To the extent I’m a researcher at all, I’m a cut-to-the-chase type. What I kept thinking, driving on home from Devon, was
that nobody would pay much attention to such a convoluted theory unless I produced objectively valid soil tests to back it
up. The impulse to go get the samples right then cooled before I could point the Bronco in the appropriate direction. Relationships
being what they were, I’d need a court order nobody was about to issue. And my foolhardiness does have its limits. Unauthorized,
this was not an operation I’d want to try unless surrounded by sturdy escorts. I’d give Baxter first dibs. If he passed—wouldn’t
he have to?—maybe the Yardley brothers would be open to branching out.
Why hadn’t I thought sooner of hiring myself some bodies, I wanted to know, looking down my driveway at the borderline-amazing
activity taking place over by my house. Or, more precisely, on it. The angle at which Kate Etlinger had parked her car suggested
she’d muttered, “This is far enough,” yanked the keys out, and stormed ahead. Kate herself looked like she was having one
hell of a good time swinging a sledgehammer golf-club style against the wall. From inside, Roxy was barking like crazy.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelled scrambling out of the Bronco and striding toward her.
She didn’t break rhythm. “What the hell did you think you were doing yesterday, telling Willem somebody in his family was
a murderer? I warned you to leave us alone!”
“Like you’ve left me alone? Was that your sign I painted over?” Her swings were connecting up into the lower part of my blue
rectangle, making jagged, ugly dents. I tried to think how close she was to any pipes. “Kate, stop that!”
“You should have taken it to heart.” She delivered another thunk. “You’re not wanted around here.”
“I don’t give a shit what you want, or your asshole father, or the whole lot of you, up to and including Willem at this point.
You butt out of my life, I’ll steer clear of yours—that’s the message I wanted him to deliver. Waste of breath, obviously.”
I’d been watching long enough to see at what point in her swing I should make my grab, but I mistimed it a little. Or maybe
it’s that Kate, though much smaller than me, is a very strong woman. Though I kept the sledgehammer from connecting, her momentum
was strong enough to topple the two of us backwards, me landing heavily on the ground with her partly on top of me. We both
managed to retain our grips on the sledgehammer handle.
We got right into wrestling for sole possession, her kicking and elbow gouging backward, me trying to bull her over, facedown
into the dirt. She managed to angle her head over into my bare right forearm, and I felt a sharp pain as her teeth sank in.
It was enough to break my grip, but my outrage was such that I made a fist on the injured arm and slammed it into the side
of her head. Hands slipping off the sledgehammer, she rolled away from me, onto her back. She looked a little dazed but not
the least bit calmer.
Hefting the sledgehammer in both hands, I heaved it beyond both our reaches. Kate’s eyes followed, her body tensing. I rolled
over on top of her, pinning her down. It was a lesser struggle, this second one. She delivered a few more kicks but couldn’t
get much leverage on them. When I managed to twist one of her arms at an angle that it must’ve felt on the verge of breaking,
she went abruptly limp. I’m sure she could see in my eyes, only inches from hers, that I wouldn’t mind carrying through. For
what seemed like a long time I enjoyed the fear I read in her expression; then I let go of her arm and pushed off and up onto
my feet.
“Go home,” I told her, panting, backing away little to give her some room. She lay there for a minute, then got slowly, warily
up, rubbing her arm. “Please don’t ruin it for him,” she said tonelessly, eyes averted.
I did not answer, watching her walk slowly at first, then with increasing briskness, toward her car. The way my insides were
roiling, it would not be safe to start anything up again.
Not wanting to give Baxter any more reason to move me off the premises, I wasn’t going to report the encounter. I could disinfect
and bandage my bleeding arm and think up an excuse for nailing some boards over the abused wall, work off the adrenaline.
It seemed unlikely Kate would be any more eager to show and tell than I was. What screwed it was that as she was getting into
her car, Baxter’s patrolman, apparently having gotten a good enough look from the road to warrant a closer one, pulled into
the driveway, blocking her exit.
The man who emerged from the car and approached us in a classic, laconic cop swagger was one I’d seen around but couldn’t
put a name to. Kate could. “Jimmy,” she said, her public smile looking good as new except maybe for the smudges of dirt around
her mouth.
“Hey, Kate,” he acknowledged. He glanced slowly from her disheveled figure to my hardly spiffier one, to the damaged wall.
“Was something going on here we need to know about?”
“No,” I offered, unable to immediately come up with any helpful amplification.
“Kate?”
That really was a damn effective smile she’d taught herself. “I just stopped by on my way to a lunch date to tell Val something.
I do have to run, and I know Val wouldn’t want it to be over her, uh, lawn, so if you wouldn’t mind backing on out—”
He looked around hard, then again more slowly, and shrugged. “Sure.”
It wasn’t until both of them had gone that I thought to wonder which “him” Kate didn’t want me to ruin something for.
The Yardley brothers, I learned from Sue’s voice delivering the last message on my answering machine, were up in the Adirondacks
on a fishing trip, due home that night or maybe sometime Sunday, or they might stay over till Monday— neither of the wives
seemed to have definite expectations. They would call Denny, whenever. Swell, I thought, jabbing the rewind button. I physically
ached for someone or something to unload on.
Slow it down, I told myself. As far as the Yardleys went, what was the rush? I’d be around, mostly, over the weekend, and
there’d be Baxter’s patrol, not to mention Baxter himself, some of the time. It seemed unlikely Kate would come back, or that
the rest of them would be dumb enough to make another move right away. Or that there’d be many outsiders to pester me. While
the rest of that tape with Sue on it had been taken up by hang-ups and media calls, the voices were sounding both less urgent
and less hopeful. Give it another day or two, that component of the stress ought to vaporize of its own accord.
Meantime, Baxter might hit some or other payoff. Surely he was due. I couldn’t see what he wasn’t chasing that he should.
So many people must have ideas, and concerns, about what was going on—wouldn’t it stand to reason one of them might let something
slip? Someone on the fringe, most likely. The people at the core must be buzzing like hell among themselves by now, but they
had awfully good reason to invoke damage control, not to mention lots of practice. Though if Kate was core, you’d have to
speculate things were starting to spin loose even from them.
So maybe Baxter or one of his men would overhear something useful. Or rattle someone enough they’d make too candid a remark.
Maybe somebody with a conscience would volunteer. Who did I suppose that would be?
Personally, I, like Baxter, had more faith in the physical sort of breakthrough: convincing soil test results, Steve tracing
Mariah’s line of research. Or maybe the list of calls to and from her phone would point the way.
Baxter expected to get his hands on that by afternoon. He’d said if nothing obvious showed he’d bring it out and let me have
a look. I pronounced that good enough reason to hang around. If it turned out I wasn’t needed, fine. And if nothing showed
to me either, there would still be the potential of a late-night excursion to Hudson Heights. Maybe even, knowing that one
particular area as well as I did, a solo one.
The boarding-over didn’t take long. I was running short on energy-intensive projects and flat out of housework. The garden,
then. On principle I object to working there for any motive except pure pleasure, but times were tough. So I loaded up on
tools and got going.
Only in spring is there very much I actually need to do, now that the garden is established. But I can always find something—a
little pruning here, a transplant there. Or a bigger project like path-making. That day seemed good for attacking an overly
dense clump of lilies of the valley and Solomon’s seal, getting some air and space into it. Neither of these plants comes
out easily when crowded. I use an ax, myself, though not around people with delicate sensibilities.
I was chopping away, well splattered with mud and leaf bits, when I heard a car turn in to the driveway. Such was my level
of trust at that point I took the ax along to see who it was.
Baxter was staring at the boarded-over section of the wall. “Kate?” he asked.
“You heard.” I made a show of shrugging it off. “She got a little crazy.”
“She’s always been a lousy loser. Apparently the patrol timing wasn’t much of a challenge.”
“In her state of mind, your guy could have followed her right into the driveway.”
“There will be a car parked down the road from now on. Let me see under that bandage on your arm.”
“No need.” I stuck it behind my back. “She’s a dirty fighter, but surely not rabid. Forget Kate. I’ve got things to tell.”
“So do I. How about a soda—you look like you’re ready for one, too. Let’s sit down somewhere.”
“I’ll bring them out to the porch.” Which I did, along with the pretzels from the other night and the fruit bowl. He’d planted
himself in one of the wicker chairs. “Want to go first?”
I certainly did. So I told him about Skip’s take on the cave, the soil-test trigger. “Baxter, it fits! It explains everything
I couldn’t before.”
“Most everything,” he conceded. “Except the incentive to haul the stuff all the way up the hill.”
“Damned if I know—” I frowned, briefly. “Wait a minute, of course I do. It was the bats! Toby Babcock wanted to get rid of
them because they’d swarm out whenever a hunter started firing and most people get nervous being under a sky full of bats.
It was cutting into his income. What if he told Albany Univers they could dump up there cheap, or for free, if they’d just
fill the cave and seal it off?”
“There should be records.”
“The only records we have from Toby Babcock are the ones Clete’s people produced.”
“Albany Univers records, then. One of the things I came to tell you is Steve got a hit at the Commerce Department this morning.
A clerk remembers seeing Mariah. I’ve set him to printing out data on what the waste shipments from all five Albany Univers
plants contained—where they’re supposed to have gone and when.”
“You can abort that: it’s already been done. During the hearing stage the Save the Earth Committee had their people match
Toby’s record of deliveries to his dumpsites with Albany Univers’s, just like the Hudson Heights folks claimed to have done.
They combed for undesirable components and looked for discrepancies in dates or load listings, where those were available.
I was reading about it this morning. All their paperwork is in one of these binders.” I dug through the stacks and handed
it to him.
He flipped pages frowning. “Any chance I’ll hit a summary?”
“You can have mine. They carry on about how sloppy the record keeping was, on both parts. Dates didn’t always match, Toby
Babcock usually didn’t bother to note down what materials had been delivered—only how much he got paid to accept them. Albany
Univers was more conscientious, but hardly thorough. This was in keeping with the period, and the discrepancies didn’t look
major. The best they could do was to declare that the only way to be sure what those dumpsites contained was to open them.
Which Clete obligingly did.”
“Mariah would have been familiar with this, right? Well, what if there was dumping beyond the assumed time frame? What if
Toby Babcock had another contract with another firm? The Save the Earth group couldn’t have checked every company that ever
dumped anything anywhere in the Capital District.”
“How could Mariah have done that either, in just a couple of days? And outside the time frame wouldn’t work because the road
was blocked by ’47, when Mr. Kanser came back from the Army. She wouldn’t have known that, of course.”
“But we have to presume she came up with a successful approach.”
I thought hard. “Okay. Mariah had educated herself on toxics, and Willem and I inadvertently got her wondering what might
be hidden under the Crane Hill plateau. She knew the delivery records had already been scrutinized and compared with Toby
Babcock’s. So she must’ve thought of a new approach that involved other parts of the Albany Univers data.”
“Like?”
“Like I don’t know. Production records? What if she found that some nasty substances apparently never got disposed of at all?”
“Because the deliveries were never recorded? Or somebody had lifted the records?”
“Maybe something like that. She must’ve spotted a pattern of some kind. It didn’t shout at her, though—remember the phone
message. She needed to take it further and she wasn’t sure how to do that.”
Baxter tapped his fingers on the binder cover. “Okay, I’ll redirect Steve, get him to pull production records and whatever
else he sees that pertains to the toxic chemicals. He’s got several hours before they close. Maybe something will jump out
at us.” He pulled out his cell phone from one pocket, a small notebook from another, and delivered a succinct message. “But
you know,” he said, collapsing the phone, “even if we can figure out what Mariah found, it’s going to be well short of proof
that there’s a toxic-waste dump under the plateau.”
It seemed as good a time as any to make my pitch. I stood, moving over in front of his chair. “Wouldn’t it help if we actually
found toxics on the site?”
“Obviously. But Val, if there’s anything to find they’re not going to say ‘Sure, come on out. Run whatever tests you feel
like.’ Unless Steve comes up with something more solid than I expect—”