Chapter 24: Contaminated

"Who sent it?" I said.

"I told you. No name."

"The run came off the line at ten last night. The lab samples are in a cooler on my truck seat. Nobody's tested anything."

The phone went quiet.

"Then how does somebody know it's bad?" she said slowly.

"That's my question."

"Test it, Josette. Today. Send me the paper."

She hung up.

Etienne was already pulling on his boots.

"Whoever wrote that email knew before the lab did," he said.

"Because they made it true."

I drove the cooler to the lab in Lafayette myself.

I didn't trust the courier.

I didn't trust anybody that morning but the man beside me.

The lab called on Tuesday at four.

Lise put it on speaker in the café kitchen, and the whole trust crowded in behind her.

The vinegar in every sample had floor degreaser in it.

The same brand in the closet by the bottling house door.

"Nobody spills this much by accident," the lab man said. "Somebody poured it in the tank."

Two thousand cases.

Eight days of the whole island stripping peppers in the cold.

Sixty thousand dollars of my brother-in-law's boat.

Nobody in the kitchen said a word.

Then somebody's grandmother started to cry, very quietly, into a dish towel.

On Wednesday morning we poured it out.

The crew opened the cases one by one and emptied the bottles into the floor drain.

The bottling house smelled like green peppers and soap.

I made myself watch every bottle.

When the last one was empty, I climbed up on the pallet where Luc had stood to make his speech.

The whole bottling crew was there.

Forty men and women in blue shirts, the ones who'd given up their Sunday for nothing.

"Somebody in this room poured cleaner into our vinegar," I said.

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