Faye, intent on getting to Ahua, wouldn’t have noticed the scene in Kaayla’s office, if it hadn’t been for the sound of a woman weeping. The hotel manager’s temporary office was near the elevator bank, so it was impossible to miss the quiet sobs.
As she neared Kaayla’s office, she saw the door swinging shut. Nothing of Kaayla was visible but her hand, pale against the rubbed bronze doorknob. She was silent, but Faye heard voices coming from further inside the room. One of the speakers was weeping.
Faye got a single glance through the closing door, but she only saw one of Kaayla’s guests, a woman who sat in a chair opposite her desk. It was Lucia.
Faye had noticed Lucia’s quick exit from the lunch buffet, right after a quick phone conversation. She hoped the young woman hadn’t gotten bad news. At least Kaayla’s personal kindness made Faye feel like this incident wasn’t going to be a mark against Lucia with the boss. Faye admired the way that Kaayla interacted with her staff. Her demeanor was unfailingly professional, but still very warm. People who worked in jobs like hotel housekeeping and maintenance had to put up with a lot of dehumanizing treatment from the people they served. At least the employees of the Gershwin Hotel didn’t have to take that kind of treatment.
As she power walked out of the South Tower, Faye tried to focus on the question of where the reporter learned about the painted chamber, but the scene in Kaayla’s office kept popping back into her head. Lucia’s tears could stem from something unrelated to the bombing or her job, and they probably did, but seeing her with Kaayla reminded Faye that the hotel staff had access to parts of the Gershwin Hotel that most people wouldn’t even know existed. Was it possible that someone associated with the hotel had been down the hidden stairs into the underground network of rooms?
If anybody was likely to stumble onto the hidden door and get a look at the painted room, it would be someone like Lucia who could have dusted the right panel in the right way and accidentally opened the door. Or perhaps a handyman. Or perhaps Kaayla had stumbled on it somehow during her work as the hotel’s assistant manager.
But why would they pretend ignorance? The FBI had surely interviewed everybody associated with the hotel, and they would have asked questions designed to find out who knew about the secret door. It made no sense not to tell the FBI if they’d been down the hidden staircase. Exploring a strange place was no crime and Faye had no inkling that they were suspects.
Deep down, Faye could not make herself suspect any hotel employee she’d met, especially not the devastated Lucia. She suspected that Lucia’s breakdown didn’t come from a dark, secretive place. Anybody could fall apart after a trauma like the explosion and delayed responses were perfectly normal.
When Faye reached the sidewalk, she saw that the protesters and counterprotesters had all gone home. The world outside the towers looked completely normal. Nothing stood between her and the site of the bombing but a few hundred feet of sidewalk and the FBI’s barricades, but it somehow seemed very far away.
As she entered the mobile command center, Ahua met her eyes with a cold stare, prompting her to say “It wasn’t me!” in her best imitation of a guilty person.
He didn’t say anything, so she tried to channel innocence as she said, “Seriously. I didn’t tell a soul. Who do you think spilled the beans about the painted room? Is it the same person who talked about the children’s bodies?”
“Could’ve been you both times, but it wasn’t. It was me. Why do you think I trusted you so easily last time?”
“But why?”
“I thought surely somebody would remember three missing children. And I thought that spilling the beans about the painted room might stir up some people who’ve been listening to family stories about the Chinese underground for their whole lives.”
“Did it work?”
“So far, no.”
“Remind me never to believe anything you say.”
“I have a lot of FBI mind tricks up my sleeve.”
Now Faye felt like she was face-to-face with a master manipulator, and she very probably was. This made her unaccountably eager to talk.
“I’ve been thinking that it’s possible that someone in the hotel knew about those stairs. They may even have been down them, although I guess it’s been years, considering the dust. Are Kaayla, Grace, and Lucia old enough to have gone down there in the nineties? I’m not sure about the redheaded desk clerk, but the gray-haired woman who works with him is certainly old enough. They’re the only hotel employees I know on sight, but I’ve seen plenty of others because it’s a big hotel and Kaayla’s got them all on overtime. Frankly, they all need to go home and sleep before one of them cracks.”
“We’ve spoken with Kaayla and all of her employees, so their ages are on file, but the ones you mentioned by name look thirty-ish. Maybe a little older, maybe a little younger. So does the redhead. The gray-haired woman? I’d say fifties, don’t you think?”
Faye, who was terrible at guessing ages, nodded like she agreed with him when she, in fact, had no clue.
“You’re wrong about one thing,” he said. “Yes, the dust was thick on the floor of the painted room. Goldsby and his people have made enough progress at the foot of the stairs to know that the room to the left is blanketed with dust, too. But the stairs? They weren’t nearly so dusty.”
“Are you saying somebody swept them?” Faye pictured Kaayla ordering her housekeeping staff to sweep this space that no hotel guest would ever see.
“No, not at all. It’s just that the stairwell seems to have had a very slow water leak. Or maybe the water condensed off those cool plaster walls and collected on the floor over a period of years. The brick stair treads were covered with a light skim of dust that had been wetted and dried over and over. Goldsby says that people could have walked up and down those stairs without leaving evidence, easy.”
Faye wasn’t sure whether she thought that this was significant, but she mentally filed it away for later.
“I suppose you have agents working in the newspaper archives?” she asked.
“Yes. Because, despite what a lot of people want to think, the FBI is not stupid.”
“I didn’t think you were. But do you mind if I take a look in those archives, too? They may have historical photographs of downtown Oklahoma City from the years when those underground rooms were occupied. I would dearly love to find another entrance.”
“You and me both, but people have been looking for years.”
“None of them were the FBI. And none of them were me.”
He laughed out loud and said, “Well, that’s true. I’ll pay for a few hours of your library time. You may already know this, but you don’t have to go work in The Oklahoman’s archives. Their back issues are digitized all the way back to 1901. You can access what you need from a computer in the comfort of your own hotel room, and I want you to. There are just too many people in this command center so, and I mean this kindly, please get out.”
Faye rose to leave.
“Go find something that a lot of people have been trying to find for years. Something about you makes me think you can do it. That’s why I hired you.”
* * *
True to Ahua’s word, Faye’s computer took her straight to 1969 while she was sitting in the comfort of her own hotel room. There, on the front page of the April 9 edition of The Daily Oklahoman, was a headline saying:
Hidden Chinese City? Maybe So, Maybe No.
Accompanying the article was the picture she’d already seen on her phone, showing a man in a suit shining a flashlight on an old oil cookstove.
The discovery of a world beneath downtown Oklahoma City had been front-page-and-above-the-fold news, and coverage had continued for more than a week. Older residents had shared their memories of the underground community, some of them confirmed observations and some of them rumors. One reporter, skeptical about their oral histories, said that if every rumored entrance had been real, it would have been impossible to walk down the street without falling into the catacombs below.
Faye learned cool details, like the fact that the ceiling sockets in some of the newly uncovered rooms had still held light bulbs. One writer said that explorers had found a map of the United States on one wall. She imagined immigrants studying it to learn the shape of their new home.
None of the few published pictures depicted the room that Alonso Smith would eventually fill with color. Faye looked carefully for the small metal door, but failed to find it. No matter how many times she reread the 1969 articles, she wasn’t able to find a useful clue that she could tie to the bombing.
She clicked back to the first article about the discovery of the underground chambers, published on April 9, 1969. At the very top of the front page, above the headline about the hidden Chinese city, was a headline reading:
Other Indian Schools No Better Than Chilocco
It detailed an investigation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs into the conditions at the schools that Sly, Cully, and many other indigenous people had attended. Investigators had found abuse at some schools, as well as a widespread lack of the most basic tools of education—paper, books, and chalk.
Faye thought of Joe’s grandfather sending Sly away to boarding school because he thought his intelligent son deserved an education, and she burned with anger. What could he have accomplished if someone had helped him reach his potential? How different would her husband’s growing-up years have been?
Cully, too, had left his family for a promise that was never kept. Both he and Sly had made their way in the world without even a high school diploma to open a few doors for them.
The thought of Cully’s high school diploma made her think of the reason he’d lost it. Sly had said that he ran away from boarding school a year before he would have graduated. Cully had consistently avoided speaking of this past. Maybe Angela was the reason.
This reticence on the subject of Angela had been risky, because it had kept Cully from being straight with the FBI. This made him look bad.
Would Cully and Angela’s escape from boarding school have made the papers? Maybe. Two missing teenagers would have been noteworthy, or so it seemed to Faye. She didn’t know the name of his school, but she knew that his extended family still lived well east of Oklahoma City. She wasn’t at all sure if The Oklahoman would have covered their disappearance, but it was the newspaper of record for the state. She might as well start there, then branch out to the Tulsa World and then to smaller newspapers to the east, if need be.
What year would Cully have graduated? Faye didn’t even know how old he was.
But the internet did. In the twenty-first century, celebrities were entitled to no privacy whatsoever. A quick web search for “Cully Mantooth birthday” brought her the date she needed—March 11, 1945. Presuming he would have graduated at eighteen, as most Americans do, he would have been a seventeen-year-old runaway at Eastertime in 1962.
She typed “runaway” into the search box and chose a time window from March 1, 1962 to April 30, 1962, planning to refine the search with Cully’s name, but there was no need. Six articles popped up and all of them were about Cully and Angela, whose last name was given as Bond.
The first headline said, “Teenage pair runs away from tribal boarding school,” and it asked for help in finding them. Two photos, obviously taken for the school yearbook, accompanied the article.
Angela had been heartbreakingly thin, with huge dark eyes and a tight-lipped smile. Black hair, parted in the center, framed her heart-shaped face. She wasn’t beautiful but she looked easy to love.
Joe had been a part of Faye’s life for so long that she had forgotten how young he had been when they met, how very young they had both been. Joe had left Oklahoma at about this age. When she met him at twenty-five, he had looked startlingly like his distant cousin Cully at seventeen. He looked more like Cully than he looked like his own father, and Faye had always thought that Joe took after Sly. Looking at Cully’s photo felt like time travel. One moment, some part of her believed that she was looking at her husband’s square jaw, soft eyes, and broad shoulders. Then in the next moment, she recognized the age of the photo and knew that she couldn’t be looking at Joe.
What had happened to this boy and girl when they disappeared in 1962?
She scrolled forward through the later articles. There were a few mentions, very brief, saying that there had been no news on the disappearances. As the articles’ dates proceeded through April, she found more of the same. Until she didn’t.
On the last day of April in 1962, the body of a young woman washed ashore on the banks of the North Canadian River. In the years since then, the stretch of the North Canadian that rolled through downtown Oklahoma City had been renamed the Oklahoma River, a name that the city’s boosters thought more appropriate, considering that it lay a thousand miles south of the Canadian border. But in 1962, it was still called the North Canadian from its source in New Mexico to the point where it merged with the Canadian River in east Oklahoma.
The North Canadian was, and still is, a shallow stream that winds through sandbars and, in parts of Oklahoma, brilliant red clay. During the dry summers, a very old joke circulates, with the punch line being that Oklahoma was the home of the only river that needed to be mowed.
The stretch through Oklahoma City, however, is deeper than it used to be. It has been altered over the years, time and again. It has been deepened and straightened. The water that falls on the city’s mostly paved urban area is now diverted to the river through an underground network of storm sewers, one of which Faye knew intimately. The water that discharges from those sewers converts the urban stretch of the river into a rampage after Oklahoma’s notoriously violent thunderstorms.
The woman’s body was found in 1962 on a sandbar in a river that was still shallow and sandy. She was found east of the city, caught in twiggy undergrowth that hung down from its banks into its shallow water. It was hard to say how long she had been there, given the limits of 1960s forensic science, but her flesh was largely decomposed. Her fingerprints were a thing of the past and her facial features were obliterated.
The article reporting the discovery of the corpse mentioned the two runaways, Cully Mantooth and Angela Bond, speculating whether Angela had been found and whether Cully’s corpse might be nearby. Or whether Cully might have had a hand in her death.
Faye’s hand went to her phone and dialed Ahua’s number by feel. There was a lot about the disappearance of Cully and Angela that she didn’t know, but now she knew one critical fact. She knew why Cully might be so reluctant to tell the FBI much of anything.