Asha looked at the forty-two glasses for a long moment. Then she picked up the first one, and swirled it, and smelled it, and began.
At six o'clock, with the first flight finished and her notebook open beside her, she called her father.
Darnell Reynolds answered on the second ring. He always woke at five. Twenty-two years in the Navy had made sure of that. "Baby girl? What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong, Daddy," she said. And then she stopped, because that wasn't true, and she had never lied to her father in her life. "Actually, a lot's wrong. But I think I did something right. I need to tell you about it."
She told him. All of it. The cold passage and the candle and the decanter. The phone call. Trust is the cheapest thing in the world to buy. Mr. Okada in his barrel-desk office. The dinner. The bow. Sweetheart. The phone with the glowing numbers. You couldn't even point to Japan on a map. Her gloved hands on the table. Then listen carefully. The sentence. Mr. Nakamura standing up.
Her father did not say a single word the whole time. When she was finished, there was a long silence on the line, so long that she thought the call had dropped.
"Daddy?"
"I'm here." His voice was thick. "I'm here, baby. I'm just… give me a second."
She waited. She could hear him breathing.
"You remember what I told you?" he said finally. "On the plane. Coming home from Tokyo. You were sixteen and crying against the window."
"Let them be wrong," Asha said. "And listen."
"That's right." He was quiet again for a moment. "I've been thinking for ten years that maybe that was bad advice. That maybe I taught you to hide. To make yourself small so folks wouldn't bother you. I used to lie awake worrying about it." He let out a long breath. "But that's not what you did. You let him be wrong, and you listened, and then when it mattered, you stood up. That's the part I forgot to tell you. Listening's only half of it. The other half is knowing when to stop."
"I was so scared, Daddy."
"I know you were. That's what makes it count." He cleared his throat. "Now. You said Lindenwald. You said the Garcias and an old lady on Hobart. Eddie's been on Pleasant Avenue thirty years. He knows everybody. And Loretta knows everybody Eddie doesn't. I'm calling him right now. What time are those Japanese folks going out there?"
"Nine o'clock."
"Then I'll be there at eight-thirty," said Chief Petty Officer Darnell Reynolds, United States Navy, retired. "With my cane and my hat and Eddie and Loretta. And you bring that clipboard, and you hold your head up. You hear me?"
"Yes, sir."
"And baby girl?"
"Yes, Daddy?"
"Your mama would have been so proud of you she'd have bust every button on her dress." He laughed, and it cracked in the middle. "Mrs. Shimizu too. Lord. Somebody needs to call that old woman."
At nine o'clock that morning, Asha Reynolds stood on the sidewalk of Hobart Street in Lindenwald, in a gray sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers, holding a clipboard, beside a white van from an independent environmental laboratory in Columbus and two young technicians in blue polo shirts carrying coolers full of sterile sample bottles. Ryo Mori stood beside her in his slightly-too-new suit, with his phone in one hand and a stack of printed letters in the other, in English and Spanish, on Kanazawa Seiki letterhead, explaining that the company was paying for free water testing and free bottled water for every house in the neighborhood, no strings attached, no papers to sign. Behind them, a delivery truck from a water company in Fairfield was already unloading cases of bottled water onto a hand truck.
Her father was there too. Darnell Reynolds was fifty-seven years old, a tall, heavy, slow-moving man with a gray beard and a cane and a Navy ball cap, and he had kept his word. He had brought Eddie Pruett and Eddie's wife, because, as he put it, she knew every single person in Lindenwald and every single one of them was scared of her.
Eddie Pruett's wife, Loretta, was seventy-one and four-foot-eleven and had taught Sunday school at Lindenwald Baptist Church for forty years, and she walked up and down Hobart Street and Pleasant Avenue and Fairfield Road that morning knocking on doors with Asha beside her, and every single door opened.
The old woman on Hobart Street was named Dolores Hartley. She was eighty-four years old. She had lived in the same small white frame house with green shutters since 1964. Her late husband, Frank, had worked as a machinist at the Holbrook plant on Fairfield Road for thirty-eight years, under Walter Holbrook. He had died of kidney cancer in 2011. Her house had never been connected to the city water line, because the line stopped two houses short of hers and the city had never gotten around to extending it. She had drunk water from the well in her backyard every day for sixty-one years.
When the man from the company had come to her door eighteen months ago, offering five thousand dollars for a "water-quality upgrade" if she signed a paper, she had read the paper twice, very slowly, with her reading glasses on, and then she had handed it back to him and said, "Young man, my Frank worked at that plant for thirty-eight years. Walter Holbrook came to his funeral. If there's something wrong with my water, you tell me what it is. Otherwise I'm not signing anything." The man had not told her. He had left. She had not heard from the company again.
She stood in her doorway now, small and stooped, in a housecoat and slippers, and listened to Asha explain, plainly and carefully, about the groundwater and the solvent and the report. When Asha finished, Mrs. Hartley was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Frank always said the cleaning tanks leaked. He used to come home with his hands smelling like it. He said the young Mr. Holbrook didn't care about anything but the numbers." She looked at Asha. "Is that how my Frank got sick? From the water?"