Sour Apples (29 page)

Meg and Seth watched Art pull out of the driveway. “How sad,” Meg said. “You think it’s possible that Ethan killed himself because he just couldn’t face milking one more cow?”

Seth shook his head. “Whether or not he liked the whole dairy business, I don’t think he would have left the cows to suffer. He was more responsible than that. I’m going to have to go along with Art on this one.”

“Why did Art come all the way over here to tell you? Couldn’t he have told you on the phone?”

Seth sighed and looked into the distance over her shoulder. “He could have, but I think he didn’t want to be overheard while he was still at the Truesdell place. Looks like he’s been listening to what we’ve been telling him. Maybe this is exactly what it appears to be: Ethan was overwhelmed trying to do everything at once and he took the easy way out. Maybe not. We’ll have to see what the ME says.”

“You think it’s easy to kill yourself?” Meg said, horrified.

“Sometimes it’s easier than trying to fight your problems. But Ethan had other options, and he knew it. He would have been happy to walk away from the dairy business. That was Joyce’s dream, not his. With her gone, he could have.”

“Seth…do you think this happened because we’ve been pushing this investigation?” Meg pressed.

“Damn, I hope not. I’d better make those calls. The cows can’t wait.”

“Seth, was I right?” Meg said, almost to herself.

“That there’s something very wrong going on here? I think so. And I think Art thinks so, too.”

She walked into his arms and let herself be held for a long moment. First Joyce, now Ethan. Did this really all come back to the contaminated land? Could someone really have believed that by eliminating Ethan, they could shut
down the whole investigation? If so, they were too late: too many other people knew that there was something going on, even if they didn’t know exactly what.

What would happen to the field now? It would revert to the town, she supposed. No one had been interested in it for decades before, and there wasn’t any reason to believe anyone would want it now. But wasn’t the genie out of the bottle already? Seth would make sure that there was an official soil test to confirm publicly what they already knew. He had a legal and moral obligation to do that, which had nothing to do with Joyce’s and Ethan’s deaths. Would the town want to sue Pioneer Valley, to make it right? Would Pioneer Valley try to fix their mistake?

Meg pulled back suddenly. “Seth, you haven’t looked at all the town documents you collected, have you?”

“No, not yet, not in any detail—I was headed over to town hall to get them out when I got the call from Art. Why?”

“Can I help when you go over the documents? And we can add what Lauren gave us?”

“Sure, two sets of eyes are better than one. But why?”

“There has to be a trail somewhere here, in what’s in the files—or what’s not. I want to see for myself.”

“Okay. Let me get the cows taken care of, then we can grab some lunch and go over to town hall.”

“Okay, where do we do this?” Meg asked as she and Seth climbed the steps in front of the Victorian town hall on the green. Under her left arm, Meg clutched the envelope Lauren had dropped off with them that morning.

“How about the board room? There’s a large table there so we can spread things out.” Seth ushered Meg into the building and stopped to greet the woman at the front desk. “Sandy, is the meeting room free?”

“Sure is, Seth,” Sandy replied. “Hi, Meg, how you doing? Awful thing about Ethan Truesdell, isn’t it?”

“I’m fine, Sandy. You’ve already heard about Ethan?”

Sandy shrugged. “It’s a small town—news travels fast. I think three people have mentioned it so far. Anyway, nothing’s scheduled for that room, Seth. You go right ahead and use it.”

On the way to the board room, Seth stopped at a counter. “Hi, Jennifer. I need to get something out of the safe.”

“Sure thing, Seth. Just let me find the keys…” The
young woman rummaged around a drawer until she found a key ring, then handed it to Seth. “Hey, Meg. What a shame about Ethan Truesdell.”

“It is,” Meg agreed. “Did you know him?”

“I knew Joyce a little better. She used to come in to look at the town’s records. Ethan came with her now and then. He was in just a couple of days ago. They seemed like real nice folk. Shoot, I forgot—Ethan left something for you, Seth, last time he was here. Did I give it to you?”

“I don’t remember seeing it. I’ve been in and out lately, so you might have missed me.”

Jennifer started rummaging through stacks of documents on the broad countertop. “Must have been…Tuesday? Wednesday? Where did I…oh, right. Jack Smith came in with a problem with his dog licenses at the same time, so Ethan just handed it to me and left. Didn’t say a word, poor guy. He looked awful. I didn’t even know who it was for until I looked at the envelope. I guess I stuck it in a pile here—sorry about that.” She pulled out a plain business-size envelope with Seth’s name scrawled on it and handed it to Seth. “Here you go. Wonder what’s going to happen with the dairy farm now.”

Seth took the envelope and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “I don’t know. If you know anybody who wants to step into a working dairy operation, let me know.”

“I’ll think about it, Seth. I know they had a nice small farm going there.”

“Thanks, Jennifer. And remind me to give you back the keys on my way out.”

Seth guided Meg into the board room and made sure the table was clear. “Why don’t you lay out what we’ve got, chronologically?”

“Seth, open Ethan’s envelope.”

Seth patted his shirt pocket. “Oh, right. Wonder why he didn’t just give it to me? When was the last time he stopped by your place?”

“A week ago,” Meg replied thoughtfully. “So, what is it?”

Seth slit open the envelope and pulled out a couple of pieces of paper. “I’ll be damned—it’s the soil report. No—hang on. There are
two
reports in here.” He scanned the pages. “It looks like Joyce’s request was processed about a week after it arrived—that’s pretty good turnaround. That report gives the land a clean bill of health. But the second one…that’s the one that shows unsafe levels of contaminants, including lead. What the hell is going on?”

Meg peered over Seth’s shoulder. “I have to wonder if Joyce ever saw that first report or if somehow it got delayed. And where does the second one fit? Why two different ones? We don’t know when Ethan received either of them. Maybe when he saw the first one he didn’t think it mattered much, since it seemed to shoot down the theory of the field being the source of the lead. But when he saw the second one? Why did he bring it here instead of to your office?”

“Maybe he didn’t think it was urgent,” Seth said. “He didn’t know what we’d figured out about the possible Sainsbury connection and why there was more at stake than a dead cow. Or that the police might be interested.”

“We should compare these to the other reports we’ve got, right? We now have five: the original site assessment in the Pioneer Valley pile, the report that the MDEP signed off on after the cleanup, the one Lydia and I got through Christopher, and now two different versions of the one that Joyce asked for. And they don’t all match. The ones you’ve got should go back earlier, and you’d also have the more recent details for the lease. Can we lay out the Pioneer Valley documents and the town documents side by side? Then we can see where the gaps are and where they’re different.”

Seth looked increasingly troubled. “Good idea. Let me go get the town files out of the safe.”

When Seth headed for the safe, Meg opened up the bulky file that Lauren had given her—minus the profile of
Rick Sainsbury, which she had stowed safely at home. She’d already put the documents in chronological order, so she began laying them out along the longer axis of the table. The earliest documents that Pioneer Valley had provided appeared to be assessments and cost analyses that had gone into the bid for the remediation job. That wasn’t surprising, since there was no reason why the company would have had any interest in the property before that. Meg wasn’t sure what the bidding process involved. She could check into that later, if necessary.

Then there were various reports on preliminary soil tests, some carried out by Pioneer Valley and others from the MDEP; the results matched fairly closely. The records continued through several years, culminating with several reports made to the MDEP and to the town of Granford, stating that after remediation the contaminant levels in the soil met current safety standards, and detailing what means had been used to achieve that end. There was also a letter from the MDEP to the town confirming that and, in effect, closing the case. All looked to be as it should; everything tied up neatly with bows. So what had gone wrong? And when?

Seth returned with an even thicker file. “Where’d you start?”

Meg pointed. “This end, in the late nineties. What’ve you got?”

“This material goes back to the original acquisition by the town, and then the various tests done over the past few decades, until the MDEP forced us to deal with it. Took a while.”

“So I’d guess that we overlap somewhere in the middle here. If you want to put the early stuff at that end, I can slide this down the table until everything lines up.”

“I love an organized woman!”

In less than half an hour they had two orderly rows of documents marching the length of the table. Seth’s line extended beyond Meg’s at both ends.

Meg stood back and looked at their collection. “Okay, now what?”

Seth came to stand beside her. “Well, we’re assuming that the toxic chemicals that were identified in the early documents”—he pointed toward the stacks at the left end—“were accurate in representing what was in the ground then. We know that the all-clear reports to the town at the other end are false, because we’ve just retested the same soil with very different results. The levels are somewhat diminished in the recent reports, but they’re still higher than what would be considered safe. So something happened between the middle and the end. If the land is unsafe now, then somebody falsified reports.”

“Can you explain to me how the MDEP works? Do they have their own labs? Their own cleanup people?”

“No, they have a list of cleanup professionals who have been approved for this kind of work,” Seth said. “It’s on their website, and it’s a long list. Pioneer Valley is on it.”

“Yes, fine, good,” Meg said impatiently, “but who does the testing when the work is finished on a project?”

“The individual firms, I assume. They have to submit the results to the MDEP.”

“And the MDEP doesn’t see a conflict of interest there? Wouldn’t they have used a different lab to verify the results?”

Seth shrugged. “Apparently not. But I can’t tell you what resources were available then.”

“So we’re kind of going in circles here,” Meg said. “We know the ground was contaminated in the beginning. Pioneer Valley said that they did the cleanup work and gave it a clean bill of health, and the MDEP accepted the report they submitted. My own report from Christopher shows that the land is still contaminated, though less so. Ethan received two conflicting reports, one supporting the Pioneer Valley side and one that more or less matches mine. I think that the work that was done at Pioneer Valley has to be the weak
link. Somebody faked the original cleanup report. Why would anyone do that rather than just doing the work?”

“I can’t answer that. Money? Incompetence?”

“Can we figure out who the analyst was?”

“Probably, because an analyst of this type has to be licensed and he has to sign the report. Hang on, let me check…” Seth sorted through a pile of papers at the early end and pulled one out, leaving a sticky note where he’d found it, then did the same thing in another pile of papers at the later end. He laid the two reports on the table to compare them. “Looks like a guy named Marvin Dubrowski did the work for Pioneer Valley both times, before and after the remediation.”

“Do you think he’s still with Pioneer Valley?”

“If Pioneer Valley is a privately held corporation, I don’t know that I can get at a list of employees. Wait—I can check if he’s a licensed engineer in the state and cross-reference that with the list of approved professionals. Let me get my laptop from the car. Back in a few.”

Seth left, and Meg stared at the orderly piles. She looked at the reports that Seth had pulled out and laid side by side, the reports from Ethan, and the report that Christopher had sent her.

When Seth returned, his laptop tucked under his arm, she said, “Look at these.”

“What am I looking at?”

“The test results. From Pioneer Valley, years ago, the ones that Ethan left for you, and the latest one from Christopher’s contact.”

Seth studied them for a minute. “The earliest and the last show the same contaminants but not at the same levels. Ethan’s first one matched the one that the MDEP approved, and his second one matches yours. They can’t both be right.”

Meg peered at the new document. “What agency issued Ethan’s reports?”

“The group at the UMass extension—anyone can use their services.”

Meg dropped into a chair. “I know—I looked at their website and so did Lydia. So let’s think this through. This Marvin Dubrowski did the original analysis for Pioneer Valley and found contaminants. Pioneer Valley did the cleanup, and Marvin produced a report that showed everything was hunky-dory, and the state environmental people signed off on it. Right?”