A Fountain Filled With Blood

“Hey, there’s Leo Waxman,” Ray said, pointing. Clare squinted. She could make out a man approaching the natural pool across a field of scree. Wearing shorts and a backpack, he looked like a hiker. “Leo! Hey!” Ray headed down the steeply angled road in long strides Clare had to hop to keep up with. “Sorry,” Ray said, “you were asking about the PCB stuff, right? This place was cleaned out in the eighties by the feds. Leo Waxman here, he’s from the state geologist’s office. He’s been over this place two, three times now for the certifications. It’s clean. I’d take my grandkids here for a swim”—he grinned at her again— “except once the place is built, I won’t be able to afford to get through the gate.”

The peculiar flat tang of rock dust rose to meet her as they neared the quarry floor. “Hey! Leo!” Ray yelled again. The man in shorts stopped, reversed himself, and began picking his way down a rubble-strewn trail toward the machinery.

Leo Waxman was surprisingly young, with a goatee and ponytail that made him look more like a grad student than a state employee. He wiped his hands on his rumpled, sweat-stained shirt, hitched his backpack more comfortably on his shoulders, and reached for Ray’s hand. “Hiya, Ray. What are you doing down here?”

“Showing this lady around. Leo, this is Reverend Clare, um…”

“Fergusson,” Clare supplied.

“Leonard Waxman,” he said, shaking her hand. He glanced back up the curving road, as if to see if any other tourists would be emerging from the woods.

“Peggy Landry kindly said I could see the place. Since she’s not here, Ray volunteered to be my escort.” She raised her eyebrows at Waxman’s backpack. “I hear you’re the state geologist for this project. Are you here for business or pleasure?”

He shifted the backpack again. Clare could hear things clanking inside. “Business. Getting soil and water samples.”

“Again?” Ray asked. “Jeez, how many tests does it take to satisfy the government?”

Waxman smiled briefly. “You know how it goes. Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. I get paid whether I think it’s necessary or not.”

“I thought the testing was all done and the site had been cleared,” Clare said. “I was under the impression that the protests in town were to try to persuade the aldermen to get the state to take another look, not that the certification process wasn’t complete.”

Waxman blinked. “Well, yes, you’re right. I’m doing ongoing monitoring—because of the local concerns. Actually, John Opperman asked me to do the testing. To be prepared if the case reopens.” He looked at her warily. “You aren’t with the Clean Water Action group, are you?”

“Me? Nope. I’m with the Episcopal church.” She opened her hands. “I’m just curious. I only moved to Millers Kill last November, so I don’t really have a good grasp of what the issues are.”

Waxman’s closed-off expression eased, and he hitched the backpack off his shoulders and set it on the ground. “It’s pretty straightforward. From the early fifties to the mid-seventies, General Electric made PCB-filled capacitors at their Hudson Falls and Fort Edward plants. The wastewater from cleaning the capacitors went into the Hudson and settled into the sediment, where it sits, waiting for the state, the EPA, and the Fish and Wildlife folks to figure out whether to let it lie and degrade or dredge it up in the hopes of getting it out.”

Clare waved a hand at the mountainside. “This is pretty far away from the Hudson.”

“Not as far as you might think. The river originates in these mountains. Adirondack aquifers feed the Hudson and—this is why the folks in your town are up in arms— Millers Kill.” He pointed to the rock cliff rising in front of them. “By the late sixties, the companies producing capacitors and the companies in charge of cleaning ’em up and disposing of them realized they had a problem on their hands. The usual technique—rinsing them—produced contaminated wastewater, which, when you released it into the environment, made a kind of toxic sludge. They were trying out different containment techniques, and one of the companies involved with solid-waste disposal came up with the idea of soaking the water into cellulose-filled containers—sort of like a giant sponge—and then capping them off and putting them someplace high and dry. Peggy Landry’s dad struck a deal with them to use this quarry as a storage site. Landry and the town split the profits. Of course, they didn’t really have the technology back then to safeguard adequately against seepage.” He wiped his hands on his shirt again. “That particular company went belly-up in ’seventy-four, G.E. stopped making the capacitators in ’seventy-seven, and the state cleaned this place up in ’seventy-nine.”

“So you don’t think the rise in PCBs in the town has anything to do with the digging going on here?” Clare said.

He shook his head. “Nope. No way.”

“How about the water coming from that crevasse? Does that go into the aquifer?”