Chapter 28
The lawyers arrived the way lawyers arrive after a disaster: all at once, with folders and sympathy and contingency agreements. Within a month there were class claims filed on behalf of every homeowner on the street, and then on behalf of the streets next to ours, because the core samples showed the drift ran farther than the cul-de-sac and the thirty-six acres covered more ground than anyone had admitted. Marlene signed on first. I signed on second. The young couple who had asked about their mortgage signed on third, and after that it was just a matter of paperwork.
The title-insurance fight was the ugliest part, and it lasted the longest. The insurers said the 1977 order was unrecorded, which meant it was not in the chain of title, which meant they had insured clear title in good faith and owed nothing. Our lawyers said a condemnation order with a county seal on it does not stop being real because somebody filed it in the wrong drawer, and that the insurers had a duty to look harder than a drawer. The argument went back and forth for months in letters that cost more per page than my first car, and in the end, the way these things usually end, nobody admitted anything and everybody paid something.
The county, to its credit or to its embarrassment, established a settlement fund. It was not enough to make anyone whole. It never is. But it covered the outstanding mortgage balances on the condemned parcels, and it paid relocation costs, and it set aside money for medical monitoring for the families who had lived over the drift the longest, including the man who had complained about the smell after rainstorms and the young couple who had only been there two years. Marlene got her three hundred and ten thousand dollars back, not as a purchase price but as a settlement, which is a different kind of money: quieter, and colder, and it does not come with a house attached.
And then there was the question of me. The prosecutor's office reviewed the file for months, and I waited for their decision the way I had once waited for the pump to kick on, listening for a sound that would tell me which way my life was going to go. In the end they declined to charge me. The letter, when it came, was short and dry, the way official mercy usually is: given my cooperation, given that I had maintained the scavenger pump at my own expense to prevent collapse, given that I had taken no personal profit from the system and had reported its existence to deputies on the night it failed, prosecution was not in the public interest.
I read that letter three times in the motel room, and then I sat down on the bed and cried, which I had not done when the garage cracked or when the fence went down or when I watched the key vanish into the slurry. I cried because somebody with the power to punish me had looked at the whole story and decided that the man who kept quiet for five years was not the criminal in it. The criminals were the ones who had pumped poison into the ground and then sold the ground to families and filed the order in the wrong drawer. I was the man who had kept the lid on it with tape and a clamp and his own hands, and that, it turned out, was not a crime. It was just a tragedy with a maintenance schedule.
Marlene called me the night the letter came. She had heard from her lawyer, and she said she was glad, and she said it in a voice that did not sound like a woman reading from a script. "You kept my house standing, Ray," she said. "You should have told me, but you kept it standing." I told her I would have traded the letter for one more year in that house, and she said she knew, and then we were both quiet for a while, two people on the phone in two temporary rooms, with a settlement fund and a declined prosecution between us and nothing else left to argue about.
The fund paid out in stages. The checks came with forms to sign and releases to initial, and each signature felt like closing a door on a room I would never go back into. I signed them all. I had spent five years keeping a secret to save a house, and the secret had cost me the house anyway. The only thing left to save was the truth of what had happened, and that, at least, was finally on the record.