Sour Apples (18 page)

“I don’t know. We didn’t really discuss it. If it was just the problem with the land, I guess it might be fraud. I don’t know if Art would be involved or not—probably I’d have to report it to the town select board and then we’d inform the MDEP officially. But since we know that Joyce was murdered, that throws it into Marcus’s court, since it goes to motive. Anything relating to the land might be relevant, so Marcus needs to know, and Ethan already told him about the problem. I told Marcus I’d check the town records, and I will, as soon as I have a free minute. Or a free couple of hours, because there are a lot of places to look. Marcus hasn’t been calling me daily to ask where the information is, so I assume he doesn’t think it’s critical.” Meg gave him a look and he sighed. “All right, I’ve promised I’ll track down the records, and I will. Will tomorrow do, or do you want me to start tonight?”

“I didn’t mean to nag you, but Gail’s information got me thinking. Tomorrow is fine. Do you want me to help?”

“Thanks, but you wouldn’t even know where to start looking, Meg. Once I’ve pulled the records together, though, you can help me out with them.” He sat back in his chair and twisted his head around, as if to remove kinks in his neck. “We’re a great pair, aren’t we? All we’ve been talking about lately involves either murder or politics.”

“Don’t forget apples—we’ve talked about those, too.”

“You’re right, we have.” Seth stood up. “I think I’ll call it a night. I need to go home and collect Max from Mom’s and give him a short run. I’ll call you in the morning, okay?”

Was the bloom off the romantic rose already? “What? You’re turning down a night alone with me because you need to walk your dog?”

“Meg…” he began, but at least he was smiling. “You know that’s not what I meant, but I, uh, couldn’t give you the attention you deserve tonight. Rain check?”

“Of course. You know where to find me. Get home safely.”

They shared a slow kiss at the door, and heat flickered only briefly before Meg accepted that they really were both too tired for fun. She watched as Seth went to his van, started it up, and drove off into the night. She locked up and trudged up the stairs to bed, with only Lolly for company.

Morning found Meg enjoying a leisurely breakfast in the kitchen, with the Sunday paper spread out in front of her. Despite the disappointment at how last night had gone—or not gone—with Seth, Meg had to admit she rather enjoyed having a few moments of precious peace, without anyone asking anything of her. The satisfaction of a job well done—yesterday’s orchard planting—lingered pleasantly despite her aching muscles, and there was nothing pressing on her agenda at the moment. The sun was shining; Lolly was purring contentedly on her lap. Life was good.

She turned a page of the paper to find a picture of Rick Sainsbury delivering a speech. He did photograph well, Meg had to admit. She turned her attention to the faces of the group behind him on the podium. No sign of Lauren, but she was a behind-the-scenes worker bee, wasn’t she? Her smiling face wouldn’t win any local voters. Miranda, looking every inch the candidate’s wife, looked up with restrained adoration
at her husband. A couple of the larger guys standing behind the couple could have been the bruisers she had noticed being turned away at the Spring Fling. His old buddies, Meg recalled Lauren telling her. Maybe he was packing the crowd, to give the illusion of a bigger group behind him for benefit of the cameras. She read the caption, which called Rick a possible congressional candidate. No surprise there: these little references were meant to soften up readers before the big announcement and would give him some name recognition when his ballot petitions were circulated. Meg wondered briefly if Lauren was doing his PR as well as everything else.

Her peace lasted about half an hour, and then Seth came banging against her kitchen door, his hands full of tattered files. She let him in and stood out of the way while he juggled the files and finally succeeded in dumping them in an unruly pile on the kitchen table. Lolly fled to the top of the refrigerator.

“Happy now?” he asked, gesturing toward the mess on the table.

“Good morning to you, too, Mr. Chapin. Would you like some coffee?” Meg said mildly.

“Sure, fine,” Seth said.

Meg set a mug of coffee in front of him, in one of the few remaining clear spaces on the table. “If those are all the files for the Truesdell land, yes, I guess so. You didn’t need to rush. It’s Sunday.”

Seth glanced at the newspaper Meg had been reading, and his eye lingered on the picture of Rick Sainsbury. He grimaced. “Still hanging with the same old crew,” he said.

“You know the other guys in the picture?”

“Most of them. They were all members of the football team in high school. It looks like Rick has gathered together his old posse.”

“So they’re all still around the area? Who are they?”

“If I had my old yearbooks handy, I could show you. I think I told you that Rick was the quarterback—they
always attract a lot of admirers.” He studied the grainy photo for a moment. “It’s been a few years, but I think that’s Alex Cook there on the left, and Tom Ferriter next to him. That’s Ray Dressel on the other side, with George DuPont. They were all on the team.”

“What are they doing now?”

“I haven’t followed their careers. I told you, they were a couple of years ahead of me at school, and they didn’t give me the time of day.”

Seth’s tone didn’t invite any additional comments, so Meg changed the subject. “What’s all this?” she asked, waving a hand at the stack of paper he had strewn across the table.

“After I left last night, I started thinking about what you said, about whether this lead issue could have anything to do with Joyce’s murder. I still think it’s hard to make the connection, but I figured I could at least settle it one way or another. So you’d stop nagging me.”

“Hey, you did promise Detective Marcus you’d look into it, and he didn’t even know about the paint factory when he asked. Look at it this way: you can get ahead of it
and
present him with the results before he even asks again.”

“Yeah, right,” Seth muttered. He was in a foul mood today, Meg thought. But he’d had to give up part of his Sunday to rummage through dusty files, so maybe she should cut him some slack.

“How did you get all these together so fast?” she asked as she settled herself at the table with a fresh mug of coffee.

“Turns out some of the more recent files were in the basement at town hall, which, if things were different, is where they all should be. There were a couple of other storage sites I knew I could check, and I’ve got all the keys. The town really needs to get its filing sorted out and consolidated. We probably even have the space, if we got organized. What we need is someone to take the time to catalog what we’ve got. But it’s a big job and we can’t afford to pay someone to do it, so it’s pretty low priority.”

“I can’t argue with that. What’ve you got here?”

“I
think
I’ve got everything relating to the original acquisition of the property, which goes back to the thirties, plus the files relating to the Department of Environmental Protection’s notice that they’d found high levels of chemicals—and I quote—that ‘posed a significant risk to human health and the environment,’ through the development of a cleanup plan in the seventies and implementation of the remediation, which was completed just after 2000.”

“Wow. That sounds pretty thorough. So the DEP did get on the town’s case about the problem?”

Seth nodded. “They did, and all the documents are here.”

“Have you read all of this?”

“Nope, I just located it all and laid it in front of you, like a cat with a dead mouse. Since you offered, I thought we could go through it together.”

“I love your metaphor. Which part of the mouse do you want to start with?”

“Let’s start by putting this stuff in chronological order. And you’d better make another pot of coffee.”

An hour later they had managed to reduce the unwieldy mass of paper into three piles, according to Seth’s rough outline. At some point Bree came in, looked at the stacks on the table, and fled to her room. “Chicken!” Meg called out after her. Bree had a notorious aversion to paperwork. “Now what?” Meg asked Seth.

“We figure out what we’ve got. Start reading.”

It took a couple of hours to wade through the piles of documents, especially since much of the language was technical and unfamiliar to Meg. At least she could recognize the term “lead,” which appeared regularly in the later paperwork. She and Seth finished at about the same time.

“So, what have we learned?” Meg asked.

Seth stretched and sat back. “You have a pad of paper around here?”

“Of course. Want me to take notes?”

“Wouldn’t that be sexist?”

“Yes, generally, but I’m offering.”

“I love a submissive woman.” When Meg snorted, he went on. “Okay, okay. I think we can skip the deeds for now. No one has contested the town’s ownership, but it does establish one end of the timeline, and only Gail would have anything earlier. I suppose whoever claimed it on behalf of the town back then knew something of its history, but times were different, and I don’t suppose they were worried about contamination or residues. And that remained pretty much status quo until the 1970s.”

“Which was when the government got involved?”

“Yes. In 1975, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection identified soil contaminated with leftover paint pigments on the site. The town was required to do a lot of environmental testing.” Seth leafed through a stack of papers clipped together. “We’ve got soil borings, surface water sampling, and so on. They showed a really nasty mix of stuff, including lead, chromium, arsenic, and cyanide, both in the surface and subsurface soils and in the pond sediment.”

“That doesn’t sound good. Makes you wonder how anybody survived working at the paint factory, doesn’t it?”

“It does. To go on, after that we started a dance with the state agencies, and nothing much happened until the mid-eighties. Since no one was using the land, there wasn’t any real sense of urgency, and of course we had to find the money to do the remediation. Then there was another round of samples taken in the late nineties for what was called an ‘imminent hazard evaluation.’ Along the way we started to develop a remedial action plan, which was completed in 2000. And then finally we hired an outside remediation firm to carry out the plan.”

“Not something a small town can handle on its own, I assume.”

Seth shook his head. “No way. We don’t have the staff, the equipment, or the expertise to do it.”

“So what was done?”

Seth pointed to the third pile of papers. “Those are the reports.” He picked up the stack and leafed through it. “Looks like they excavated a portion of the contaminated soil, treating some of it chemically, built an elevated ‘clean pad,’ and capped the treated soils and sediments so that any remaining chemicals couldn’t leach into the ground water.”

“Sounds complicated. And expensive. Do you remember any of this happening?”

“Not really. I graduated from college in 1998 and went to work with my father. He was already sick then, so I was carrying a lot of the weight. I vaguely remember talk of the whole remediation project, but I wasn’t exactly involved, or particularly interested in local events at the time.”

“And this company the town hired, they took care of it?”

“They filed all the correct reports, if I’m reading this right. The MDEP signed off on it. The test results are all here. Of course, this is just a first pass, but it looks as though the work got done.”

“If it wasn’t the paint factory residue, where did the lead in Joyce’s cows come from?”

“No idea.”

Seth slumped back in his chair, looking tired and frustrated. “All that running around finding the paperwork, and it proves exactly nothing.”

“Well, at least it shows what
didn’t
happen. So you can tell Detective Marcus you tried and give him what you found,” Meg said. She thought for a moment. “Could something have happened in the last decade or two? Like, is someone dumping construction debris or toxic waste on the sly?”

Seth shook his head. “Joyce told me and Ethan confirmed that they’d submitted samples for a new series of soil tests, once they’d seen the blood work report, but they were still waiting on the results for the soil. I won’t say that things like you describe don’t happen, but I know Joyce went over the land carefully. She would have found anything obvious. Unless somebody dumped something on the land early this year, after they’d cleared it.”

“Would the new soil tests show that?” Meg asked.

“Not necessarily. It would depend on where they took the samples, and it’s a big field.”

“Where are those results?”

“I don’t know. I’ll check back with Ethan on that.” Seth shook his head again. “None of this makes sense. The land was clean, and we have the documents to prove it. But the cows’ blood showed lead, and Joyce had the documents to prove
that
. As you say, something could have been added to the land between those two sets of tests—but what? How did she miss it? And none of it gets us any closer to proving
why
Joyce was killed.”