Slow Burn

by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

  “Come in,” a voice said in reply to my knock.

  He sat at a desk, staring at a computer screen, right hand on a mouse. To his left, a window, in front of that, a table covered haphazardly with papers and magazines and books. Beyond that a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf crammed with more books and science journals. Plastic file crates lined the floor behind his desk, each bursting with documents. At the rear of the room a second computer with a wide screen sat at another work station, and beside that sat a third computer whose screen was jumping as some kind of statistical program ran table after table of graphs and numbers. A poster for a U.S. Geological Survey conference on hydraulic fracturing hung above the computers.

  “Tanner Gridley?”

  “Yes,” he said, not looking up. He made an adjustment with his mouse, saved the action, then glanced at me.

  “Help you?”

  “My name’s Andy Hayes,” I said. I handed him my card.

  “What’s this about?”

  “I’m trying to find people who knew Matt Cummings.”

  He frowned. “Matt? Why?”

  I explained.

  When I was done he folded his arms and stared at me.

  “That’s got to be the most screwed-up thing I’ve ever heard of,” he said.

  I let my gaze drift to his desk. A family photo sat to the left of the computer—him, a woman I took to be his wife, and a girl and a boy that looked about Joe and Mike’s ages. A smart phone lay in front of the photo. To the right of the keyboard, another pile of papers, topped with a Youngstown State coffee mug adorned with a picture of a scowling, scarf-wearing penguin, the school’s mascot. It was enough to make you smirk, until you remembered that Ohio State’s equivalent was an anthropomorphic buckeye.

  “Let me get this straight,” Gridley said. “Aaron Custer’s grandmother is paying you to prove he’s innocent.” He was clean-shaven, with closely cropped hair and black-framed glasses.

  “To see if he’s innocent,” I said.

  “Big difference. That what lets you sleep at night?”

  “I sleep OK,” I said. “Mind if I sit down?”

  “Be my guest,” he said, lifting a textbook from the chair beside his desk. “Until my next student arrives, when you need to get the hell out.”

  “Let’s forget about Aaron,” I said. “Tell me about Matt.”

  “I’d like nothing better than to forget about Aaron Custer,” he said. “Along with half the university.”

  “Matt must have been a good student. He cowrote a paper with a professor.”

  “Assistant professor,” Gridley said. “And you’re wrong—he was a brilliant student. Brilliant and passionate.”

  “Brilliant how?”

  “Straight A’s. Math, science, even writing. You name it.”

  “Impression I got.”

  “Would have made an outstanding geologist. Could have walked out of here the day he graduated and gone to work for any of the big oil companies in a second.”

  “Was that his plan?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s from eastern Ohio. Was,” he corrected himself. “Ground zero of the state’s fracking boom. His family’s farm sits smack over the western edge of the Utica Shale.”

  “That’s a formation of some kind.”

  “Giant deposits of shale, deep underground. Not as big as the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, but still huge. And lucrative. Natural gas is trapped in the shale. Fracking is how you get it out.”

  “Big market for natural gas right now.”

  “True.”

  “Cleaner than coal.”

  “Cleaner-burning. Not any cleaner to extract.”

  “Because of fracking?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But isn’t it just another kind of drilling?”

  Gridley snorted. “Calling fracking a kind of drilling is like calling rape a way you make love,” he said. “Pardon the analogy.”

  “Pardoned, I guess,” I said. “Not a fan?”

  “Depends what you think of blasting millions of gallons of water laced with huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the earth, then taking that leftover liquid and injecting it into wells, where it sits around contaminating the water supply or causing earthquakes.”

  “These wells cause the earthquakes? I thought it was the drilling.”

  “Common mistake,” he said. “There’s the gas wells and the injection wells.”

  “OK.”

  “Liquid from the injection wells seeps into the bedrock and encounters existing faults, which can then cause quakes.”

  “And this is proven?”

  “Injection wells have been linked to minor earthquakes all over the country—Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas. Not to mention right here in Ohio. Up in Youngstown, 2011. Don’t tell me you hadn’t heard about that.”

  “I remember those,” I said.

  “You ought to. Because the state still hasn’t learned its lesson.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there’s an injection well sitting right over there in Knox County that triggered a quake three years ago, and the state’s in total denial about it. Says the jury’s out. More study needed. It’s bullshit.”

  “That’s what the paper was about. The one you cowrote.”

  “You read it?”

  “Saw the summary online.”

  “Then you know we made our case.”

  “But the well’s still open.”

  “Like I said, state’s in denial.”

  “Are they going to study it more?”

  “Not if they can help it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means they’re going to make a final decision soon based on existing data. Which is a fancy way of saying they’ll ignore our paper and findings and go with what Appletree Energy wants.”

  “Company that owns the well?”

  “Energy company doing the fracking. They also operate the well. But they can’t frack until the well’s in the clear. Which is pissing them off, which is why they’re lobbying hard for the state to get off its ass and sign off on the No. 5.”

  “No. 5?”

  “Knox Excavating Class II Injection Well No. 5.”

  “The well you wrote the paper about.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which proved it caused a quake.”

  “Which proved the evidence leaned strongly in that direction,” Gridley said. “I guess that’s not good enough.”

  “Appletree’s fighting to keep it operational.”

  “With their wallet wide open. And it’s a big wallet.”

  “Are you going to publish another paper?”

  He slumped a little in his chair. “I might have,” he said. “That was the plan. It all sort of went to hell after Matt died. Which is why this is such bullshit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What Matt and I found should be good enough. Enough to scuttle Appletree’s case. But it’s like they know they have the upper hand, because Matt’s death screwed everything up for us. For me. They’re exploiting that tragedy for their own business purposes.”

  “Sounds like you’re mad at Matt,” I said. “For dying.”

  “Jesus Christ. Are you kidding?”

  “You said it yourself. His death screwed things up for you.”

  He looked on the verge of getting angry. Then he glanced around his cluttered office and took a breath.

  “Came out the wrong way,” he said.

  “Figured as much.”

  “His death was horrible. I have a hard time talking about it.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And now you’re here, bringing this shit up.”

  “Was Matt opposed to fracking? Or you?”

  “We both were,” he said.

  “Based on the earthquakes?”

  “That, and all the other environmental damage.”

  “Like what?”

&n
bsp; “Like drinking wells tainted with methane. Like water coming from kitchen faucets you can light with a match. Like the disruption of wildlife habitats.” He gestured at the poster on his door. “Ever see Gasland?”

  I told him I hadn’t.

  “Check it out. You want to know about Matt? That was his favorite movie.”

  “His, or yours?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”

  “It’s a great film,” he said. “Should be required viewing in any state where they’re fracking.”

  I thought about Glen Murphy, Suzanne’s boyfriend. Boyfriend for now. “But isn’t there already a lot of drilling here? Traditional oil drilling?”

  “Sure,” Gridley said. “But it’s got a much smaller impact. You don’t need the six-acre pads you see with fracking.”

  “That must have been a pretty big deal for Matt,” I said. “Getting a paper published.”

  “I told you, he was brilliant. ”

  “Sounds like a good kid.”

  “He was. Until a scumbag named Aaron Custer killed him.”

  I didn’t respond, since there was nothing to say. At this point it was hard to disagree with the prevailing view of Aaron Custer. Instead, I said, “You have a copy of the paper? Only thing online was the abstract.”

  Gridley thought about this for a second. Then he swiveled in his chair, went to the cluttered table, sifted through papers for a couple of minutes, found the document, and handed it to me. “Hydraulic Fracturing Injection Wells and the Prevalence of Seismic Activity in the Eastern Ohio Geological Corridor,” the title read. By T. Gridley and M. Cummings.

  “Just for the heck of it,” I said. “Anybody not like Matt?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get in any arguments with anyone? Anybody in favor of fracking? Somebody who didn’t like your findings?”

  “Sure,” Gridley said. “The entire fracking industry, starting with Appletree Energy. But the entire fracking industry wasn’t a convicted firebug who got drunk and decided to torch a house full of hardworking students.”

  Before I could reply a shadow darkened the door. I looked up and saw a young man, backpack around his shoulder. He looked questioningly at Gridley, who waved the student in, which I knew was my signal to go.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said.

  Gridley didn’t reply. He didn’t look at me. He just gestured for me to leave.

  15

  I recovered my van from the garage next to the university’s Wexner Center for the Arts and drove down High a few blocks toward downtown. A few minutes later I parked and walked into the Short North Tavern, ordered a draft PBR, and sat at the bar while I read Matt Cummings’s paper. The article was dense and crammed with scientific terminology and took me a while to understand. I girded myself with a second beer. For all of Gridley’s passion about fracking, the article, as a piece of science writing aimed at an academic audience, was devoid of emotion. Its gist was the argument, with several caveats and provisos, that the well dubbed Knox No. 5 could have contributed to a series of minor temblors a year before the article was published. Not exactly a smoking-gun document but somewhat convincing nonetheless.

  I was almost done with my beer and trying to keep my mind off the fact that each person I talked to about Aaron Custer left me increasingly convinced of his guilt when my phone rang.

  “Andy Hayes?” the female voice asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Janet Crenshaw.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m with Smyth, Sanner, Stacy and Franko.”

  “Lot of names,” I said. “Is that a folk group?”

  “It’s a law firm, as I’m sure you know. Did you call the parents of students killed in the Orton Avenue fire?”

  “This is the part where I say, ‘Why do you want to know?’”

  “I want to know because I’m their lawyer.”

  I acknowledged the calls.

  “They’re not talking,” she said.

  “How about Helen Chen,” I said. “Happen to have her number?”

  “She’s not talking either. Nobody is.”

  “Why not?”

  “I represent them in a lawsuit against the landlord of the Orton Avenue house. As long as that’s pending, they’re not giving interviews.”

  The civil lawsuit. Another of Suzanne’s exclusives, reporting first for Channel 7 that the realty company that owned the house was being sued.

  “I don’t want to talk to them about the lawsuit.”

  “What then?”

  I told her.

  “Oh my God. Even less of a reason. You must be kidding.”

  “It may be a stretch,” I admitted. “But I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Be my guest. But not with my clients. It’s a bad idea, legally speaking, and it’s a really bad idea on moral grounds.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You can imagine what they’ve been through. Now you come along saying police got the wrong guy? I don’t think so. It would shatter them.”

  “Speaking of Aaron,” I said. “Any reason you’re not going after him? Wrongful death?”

  “Right,” she said. “Move to seize the assets of an unemployed, alcoholic arsonist serving a life sentence.”

  “So you go after the landlord instead? Even though everything I read says there were working smoke detectors in the house.”

  “Some smoke detectors,” she said. “There weren’t enough.”

  “Would that have made a difference?”

  “We think it would have.”

  “Looks to me like you just spun the wheel until you found the deepest pocket.”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with a response. And I’m not sure why we’re even having—”

  “Why not go after Aaron’s mom, then? Or his grandmother? She’s wealthy enough.”

  “Not that wealthy,” she said dismissively. “And in any case, they’re not the ones who doused gasoline on the porch of that house and killed the innocent children of my clients. And yes, you’re right, we could go after Aaron Custer and garnish his prison wages for life and my clients would be a few pennies a month richer. But what good would that do? What point would that serve?”

  “As good a point as going after a realty company that wasn’t responsible for their deaths.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says everyone who looked at this case.”

  “That’ll be for a jury to decide,” she said. “I can’t spend any more time on this. I just want to make sure we’re clear you’re not to contact my clients.”

  “What if I talk to them off the record? Mediated questions. With you there?”

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m not interested in your lawsuit. And believe it or not, I’m sympathetic to the effect of bringing everything up again. I just have a few questions. Bet you we’d be done in less than an hour.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Pretty please.”

  “You know, I was warned about you.”

  “Warned how?”

  “Warned you’re an indefatigable asshole who doesn’t give up. Few questions lead to a few more. And a few more. Last thing the families need right now.”

  “Indefatigable.”

  “You heard me.”

  And that was about it. She was too professional to hang up on me. She informed me that she had to go, and it was not a good idea to reach out to the families under any circumstances.

  And then she hung up.

  I made it as far as the door of the bar when Anne called.

  “Hi there,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to disguise the pleasure in my voice.

  “Hi there, back,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  “Channeling my inner Don Quixote,” I said.

  “Aaron Custer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You have an interesting
job. Anybody ever told you that?”

  “Frequently. Usually with R-rated language.”

  “Makes what I do seem kind of pedestrian.”

  “You’re a college professor,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So I clean up messes. You’re training the next generation to run the world. So hopefully there won’t be messes.”

  “I teach science fiction.”

  “You say it like it’s something to be ashamed of.”

  “Maybe it is,” she said. “Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

  “Science fiction is a good thing. That book, World War Z? I’ve been enjoying it.”

  “You know what Kurt Vonnegut said about science fiction?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But why don’t you tell me just so I can see if you do.”

  “He said, ‘I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “science fiction” . . . and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.’”

  “I like how you know that by heart.”

  “It’s a college professor thing.”

  “Given that I have a hard time remembering what kind of dog food Hopalong eats, I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Your point being?”

  “A rational person could question whether the world needs college professors teaching the next generation about ray guns.”

  “Good thing I’m not rational.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Ray guns,” I continued. “Good at cleaning up messes.”

  “Very funny,” she said, but there was an edge to her voice.

  “I try.”

  “Listen,” she said. “I called because I can’t make it tomorrow. There’s this in-service thing at work.”

  “OK,” I said, two beats too late. “Sorry about that.”

  She said, “You forgot, didn’t you?”

  I thought furiously. Birthday? Lunch? Four-month anniversary? No, I’d already forgotten that. Then, too late, I remembered. A few days earlier, she’d moved up the Thursday run by a day.

  “I did,” I confessed. “I’m sorry.”

  “No matter,” she said brightly. “It works out anyway. How about Thursday after all?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thursday would be great.”