“Maybe the country air agrees with me,” he says, stretching his arms out as if he’s never seen so much open space before. I wonder why the hell he’s so peppy this early, after a long drive from Indianapolis. Joe refuses to sleep in one of Barrens’s few motels or rentals, claiming that a gay black man belongs in Barrens, Indiana, like a dildo belongs on a dinner table. Instead, he’s chosen to commute.

“Maybe the water does,” I say, which makes him laugh. He’s not the only one buzzing on something more than caffeine. It’s that new-job, new-team energy. These pimply law students still believe we’re going to change the world, one oil spill, one contaminated reservoir, one gas pipeline leak at a time.

“Hey guys,” Joe speaks up. “This is Abby Williams in the flesh. She’s the one who’s been cluttering your inbox for the past two weeks.”

The research team is a modest one: a first-year associate and a few wide-eyed volunteer law students. I swear one of the girls looks as if she’s still in high school. That’s CEAW—law on a shoestring budget. Fighting the good fight is always underpaid.

“I believe the correct term is prepping,” I tell Joe.

He ignores that. “Abby,” he says to the rest of the group, “as you all know, is the other lead on the team besides me. But really she’s the reason we’re here, so when you hate your life in a few days, blame her.” He bats his eyelashes at me when I pull a face.

I can match the team to the little thumbnail images I got from Estelle Barry when she was staffing us. There’s Raj, the first-year associate, fresh out of Harvard. And, already, I’ve given out nicknames to the interns: Flora, a perky California girl in a floral top; Portland, a bearded hipster with a flannel too tailored to be truly authentic. Interns are like one-night stands. You can pretend to listen to a name or two, but the outcome never justifies the effort.

Flora leaps to her feet. Wants to prove she did her homework. “So far we’ve gathered all the town hall meeting notes from the past five years, before they went digital,” she says. “Several families started complaining as early as, um…” She glances down at her notes, and her face darkens. “As early as three years ago.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “We’ll be revisiting those complaints, one by one,” she adds, before sitting back down.

“What about now? Who else do we have besides Gallagher?” Gallagher is one of the largest landowners in or around Barrens—his farm’s been here since long before my time—and he uses the reservoir for irrigation. According to the notes Joe sent, he’s had to rely on it more than ever during the past two years’ drought. When he lost whole fields of corn and soybeans, he began to suspect something was wrong with the water—a suspicion borne out by several neighbors’ complaints of funny odors from the pipes, of skin inflammations and headaches.