“Sorry I’m late,” he said, stepping out of the Ford, looking like he’d answered the same casting call as Amanda, wearing khakis over a pair of L.L. Bean Maine Hunting Shoes, red flannel shirt and a herringbone marksman’s jacket. He reached into an inside pocket of the jacket and pulled out a silver case.
“It’s my new digital camera,” he said. “Can’t hurt, right?”
“Tally-ho.”
Dan reviewed everything again for Burton while we put on the boots and hard hats and played around with the industrial-strength flashlights. Then Burton, Amanda and I followed the van on foot as it plowed its way over the undergrowth that had filled in the path running along the cyclone fence, heading down the east side to where it took a sharp turn and paralleled the strip of territory next to the lagoon where the storage cellars were located.
Driving like a dauntless field guy, Ned got the van within twenty feet of our destination. Then, with ill- disguised enthusiasm, stuffed himself into the caged cockpit of the backhoe and drove it off the trailer the moment Dan had him unhitched.
The noise and fumes coming from the little beast were unsettling after the subdued tone of our preparations. Amanda held my arm as we watched Ned use a handheld GPS to zero in on his point of penetration.
In about five minutes we were looking into a slanted black hole in the side of a bank of tangled foliage.
“Fascinating,” said Burton. “It’s like bloody archeology.”
“How bloody depends on what we find,” I said, edging up to the hole with my flashlight.
Dan cleared his throat and gently moved me out of the way. Then he stuck his own flashlight in the hole, immediately followed by his head.
After an intolerable wait, we heard him speak.
“Cool.”
He sat on the ground with his feet in the hole, then popped out of sight,
“Come on in,” he called from the darkness. “Just watch your step.”
I let go of Amanda’s hand and followed. The hole was in a stone wall that curved up to a concrete ceiling. You only had to step down about two feet to reach the floor, which was also concrete. As the beam of my flashlight flicked around with Dan’s, I saw a room lined with stone and filled with exactly nothing.
“So far, so good,” I yelled out the hole. “Come see.”
The space had a heavy, choking smell, like fetid vegetation. The air was damp, but the floor was dry to the touch, as was the laid-up stone wall.
“Look over here,” said Dan.
He’d been in front of me, blocking the view of an arched doorway at the far end of the room.
“Let’s wait a second so Ned can take some samples,” he said, using his flashlight to guide Ned’s less graceful entrance through the hole. We watched him kneel and swab the floor, open and wave around little canisters, open others and set them on the floor, shoot his flashlight at the face of a handheld device and do all those other things chem engineering people delight in doing.
As he worked, we listened to Burton reminisce about trips into the Pyramids and catacombs, the sewers of Paris, the caves in the cliffs of Monte Carlo and a coal mine in West Virginia. The closest I’d come to that experience was crawling inside a giant pressure vessel to grab a sample of a contaminated catalyst. I didn’t like this environment a whole lot better, so I was glad when Ned said we could move on.
Dan made us wait until he checked out the next cellar, which proved to be an exact duplicate of the one before. We had to endure another round of test sampling and travelogues before we moved on. This time, however, things were a little different.
“Barrels,” Dan called out from the darkness.
Amanda grabbed my hand again.
“Ned first,” said Dan, although Ned was already on the way. “Damn,” said Burton, quietly.
“Let’s just see,” I said.
So the three of us stood in the semi-dark for about ten minutes, listening to the rumble of their conversation on the other side of the wall.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t have remediation,” I heard Burton saying. “It’s done all the time.”
“He’s right,” I said to Amanda. “I worked a lot of these sites at the company. Every time we closed a plant something like this happened.”
“Any in the Hamptons?” she asked.
“We need Sam,” Dan called.
I asked Burton to take Amanda’s hand, then went through the passage. It took me a few seconds to locate them in the bigger room and I was confused by the frenzied criss-cross of flashlights. I followed the sound of their voices.
“Check it out, Sam,” said Dan. “What’s your opinion?”
They cast their flashlights on a wall of containers, stacked three high. The bright, colorless light of the flashlights made it hard to focus at first, but as I got closer detail began to emerge. And then I was close enough to reach out and stroke the side of one of the containers.
“Wood,” I said. “They’re old wooden barrels.”
“Right,” said Dan. “Not good. Porous.”
I squatted down and felt the dry floor. Then I stood again and took a few paces back.
I don’t know if I started laughing before or after the thought struck me.
I went to the end of the wall where the barrel that began the first row was almost clear of the one above. I muscled it out away from the wall.
“Hey, careful,” said Ned, flashing his light at the floor under where the barrel had been standing. While he was doing that I slipped the little geologist’s hammer out of his utility belt and swung it down hard on the top of the barrel. Both Ned and Dan literally jumped back in horror.
“Hey!”
I hit it again and then a third time, finally loosening a slat on the top so I could get my hands around and pull it upward.
“Jesus, man, we need special equipment if we’re gonna do that kind of stuff,” said Dan.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve got it back at the house. I just didn’t think to bring along ten-ounce glasses and a couple trays of ice cubes.”
I dipped my hand in the barrel and held the liquid up to my nose, then touched it with my tongue.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Sampling a little Scotch. Could be bourbon. It’s been sitting here a long time. Anyone bring peanuts?”
TWENTY-FOUR
I LEFT AMANDA AND BURTON with Ned to guard the inventory while he took test samples and went with Dan to check the rest of the cellars. Unfortunately, no more booze appeared. The last cellar had a door to the outside, a table and chairs and what were probably canvas cots, now just piles of musty disintegration.
We tried to push open the door but only managed a thin slice of daylight. We could see the tangle of flora through the crack. It would be easy enough to find from the outside.
“Let’s go rejoin the party,” I said to Dan.
Ned, wearing official DEC goggles and gloves, was filling and corking the last of his glass cylinders. Amanda was standing with her arms around Burton and her head on his shoulder. She looked up hopefully when I shot her in the face with my flashlight.
“All clear,” I said. “Nothing down there but a rumrunner’s dormitory.”
I got the next hug. It was nice, especially with the buttery soft leather jacket in between.
“We’ll go through the whole place and take samples at regular intervals,” said Dan. “You’d want us to do that.”
“Yes we would,” I told him.
“I’ll get a generator and some can lights and see if we have enough sample kits. Ned, you can start prescreening the hooch so we can help Sam’s internist work up an antidote.”
After showing Amanda and Burton around the rest of the place, we went back outside to the bright daylight
