Second Sight Read Free

offered.
    “What was the score?” McCullough turned his back to his men as he opened the book and thumbed through the pages. There were dates and paragraph entries, neatly handwritten inink toward the beginning of the book, but turning to scribble toward the middle where the writing ended. It was a log or journal of some kind, he thought, folding it closed and tucking it into his back pocket.
    “Forty-nine to fourteen. The Lions had five hundred and eighty yards of offense.”
    “Jiminy Christmas.” McCullough shook his head, looking up once more at the towering rock pinnacle above him. There was no way the boy could have missed recognizing the danger of walking out on it. He would have to have believed the fall would kill him if he jumped. So was this suicide?
    “Hoernschemeyer ran ninety-six yards for a touchdown. I would have loved to have seen that one.”
    “Yeah, and I’d love to see New York put up ten thousand dollars for a decent running back.” McCullough spat out a grain of tobacco caught on his tongue.
    “What about Pittsburgh and Chicago?”
    “Steelers twenty-eight, Cardinals seventeen.” Emmet peeled off his outer jacket and tossed it to McCullough. “Here, Jack. You must be freezing. I’ve been walking all the time you was waiting here.”
    McCullough nodded gratefully and put it on. When they started down the muddy hillside—planting boots sideways to keep from slipping in the mud—McCullough patted his back pocket to reassure himself the book was secure there.
    McCullough remembered the day the army first arrived to look over the adjacent property on Mount Tamathy. The asylum’s administrator had asked him to meet an entourage of officers and guide them through a service road to the wooded property west of the asylum. He’d said they were looking at it as a possible site to place an air command monitoring station. He had also make it clear that the army wanted to bring as little attention as possible to their visit.
    It was early on a Sunday and McCullough had met thelarge black sedan at the main gate and escorted it to the edge of the asylum property before he left the army men to wander in the woods.
    He could still remember the glitter of medals and gold epaulettes on the uniformed passengers front and back, but it was the man with the white homburg hat and white meerschaum pipe who startled him most. Dr. Edward “Buzz” Case, easily recognizable from newspaper stories and television appearances, might have been the last person he expected to see in the remote Catskill Mountains.
    Case had been headline news around the country since the end of World War II, renowned for his work on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb. Case’s connection to the army was well established prior to 1950, but publicly he was parting ways from the military, devoting himself full-time to the new field of nuclear medicine. Some said he was atoning for the millions of lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Case himself suggested he was close to developing a “radioactive” magic bullet that would cure cancer, and there was much ado about his moving to California to be near radiological research at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley.
    Then, without a whisper or a warning, he disappeared off the face of the planet. Reporters who had been following him and the esteemed biologist and physician Jonas Salk—the man who would conquer polio—across the country were left bewildered as to what happened to their photogenic genius.
    When he didn’t reappear at the five-year anniversary celebration of the surrender of Japan in Washington, D.C., the press began to ask questions. When they realized that Case’s own family was stonewalling them, they began to speculate on everything from a Soviet kidnapping to alien abduction.
    Jack McCullough had never mentioned seeing Dr. Case that day to anyone else, but was sure that he knew what the rest of the world did not. That Dr. Edward Case was living