I pointed to one of the property developers listed in an EPA correspondence letter, a company that had apparently responded to an inquiry about the site 3 years before Daniel died. Denied any knowledge of improper disposal and been cleared without a site visit. No, she straightened up. Should it? I don't know yet.
We kept going through the box. Near the bottom, rubber banded together, were Evans field notes, not letters this time, actual field notes on graph paper. The kind environmental consultants use sample locations numbered and cross-referenced. GPS coordinates, dates, chain of custody notations. Evan had collected soil samples from 11 locations on and around that property.
He'd sent them to a lab under a false name. The receipt was paperclipipped to the notes. The results were there, too. Printed out, highlighted. I'm not a chemist, but I've done enough property work to know what the highlighted numbers meant.
Heavy metals, chlorinated solvents, the kind of contamination profile that means someone has been disposing of industrial chemical waste illegally for a long time. Evan documented all of this. I said he had lab results, GPS coordinates, truck photographs, plate numbers. This was enough to take to the EPA, but he didn't file it. He didn't get the chance.
Clare was very still. And Daniel kept it all. For 6 years, she looked at the stack of boxes. He kept collecting. He kept adding to it.
She picked up a printout near the top of the pile, one of the more recent documents. Dated about 8 months before Daniel died, a newspaper article about a proposed land resoning application for agricultural properties in the county. The parcel number was circled in red marker. Someone was trying to redevelop the site, I said. Which would mean a sale, environmental assessment, due diligence, which would mean someone looking very carefully at the soil on that property, which would mean the contamination would be found.
Unless, I said, the people responsible had reason to move fast, clean things up, or bury the evidence deeper. Clare set the article down. Eight months before Daniel died, she said the same time he started locking the workshop, taking calls outside. Someone contacted him or he contacted someone. Either way, something shifted.
He started moving faster and then he died. She looked at me for a long time. Caleb, her voice was quiet. Careful. My brother drove a road he'd driven a thousand times and went off a curve with no skid marks.
And my husband was 39 years old and healthy and collapsed in the backyard near the garage. She swallowed, "What are we actually sitting in the middle of right now?" I didn't answer right away. I thought about what I actually knew versus what I was inferring. I thought about the difference between a story that makes sense and a thing that can be proven, but I also thought about the freshly screwed vent panel on the side of her garage. I thought about the sound she heard at 2:00 in the morning.
I thought about a sinkhole that appeared overnight in a yard above an old drainage channel that someone had recently accessed. We're sitting in the middle of something that was supposed to stay buried, I said, and the ground just gave out. We were there for almost 2 hours. I photographed everything on the corkboard with my phone. Clare went through every box.