NEAR MAYFIELD, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 9
5:10 P.M.
ATKINS SAT IN THE FRONT SEAT OF BEN HARVEY’S pickup, watching the cattle. They’d driven to one of his far pastures. Sheriff Hessel had left to get back to his office in Mayfield. He was worried about the weather icing up the roads.
The behavior of some of the animals was bizarre. Cows normally moved slowly as they grazed. Atkins watched as the animals—individually or sometimes three and four at a time—suddenly lifted their heads up from the feed trough and trotted stiffly in wide circles.
Harvey couldn’t explain it. Or hide his concern.
“They’ve been doing that on and off for a week,” he said. “I haven’t got an explanation. Neither does the vet.”
“Have you felt any tremors lately?”
Harvey smiled. “We get three or four little shakes a year around here. You get used to that pretty quick you live in this country. Five, six years ago there was a good jolt. Maybe a 5 on that Richter scale. It didn’t do any damage to speak of except maybe snap a few sewer lines and some gas pipes. And, friend, it never made my cattle go nuts.”
Harvey invited Atkins for dinner and drove back to the farmhouse. Atkins was eager to leave but Harvey and his wife, Barbara, insisted that he stay. The pot roast was already in the oven. The delicious aroma of meat, onions, and simmering gravy filled the kitchen.
Barbara drew a glass of water from the tap.
“Smell that,” Harvey said, handing the glass to Atkins.
The odor of sulfur was unmistakable. The water was slightly clouded.
“Three days ago that water was clear and sweet,” Harvey said.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Harvey said, looking out the window. “It’s finally starting.”
The wind came in gusts, and Atkins heard the sleet hitting the glass like handfuls of pebbles.
“You better spend the night, Mister Atkins,” Ben Harvey said. “This keeps up, the road’s gonna be solid ice. It’s really coming down.”
Atkins didn’t want to put them out. Even more to the point, he wanted to get back to Memphis as soon as possible and start going over Walt Jacobs’ data on the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
“Now that the boys are grown and living on their own farms, we’ve got four empty bedrooms upstairs,” Harvey said. “You’re welcome to one of them. I wouldn’t go out in that.”
Although he was eager to leave, Atkins accepted the offer with gratitude. He enjoyed a huge meal, and afterward Ben Harvey got out a bottle of Old Granddad and poured each of them a jigger. They sat by the fire in the farmhouse’s spacious living room. When they turned in, it was still sleeting.
A little after midnight a telephone awakened Atkins. Moments later, Ben Harvey knocked on the bedroom door.
“What is it?” Atkins asked, struggling to clear his head. He’d been in a deep sleep.
“Poachers,” Harvey said.
The caller was a hired hand who worked for him. He and his wife lived in a trailer on the far side of the farm. He was getting ready to turn in for the night and had looked outside to check if it was still sleeting. He’d seen some lights in the hills.
“I told him to call the sheriff,” Harvey said. “I’ll head on out there and take a look myself. There’s a lot of deer that winter in those hills. The poachers come after them at night with four-by-fours. The bastards use spotlights. You catch a deer in the light, it won’t move, and you can pick it off easy. We had a hell of a problem with poachers a few years back. We finally ran them off. At least I thought we had. It looks like they’re back in business.”
Harvey put on his raincoat and boots and got a rifle out of a gun case in the family room. He asked Atkins if he wanted to go with him.
“I wouldn’t mind the company if you’re up to it. You gotta sit out there in the dark and hope they come your way. It can get kinda boring.”
Left unsaid was what they’d do if someone did come their way.
They walked out to the truck and headed down one of the dirt roads that crisscrossed the farm. The sleet had stopped. They had to drive a few miles, the wheels crunching through thick sheets of ice.
Looming ahead, Atkins saw the low hills, snake-backed and dark.
They were still a mile away when a flash of bluish-white light lit up one of the hillsides.
Harvey stopped and said, “That’s no lantern.”
The light alternated from a pale, luminescent blue to reddish-orange. It flashed, then flashed again, lingering for a few seconds with a strong afterglow. The band of light appeared to hover directly over the ridgeline.
“Are there any power lines or buried cables running across those hills?” Atkins asked.
“Not that I know of,” Harvey said. He let out a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
The hillside had gone dark then the lights burst out again, brighter than ever. They seemed to rise from the ground and settle over the tops of the trees, a color spectrum of white, various shades of blue and orange that radiated in waves.
“What do you think’s causing that?” the farmer asked.
“I don’t know,” Atkins said. And he meant it. He’d read about “earthquake lights,” but had never seen them before. Most seismologists—himself included—were skeptical about such lights, even in the face of some fairly dramatic reports. The light show—and according to the descriptions, it could be even more spectacular than this— usually happened before or during an earthquake. The entire sky had reportedly lit up like the northern lights just before a powerful quake struck in Italy in May 1976. More recently, twenty-three spottings of earthquake lights were reported in and around the Japanese city of Kobe before the 7.2 magnitude quake on January 17, 1995. Most appeared as streaks of lightning, arcs of light, or quivering fan-shaped bands of color that appeared to rise above the ground.
They differed substantially from the northern or southern “auroral” lights, which were caused by solar storms that sent energy pulsing into the upper atmosphere along magnetic field lines. The auroral lights were usually seen in northern latitudes, more rarely in southern. They tended to be green or yellow. Earthquake lights were usually blue, white, or orange.
Sightings of earthquake lights were plentiful but good photographs of the phenomenon were rare. They’d often been reported along the coasts of northern California or Mexico, frequently just offshore. Their origin remained a mystery. One theory suggested that the main cause might be the discharge of polarized electricity from rocks during heavy ground shaking.
Atkins stepped out of the pickup. Harvey got out on the other side. The lights that continued to hover over the hills were more vivid now. It looked like sheet lightning.
Atkins wished he had a tape recorder to dictate his description. Or a camera.
“Ben,” he said to the farmer. “I’ll need to get back to Memphis first thing in the morning. I’ll take my chances with the ice.”
SANTA MONICA
JANUARY 9
10:25 P.M.
OTTO PRABLE’S OFFICES WERE JUST OFF WILSHIRE Boulevard in Santa Monica, a low-rise, nondescript building that he owned. Elizabeth Holleran drove straight there after watching the video again. She used the key he’d sent her to open the front door.
