Breaking Point

what I mean. You don’t know this about him, but he has a tendency to get down in the dumps. He was raised in a tough household where his dad had nothing good to say to him. Ever. He doesn’t have a lot of confidence in himself at times, even though he should, because he’s a good husband and father and he’s solid as a rock most of the time. But Butch can really be hard on himself, and when he gets like that he’s not much fun to be around.”
    “That surprises me to hear that,” Joe said. “I’ve always found him rough and ready.” As he said it, he was reminded of Butch Roberson’s haunted eyes just that afternoon.
    “He comes off that way,” Pam said. “He doesn’t like to talk, and sometimes I have to practically scream at him to say something. But when he told me that the most important thing to him—besides Hannah and me—was a nice home in the mountains, well, I wanted to do all I could to make that happen for him. So I agreed on the deal, even though we were taking a risk if the spec home didn’t sell. We had to really beg our bankers to max out our loan ceilings, and we knew the bankers and the material suppliers were nervous about getting paid back.
    “But we did it,” she said, with a proud smile. “It took too long, almost eighteen months, to sell the spec home. Did you see that nice A-frame up there?” she asked Joe.
    “I did.”
    “That was it. And when it sold, we paid off everyone and got the title to the lot you saw. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Butch so happy. He was like a little boy because it was the first time in his life he really had his own property. Even though we can’t afford to do anything with it yet, he goes up there after work and on weekends just to putter around. He’s got targets set up for archery and for his hunting rifle, and he’d ask Hannah to go with him. It makes me almost cry when I think about how happy he was, how proud he was.”
    Joe glanced over at Marybeth and saw her eyes glisten as she listened to her friend.
    “So this was five years ago,” Joe said. “But it doesn’t look like anything was done with the lot until very recently.”
    Pam placed both of her hands around her tea and focused on the glass itself.
    “Not until a year ago,” she said. “That’s when Butch put our company tractor on the trailer and took it up there to start leveling out the ground for the foundation. Until then, we hadn’t really done anything with it except get all the permits we needed and design the house. We spent hours at night drawing floor plans and crunching numbers. I’ll have to show you the plans, Marybeth,” she said. “Two levels, three bedrooms, three baths, and a wraparound deck for the whole place. It really is wonderful.”
    “I’d like to see it,” Marybeth said wistfully.
    Joe got a pang. He wondered if Marybeth harbored similar dreams that were unattainable to them right now.
    Pam said, “I told him it might be years before we could actually finish the house, but he took on extra work—driving the school bus and working part-time at Bighorn Liquors—to sock enough away that we could at least pour the foundation. We figured if he did most of the work himself we could save a bundle and maybe even be able to use the place once Hannah went to college.”
    “She didn’t want to move up there?” Marybeth asked.
    “Ha!” Pam coughed. “Don’t get me wrong—she loved to go up there with her father, but I think it’s more because she wanted to be with him. The last thing on earth she wanted was to move so far out of town away from her friends.”
    “Sounds like Lucy,” Marybeth said, and laughed. “A social butterfly.”
    “Exactly,”
Pam said.
    “So . . .” Joe prompted.
    “Right,” Pam said, switching back on track. “Butch saved enough to get the foundation dug out, framed, and poured. So a year ago, he went up there on a Friday and started moving dirt. He also had fill dirt brought up and dumped because the lot slopes toward the lake.”
    “Two acres, right?” Joe asked.
    “Yeah. Not very big, but big enough.”
    “So tell me how this involves the EPA,” Joe said. “I’m not connecting the dots.”
    Pam looked at him and her expression was fierce. “Even when I tell you what happened, you won’t be able to connect them,” she said.
    “Okay,” Pam said. “Three days after Butch started grading the lot, on a Monday—Hannah was up there with him because it was Memorial Day—he was on his tractor