water and soil samples as they pushed downstream. Upon their return to the lab later that afternoon they would analyze the samples for turbidity, dissolved minerals and other solids, tannic acid content, ph variances, and other chemical anomalies. This data would then be cross-correlated with other data in a regression analysis of Chytrid infestation and genetic mutations.

Periodically they waded into the shallow waters of Sinking Creek to examine the leaves of various aquatic plants. They checked for frog eggs and tabulated the number of egg clusters in a given area. This would give them an indication as to whether population sizes were diminishing or increasing.

Throughout their trek, Clayton noticed that they were periodically being observed by the same individual he had seen near the sawdust piles. Though the observer had kept his distance, Clayton realized that the man had been following them for over an hour, recording their actions, and staring at them. At first Clayton had thought that the man was simply a safety officer doing his job at the mill and that they were coincidently crossing paths, but it had now become obvious that the observer was actually spying on them. Clayton felt uncomfortable at being observed but did not understand why their actions should warrant such attention.

=/\=

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

Sheriff’s Office

A few days later, Sheriff Akers sat at his desk at the Shannon County Sheriff’s office across the street from Opal’s café. He had been aimlessly shuffling papers, which seemed to be the never-ending sum total of his professional life. Not much ever happened in his county.

Sheriff Akers was an Andy Griffith type of person – older, wise, slow in his movements, not too excitable, not prone to panicking or making hasty decisions, and filled with a lot of good common sense – the type of sense that usually comes by graduation from the school of hard knocks. Some of the local town folk had even teased Sheriff Akers about his resemblance to the television actor, even though, unlike Andy Griffith, he was a little over-weight. However, what the town folk overlooked was that even though Eminence was the county seat of Shannon County, that Mayberry would have been considered a major metropolis by comparison.

Having filed his reports, the Sheriff rose to stretch his legs and walked out of his office into the main reception area. There he began to speak with Jane Chilton, the dispatcher, about some routine county business. As they were speaking, the door from the street opened.

“Well, good afternoon Hank,” Sheriff Akers greeted the tall lanky man who entered.

Hank Dobbs was a cattle rancher who ran four hundred head on his spread a few miles east of Eminence. He and his two sons, one married and the other studying agronomy at the University of Missouri, were among the few successful cattle ranchers in the area. The dairy business never caught on in the Ozarks, but raising beef cattle was gradually becoming a respectable operation. The open range guidelines established by the Federal Bureau of Land Management helped cattlemen lower their operating costs and thus subsidized their profits. Hank was a second generation rancher and hoped to pass his operation on to his sons.

“Sheriff . . . Jane,” Hank said as he tilted his head in the direction of the dispatcher.

“I came in to report some rustling.”

“Rustling! Are you sure? We haven’t had anything like that for a long time.”

“Well, no. I’m not sure,” said Hank as he removed his straw cowboy hat and scratched his head. “But I don’t know what else it could be.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

“I’ve got my herd out in my south pasture, and with them I’ve got four calves. Soon as the calves can take fodder I was plannin’ on takin’ ‘em over to the feed lot in Salem. This morning my boys and I got on our four-wheelers to take a salt lick out to the herd.”

Sheriff Akers turned one of the wooden backed chairs around, straddled it, and sat down with the back of the chair facing forward. He motioned for Hank and his sons to join him. As soon as they got settled, Hank continued.

“Well, as we approached the area where I figured they’d be, we heard the calve’s mothers bellowing and bawling up a raucous. They wanted to be milked real bad. When we got to them their milk bags were swollen up somethin’ fierce but the calves were nowhere to be found. They’d just vanished.”

“Vanished?” inquired Sheriff Akers.

“Yeah, not a trace. We immediately milked the cows to ease their pain, then set out to find the calves. We searched everywhere but couldn’t find them. You know that calves don’t wander far from their mothers.”

“Not generally,” admitted the Sheriff.

“But I did find a section of my fence, near the river, that had been trampled down and it looked like something had been drug across the ground and down into the water. I figure that somebody stole my calves and drug them down to a waiting boat. I’m sure I’ll never get ‘em back, but just in case, I want to file a complaint,” concluded Hank.

“Well, I’d hardly call that rustling,” commented Sheriff Akers, “unless we can find more evidence than that.”

“Well, I couldn’t find any.”

“I doubt that any professional rustlers would have taken just the calves. More than likely this is just some kids pulling a prank.”

“Or hosting a barbeque!”

“Either way, I’ll keep my ears open and see what I can learn. In the meantime you might want to round up the rest of your herd and keep them closer to your barn.”