Dollie the Doctor's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Harold left with a promise to unlock his back door for her that night. Dollie locked the clinic and drove home to gather what she had. She spread her supplies on the kitchen table. A field kit from med school. Test strips meant for pool water. A pH meter with a cracked screen. None of it could measure lead at the levels that would poison a body slowly over years. She needed parts per billion. Her strips read parts per million, if they read anything at all. She sat down and rubbed her eyes. Without hard numbers, the town council would call it a hunch. The water utility would call it slander. Harold's tremor and four charts would not be enough. She remembered a flyer taped to the clinic's community board. A graduate student had been surveying the creek behind the elementary school for her thesis. Dollie had barely glanced at it. Now she dug it out of the recycling bin and called the number. Maya Thornwood arrived within the hour. She was small, in muddy boots and a patched field vest, a sample bottle already in her hand like she never set it down. She looked twenty-five and tired in the way graduate students get tired. "You said lead," Maya said at the door. "On the phone. You sure?" "I'm sure enough to ask." Maya set her pack on the table and pulled out a hard case. Inside, a portable spectrometer nested in foam. "University loaned it to me for the creek work. It reads down to one part per billion. If it's in the pipes, this will see it." Dollie felt her shoulders drop for the first time in a week. "Why help me? You don't know these families." Maya shrugged. "I know lead. And you called a stranger at eight at night. That means you're scared." They drove to Harold's house first. He met them at the back step and pointed to the kitchen tap. Maya ran the water thirty seconds, filled two vials, and fed one into the machine. The screen counted. Dollie watched Harold's hand shake against the counter. The reading came up. Ninety-one parts per billion. The federal limit was fifteen. Maya whistled low. "That's not borderline. That's a public health emergency." They drove to the other three addresses. Water Lane hit seventy-eight. Old Mill Road hit one-forty. Chestnut Row hit sixty-two. Maya printed each result on a small thermal strip and taped them into Dollie's notebook, signed and timed. By midnight Dollie had four numbers, four signatures, and a witness with credentials. She had proof. She also had four houses full of people who had been drinking poison for decades, and a town council meeting in nine hours where she would have to say so out loud. Harold coughed into his sleeve on the porch behind her. Somewhere on Old Mill Road, a child was asleep in a house reading one-forty.