After his father’s unexpected death, he couldn’t help it, but he was lazy and did shoddy work and nearly lost the company when the Ultimate Escape Fun Park went belly-up. He hadn’t been directly involved in that doomed venture, but he’d gotten wind of it early and purchased for virtually nothing a tract of adjacent land he figured would eventually be needed for parking. There, using federal dollars, he set about erecting a dozen low-income housing units and awaited the groundbreaking of the fun park, after which he intended to sell the parcel, improvements and all, at extortionary profit. But then, at the eleventh hour, financing for the park had fallen through, and Carl, who’d seen no reason to build his units to code, thinking nobody’d ever live in them, had been stranded with a dozen substandard duplexes whose brand-new roofs already leaked, whose porous basements sucked sulfurous moisture from the nearby wetlands every time it rained and whose moldy walls sported earthquake-sized fissures. It had taken most of the last decade to extricate Tip Top Construction from the resulting quagmire of litigation. To save it, Carl had to sell his house and half the heavy-construction equipment on his lot — the half, he privately lamented, that still worked. He hadn’t minded losing the house because at the time his wife, Toby, was divorcing him and would have ended up with it anyway, but still. It had been a decade of painful misfortune from which Carl had learned, as far as anyone could tell, exactly nothing.
His current project, snakebit from the start, was the conversion of the long-abandoned shoe factory on Limerock Street. The concept of the Old Mill Lofts was so dumb — or so the conventional wisdom had it — that it took your breath away. Ever since it was announced, people had been writing in to the North Bath Weekly Journal pretty much nonstop, decrying its abject lunacy and its complete and utter waste of taxpayer (“partnered”) dollars. Even assuming you could accomplish the planned renovations — a point no one conceded — and could also drive out the army of rats that reportedly had taken up residence in the building’s nether regions, and then could fix the roof that’d been leaking for forty years, who in Bath could afford to live there? The cheapest units on the ground floor were supposed to start at around a quarter of a million dollars, the larger units on the top floor going for three times that. Those were Schuyler prices.
But according to Mayor Moynihan, who himself had a down payment on one of the units, the high price tag was precisely the point. The Old Mill Lofts signaled that Bath was back in the game, a town with much to offer. Sure, the project was ambitious, the new administration conceded, but it was hardly unprecedented. Decrepit, abandoned factories were being converted into living and retail spaces all over the country. In fact lofts, like ramps, were all the rage. Better yet, Schuyler Springs, which had never engaged in anything as grubby as manufacturing, had no decrepit old mills to retrofit, so in this respect Bath had a clear advantage. (Yes, the habit of invidious comparison was hard to surrender.)
The real problem with the Old Mill Lofts, according to others, wasn’t so much the concept as Carl Roebuck himself. The units were being billed as upscale urban-style dwellings, but woven deeply into his character and experience was the desire to do things on the cheap and pocket the difference. Old-guard pessimists grumbled that the town wasn’t so much partnering for tomorrow with a gifted entrepreneur as fronting for yesterday’s known swindler. Some even wondered if Carl might be up to his old tricks, having purchased something seemingly worthless on insider information in hopes of flipping it when its true value became apparent. Maybe the work being done on the mill was just for show. Carl, who was widely rumored to be distracted by health problems, was seldom at the mill when important decisions needed to be made, and when he happened to be on hand, he didn’t seem to care much whether they zigged or zagged. Even those who gave him the benefit of the doubt when it came to his motives still worried that Tip Top Construction, impaired by relentless court judgments and harsh penalties, simply lacked the working capital necessary for a project of this scope. What was left of Carl’s heavy machinery sat rusting out at the yard, fritzed beyond repair. At present he employed only a dozen workers and kept most of them under forty hours a week so he wouldn’t have to pay benefits. Every week rumors circulated that this would be the one where he failed to make payroll.
The other problem with the new Bath, at least at the moment, was that it stank. Literally. In the Schuyler Springs Democrat—known in Bath as the Dumbocrat—it had been dubbed “the Great Bath Stench,” a phrase that had been picked up in the Albany Times Union. For the last two summers, whenever the thermometer hit eighty-five, a thick, putrid odor blanketed the town, everywhere at once, so you couldn’t even tell where it was coming from. Bath, visitors remarked, wrinkling their noses and quickly getting back in their cars, needed a long one itself. Some argued that the stench originated in the fetid wetlands adjacent to Hilldale Cemetery and was borne into town on summer breezes. Except that the odor was less powerful out there. One local fundamentalist minister thought the problem might be moral in nature. Nearby Schuyler Springs had a substantial and growing gay community, and he wondered from the pulpit if God wasn’t sending a message — an idea that failed to get much traction, begging as it did the fairly obvious question of why God wouldn’t visit olfactory retribution on the actual offenders and not their innocent neighbors. This summer, as if Carl Roebuck didn’t have enough problems, people who lived nearby claimed the stench was emanating from the old mill. But how could that be? The building had been boarded up for decades. There was nothing in it to stink.
Then yesterday, more bad news. After two straight days of drenching rain, the Tip Top crew discovered a foul, viscous, yellow goo oozing out of a crack in the basement’s concrete floor. Carl, true to form, was for sealing up the crack and forgetting about it, but a Bath selectman insisted on consulting a state inspector, who demanded that Carl jackhammer out a section of concrete and find out what the hell was down there. The town’s sewer line paralleled the front wall of the factory, and while the ooze didn’t look or smell like raw sewage — it in fact was far, far worse — the inspector speculated that maybe the pipe had been invaded at the seam by tree roots. Once inside and fed a steady diet of sewage, roots could grow like tumors and cause the pipe to rupture. At which point whatever was in the line had to go somewhere. Who knew? Maybe there was a reservoir of really awful shit under the mill. Only after the concrete was ripped up would they know what they were dealing with, and how much of it. And whatever was down there would have to be mucked out.
It was this necessity that caused Carl to think of Rub Squeers, whose sense of smell had been compromised, people said, by adolescent glue-sniffing, as a consequence of which he could stand hip deep in ripe manure without complaint. Rub lived on the outskirts of Bath with his harridan of a wife, Bootsie, but this time of day he was likely out at Hilldale, where he served as the cemetery’s caretaker. The person who would know was Donald Sullivan, Carl’s friend and, since losing his house, his landlord. Since busting Sully’s balls invariably improved Carl’s spirits, which happened just then to be at low ebb, he decided to pay him a visit.