“What about you?” Marybeth asked. “Is that your dream, too?”
Pam looked away rather than answer. Finally, she said, “I wanted Butch to be happy. I wanted him to have something to aspire to, if you know what I mean. You don’t know this about him, but he has a tendency to get down in the dumps. He was raised in a tough household where his dad had nothing good to say to him. Ever. He doesn’t have a lot of confidence in himself at times, even though he should, because he’s a good husband and father and he’s solid as a rock most of the time. But Butch can really be hard on himself, and when he gets like that he’s not much fun to be around.”
“That surprises me to hear that,” Joe said. “I’ve always found him rough and ready.” As he said it, he was reminded of Butch Roberson’s haunted eyes just that afternoon.
“He comes off that way,” Pam said. “He doesn’t like to talk, and sometimes I have to practically scream at him to say something. But when he told me that the most important thing to him-besides Hannah and me-was a nice home in the mountains, well, I wanted to do all I could to make that happen for him. So I agreed on the deal, even though we were taking a risk if the spec home didn’t sell. We had to really beg our bankers to max out our loan ceilings, and we knew the bankers and the material suppliers were nervous about getting paid back.
“But we did it,” she said, with a proud smile. “It took too long, almost eighteen months, to sell the spec home. Did you see that nice A-frame up there?” she asked Joe.
“I did.”
“That was it. And when it sold, we paid off everyone and got the title to the lot you saw. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Butch so happy. He was like a little boy because it was the first time in his life he really had his own property. Even though we can’t afford to do anything with it yet, he goes up there after work and on weekends just to putter around. He’s got targets set up for archery and for his hunting rifle, and he’d ask Hannah to go with him. It makes me almost cry when I think about how happy he was, how proud he was.”
Joe glanced over at Marybeth and saw her eyes glisten as she listened to her friend.
“So this was five years ago,” Joe said. “But it doesn’t look like anything was done with the lot until very recently.”
Pam placed both of her hands around her tea and focused on the glass itself.
“Not until a year ago,” she said. “That’s when Butch put our company tractor on the trailer and took it up there to start leveling out the ground for the foundation. Until then, we hadn’t really done anything with it except get all the permits we needed and design the house. We spent hours at night drawing floor plans and crunching numbers. I’ll have to show you the plans, Marybeth,” she said. “Two levels, three bedrooms, three baths, and a wraparound deck for the whole place. It really is wonderful.”
“I’d like to see it,” Marybeth said wistfully.
Joe got a pang. He wondered if Marybeth harbored similar dreams that were unattainable to them right now.
Pam said, “I told him it might be years before we could actually finish the house, but he took on extra work-driving the school bus and working part-time at Bighorn Liquors-to sock enough away that we could at least pour the foundation. We figured if he did most of the work himself we could save a bundle and maybe even be able to use the place once Hannah went to college.”
“She didn’t want to move up there?” Marybeth asked.
“Ha!” Pam coughed. “Don’t get me wrong-she loved to go up there with her father, but I think it’s more because she wanted to be with him. The last thing on earth she wanted was to move so far out of town away from her friends.”
“Sounds like Lucy,” Marybeth said, and laughed. “A social butterfly.”
“Exactly,” Pam said.
“So. .” Joe prompted.
“Right,” Pam said, switching back on track. “Butch saved enough to get the foundation dug out, framed, and poured. So a year ago, he went up there on a Friday and started moving dirt. He also had fill dirt brought up and dumped because the lot slopes toward the lake.”
“Two acres, right?” Joe asked.
“Yeah. Not very big, but big enough.”
“So tell me how this involves the EPA,” Joe said. “I’m not connecting the dots.”
Pam looked at him and her expression was fierce. “Even when I tell you what happened, you won’t be able to connect them,” she said.
“Okay,” Pam said. “Three days after Butch started grading the lot, on a Monday-Hannah was up there with him because it was Memorial Day-he was on his tractor when he looked up and saw a car coming down the road. Three middle-aged women get out, and one starts waving at him-summoning him-to come over. He shuts off the tractor and climbs off and walks over to where they parked, which is the road right next to our lot.”
“Were you there?” Joe asked, trying to ascertain if Pam was an eyewitness or had heard the story secondhand, considering her use of the words “middle-aged” and “summoning.”
“I wasn’t there,” she said, “but I heard the same story from both Butch and Hannah. Hannah overheard the entire exchange.
“So these three women get out of their car and stand there, glaring at my husband. There was nothing special about them-they weren’t wearing suits or professional clothes or anything. Butch said he thought they were three lost tourists when he saw them,” she said.
“So he goes over there and one of them says she’s from the EPA office in Cheyenne. She says he has to cease and desist moving dirt that second, that the lot is an official wetlands, and to restore the ground immediately exactly like he found it or he was breaking the law.”
Joe sat back, blinked, and said, “What?”
“That’s what they told him: that our lot was a wetlands and he was violating the Clean Water Act by disturbing it. They told him they were issuing him a verbal compliance order and that unless he restored every inch of the dirt to where it had been before he started up his tractor-and planted native grass and plants on the disturbed soil-we’d be fined every day until it was done.”
“Hold it,” Joe said, shaking his head. “I thought you said you got permits before you did anything.”
“We did!” Pam said, smacking the tabletop with the palm of her hand. “I did it myself. We’re in construction-we know how these things work. I got permits from the county and the state, and I got title to the land cleared through a title company. No one ever said anything about wetlands. And you’ve seen it, right?”
Joe said he had.
“Did you see anything that looks like a wetlands? Did you see any running water, or a swamp, or anything at all besides the natural slope of the land?”
“No,” Joe said, trying to recall the contours of the lot. There was nothing resembling a stream or runoff ditch. And the neighboring houses were close enough, he thought, that he could throw rocks and hit them.
“So when Butch came home that night he was nearly out of his head,” Pam said. “I made him repeat the story about four times, because I couldn’t believe that three broads could just drive up and tell us to stop building our home like that.”
“Back up,” Joe said. “I’m trying to wrap my mind around this. So walk me through it, okay?”
“Okay.”