"I don't know, Mrs. Hartley," Asha said honestly. "Nobody knows yet. That's what the testing is for."
Mrs. Hartley nodded slowly. Then she stepped aside and let the technicians into her kitchen.
The Garcias lived two doors down. Miguel and Rosa Garcia, in their thirties, with three children: a seven-year-old boy, a four-year-old girl, and a baby, eleven months old, whom Rosa was holding on her hip when she answered the door. Miguel worked the second shift at an auto parts plant in West Chester. Rosa cleaned offices at night. They had bought the house three years ago, a fixer-upper, because it was all they could afford, and they had not known, when they bought it, that it was on a well. They had been mixing the baby's formula with tap water for eleven months.
When Asha explained, in English and then, haltingly, in the Spanish she had picked up from cooks at three different restaurants, Rosa Garcia sat down on the front steps with the baby in her arms and could not stop shaking.
The laboratory results came back nine days later.
Of the thirty-one private wells tested within a kilometer of the Holbrook plant on Fairfield Road, twenty-three showed detectable levels of trichloroethylene. Eleven exceeded the federal maximum contaminant level. Four exceeded it by more than twenty times. Dolores Hartley's well was one of them. So was the Garcias'.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency order the same afternoon. The city of Hamilton began extending its municipal water line to every house in Lindenwald within the week. Every family whose well showed contamination was offered free medical screening at a clinic in Hamilton, paid for, at Hiroshi Nakamura's personal insistence, by Kanazawa Seiki, even though Kanazawa Seiki did not own, and might never own, a single share of Holbrook Precision Components.
The Garcias' baby was tested. Her levels were elevated, but within a range that the pediatrician said was unlikely to cause lasting harm, provided the exposure stopped immediately. It had stopped nine days ago. On the morning of the ninth day, at nine o'clock, a young Black woman in a gray sweatshirt had knocked on their door with a clipboard and a case of bottled water.
Rosa Garcia called Asha at the restaurant that evening, sobbing, to tell her. Asha took the call in the staff changing room, sitting on the floor with her back against her locker, and cried with her.
Carter Holbrook did not go to prison.
He came close. The Ohio EPA referred the case to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which referred it to the Department of Justice, and for a while, there was serious talk of federal criminal charges for knowingly concealing a release of hazardous substances. But Carter had walked into the Ohio EPA office in Dayton on his own, two hours after Phil Danziger, with the original report and every document he had, including the releases and the emails and the notes from his own lawyer's visits to Lindenwald. He had sat in a windowless room with three state investigators for nine hours that day and answered every question they asked him. He had not asked for a lawyer until the fifth hour. He had not tried to blame anyone else.
He resigned as chief executive of Holbrook Precision Components two days later. The board accepted his resignation unanimously. In the end, after eleven months of negotiation with federal prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to a single federal misdemeanor under the Clean Water Act. He was sentenced to three years of probation and four hundred hours of community service, and fined two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
He also did something that none of the prosecutors had asked him to do.
Three weeks after the dinner at Vault 1887, a cashier's check for one million dollars, drawn on the private brokerage account of Carter W. Holbrook, arrived at the office of a newly formed nonprofit called the Lindenwald Water Fund, which had been set up by Loretta Pruett and the pastor of Lindenwald Baptist Church to help families in the neighborhood pay for medical testing, home repairs, and the legal costs of the claims they were filing against Holbrook Precision. There was no letter with the check. Only a single line, written by hand on a plain index card, in a stiff, careful script.
For the water. Like she said. C.H.
Loretta Pruett showed the card to Asha a week later, at the Pruetts' kitchen table on Pleasant Avenue. Asha read it, and then sat for a long time looking at it, without saying anything.
"You think he means it?" Loretta asked.
"I don't know," Asha said. "Maybe he doesn't know yet either."
Carter Holbrook came back to Vault 1887 on a Tuesday afternoon in late January, four months after the dinner, at three o'clock, when the restaurant was closed and the cellar was empty except for the staff setting up for the evening.
Asha was at the bar at the foot of the stairs, tasting through a delivery of new wines from the Loire Valley with a notebook open beside her, when the heavy oak door at the top of the stairs creaked open and a man came slowly down the curving stone steps. She did not recognize him at first. He was wearing a plain gray wool sweater and dark jeans and a worn canvas jacket. His black hair was cut short, no longer slicked back. The beard was gone. He had lost weight. He was not wearing a watch.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, a few feet from the bar, and stood there with his hands in the pockets of the canvas jacket, and she saw his face in the candlelight, and knew him.
She did not get up. She set down her glass and closed her notebook and waited.