A Fountain Filled With Blood (17 page)

“Wasn’t Mr. Ingraham”—she caught herself—“isn’t he worried about the PCBs? I assume this is the same quarry that was used for storage back in the seventies.”

The road opened up to a breathtaking view. They were at the upper end of the quarry, to one side of a curving cliff of pale rock that fell dramatically to the working quarry below. It sloped as it reached the lowest point and was riddled with ledges and dotted everywhere with stubbornly surviving plants. A narrow crevasse split the cliff, and Clare was delighted to see a thin waterfall pouring out of it, splashing over the scree and filling a wide, dark pool. “Water from the cleft,” she said, grinning at Ray. “Very biblical. Is that going to flow into the swimming pool?”

“Naw. That stream comes from up the mountain, and it’s too unreliable. When we started, it was gushing so fierce, you wouldn’t want to go near it, but by the end of July, it’ll just be a damp spot. Besides, there’s no way to guarantee the quality of the water. We’re gonna build a catch basin and channel it off the property. Put a screening wall of natural stone in front of it, so the guests can still see the water falling. It’ll be real pretty.”

Below, in the work pit, a rock crusher and a cement mixer squatted amid a tumble of rocks and enough bags of sand and chalk to stop a flood. The road Ray and Clare were standing on wound down in a curve to an earthen staging ground plowed out between the quarry and the trees. Three dump trucks, idle now, sat on the dirt, flanked by an excavator and someone’s Jeep. She took off her helmet to let the breeze cool her head. Ray was right: It would be pretty. If you didn’t worry about carcinogenic chemicals floating around with you, that is.

“Hey, there’s Leo Waxman,” Ray said, pointing. Clare squinted. She could make out a man approaching the natural pool across a field of scree. Wearing shorts and a backpack, he looked like a hiker. “Leo! Hey!” Ray headed down the steeply angled road in long strides Clare had to hop to keep up with. “Sorry,” Ray said, “you were asking about the PCB stuff, right? This place was cleaned out in the eighties by the feds. Leo Waxman here, he’s from the state geologist’s office. He’s been over this place two, three times now for the certifications. It’s clean. I’d take my grandkids here for a swim”—he grinned at her again—“except once the place is built, I won’t be able to afford to get through the gate.”

The peculiar flat tang of rock dust rose to meet her as they neared the quarry floor. “Hey! Leo!” Ray yelled again. The man in shorts stopped, reversed himself, and began picking his way down a rubble-strewn trail toward the machinery.

Leo Waxman was surprisingly young, with a goatee and ponytail that made him look more like a grad student than a state employee. He wiped his hands on his rumpled, sweat-stained shirt, hitched his backpack more comfortably on his shoulders, and reached for Ray’s hand. “Hiya, Ray. What are you doing down here?”

“Showing this lady around. Leo, this is Reverend Clare, um…”

“Fergusson,” Clare supplied.

“Leonard Waxman,” he said, shaking her hand. He glanced back up the curving road, as if to see if any other tourists would be emerging from the woods.

“Peggy Landry kindly said I could see the place. Since she’s not here, Ray volunteered to be my escort.” She raised her eyebrows at Waxman’s backpack. “I hear you’re the state geologist for this project. Are you here for business or pleasure?”

He shifted the backpack again. Clare could hear things clanking inside. “Business. Getting soil and water samples.”

“Again?” Ray asked. “Jeez, how many tests does it take to satisfy the government?”

Waxman smiled briefly. “You know how it goes. Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. I get paid whether I think it’s necessary or not.”

“I thought the testing was all done and the site had been cleared,” Clare said. “I was under the impression that the protests in town were to try to persuade the aldermen to get the state to take another look, not that the certification process wasn’t complete.”

Waxman blinked. “Well, yes, you’re right. I’m doing ongoing monitoring—because of the local concerns. Actually, John Opperman asked me to do the testing. To be prepared if the case reopens.” He looked at her warily. “You aren’t with the Clean Water Action group, are you?”

“Me? Nope. I’m with the Episcopal church.” She opened her hands. “I’m just curious. I only moved to Millers Kill last November, so I don’t really have a good grasp of what the issues are.”

Waxman’s closed-off expression eased, and he hitched the backpack off his shoulders and set it on the ground. “It’s pretty straightforward. From the early fifties to the mid-seventies, General Electric made PCB-filled capacitators at their Hudson Falls and Fort Edward plants. The waste water from cleaning the capacitors went into the Hudson and settled into the sediment, where it sits, waiting for the state, the EPA, and the Fish and Wildlife folks to figure out whether to let it lie and degrade or dredge it up in the hopes of getting it out.”

Clare waved a hand at the mountainside. “This is pretty far away from the Hudson.”

“Not as far as you might think. The river originates in these mountains. Adirondack aquifers feed the Hudson and—this is why the folks in your town are up in arms—Millers Kill.” He pointed to the rock cliff rising in front of them. “By the late sixties, the companies producing capacitators and the companies in charge of cleaning ’em up and disposing of them realized they had a problem on their hands. The usual technique—rinsing them—produced contaminated waste water, which, when you released it into the environment, made a kind of toxic sludge. They were trying out different containment techniques, and one of the companies involved with solid-waste disposal came up with the idea of soaking the water into cellulose-filled containers—sort of like a giant sponge—and then capping them off and putting them someplace high and dry. Peggy Landry’s dad struck a deal with them to use this quarry as a storage site. Landry and the town split the profits. Of course, they didn’t really have the technology back then to safeguard adequately against seepage.” He wiped his hands on his shirt again. “That particular company went belly-up in seventy-four, G.E. stopped making the capacitators in seventy-seven, and the state cleaned this place up in seventy-nine.”

“So you don’t think the rise in PCBs in the town has anything to do with the digging going on here?” Clare said.

He shook his head. “Nope. No way.”

“How about the water coming from that crevasse? Does that go into the aquifer?”

“Yeah, it does. But that’s from a stream that originates way up. That gorge it runs through knifes right down the mountain. It’s never been used for storage or anything. Too inaccessible.”

“So where do you think the pollution’s coming from, then?”

“There was a fresh contamination site discovered in ’91,” he said, “if
fresh
is the right word to use. An abandoned mill that had been used by G.E. Tons of sediment, seepage into the rock and groundwater—very high percentage of the stuff. Some of it was almost pure PCB. This area has had some heavy winters and rainy summers since then, which causes the contaminated sediment and water to travel through the aquifers in ways it didn’t before. The PCB contamination in Millers Kill is coming from the Allen Mill site.” He nodded in a satisfied way.

“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” Clare said.

“I am.”

Ray laughed. “See why I’m not worried, Reverend?”

Waxman hoisted his backpack. “I was just about to take my Jeep back up. Why don’t I give you two a ride? It’s an awful steep road.”

“You done already?” Ray looked impressed. “You just got here a little while ago.”

Waxman popped the back gate of the Jeep and lifted his backpack inside. “You’re just used to the rate your guys work at, Ray. Fifteen minutes, coffee break, another fifteen minutes, cigarette break…”

Ray let out his short, explosive laugh. Waxman opened the passenger door and gestured for Clare to get in. She squeezed past the flipped-down front seat and climbed into the back, pushing aside crumpled shirts and shorts, empty soda cans, back issues of
Science
magazine, and an oily box containing unidentifiable engine parts. “Sorry about the mess,” Waxman said. Ray got in the front, the Jeep sagging to one side beneath his weight. Waxman hopped in and slammed the door. The Jeep’s ignition sounded as if it needed new spark plugs, and from the sound of the exhaust, a new muffler, as well. As Clare peered into the box, they lurched, and the Jeep began chugging up the hill.

“This is a bear to climb.” Waxman spoke loudly over the noises coming from the Jeep. “They’re going to have to regrade it if they expect to have regular traffic here.”

“Bill’s plan is to have a bunch of those little golf carts,” Ray said just as loudly. “People will be able to drive themselves all around the complex if they want to.”

Clare leaned forward. “How have you found working with Bill?” she asked Waxman.

There was no reply. For a moment, she thought she hadn’t been speaking loudly enough, but then Waxman said, “I don’t know him very well. Peggy, the landowner, is the person I deal with usually. And sometimes John Opperman. He’s responsible for the permits.”

A pothole jarred the Jeep, flinging Clare back into her seat. She jabbed at her hair, which was falling out of its twist in earnest now. She wasn’t going to get many insights from Waxman, evidently. “Are you used to large developments like this?” she shouted toward the front seat. “Or is this the first big project you’ve worked on?”

“This is the first I’ve soloed on,” Waxman yelled back. “I assisted on several surveys while I was getting my doctorate.”

Which couldn’t have been all that long ago, Clare thought. Everything about Waxman screamed graduate school poverty. He was probably still living off peanut butter sandwiches and Ramen noodles. The Jeep bumped hard again and let out an alarming rattle. “It must be gratifying, working for the state. I can’t imagine there are a lot of teaching jobs out there.”

“You got that right.” Waxman twisted the wheel and downshifted. “State and federal agencies hire a lot more geologists than universities do. Private’s really the way to go, though. You get a berth with an oil company, and you’re set for life, man.”

The Jeep heaved over the top of the hill and Waxman shifted into park. The sudden drop in noise level left Clare’s ears ringing. “Are you two headed back, or what?”

Ray turned around in his seat. “Anything else you’d like to see, ma’am?”

So far, the only thing she had gotten from this venture was a coating of dust and a couple of mosquito bites. She didn’t have any more of a feel for Bill Ingraham’s life than she’d had when she started out that morning. “What else is there?” she said, stalling.

“Well, up that way is going to be the waste-reclamation plant and the power plant,” Ray said, pointing to where the rutted track led up and out of sight between the trees. But there’s nothing there now but a dump. It’s a pretty-enough walk, if you like that sort of thing.” The tone of his voice revealed that he hoped she didn’t. “You can get real close to that gorge Leo was talking about. See it from above. Along this way.” He gestured back toward the way they had walked. “We’ve cleared land for a garage for those golf carts I was telling you about. There’s a helipad farther along the—”

“Whoa. Did you say helipad?”

“Yeah, but it’s only temporary. For bringing in cargo that’s too delicate to hump over the road, and for the VIPs to fly in and out. When construction finishes up, it’ll be converted to a tennis court.”

“I want to see the helipad.” Something in her voice must have been different, because Ray and Waxman looked at each other. Ray shrugged.

“Okay,” Waxman said. “The helipad it is.”

“We have to backtrack to the central complex and get on the other road there,” Waxman said.

The road leading back to the main site had been a pleasant walk but was a terrible ride. They lurched through the trees into the blinding sunlight of the construction area, then bounced along a beaten dirt track running along the uppermost terrace and plunged back into the forest. The Jeep jumped and jolted, until Clare thought she would suffer permanent kidney damage. The sample bottles in Waxman’s backpack clinked together violently.

“You okay back there?” Waxman shouted.

“Just great!” she said, grabbing the seat to avoid her head smashing into the roof.

“We’re going to pave all this over before they start rolling out those golf carts,” Ray explained loudly.

“That’s g-ouch!”

“Sorry,” Waxman shouted. “Rock. Here we are.” The tree-shrouded road opened into more brilliant July sunshine. Waxman stopped the Jeep. Ray hopped out, flipping his seat forward and extending a hand to Clare.

She staggered out of the backseat, feeling a sudden kinship with airsick passengers she had seen over the years. Her gratitude at touching the ground must have been the same as theirs. She took a deep breath.

The air was heavy with the smell of pine, warm asphalt, and oil. “Oh my,” she said. “I was expecting a little touchdown space. This is…professional.” The clearing was the size of a house lot, squared off and leveled. It had been fitted out with four pole-mounted lights in each corner for night landings, with a remote refueling tank parked next to a prefab shed, which she guessed held tools, compressors, and other maintenance requirements. Smack in the middle of the clearing was a tennis court–size asphalt square painted with directional markings that glowed whitely in the sun. Taking pride of place was—

“There it is,” Ray said. “It’s a helicopter. You seen one, you seen ’em all, if you ask me.”

“It’s a Bell four twenty-seven.” She prowled around the edges of the pad, taking it in from all angles. “A real classic. You can configure it in a half dozen ways. Very versatile. Like here, they’ve opted for a cargo door and boom.” The cargo door was shut, but the boom, a pair of struts holding a cigar-shaped winch pod, was still rigged with a net, which puddled on the tarmac like abandoned rigging from a long-ago sailing ship. Just the sight of it made her long to be up and away.