Chapter 21
Summit Ridge Development didn't fall all at once. It fell the way a building comes down when they strip it floor by floor.
The lawsuits came first. Seven families filed within a month of the arrests. Then the school district. Then the county, for the falsified inspections. Then the state environmental agency, for cleanup costs. Ortiz told me the company's lawyers stopped returning calls around the third month. By the sixth, Summit Ridge had filed for bankruptcy.
"There's nothing left to take," Ortiz said. "The cleanup costs alone will eat whatever the creditors get."
The state took over the remediation. That was the word they used β remediation. It sounded clinical and manageable. It wasn't.
The crews came to Alder Court in the spring. They started with the Harrisons' yard, because their tank was the oldest and the readings around it were the worst. I watched from my driveway as an excavator tore up a lawn that had taken fifteen years to grow. The Harrison kids stood on their porch and watched too. The younger one cried. The older one just stared.
Three yards were excavated completely β dug down twelve feet, the contaminated soil hauled away in trucks with sealed covers, the holes filled with clean fill and tested three times before anyone was allowed to plant grass.
Seven families were relocated. Not all at once. One by one, as the testing spread. The Nguyens went first, to an apartment across town. Then the Parkers. Then an older couple, the Whitfields, who'd lived on Alder Court since the development was built.
Mrs. Whitfield knocked on my door the day before she left. She was seventy-four and she cried on my porch.
"Forty years," she said. "We raised our children in that house."
"I'm sorry," I said. It was all I had.
"They told us the water was fine. Every year, they tested it and told us it was fine."
The state paid for the relocations. Temporary housing, moving costs, the difference in property value. It wasn't enough and everybody knew it, but it was what the law provided.
Ava and I walked the street one Saturday while the crews were working. The whole court smelled like diesel and turned earth. Men in hard hats shouted to each other over the noise. A woman from the state office stood at a folding table handing out fact sheets about the cleanup timeline.
"Dad," Ava said, "are we going to have to leave too?"
I stopped walking. "Our yard tested clean, sweetheart. The tank under our pool is being removed, but the soil is okay. We're staying."
"Are you sure?"
"The state tested it three times. I'm sure."
She nodded, but she held my hand for the rest of the walk, and she was ten years old and hadn't held my hand in public in two years.
That night I sat at the kitchen table and added up what Summit Ridge had taken. Not the money β the state could count money. The birthdays. The summers. The trust. Mrs. Whitfield's forty years. The Harrison kids' lawn. You couldn't put those in a bankruptcy filing.
The next morning, a reporter knocked on my door. Young woman, notebook out, polite. She asked how I felt about the company's collapse.
"I don't feel anything about the company," I told her. "I feel something about the people on this street."
"Can I quote you on that?"
"Sure."
She wrote it down. I never saw the article. I hoped she used it, but it didn't matter much either way.
Carl came over that afternoon with two beers. We sat on my front steps and watched the trucks go by. The whole street was a construction zone β barriers, cones, men in vests, the constant beeping of heavy equipment in reverse.
"You know what gets me?" Carl said. "We all thought we were lucky. Nice neighborhood. Good schools. Pools in every other backyard."
"We were lucky," I said. "Just not the way we thought."
He laughed, but it wasn't a happy sound. "My wife wants to move. Says she can't look at the yard anymore."
"Are you going to?"
"I don't know. Where do you go? Everywhere's got something buried."
We drank our beers and didn't say anything for a while. A dump truck rumbled past, full of dark soil, sealed under a tarp. I wondered where they took it. Somewhere far away, probably. Somewhere nobody would build a school.
"Your girl doing okay?" Carl asked.
"Getting better."
"Good. That's good, David."
He finished his beer and left the empty bottle on my step. I sat there until the sun went down and the crews packed up for the day. The excavator was still running when I went to bed. I lay awake listening to it, thinking about Victor Rhodes in his cell, and wondering if he could hear anything at all where he was.