“Donald begged me to let him go home, to let him play soccer again, but I always said no. I still held out hope, you see. I still pretended to myself that he might recover. So I made him stay in the hospital, where he was miserable. Now I’d give anything to turn the hands of the clock back, to let him go out and kick the ball, even just once. To give him one tiny moment of happiness before he was gone.”
Ralph Foley had a simpler tale to tell. He and his wife hadn’t been put through the protracted series of treatments and therapies, advances and setbacks that the other parents had endured. The first warning sign they received that Jim was in danger came when he developed a persistent cough. Three months later, Jim was dead.
“People kept telling me I was lucky—lucky that the inevitable end had come so mercifully fast. I don’t feel lucky. Even now, I can’t believe Jimmy is gone. It was all too quick, too unreal. One day, you have a healthy ten-year-old boy, and the next, he’s buried in a hole in Meadowland Cemetery. Things don’t really happen like that, do they?” There was a tremble in his voice, the advance guard for the tears that began streaming down his face. “It can’t be over so fast, can it? They can’t take the most precious thing in your life and just … and just …”
He never managed to finish his sentence.
Ben listened to those stories and all the others. Each time he thought he had heard the worst, he found out he was wrong. Rarely in his life had he sat in a room in which the sense of tragedy was so palpable. These were grieving parents, mothers and fathers who had poured their hearts and souls into raising their children, only to lose them due to something entirely outside their control. There could be nothing worse than that, Ben thought. Nothing at all.
When the stories were done, Ben asked a few simple questions. “How did you all come together?”
Cecily answered first. Ben gathered she was their unofficial leader. “I got some names from Billy’s pediatrician, after his first relapse. He wanted us to form a support group, but I never called the others. I was too busy trying to save my boy’s life. After Billy was gone, I met a priest from the local Episcopal church. Father Richard Daniels. I wasn’t Episcopalian, or even particularly religious. In fact, at that point in time I probably felt less religious than at any time in my life. But he was a comfort. He knew what I needed to hear—in part because he had been through this before. He told me about some of the other parents in town who had lost their children. Before long, we started getting together regularly to talk about what had happened—and what we were going to do about it.”
“Cecily’s been the ramrod behind this since day one,” Ralph Foley explained. “She’s the one who refused to just take it. She kept saying all these leukemia deaths in the same area couldn’t be a coincidence. Something had to be causing it.”
“What do your doctors say caused it?” Ben asked.
“They all say the same thing,” Jim answered. “That no one knows what causes leukemia.”
“But I wasn’t prepared to accept that,” Cecily said. “It was just too coincidental. Look at this.”
She unfolded a map of the small city of Blackwood. On the map, she had penciled an X where each of the deceased children had lived. They were all congregated at the north end of the city, all within about five square miles of one another.
“Leukemia is a very rare disease,” Cecily continued. “And yet here were eleven cases, all clustered together at the north end of a small town. And you want to tell me that’s just a coincidence? A statistical anomaly? No way.”
“Then what caused it?”
“That’s what I didn’t know. At first, I thought maybe there was some kind of virus going around. I had read that there was a type of leukemia cats got that was transmitted by a virus. But that wasn’t the kind of leukemia Billy had. So then I tried to think of something all the boys and girls who died shared. Most of them went to the same school—but not all. Most of them played sports—but not all. Then I tried to think of things that were universal that everyone shared. Like the air.” She paused significantly. “Or water.”
“Did you share your theories with the rest of the group?”
Margaret Swanson answered that one. “She certainly did. We all thought she was crackers.” She glanced quickly at Cecily. “Nothing personal. But we did. We knew she was struggling to accept her son’s death. We all were. But this seemed a strange way to go about it. She was talking about hiring scientists, suing the city. We didn’t want any part of it.”
Christina leaned forward. “What changed your mind?”
“This.” Cecily reached into her oversized purse and retrieved a folded newspaper. “This is the front page of the Blackwood Gazette from about four months ago. See for yourself.”
Ben took the paper from her. The headline story, in bold black letters, proclaimed: POISON POOL FOUND IN BLACKWOOD AQUIFER.
Ben quickly scanned the article. A reporter named David Daugherty had discovered a half-buried pool, half an acre in size and about four feet deep, of contaminated water. The pool was connected to a ravine, which in turn fed the Blackwood water aquifer. In the water, the reporter found traces of arsenic, chromium, lead, and other heavy metals. The pool was uncovered by a construction crew in the process of laying the foundation for a new apartment complex. Ben also saw a line toward the end of the article that Cecily had underlined in red. Arsenic is believed to be a carcinogen, it said, even in small doses.
“Okay,” Ben said, “that’s frightening. But how does it link up to your stories?”
“Here’s another paper,” Cecily said, “from a week later.” This time she didn’t wait for Ben to read it. “The first article kicked up quite a stink in little Blackwood. The city council ordered the city engineer, one John Schultz, to test the city’s water supply. As the article explains, the city of Blackwood is serviced by four water wells. Three of them tested fine. But one of them was contaminated due to underground seepage from the poison pool. That was Well B. And guess where the water from Well B goes.” She paused, her jaw set. “North Blackwood. Our neighborhood.”
Ben scanned the article now in his hands. Everything Cecily had said seemed to be correct. The city engineer determined that the well’s water was tainted by several undesirable chemicals, including trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, an industrial solvent used principally to dissolve oil and grease. He had ordered the well shut down immediately.
“Wow,” Ben said quietly. He knew it sounded stupid, but it was all he could think to say. “That’s amazing. And … horrifying.”
“I always thought the water tasted funny,” Barry said. “But what can you do about it? Water’s water.”
“I thought it was gross,” Margaret said. “We bought bottled water for drinking. But you can’t use bottled water for everything. We couldn’t afford it.”
“All our children were exposed to this water,” Cecily said. “They drank it, they bathed and showered in it. It was unavoidable.”
“You may have grounds for a suit against the city,” Ben said. “The city engineer may have been negligent in the performance of his duties. But what would it get you? I can guarantee you the city coffers aren’t large enough to pay off any big judgment. A town that size probably doesn’t even have insurance.”
“We don’t want the city,” Cecily answered. “We want the bastards who poisoned the water in the first place.” Once more her hand dipped into her oversized purse, this time retrieving a report bound in a clear binder. “I started researching this as soon as I read the first article in the paper. I studied to be a biologist, back at OU, so I wasn’t totally in the dark on this. I started reading about TCE and how it’s been linked to tumors in laboratory animals. I also found out I wasn’t the only person concerned about the Blackwood aquifer.”