Chapter Thirty

Monday morning, Flora comes to hail me at our brand-new office behind Sunny Jay’s, where Condor works. Now not only is Condor across from me at home but he is next to me at work as well. Flora waves her arms overhead like an aircraft marshal trying to get me to wheel-in right.

“Environmental Testing Labs sent results of their tests,” she says, before I’ve even cleared the door. “We’ve been calling.”

“Already?” I ask. Normally getting results from ETL is like waiting for aliens to come to Earth with gifts.

“Lead,” she bursts out, before I can ask. “Lead five times the legal limits.”

“Is it true?” I turn to Joe.

He responds by wordlessly passing over the report: preliminary investigation of the chemical and hard metal composition of the Barrens, Indiana, public water supply. The document is short and straightforward: the reservoir is filthy, contaminated not just by lead but by trace amounts of mercury and industrial pollutants with unpronounceable names. Of course, the report makes no claims about the source of the pollution—it will be our job to link it to Optimal—but this gives us more than enough to take a formal complaint to the judge.

So why don’t I feel like celebrating?

This evidence is enough to justify closing up shop and heading back to Chicago. We could easily do the rest of our work there, from our own homes and our own beds. I could get the hell out of here. And yet…

All I can think about is Kaycee. Coughing up blood. The dizzy spells, the passing out.

“Who’d you have to rub-and-tug to get these back so quickly?” I ask. There is the abstract truth: documents and numbers and theories. And then there is the real truth: Gallagher’s ruined crops, the wreckage of his life savings; little Grayson, with a soft head and a malformed brain; Carolina Dawes and her son’s itchy rashes.

“Actually, I can’t take the credit on this one,” Joe says. “Your prosecutor friend Agerwal leaned on them himself. It turns out he was serious about taking corruption out of Monroe County.”

“An honest politician. Who knew?” Everyone’s watching me, waiting for me to look happy. I keep rifling through the stack of pages, turning the words and charts back and forth. “What are the symptoms of lead poisoning again?”

“Skin irritations, for one. Rashes, like people have complained about.” Joe ticks the symptoms off on his fingers. “Long-term exposure can lead to birth defects, major cognitive disorders.”

“And Gallagher’s complaints about his yield are in line with the agricultural effects,” Flora puts in. “It all fits.”

“It fits with what people are reporting now,” Portland speaks up. Thank God I’m not the one who has to say it. “But it doesn’t fit with what happened to Kaycee Mitchell.”

Joe frowns. “Not you, too,” he says to Portland. Then: “You guys, this is a slam dunk. CEAW’s going to funnel some more funds into another round of testing. In the meantime, we can get out of here. If I never see a cornfield, or a shotgun, again, it’ll be too soon.”

“Snob.” I try to make it sound like a joke, but I can’t even force a smile. My mouth is dry. Tongue like a sock. I should be thrilled, but there’s too much miring me here in Barrens: the freaking barn fire, and Monty, I believe, wrongfully accused. My dad falling apart before my eyes. Brent kissing me all the time like I’m his girlfriend or something. Misha. Condor and his daughter and her hula-hoop.

Shariah and her baby’s tiny head. Lilian McMann’s daughter, in nothing but her socks.

The bribes.

The Game.

“What about a corruption case?” I blurt out.

Joe shoots me a puzzled look. “Why do you think Agerwal took an interest? He’s all over it already. I spoke to him this morning, and gave him your notes—on Pulaski and the connection between Optimal and Clean Solutions. Clean Solutions looks like a money dump, just like you said. Any luck, we’ll be home in Chicago right in time for dollar oysters at Smith and Wollensky.”

I can hear how truly excited Joe is about getting home—back to his life in Chicago, where a gay black man blends right in. Where he’s easily juggling a rotation of seven boyfriends and can be seen with any one of them in public. Back to the perfection of his city apartment, filled with fabulous eccentricities, a state-of-the-art sound system, matching wineglasses, and an odd “water feature” that’s essentially just a fountain.

It’s another reminder of how different he and I really are. The prospect of returning to my condo—brand-new, impeccably clean, modern, and practically empty—fills me with dread.

I know now that there’s a hole inside me. A hole that can’t be patched or filled with files or paperwork or legal cases or new clothes or miles or happy hours or bartenders.

This was never about the water. It’s not even about Kaycee, not really.

It’s about me.

“This is exactly what we came to do, Abby,” Joe adds, softer now.

But that’s where he’s wrong.

When I was a kid, the reservoir was the biggest body of water I’d seen, and it was the center of the whole world. The south side was always the good side, the area with people whose parents had jobs as electricians and telemarketers and, later, at Optimal. On the west side is a wild nest of woods. The east side is where the skeleton of Optimal gradually rose up, like a shipwreck in reverse.

And to the north, there’s an old dump of ramshackle homes, a lot of them empty, the trees growing thick between them. It’s only a mile walk through the woods from my dad’s house. A mile of woods that I played in as a kid—I would sit with my back against a rock, surrounded by trees, imagining I could live there forever like a fairy when I knew my mother was dying. Where I played hide and seek with Kaycee, and where we buried Chestnut.

I take the dirt roads instead of the woods, roads baked in heat. Flies buzz over something dead and, through the trees, the reservoir shimmers.

When I climb out of the car, I feel a little like I’m on the wrong side of a microscope. Here, too, the residents run their sewage straight into the trees down the hill. It can cost four grand for a new water hookup, and no one around here has that kind of money. They must be filling their taps and showers with water from the reservoir, like all the poorest families do. No wonder Shariah’s kid was born disfigured.

Shariah Dobbs lives at #12 Tillsdale Road, which is hard to find because these roads are more like pathways and none of them have signs. She isn’t home, so I scrawl a note on a scrap of paper I unearth from my bag and tuck it into her mailbox along with my business card.

Returning to my car, my eyes land on the one-story house across a yard littered with car parts. A mailbox leaning off the front door is labeled Allen. It’s a common enough name, I know, but I hesitate, rolling my keys in my palm.

Cora Allen was one of Kaycee’s and Misha’s best friends. Misha told me that she wasn’t doing so well, that they weren’t in contact anymore. It’s amazing how poorly the golden girls of Barrens High have fared.

Is it a coincidence? Or did something happen to explain how fast and how far they fell?

I have to know.

Dropping my keys in my bag, I cross the weedy lawn.

The house shows all its age and neglect: peeling paint, even a cracked window kept from shattering by two-by-fours. I might think it was abandoned if it weren’t for the truck pulled up beneath a plastic carport.

Before I can even make it to the door, it opens, and there she is. Cora Allen. Or rather, some rotted version of her, scabby and grayscale. Only her eyes are the same: big and brown and thoughtful.

“Abby Williams,” she says, before I can even lift a hand. “I heard you were back.” She scratches at her stomach beneath her T-shirt. “Been expecting you to find me.”

“Hi, Cora.”

She turns around and disappears inside again, and for a second I stand there, confused about whether she means for me to follow. But then she leans out the door to gesture me after her. “Well, come on in. Let’s get this over with.”

I follow her inside, which is hazy with old cigarette smoke. The kitchen counter is cluttered with empty beer bottles and before she sits, she grabs a new one from the fridge. This isn’t fun day drinking. This is something much darker. I have a quick look at the inside of her refrigerator: water, beer, orange juice, and a shriveled round of cheddar.

We take a seat in the main room, and she switches off the TV. She pops the beer against the coffee table edge, which is scored from hundreds of previous beers. She won’t stop scratching, either. Misha wasn’t lying. She’s a drug addict. It’s painfully obvious.

“So? What is it you want to know?”

I’m more and more puzzled by the minute. “It seems like you’re the one with something to tell me?”

“You’ve been asking around about Kaycee Mitchell, huh?” She takes a swig of her beer. “What did all the others tell you?”

“Nothing. And all the same exact thing. That they haven’t heard from her in years. That she was a liar. That they were glad to see her go.” Cora flinches, just for a second. “How about you?”

For a second, Cora says nothing. We stare at each other until I have to look away.

“No. She scared me sometimes. But no.” She takes a long sip of her beer. “We let her down, all of us. She was sick, you know,” she goes on. Then, in response to my look of surprise, “Sick in the head. Her dad used to be too fond of her, if you know what I mean.”

Suddenly my stomach drops. I remember Kaycee in fourth grade, proudly showing off tubes of mascara and lipstick, tucked at the bottom of her backpack. My daddy gave them to me, she told me. He says I’m a big girl now so why not?

I think of Kaycee, heating up a silver Zippo lighter, shocking my skin with the burn of steel. You know it’s love because it starts to hurt. I was too young to understand.

The air is stifling—the smell of stale beer coats everything. I feel as if I can hardly draw a breath.

“She tried to tell us, too. What do you do about something like that? Misha accused her of wanting attention. Misha was always accusing everybody of wanting attention.”

I clear my throat. “That’s called projection,” I say, and she laughs, throaty and surprisingly rich.

“I’d say.” Suddenly she leans forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her eyes fighting their way to sharp focus. “I think that when she got sick, it was because of that. You ever heard about that? How the mind can make you feel bad even when you’re not?”

“Sure,” I say carefully. “But I thought she was only pretending?”

She leans back. All at once, she seems totally exhausted. “No,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t pretend. She was sick all right. We all were. It was no one’s fault but our own.” She directs the words toward her beer, as if it’s proof of this.

Misha always said that what happened senior year was a prank that quickly spiraled out of control: as more and more girls began to get sick, no one knew what was real and what was pretend anymore. Cora’s idea is that the sickness was a kind of punishment.

But for what?

She avoids my eyes and watches her beer drain toward empty with every sip, as if trying to figure out what’s happening to it. No point in holding back now. “Was it because of the Game?”

Bingo. She jerks her head up to stare at me. “That was some sick shit. I remember when they found Becky Sarinelli hanging. I thought I was going to puke.”

“Me too.”

“It was Kaycee’s idea, you know.” She stabs a smoke ring with her pointer finger to dissipate it. “Not the Game itself. The senior boys had been competing for nudies for years. But the money part.”

The cigarette smoke is making me nauseous.

“That was typical Kaycee,” she says. “Always running some scheme.” And I know she’s right. Kaycee was always scheming for money, even when we were little. Her family was worse off than mine, or even Cora’s. “She used to steal stuff whenever she could. We all did—beer and rolling papers and gum and shit like that. But with her it was like she couldn’t help it.” She shook her head. “So then Kaycee had this idea, right, that we could ransom back the pictures they took. Make the girls pay, or else. I didn’t want to. But you know how Kaycee was…” She trails off, shrugging.

She doesn’t need to finish, anyway. I know what she would have said: It was impossible to say no to Kaycee. She could talk you into anything.

Dogs like that should be put down.

“What did she do with the photos after people paid up?” I ask. “Did she actually return them?”

Cora frowns. “What do you think?” She leans forward to stub out a cigarette. “She kept them.”