Scratchgravel Road (Josie Gray Mysteries #2)(29)

“Makes sense.”

Josie took her digital camera out of her shirt pocket and found the picture of the boots the man was wearing. She passed him the camera and said, “You’re the only person I know who repairs shoes.”

“Lost art,” he said. He picked up a pair of glasses off the side table and slipped them on.

“This is a picture of the boots the man was wearing. They’re good quality, but they’re definitely broken in. I thought they looked like work boots, maybe from a factory. Then I looked at the soles and saw the bright red thread where they had been resoled.”

He smiled broadly. “I know these boots.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You recognize the brand?”

“I recognize the boots.”

Josie laughed. She had expected nothing to come of the visit.

“Do you know where I worked before I retired?” he asked.

“I assumed you’d always repaired shoes. Had your own shoe store,” she said.

He stood from his chair slowly, easing his joints into an upright position. “Be right back,” he said. He disappeared through a sliding glass door and Josie got a whiff of what she assumed was a pot roast in the oven. She realized how hungry she was.

Through the downpour she could barely make out streams of water rushing down the tail end of the Chinati Mountain chain behind Jeremiah’s property. It reminded her of the mudslides that washed down the mountain a few years ago. Several of Jeremiah’s neighbors had lost their homes. She hoped he would manage to stay lucky.

A gust of wind blew a fine mist across the porch and caused goose bumps to run up her arms: a welcome relief from the heat the day before.

Jeremiah appeared carrying a pair of boots that looked identical to the pair the dead man had been wearing, and he placed them in her lap.

“Where did these come from?”

“The Feed Plant.” He grinned and winked. “That’s where I worked fixing boots.”

“You worked at the nuclear weapons plant?”

“For over twenty years. That’s what brought me to Artemis. I worked here in the fifties when the plant was in full production. When the plant shut down I moved away, but came back when I heard about Drench’s project.”

Josie attempted to keep her face neutral. The place, now closed up behind barbed-wire fences, had always given her an uneasy feeling. “Didn’t it bother you working there, knowing the kinds of deadly material you were working with? Weren’t you scared you might be exposed to radiation?”

He leaned forward to pick his chair up and turned it slightly to better see Josie. His face was animated, his bald head beaded with sweat. She had touched a nerve.

“What scared me was what happened in Japan at the end of World War Two. Those bombs we dropped stopped the war. If we hadn’t dropped them, someone else would have dropped them on us. Don’t you believe otherwise.”

Josie gave him a skeptical look.

“The science was out there. We just figured it out first.”

She squinted at him, trying to understand his logic. “So, we needed to build weapons capable of killing millions? I just never understood that.”

He looked at her, wide-eyed. “One of the safest eras in American history? You don’t understand that? We were top dog during the Cold War. We were proud to call ourselves American. There wasn’t any flag burning back then. We went to work at the Feed Plant because that’s what the country needed.”

“But it turned into a race to see who could build the most bombs,” she said.

He crossed his arms over his bare chest and clamped them down. His expression had turned intense. “We knew, and the Russians knew, we were stockpiling enough weapons to blow each other to kingdom come. And neither country wanted that.” He reached over and grabbed Josie’s arm. “We were in a stalemate. Neither of us could make a move without destroying not just their country, but everyone else on earth! Every country in the world had their safety in our hands. It was science and strategy.” He frowned and leaned back in his chair. “And then it all came crumbling down. And look at us now. There’s no strategy. War today is like street fighting.”

Josie didn’t want to get into a political debate with him so she returned back to her original questions. She needed to get back to the station before the road washed out.

“So, why would a nuclear weapons plant need a cobbler?” she asked.

“Was a time we went through a lot of boots. Back in the fifties? We had two thousand people who rode the railcars into work every morning. Got dropped off in their civvies, changed into regulation uniform and boots, then changed back before they left. That helped keep the radiation inside the plant. We took good precautions.”

He picked his glasses up off the coffee table again and put a hand out for Josie to pass him the boots she held in her lap. He took them and studied the bottom. He pointed to where the leather met the sole and held them up for Josie to examine them. It looked as if the leather had been melted. “See that? That’s from what they called boil-overs. There were eight or ten stations in the factory, and each one used chemicals that did something to the uranium to make it ready for the bomb.” He glanced up at her from over the top of his glasses. “They were powerful chemicals. When they would boil over, workers would walk through the sludge on the floor and the soles of their boots would melt. Rather than throwing the boots away they hired me to resole them.”