Without the rest of the team, our makeshift headquarters more closely resembles its former life as a functional barn. The smells of hay, old wood that’s been wet and dried a million times, and corn feed waft through the open air. Outside, crows caw in the fields, and a tractor revs to life.
I was hoping that work would help me focus and would pull me back to whatever it is I’ve forgotten—about Kaycee, about what happened last night, about the reservoir. But memories of Brent, pulling me close as the smoke curled around us, keep interfering. Brent pressing his lips against mine. Voices laughing and joking in the background and the gentle sloshing of lake water against the pebbled shore.
After my third cup of coffee and seventh Advil, my headache eases, finally, and so does my hangover—chased back to hell, or wherever bad hangovers come from.
Work has always centered me, especially the early stages, the research, the reading, the note-taking. Like unwinding a braid made out of a thousand strings, and tacking each one down into place.
When Optimal was called Associated Polymer and headquartered in Tennessee, the company settled a complaint against them by a group of two hundred plaintiffs claiming runoff from their plant was causing bad smells, skin irritations, headaches. Unfortunately, because the case didn’t ever make it to court, public information is limited. But it stands to reason that they settled because they knew the claims were valid. Why else?
Even if Kaycee, Misha, Cora, and Annie did pretend to be poisoned, pretend to have the same symptoms as the complainants in Tennessee because they were hoping for a payout, it also stands to reason that they may have unconsciously hit on the truth. If you throw a dart enough times, eventually you’ll hit the bull’s-eye.
But five years of safety audits and public records yield nothing: Optimal has never even gotten a ticket. From the very beginning, the mayor and eight-person city council all but showed up for Optimal greased up and naked with a bow.
Before Optimal Plastics, the town was on the verge of collapse. The vast majority of the residents were over the age of seventy-five, not working, on disability, or just not in a position to move. Optimal has brought jobs, and young people, back to Barrens. They helped reconstruct the high school after it was damaged in a bad storm. They’ve poured money into roads and infrastructure. They’ve inspired new businesses, new house construction, new life.
But it’s possible they’ve done it at the expense of the poorest people, the ones who always suffer the most: the people who live closest to the reservoir, or farmers like Gallagher who depend on public water supply for their livelihoods.
Even if we do find something on Optimal, litigation will be a nightmare—like going after the most popular boy in school for stealing money from the church donation box. Optimal has been busy courting locals and state politicians up the chain. The contributions, if not the amounts, are listed proudly on the company’s Corporate Sponsorship page, beneath Barrens Little League and the Veterans Health Fund.
I dig up an old interview with a guy named Aaron Pulaski, the old Monroe County prosecuting attorney. The interview, published by a regional newspaper with a circulation of maybe a few thousand, if they’re lucky, focuses on Pulaski’s determination to clean up corrupt business interests in the county, and to make sure that Indiana tax dollars were flowing back to homegrown businesses.
He mentions Optimal by name—not for environmental violations, but for skirting labor union laws and hiring mostly foreign workers in its distribution centers throughout the Northeast.
Still, it’s something.
But if his office conducted an investigation, it has disappeared down an online sinkhole. That bothers me. It’s standard practice for the county prosecutor’s office to announce criminal investigations against major public figures—or against corporations. And announce it big.
An idea takes shape.
Weak spots.
After a little more digging, I learn that only six months ago, Aaron Pulaski hopped from the county prosecutor’s office to a state congressional seat, running on an anticorruption, antiestablishment platform that easily handed him the vote. And though Pulaski doesn’t appear on Optimal’s list of corporate donations, a quick visit to the financial disclosure section of the Indiana state legislature confirms my suspicion.
Only a few months after Pulaski was quoted in a newspaper saying he would investigate Optimal for labor violations, and a few short months before he landed his congressional seat, Associated Polymer, Optimal’s parent company, wrote a $100,000 check to his campaign.
A bribe.
Has to be.
But more important: a way in. We’ll need help, and luck, and a really friendly circuit court. But Optimal might turn over their finances to us even before we’ve filed if the alternative is turning them over in a criminal case.
It’s a long shot—but at least it’s a shot. Finally. Something.
My whole body is humming with something something something by the time Joe throws open the door with his shoulder. I’ve almost forgotten the nagging doubt that tailed me all morning, that something terrible happened at the bonfire.
“It’s a Saturday.” Joe smiles at me.
“Exactly. What are you doing here? Couldn’t resist the Barrens social scene?” I say. A joke—until I realize, from his just-got-laid grin, that he probably spent the day with Raj. Joe can’t do one-night stands. The sex always unrolls into brunch dates and trips to the farmers’ market, Saturday-night Netflix binges on the couch. Joe is one of those people who can be around other people all the time. He doesn’t need solitude to recharge, like I do.
He’s just easy and malleable and he can make a home everywhere he goes.
Some of us are out of place even when we are home.
“I figured I’d have a better shot at going door-to-door on a Saturday.” He shook his head. “But it seems we’ve already overstayed our welcome.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people wouldn’t even open their damn doors. Not used to a queer black man showing up on a weekend, apparently! One asshole—Paul Jennings, I think? Or Peter?—came to the door with a shotgun. I kid you not. He apologized and said he was jumpy because his wife never came home last night. I wouldn’t, either, if I was married to him. And then a woman named Joanne Farley tried to convince me that—”
“Wait.” In the flow of his complaints washing over me, alarm bells have started going off. Misha. “What did you say?”
My pulse is so hot in my ears, I miss Joe’s reply.
“More important,” he’s saying, “the guy slammed the screen door in my face—my tie almost didn’t make it out alive. So much for small-town hospitality.” He stops when he takes in the expression on my face. “Are you okay?”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Inside, fear sharpens.
Misha Jennings didn’t come home last night.
But I did.
Wearing her pink shoes.
Chapter Fifteen