Bonfire: A Novel Read online

  “Maybe the water does,” I say, which makes him laugh. He’s not the only one buzzing on something more than caffeine. It’s that new-job, new-team energy. These pimply law students still believe we’re going to change the world, one oil spill, one contaminated reservoir, one gas pipeline leak at a time.

  “Hey guys,” Joe speaks up. “This is Abby Williams in the flesh. She’s the one who’s been cluttering your inbox for the past two weeks.”

  The research team is a modest one: a first-year associate and a few wide-eyed volunteer law students. I swear one of the girls looks as if she’s still in high school. That’s CEAW—law on a shoestring budget. Fighting the good fight is always underpaid.

  “I believe the correct term is prepping,” I tell Joe.

  He ignores that. “Abby,” he says to the rest of the group, “as you all know, is the other lead on the team besides me. But really she’s the reason we’re here, so when you hate your life in a few days, blame her.” He bats his eyelashes at me when I pull a face.

  I can match the team to the little thumbnail images I got from Estelle Barry when she was staffing us. There’s Raj, the first-year associate, fresh out of Harvard. And, already, I’ve given out nicknames to the interns: Flora, a perky California girl in a floral top; Portland, a bearded hipster with a flannel too tailored to be truly authentic. Interns are like one-night stands. You can pretend to listen to a name or two, but the outcome never justifies the effort.

  Flora leaps to her feet. Wants to prove she did her homework. “So far we’ve gathered all the town hall meeting notes from the past five years, before they went digital,” she says. “Several families started complaining as early as, um…” She glances down at her notes, and her face darkens. “As early as three years ago.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “We’ll be revisiting those complaints, one by one,” she adds, before sitting back down.

  “What about now? Who else do we have besides Gallagher?” Gallagher is one of the largest landowners in or around Barrens—his farm’s been here since long before my time—and he uses the reservoir for irrigation. According to the notes Joe sent, he’s had to rely on it more than ever during the past two years’ drought. When he lost whole fields of corn and soybeans, he began to suspect something was wrong with the water—a suspicion borne out by several neighbors’ complaints of funny odors from the pipes, of skin inflammations and headaches.

  “A half dozen people have signed the complaint he brought to the town. A family called Dawes and a Stephen Iocco seem like our best bets.”

  “A half dozen complaints? We’ll be laughed out of the judge’s chambers.” Joe is underexaggerating. We’ll be kicked out.

  Flora looks uncomfortable. “Optimal’s the biggest employer in Barrens,” she says. “It’s hard to sway people.”

  “It’s a company town,” I say, and think uneasily about what Misha said—you’re on opposite sides now. I fear most people in Barrens will be on the other side. “That’s going to be our biggest obstacle.”

  Everyone nods, but the whole team has the slick look of a city—or at least suburbia—about them, and can’t possibly understand.

  When I was growing up, the morning air was coated in a film of plastic ash; we breathed in Optimal chemicals every time we inhaled, and the chemical smog turned the sun into different shades of pink and orange. Our ears rang with the constant din of Optimal construction: new scaffolds, new warehouses, new storage hangars, new smokestacks. I ate my lunch in a newly added school library built by an Optimal donation and rode home on a bus purchased by Optimal, with parts made by Optimal, and went to Optimal-sponsored dances, bake sales, and cookouts. My dad was right: there was someone bigger than us, someone watching us, someone who even made the colors in the sky and textured the air we were breathing. I remember as a kid when the skeleton of the production plant went up. I used to sneak around the reservoir to play on the construction site and write my name in the rusty ooze along the drainpipes, when the house was full of the smell of sick and seemed as if it might fold in on me.

  “A company town,” Joe repeats. “How quaint.”

  “When is ETL sending techs?” Raj asks. He even sounds depressed. Environmental Testing Laboratories specializes in clean water supplies, with a focus on heavy metal contamination. Unfortunately, they’re one of the few trustworthy labs in the Midwest, and their backlog runs months deep.

  “Next week,” Joe says. “But we shouldn’t expect results on the water to come in before July.”

  “If that,” I say. “What else can we look at? What about accelerated rates of cancer?”

  “In the past few years? Nope.” Only in our line of business is there reason to be disappointed that cancer doesn’t work faster.

  “Optimal moved in twenty years ago,” I point out.

  “You expect us to go back that far? We don’t have the manpower. Besides, you know how these hospitals work. It’s easier to get blood out of a quarter, and half of what you do get is restricted.”

  “It’s data. Even if it isn’t admissible later, it isn’t a waste. We should do a survey of local doctors at least.” This is how we work: quick back and forth, push and pull. The first time I met Joe, he pointed out that the water bottle I was drinking from was a source of chemical leach, and I pointed out that he was a dick. We’ve been friends ever since.

  I decide to push my advantage. “What about the old cases I sent around? Do we think there’s anything there?”

  “You mean the Mitchell case?” Flora speaks up. Brightly, of course.

  “The Mitchells, Dales, Baums, and Allens were the primary plaintiffs,” Portland jumps in. He doesn’t miss the chance to get some Brownie points. I like him. “Apparently their daughters—teenagers, four of them—got really sick. Tremors. Vision disturbances. Episodes of fainting. They filed a civil suit when it began to spread—”

  “Right. Then dropped it.” Joe tosses the stack of notes back on his desk. “It was a hoax. Just young girls trying to get rich in a corporate payout.” Then, without warning, he rounds on me. “Wasn’t it, Abby?”

  Fucking Joe. He’s always litigating.

  “That’s what they said.” I think of Kaycee trying and failing to pick up her pencil in art class. I think of her friends, twitching through the halls like insects. “There was a lot of attention on them. One of the girls skipped town afterward. The others withdrew their complaints. I’m originally from Barrens,” I explain into a room of blank stares, taking on the originally as if afterward I hopped around to, who knows, Paris and Rio and Santa Monica. “I was in school with the girls who got sick.”

  “But there was an audit.” This is from Raj, our first-year associate. I suspect, from the distant courtesy with which he and Joe treat each other, that maybe they are screwing after hours. “Someone from the EPA came down and spent a month doing tests. Optimal passed. They’ve passed every review since then, too.”

  “Still, it’s a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think?” I say, casually, as if the idea never occurred to me before.

  “But it wasn’t a coincidence,” chimes perky Flora again. “Before Optimal moved to Barrens they were headquartered in Tennessee for a decade. At the time, they were called Associated Polymer. I guess that’s still the parent company. In the early 2000s a group of plaintiffs brought a case accusing Associated Polymer of illegal dumping. They paid out rather than fight the case, though they always denied wrongdoing.” This girl is really working for her A. You gotta love overachievers.

  “If they didn’t do anything wrong, why would they settle?” Portland asks.

  “Optimal’s come close to skirting the line a few different times over the past decade,” Joe says, riffling through a stack of papers as if checking his notes. It’s all for show. He has a photographic memory, or close to it. “Labor violations, tax audits, even a discrimination case. But nothing sticks. No one wants to press them too hard, not when they’re bringing in so much cash.”

  “That’s small-town
politics for you,” I say.

  Flora picks up where she left off. “Well, that’s how the girls got the idea to shake them down in the first place. One of the girls—Misha Dole—said so.”

  “Misha Dale,” I correct her.

  “That wouldn’t help us now unless we can prove continuity,” Joe puts in. “If we want to do a deep dive on Optimal, we’ll need to convince someone there’s a reason we’re even looking. That means sworn testimonies and affidavits from people who are experiencing symptoms now. It also means ruling out other causes. I do not want to put my ass on the line only to find out we got some bedbugs and a crazy old man with a vendetta.”

  “You have to understand.” My voice echoes to the old rafters, and something startles. A bird. I can’t see what kind, though. “We’re not the heroes here. We’re the enemy.”

  “Oh, good.” Joe smirks. “The villains always get better outfits. Let’s get to work.” When he claps, the bird alights and swoops down over our heads, beating its way out the open door. Flora screeches.

  “It’s just a crow,” I say. And then, because I can’t help it, “Crows have amazing memories. They can distinguish between human faces, too. They’re like elephants. They never forget.”

  “No wonder they always look so angry,” Joe adds, and when I look up at him he’s lifting an eyebrow at Raj. Yeah, they’re fucking.

  —

  I claim the empty desk and busy myself sorting through the notes that Gallagher left us: detailed notations, almost hieroglyphic, of changes to the soil pH, unfamiliar bacterial blight, unexplained crop failure.

  One thing leaps out at me right away: Gallagher provided a statement from a woman named Dawes who claims that her kid has been getting rashes. But if they’ve been using a private well, as most families do in Barrens, it’s bad news for us. If the contamination is in the groundwater it will be much harder to tie to a single source. And there’s always the possibility the whole case is fluff to begin with, that some locals might be sniffing around for a payout like Kaycee and her friends tried to ten years ago.

  For the rest of the team, this is just another case. For me, it’s a chance to finally take on the demons. To root out the ugly secrets. I wish I could say I was here to get justice for the voiceless, for those who have no power, just like I once had no power. I wish I could even say I want the bad guys to suffer.

  But I just want to know—for sure, for good, forever. For a decade the same questions have been knocking around, over and over, in my head. Only the truth can shut them up.

  Chapter Three

  At six o’clock I call it: type on the page has begun to collapse before my eyes. Joe packs up when I do, and watching him shove papers into a leather carryall, I wonder what he thinks of this place. I’ve tried to explain to him where I’m from before, in minor detail and broad generalities. Rural, sticks, wide-open spaces, twenty minutes to get a loaf of bread…I wonder if he sees me differently now amid the faint smell of manure and hay and the acres and acres of unpopulated land.

  Gallagher’s dogs are working overtime, and start up again as soon as Joe and I step outside to lock the place up. Several hundred yards away, the furnace behind the farmhouse feeds the smell of charcoal into the evening air. Gallagher must be home.

  “I could use a drink. Any bad sing-along karaoke around here?” Joe gives me a nudge, and I know he’s trying to make up for forcing my little confession that I’m from here earlier. That’s one of the things you have to love about Joe—off the clock, he always feels guilty for being great at his job. “You can give me the tour of the ol’ stomping grounds.”

  “I’m too wiped,” I say, which is half true, and I’ve gotta see my dad, which I don’t even want to get into with Joe. “Besides, don’t you have to drive back to Indianapolis?”

  “You’re. No. Fun.” Even his voice changes once he leaves the office, and he told me, when I once pointed that out, that mine does, too.

  “Trust me, Carrigan’s isn’t really your scene.”

  Joe gives me a wave and gets into his car. I turn away from the dust kicked up by his rental.

  I have a headache from puzzling over records old and new. Patterns are like truth. They’ll set you free, but first they’ll give you a bitch of a migraine.

  —

  The sky is in that in-between phase, day and night throwing up a confused riot of blues and pinks and oranges to a soundtrack of crickets. At this hour, Barrens looks beautiful: the fields are wrapped in haze. That’s how beauty works in Barrens, by sidling up to you when you least expect it.

  Muscle memory takes me straight out to the Barrens Dam. I spent a lot of time here when I was growing up, especially in summer, when the water was low and the current would wrap around my ankles. It was always freezing, but that never seemed to matter. If the weather was nice, it could be pretty lively. Kids catching crayfish, swinging on ropes, floating on tire tubes, fishermen in thighwaders trying their luck with the newly stocked trout.

  Today there’s not a soul in sight. The water is high and rough and would surely knock me over. I close my eyes and imagine wading in anyway. I imagine the shock of the cold, the sudden weight of all that water. The pressure of the current like a long line of clutching hands trying to pull me under. I stumble backward, hardly managing to keep my balance.

  Then: a distant sound of laugher makes me turn. Two girls, one dark-haired, one corn-silk blond, dart hand in hand into the trees, scattering dust and pebbles with every footstep.

  Time wrenches away from the present, and instead it’s me and Kaycee I see, scabby kneed and wild.

  The dark-haired girl drops a sandal and twists around to retrieve it, breaking from her friend. When she spots me, suspicion tightens her face. She looks as if she might say something, but her friend grabs her again by the hand and off they go. I exhale before realizing I’d been holding my breath.

  I used to see her everywhere. I grabbed a girl on the L only last year, shouldered my way through a holiday-packed train car and barely managed to hook a hand around her purse strap before she plunged onto the platform.

  “Kaycee,” I panted out, until she turned and I realized she was far too young—she was the age Kaycee was when she ran, not how old she would have been now.

  One time, late senior year, I found her on her knees in the bathroom, the toilet flecked with blood. She kept saying the same thing, over and over, as I stood there wanting to feel vindicated but feeling nothing but panic and a hard dread: if this thing had come for Kaycee, none of us were safe.

  She reached out a hand, but not as if she wanted me to take it. As if she was fumbling blind in the dark for something to hang on to. What’s happening to me? A convulsion worked through her and she turned to the toilet to retch.

  I remember thinking the blood was far too red.

  I remember, later, thinking, How would you fake that?

  Chapter Four

  I know where I’m supposed to be going, but I stall a little longer and end up in the drive-in parking lot of Sunny Jay’s: the seedy general store slash liquor shop where all the high school kids used to buy without ID. Myself included. Across the street, what used to be a patch of scrubby land used informally as a secondary dump has been cleared out, irrigated, and converted into a public playground: a few screaming kids coast down a bright red plastic slide and pump their legs on a spanking-new swing set while their parents wilt in the shade. A big sign on the chain-link fence reads Optimal Cares! Not exactly subtle.

  I shift my car into park and practically jog to the door. Inside, I head straight for the meager wine section, scanning the crappy pink zinfandel box wines and the Yellow Tail and the jugs of Carlo Rossi. I’m about to pull a decent-looking albeit dusty Malbec from the shelf—hard to go wrong there—when someone speaks up behind me.

  “Need help?”

  “No, thanks—” I turn and the bottle slips. I barely manage to catch it.

  There are a lot of things I’ve never forgotten about Barrens—a lot of
things I can’t forget. The smell of chicken farms in summertime. The feeling of being stuck in the wrong place, or in the wrong body, or both. The pitch-black night, the silence.

  But I have forgotten this: you can’t go anywhere in this town without running into someone. It’s one of the first things you shed in a city, the feeling of being watched, observed, and noticed; the feeling of racketing like a pinball between familiar people and places, and no way to get out. First Misha, and now…

  “You need anything, you let me know.” Dave Condor—who always went by his last name—goes back to counting money into a register. His hair half obscures his face. Something about him always set me on edge, even in high school. Maybe because he was always quiet, fluid, like he’d just yawned into being.

  I slide the bottle back onto the shelf and take a couple of steps toward the door, already regretting the detour. My dad would probably say this was punishment for wanting a drink in the first place.

  Before I can make it outside, he looks up. “Wine’s pretty old. Not in a good way. More of beer and liquor people around here,” he tells me. “Not from here?”

  He doesn’t recognize me. It feels like an achievement. I smile. “Why do you say that?” I ask, genuinely curious. Maybe the small-town stain can be scrubbed away after all.

  But he just shrugs and grins. “I know all the girls in Barrens. The pretty ones especially.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I say, and he squints at me, as if he’s seeing me through a filter of smoke.

  I remember all the stories about Condor in high school. He got in trouble for dealing weed—I remember that—and he dropped out a few months shy of graduation, when I was still a junior. I remember Annie Baum getting in Condor’s face the same year he got his girlfriend, Stephanie, pregnant. So Condor, she said, I hear you like putana? Because Stephanie’s dad came from Ecuador. And Condor had stood up without saying a word, grabbed his bag, and walked out.