Randy White - Dead of Night

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.