Breaking Point

taking this?”
    “Badly,” Pam said. “He just withdrew into his shell. He went to work, he came home and ate dinner, but it was like he wasn’t really there. We were both waiting for the other shoe to drop—for something to happen so we could maybe find a lawyer or call the governor or some politician who might be able to help. We did talk to a lawyer, but he said he couldn’t really do anything without seeing something in writing from the EPA. In fact, he kind of looked at us like we were paranoid or exaggerating. So we waited for the EPA to slap us with some kind of charge, but nothing happened.”
    Marybeth said, “Is that why you never said anything about it to me or anyone? Because you thought we might not believe you?”
    Pam took a moment to answer while considering the question. “It’s complicated. I think even though we were convinced we didn’t do anything wrong we still felt . . . guilty somehow. It’s just like the questions you’re asking me—like you think there has to be another side to this story, because why else would they come after us like that?
    “But there is no other side,” she said, “unless it’s something we don’t know or never thought about. I think both Butch and I always believed someone would just say, ‘Hey, this is crazy. This can’t happen in America,’ and it would just go away.”
    Joe said, “You mean since that first encounter you never got a letter, or anything, from the EPA? Not even a call?”
    “Nothing,” she said. “I started to think it was all some kind of bad dream. Or, like I said, that it might somehow just go away. I thought maybe Shauna Naous and the EPA had lost their paperwork, or it fell through the cracks or something. I hoped maybe she got fired or something and the whole thing left with her. Then I realized federal employees
never
get fired. Still, I was starting to have some hope again. But I couldn’t ever stop thinking of that seventy thousand dollars a day.
    “A couple of months ago,” Pam said, “Butch moved out. He said he just needed to be by himself.”
    Marybeth gasped and covered her mouth. She said, “Pam, why didn’t you tell me?”
    Pam shook her head. “I was ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to know. Every day I thought he’d move back in and our life would be normal again. We still worked together at the office, but at the end of the day I’d come home and he’d go to his place. I made Hannah promise me not to tell you, but I think she told Lucy.”
    “Lucy never said a word,” Marybeth whispered.
    “She’s a good friend for Hannah,” Pam said. “I so appreciate her being able to spend so much time here with a
normal
family.”
    “Oh, we’ve got issues,” Marybeth said, and laughed, “but we think of her as one of our own. She’s a sweet girl.”
    “She likes you, too,” Pam said.
    “Where has Butch been staying?” Joe asked Pam.
    “Downtown. In some grungy little apartment over the Stockman’s Bar.”
    “I know of it,” Joe said, recalling once breaking into the apartment during a case two years before.
    Pam said, “The good news is Butch moved back home just last week. He said since we hadn’t heard anything from the EPA in nearly a year, that maybe it was all some kind of bureaucratic snafu. He said they could at least apologize for what they put us through, but he didn’t really expect anything.
    “It was like having the old Butch back,” Pam said with a sad smile. “It was like a black cloud had lifted from him. That’s not to say I didn’t resent the hell out of him for leaving us. We still have issues to work through on that one, and I don’t plan to let him off the hook as easily as he expects me to let him off. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy yesterday when he said he was going to go up to our lot and get back to work on it. He wasn’t gone three hours before I got a call from Shauna Naous.”
    Joe held his breath.
    “She said they were delivering the documentation I’d asked for, that it had taken a while to get it all put together.”
    “A
year
after you asked for it?” Marybeth said, obviously outraged.
    “And she reminded me that our fine had been accumulating and was up to over twenty-four million dollars,” Pam said, with a high-pitched cackle. “Over twenty-four million dollars! Here we are barely scraping along with hardly two nickels to rub together and they say we owe them twenty-four million in fines. I told her they could have the