And boiling doesn’t take out nitrate. It makes it more concentrated.” Her voice cracked a little there, and she steadied it. “She didn’t do anything wrong. She did exactly what she was told. I just think somebody ought to tell people like her, before something happens, not after.”
Nobody in that room breathed.
“Young lady,” he said. His voice was rough. “Do you have anything more to show us?”
“The map.” She pushed it toward him. Thirty-one pins, twenty-seven of them green. “The four orange ones are close together, and they’re all downhill from the same two fields. I don’t know what that means. I’m not saying whose fault it is. I just drew where they are.”
“Why did you do this?” Marge Olson asked. “Why a thirteen-year-old would want to spend a summer on other people’s wells.”
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Emmy looked at her feet. Then she looked up.
“Because Mr. Greeley’s water tasted funny,” she said, “and nobody ever checked it, and he’s seventy-eight, and he lives by himself. I thought that if I didn’t, nobody would.”
From the back row a chair scraped.
“Mr. Chairman.”
It was Rhonda. She stood up at the back with her purse over her shoulder, and she spoke in the same level, reasonable tone she had used in the gym, the voice that makes a grown woman doubt her own memory.
“I judged this project at the county science fair on Saturday,” she said. “I’m a science teacher. I have to say, for the board’s benefit, that these results should not be taken at face value. Paper strips are not laboratory analysis.
A student this age could not produce this much data without substantial help, and the project was withdrawn from the fair for exactly that reason. I’d hate for the board to commit public money based on a middle school poster board.”
It was very quiet for a moment, and then Mr. Hatch put his glasses back on.
“Mrs. Brewer,” he said, “I appreciate that. You may be right about the strips. That is precisely why this board retests. We are not going to commit a dime on a poster board. We are going to send a certified sampler to the four properties, this week, and get lab numbers from the district. Mr. Dunning?”
Glenn Dunning pushed off the wall. “Yes, Alfred. I’ve looked at the notebook. The numbers are honest screening. If four wells read fourteen to twenty-two on a strip, they are worth a lab. I’d put money on it.”
“Then that’s the motion,” said Mr. Hatch. “Marge?”
“Second,” said Marge Olson. She did not take her eyes off Emmy. “And I’d like to know, Mrs. Brewer, whether you opened the notebook.”
The room turned. Sixty people, and not one of them said a word.
Rhonda stood in the back row with her purse on her shoulder. I saw her face change. I saw her look at the book in Emmy’s hand, then at Mr. Everly, who was staring into his lap, then at the clock.
“I looked at the board,” she said. “The project board.”
“That wasn’t my question,” said Marge Olson.
Another silence. A pickup went by outside on the county road, and I heard Hazel make a small wet sound in her carrier and Alexis’s low hush.
“No,” Rhonda said at last. “I did not open the notebook.”