He described the plant not as a sinister fortress but as a workplace full of ordinary people trying to earn a living.
Some wore proper protective gear and asked hard questions.
Others took shortcuts because production never stopped and supervisors praised speed more often than caution.
The worst decisions were rarely announced in dramatic speeches.
They came as small exceptions approved one at a time.
A missing inspection could be blamed on weather.
An unsigned repair sheet could be left for the next shift.
A leaking valve could be marked for replacement after the quarterly shutdown.
Years later, nobody could remember which exception created the problem.
Peter had spent his retirement collecting the records he could legally obtain.
He did not have proof of any present-day contamination in Alder Hollow.
He did have evidence that an old underground connection had been omitted from several later maps.
“That’s what I can’t forgive,” he said.
“Not knowing is one thing.”
“Pretending you know is another.”
I told him about Elise and the garden she had built near the stone wall.
He remembered seeing her outside years before, carrying a wheelbarrow full of mulch.
“She asked whether the old survey plaque belonged to the county,” he said.
I sat straighter.
“She spoke to you?”
“Only once.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her to leave it visible.”
He smiled sadly.
“She said she’d plant around it rather than over it.”
I thought of the photograph with the young azaleas.
Elise had known the marker mattered, even if she had never explained the history to me.
Peter reached into his bag again and took out a narrow envelope.
It contained a photograph from the cleanup survey, showing four people standing beside a metal sampling box.
Three were strangers to me.
The fourth was a young Lowell Finch.
Behind them stood the stone wall at the back of my property.
“That’s your yard before the houses were built,” Peter said.
“Where’s the second chamber?” Hannah asked.
Peter tapped the lower edge of the picture.
“Just outside the frame.”
The corner of a concrete lid was visible under wet grass.
It was enough to suggest a location, not enough to establish the chamber’s condition.
I asked Peter whether the lid was still there.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But somebody knows.”
When we stood to leave, Peter took my hand in both of his.
“You seem like a decent man, Mr. Pierce.”
