Chapter Twenty-nine
It had been a week since Planning and Zoning gave the project a green light, and Phillips told Stone he wanted the SGF site patrolled daily. No one wanted any more trouble, even though construction wouldn’t begin until the board approved the plan. If it did.
As he drove by, Stone noticed the RV was gone. So was the heavy construction equipment. Except for the industrial sized green dumpster at the edge of the site, the empty field, now leveled, was as gray and desolate as the sky above it. Stone drove east to Starbucks and ordered a large coffee. He was just pulling out when his radio crackled.
“Star 487, this is Dispatch. Please proceed to Waukegan and Willow and meet with the watch commander. Now.”
Stone heard the urgency in the dispatcher’s voice. He was Four-eighty seven, and Waukegan and Willow was the SGF site. He made a U-turn.
It had been less than five minutes since he’d passed by, but two cruisers and a paramedic van had pulled up. A couple of figures were headed towards the dumpster. A chill edged up Stone’s spine. He parked on the gravel and jogged across the field, skirting tiny clumps of dried prairie weeds that the earthmover had missed.
His watch commander was on a ladder peering into the bed of the dumpster, which stood eight feet off the ground. The commander poked a stick through the debris. From his angle, Stone saw only a rusty barrel, a thorny mass of bare branches, and a heap of straw-like reeds.
“Phil,” Stone called. “What is it?”
The commander looked down and motioned Stone up the ladder.
“There.” He pointed his stick. Stone squinted. Through the trash, he saw a patch of red. The watch commander moved the stick to the left. Stone followed the line of sight. The red patch was the arm of a jacket, and it was attached to a body.
Chapter Thirty
Four Years Earlier
The problems started when TJ was three. At first it was just a rash, red and raw, that spread over his stomach and back. But it was summer, one of the hottest ones on record, and Maggie figured it was heat rash. She treated it with cortisone lotions and creams, and eventually it went away.
By autumn, however, TJ started running high fevers and throwing up. He wouldn’t eat, and he couldn’t sleep. He was still too young to tell her what hurt, and Maggie was worried. She took him to the pediatrician, who diagnosed a virus. He prescribed Tylenol and suggested she feed him the “brat crap” diet until his stomach settled down. But after two weeks of rice cereal, applesauce, and mashed bananas, TJ wasn’t better. Maggie took him for a second opinion.
The new doctor laid TJ out on the table and palpitated various parts of his body. He kept coming back to his abdomen. TJ screamed each time the doctor poked. The doctor stopped, rubbed his nose with his finger, then looked at Maggie. “I think your son has a growth somewhere near his abdomen. Let’s get him to the hospital.”
Maggie arranged for Dusty to stay with a neighbor and drove TJ downtown to Children’s Memorial. Greg was out of town, but she left word with his dispatcher. On the long drive down to Chicago, she sang TJ his favorite songs, but she nearly lost it when she started in on “Mockingbird”.
“Mama’s ‘gonna buy you”—It wasn’t a diamond ring. Or a Billy goat. A week in the hospital? Surgery? Her eyes welled up. She stopped singing.
The first thing they did at the hospital was a full body x-ray. Too young to understand what was happening, TJ kept trying to get off the table. They asked Maggie to hold him still, but he rolled and twisted so much they had to strap him down. She tried to play a counting game with him to pass the time, but he howled and shrieked, his tiny voice growing hoarse. She had to bite her own lip to keep from screaming. A few hours later, they had the results. TJ had a large tumor on his adrenal glands near his left kidney.
They operated the next day. The doctors thought they got it all, but the news wasn’t good. TJ was suffering from neuroblastoma, a rare form of childhood cancer that attacks the adrenal glands and the autonomic nervous system, which, as Maggie learned, controls the heartbeat and breathing. Tumors were common with neuroblastoma, and they grew rapidly, spreading to the eyes, chest, pelvis, liver and lymph nodes. TJ would need intensive chemotherapy, and even then, his prognosis was guarded. Unlike other childhood cancers like leukemia, survival rates with neuroblastoma were better in infants than small children. TJ was three and a half.
Maggie moved into the hospital with TJ. Greg took a leave of absence to care for Dusty. The chemo was horrific; TJ lost his hair, his energy, and his good humor. His tiny immune system was so weak that he was prone to raging infections which made him shake, sweat, and whimper. Maggie, garbed in mask and surgical gown, never left his side. She’d tell him stories when he could stand the noise, or hum quietly when he couldn’t. He never blamed the doctors or nurses for causing him pain with their needle jabs, medicine, and endless tests. He just lay there, day after day, a shadow of himself, trying to hang on.
Greg came as often as he could so Maggie could have a break. Sometimes Dusty came with him, and they’d stroll down Lincoln Avenue for a hamburger or a new tape. She’d ask him about school and soccer, wondering if he knew she was just going through the motions. She didn’t know. For a kid who had just become a teen-ager, he was unusually polite and considerate. Once when they passed a toy store window, she spotted some Playmobil figures in the window and broke down. Dusty put his arm around her and hugged her. She cupped his chin in her hand and kissed the tip of his nose. She knew it wasn’t fair to burden one son with the problems of the other.
It turned out that Greg was the one who couldn’t handle it. In the five years he and Maggie had been married, this was the most time they’d ever spent together, and Maggie learned a lot about him. His first reaction was denial. The doctors were wrong. His son wasn’t sick; it was bullshit. Denial eventually turned into anger, and soon he was railing against everyone in the medical profession. The doctors were incompetent. The nurses too. His son wasn’t getting the right treatment. When Maggie begged him to stop, he turned against her. What had she done to his son in the first place? It was all her fault. She was an unfit mother.
Maggie couldn’t blame Greg. In the rare moments of clarity that broke through the numbness, she shared his rage: a visceral, pulsating fury that seeped into her soul like a parasite, coloring every conscious thought. But she couldn’t give in to it. Her obligation was to TJ, to help him recover. She forced herself to pray.
Then, after three months, the miracle happened. TJ began to improve. He sat up, watched TV, even managed to keep Jell-O down. The doctors grew more optimistic; he had weathered the worst. He would always have to be monitored, and the cancer could recur at any time, but Maggie could take him home. Studying his innocent face, all eyes now that he was so pitifully thin, Maggie was grateful.
By then it was February. Life slowly returned to a semblance of normality. Greg went back on the road, working overtime to pay for what the insurance didn’t pick up. Every day TJ seemed a little better, a little stronger. They had missed Christmas so on Valentines Day, Maggie and Dusty decorated a Christmas tree and exchanged presents with TJ. Maggie, who had ignored her appearance, even went to the beauty parlor and dyed her hair blonde. When Greg got home, he grinned, and that night they made love. Things were on the mend.
***
Maggie was shopping in the Jewel early that summer when she ran into Alice Havlacek, a Meadow City neighbor. During the worst of TJ’s illness, Alice had brought Greg and Dusty dinner several times. She commented on how well Maggie looked, and then said,
“You know I didn’t want to mention it before—I know how crazy it’s been for you— but did you ever follow up on what I told Greg?”
“What was that?” Maggie replied.
“He never told you?”
“No.” A pang twisted her stomach. “What?”
“You’re not the only family who’s had a kid with cancer here.”
Within the past year, Alice said, two other children in the area had become sick. One was diagnosed with leukemia; she wasn’t sure about the other. A chill crept up Maggie’s back.
“You might want to talk to the Stewarts and the Yablonskis.”
“I will.” Maggie wondered why Greg had never mentioned it. Of course, during the worst of TJ’s illness, they were barely speaking.
She called the other families. The Stewarts lived at Meadow City, a few streets from Maggie. Theirs was the child with leukemia. The Yablonskis, whose child had a mysterious brain tumor, lived half a mile away, but were members of the church. Maggie wondered if there might be a connection. She’d heard about this type of thing before. Cancer clusters, they called them, where several people in the same area got sick around the same time. There was even some movie about it.
Over the next few weeks, she spent time on the phone with Joan Stewart and Frannie Yablonski trying to find a common denominator among the children. She found two. All three families got their water from the same wells, and all three children had spent lots of time at the playground.
Maggie started to wonder what Meadow City had been before the homes. She remembered the empty field, but what was there before that? She pulled out the pictures Greg had taken before construction began, when they would drive out on Sundays, but she couldn’t tell anything from them. She asked her neighbors, but most had moved in after the development was underway. No one knew.
The pastor of the church referred her to Iris Thornton. Her family had farmed these parts for generations, and she lived on one of the few farms left. Maggie took both boys with her. Mrs. Thornton, now in her eighties, seemed eager for the company, setting out tea and a plate of home baked cookies for the boys.
“That land has an interesting history, child,” she said.
“How so, Mrs. Thornton?”
“Call me Iris, honey. Everyone does. Old maid Iris.” She winked at Dusty. “You young people think I don’t know.”
Dusty colored. Maggie smiled. She liked Iris.
“That land used to be owned by Illinois Edison.”
“The electric company?”
“Yes ma’am. Back in the last century there was a coal gas plant here.”
“Coal gas? What’s that?”
“You’re way too young to remember, but years ago street lights used to have gas in them to keep them lit at night. That gas came from coal. And that’s what they made here. ‘Course, when everything got electric, they didn’t need it anymore, and they shut the plant down. I think it was sometime in the Thirties.”
“I had no idea there was coal this far north.”
“There wasn’t much. But there was some.”
“So what happened to the land? After the plant closed down, I mean?”
“I reckon it just sat here. For a long while. Over forty years, probably. The place was a dump, in fact, until that developer started to build.”
“Where my home is.”
Iris nodded.
“What do you mean a dump?”
“It was an eyesore. There was all sorts of trash, barrels, things like that on the land. For a while, you could even see it from the church But then the trees and prairie grass grew so tall, you didn’t really think about it.”
Maggie watched Dusty give his cookies to TJ who gobbled them up quickly. He was putting on weight again, thank god. She thanked Iris and took the boys home.
She wasn’t sure what to do next. Logically, she should call the developer and ask him about the land. But she wasn’t anxious to do that. She still paid the mortgage through his company, but when TJ was sick she’d missed a few payments. First she got some nasty letters. When she tried to call and tell them what was going on, a woman, the bookkeeper she thought, was downright mean to her on the phone.
“If you can’t come up with the payments on a timely basis,” she’d said in that clipped tone business people used, all stripped of emotion, “we’ll be forced to take further action.”
Taking precious time away from TJ’s bedside one day, Maggie cabbed over to the developer’s office to talk to the bookkeeper in person. The woman listened to Maggie’s story, and Maggie thought she was making headway. The woman rose, walked around, and sat on the edge of her desk, leaning very close to Maggie. Maggie wanted to back away, but the room was small. There was nowhere to go.
“I’m sorry to hear about your troubles, Maggie,” she said, “but unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do.”
Maggie bent her head and looked at the floor.
Luckily, the local bank was sympathetic and gave them a loan. Maggie paid the mortgage and the penalties. They’d been current since.
Now she held the developer’s number on a scrap of paper in front of her. She had to find out, even if it meant dealing with that sicko again. This was her son. She punched in the number.
“SGF Development,” a female voice answered.
“Mr. Feldman, please.”
“Who’s calling?”
Maggie gave her name.
“And what is this in reference to, Mrs. Champlain?”
When Maggie explained, the disembodied voice said Mr. Feldman wasn’t available but she would pass along her message. A couple of days later Maggie got a call from someone who said he was Feldman’s lawyer. Maggie asked him about the land.
“A consortium headed by Mr. Feldman bought the land from Illinois Edison in the early seventies. Why do you ask?”
“Is it true the land was a dump at that point?”
“I couldn’t tell you. But Mr. Feldman did have it cleaned up. That’s standard procedure.”
“Who cleaned it up?”
“Again, I couldn’t tell you without looking at the records. Why are you asking?”
Maggie explained about the children’s cancer. When she heard how chilly the lawyer’s voice grew, she realized she’d made a mistake.
“Let me look into this, Mrs. Champlain. I’ll call you back.”
He never did.
***
Joan’s cousin, an environmental lawyer with a bluestocking Chicago firm, said he’d check it out. A week later he called. Joan invited Maggie and Frannie Yablonski over to meet with him. Art Newell was bald, with a broad chest and short neck. Maggie thought he looked like a young bull, except for his eyes, which blazed.
“The site was cleaned up by a company called Prairie State Environmental Services.” He drew out a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “Apparently, the utility kept coal tar—that’s the by-product you get when you make coal gas—in large storage tanks underground. The developer found them when they were digging the septic tank system, and they hired Prairie State to come in to take them out.”
“So everything’s okay,” Maggie said.
“Not exactly,” he said. “In the process of removing those tanks, there was an accident. Some of the workers broke into a buried tank and kicked up a cloud of coal dust and other crap. The workers were overcome by the fumes.”
“When was that?”
“A year or so before you all moved in.”
“What happened to them?”
“The workers? It’s hard to tell. There’s not very much on them. But, judging from similar incidents, they probably got nauseous and had trouble breathing. Temporarily. I’m sure no one was permanently disabled.” He scanned his papers. “Now, listen up. They finished the clean-up, but a state inspection subsequently determined that the soil around the tank had been contaminated by a leak.”
“What leaked?” Maggie started to feel uneasy.
“Coal tar.”
“The stuff you were talking about before?”
“Right. The residue that’s left after they make the gas. It’s full of something I call the ‘Eens’.”
“The what?”
“The ‘Eens. Benzene, xylene, napthalenes. They’re all highly toxic chemicals that can cause cancer. They were probably released into the air when the accident occurred. But —” Art pointed to his papers. “The thing is, they were also leaching into the ground and water in your back yards.”
Maggie fidgeted. “Why didn’t anyone tell us about it?”