Free Silent Justice by William Bernhardt

funny,” Barry said. “But what can you do about it? Water’s water.”
    “I thought it was gross,” Margaret said. “We bought bottled water for drinking. But you can’t use bottled water for everything. We couldn’t afford it.”
    “All our children were exposed to this water,” Cecily said. “They drank it, they bathed and showered in it. It was unavoidable.”
    “You may have grounds for a suit against the city,” Ben said. “The city engineer may have been negligent in the performance of his duties. But what would it get you? I can guarantee you the city coffers aren’t large enough to pay off any big judgment. A town that size probably doesn’t even have insurance.”
    “We don’t want the city,” Cecily answered. “We want the bastards who poisoned the water in the first place.” Once more her hand dipped into her oversized purse, this time retrieving a report bound in a clear binder. “I started researching this as soon as I read the first article in the paper. I studied to be a biologist, back at OU, so I wasn’t totally in the dark on this. I started reading about TCE and how it’s been linked to tumors in laboratory animals. I also found out I wasn’t the only person concerned about the Blackwood aquifer.”
    What Cecily handed Ben was a report by the Environmental Protection Agency. After the preliminary discovery of the poison pool, they had placed the Blackwood aquifer on the National Priorities List—which put it in line for cleanup via Superfund dollars. The EPA ranked all the sites on its list, based upon the chemicals involved, their concentrations, and the proximity to residential areas. The EPA ranked the Blackwood aquifer seventh out of over five hundred sites. Like the city engineer, they found TCE in Well B—280 parts per billion, an extremely significant contamination. They also found lesser amounts of other foreign substances, including tetrachloroethylene, better known as perc, another industrial solvent. The EPA considered both TCE and perc to be “possible carcinogens.”
    Ben flipped the pages, passing quickly over dense paragraphs of jargon, which he frankly didn’t understand, long academic sentences, and charts and graphs dealing with groundwater contours and well logs and such. But there was a short paragraph at the end of the report that he definitely understood.
    It was in a section labeled Contaminant Origination. It explained that Well B had been polluted by the underwater pool recently discovered in Blackwood. And it explained that the most likely cause of the contamination was dumping by the H. P. Blaylock Industrial Machinery Corporation, which owned the land and operated a manufacturing plant and headquarters not far from the poisoned pool.
    Ben closed the report. “You want to go after Blaylock Industrial?”
    “Of course,” Cecily responded. “They’re the ones responsible for this. Isn’t it obvious?”
    Ben and Christina exchanged a sharp look.
    “So,” Cecily said eagerly. “What do you think?”
    Ben bit down on his lower lip. “I think we should take a break.”
    Ben called for a fifteen-minute recess before the meeting proceeded. He needed to think about what he was going to say, and how he was going to say it. He wanted to be honest with these people, and that meant telling them many things they would not want to hear.
    Christina followed him to the kitchen while he poured himself a restorative Coke. “What are you going to do?”
    Ben shrugged. “Tell them the truth.”
    Christina nodded. “So you’re not going to take the case?”
    “It would be suicide, Christina. You know that.”
    She did not disagree. “These people have been through an awful lot, Ben. More than you or I can imagine.”
    “I understand that. But encouraging them to file a kamikaze lawsuit wouldn’t be doing them any favors.”
    Ben returned to his office early. He found all the parents waiting for him. They had never left. They were too anxious to hear what