Free Toms River by Dan Fagin

through their ordeal, one day at a time.
    Late one night at New York Hospital, however, Linda Gillick heard something that got her thinking. She was, as usual, talking to anotherparent, a man who had been a construction worker in Toms River in the 1960s. He told her a story that at first sounded outlandish, explaining that he had helped to lay a pipeline that carried toxic waste right through the middle of town. The pipe started at Toms River Chemical and passed near the Gillicks’ home in Brookside Heights, where many of the factory executives lived, too. The story startled Gillick, but she was too busy caring for Michael to try to learn more. It did, however, make her wonder what else she did not know about her town.

CHAPTER SEVEN

On Cardinal Drive
    Seen from the front, Cardinal Drive could be almost anywhere. The houses, mostly built in the boom years of the 1960s, are split-level or ranch-style, with oversized garages, manicured hedges, and handsome picture windows set into painted brick or shiny white siding. To see what makes the street unique, you need to walk around the back. Instead of another row of houses on another gently curving street, the west side of Cardinal Drive backs up against the last large undeveloped space in Toms River. You can sit in a lawn chair or float in a backyard swimming pool and imagine you are at the very edge of suburban civilization, gazing west into the forest primeval. You are not, of course. You are looking at the forest of Ciba-Geigy. Just seven hundred feet away, completely hidden by a thick curtain of trees, is the closest of a series of waste pits and lagoons extending to the north and west. For almost as long as there has been a Cardinal Drive—at least fifty years—those leaky pits have sent toxic chemicals coursing through the ground beneath Cardinal Drive and into the Oak Ridge neighborhood.
    The extra privacy on Cardinal Drive was a special attraction for the families who moved there. The McVeighs already lived in Oak Ridge but moved to Cardinal Drive in 1977 because William McVeighloved the idea of having a forest in his family’s backyard. “It was so peaceful,” remembered his wife, Sheila. “You’d be back there and you’d feel like you were in the country. You couldn’t see anything or hear anything, it was just trees.” She first heard about the problems with the local groundwater when a neighbor came over to report that the county health department had refused to let her use well water to fill her swimming pool. That sounded disturbing, but what did it really mean to have chemicals in the earth a few feet underneath your property? Sheila McVeigh was not sure, but she was glad that she and her husband, seeking more play space for their two young daughters, had replaced a backyard vegetable garden with sod when they moved into their house. The previous owner, an avid gardener, had died of cancer.
    Ray and Shelley Lynnworth had lived on Cardinal Drive even longer—so long that when they first moved into their split-level brick home in 1968, there was no back fence. The yard just trailed off into the woods, giving the quarter-acre property a certain bucolic majesty. Even after the fence went up in the early 1970s, the Lynnworth children—Jill, born in 1967, and Randy, in 1969—did not regard it as an inviolable barrier. “Did Randy climb over the fence sometimes and go into the woods of Ciba-Geigy? Of course he did. All the neighborhood kids did that,” Ray Lynnworth remembered. The children swam in the nearby river, too. The Lynnworths knew that the land belonged to Toms River Chemical, but they did not consider that a bad thing. Quite the contrary, they loved the privacy. There were unpleasant odors at times—usually at night, since that was when the factory’s smokestacks, out of sight but not out of range, were busiest. Their home’s west-facing windows, looking toward the hidden smokestacks, were a bit grittier to the touch than the other windows, as