The Half-Life of Certainty

The document was a shipping manifest, and Maren Lowe had been staring at it for eleven minutes.

She knew because the clock on the break room microwave had a stuck second hand that still showed minutes, and she had developed the habit of glancing at it whenever she surfaced from something. Eleven minutes on a shipping manifest. Her paralegal, Jillian, had slid it under her office door three days ago with a Post-it reading might be nothing in Jillian's apologetic cursive, which meant Jillian thought it was something.

Maren pulled the paper closer. Column five read PFOS waste, Class 8 Corrosive, Disposed per internal protocol. The facility name: Halloran Chemical, Perrysburg, Ohio. The date: June 1991. Thirty-one years ago, when Maren had been ten years old and obsessed with swimming.

She folded the manifest, put it in the left breast pocket of her blazer, and went back to her office to make a call she had been putting off for six weeks.

The case had started, technically, with Edgar Pryce, a retired groundskeeper from Perrysburg who had mailed a seven-page handwritten letter to Maren's firm in April. He described what had happened to his family's cattle operation, twenty-three cows dead, sixteen more born without eyes, and then what had happened to his neighbors, and then what had happened to the neighbors' children, and then what had happened to him. He typed the last two pages because his handwriting, he explained, had gone unreliable.

The firm had passed the letter to Maren because she handled environmental work occasionally, on the side of her main practice, which was corporate defense. The letter sat on her desk for two weeks. She was in the middle of a securities case that would pay well and conclude cleanly. She read the letter on a Tuesday night when she couldn't sleep, sitting in her car in the parking structure, and something about Edgar Pryce's matter-of-fact tone, I don't know if anyone reads these letters, but I figure someone ought to know, made her call him the next morning.

Edgar had died the previous October. His daughter, Phyllis, answered.

Perrysburg was four hours from Cleveland if you didn't stop. Maren stopped twice: once for gas, once for coffee, once for a second coffee when the first one failed her. She arrived at Phyllis Pryce's house at two in the afternoon with a legal pad and a folder of documents she'd gathered in the three weeks since the phone call, FOIA requests, EPA correspondence, a 1998 consent decree between Halloran and the Ohio EPA that had been quietly amended in 2004 and again in 2009.

Phyllis was fifty-one and worked from home doing medical transcription. She sat across from Maren at a kitchen table that had been scrubbed so thoroughly it had gone pale, and she put both hands flat on the surface before she spoke.

"Two attorneys came out here," Phyllis said. "In 2008. They said the consent decree covered it, that my dad had missed the statute of limitations anyway, and that the levels in the water never exceeded the advisory threshold."

"They were from my firm," Maren said. "I found the correspondence."

Phyllis looked at her.

"I'm not here to defend that. I'm here because I think the 2008 assessment was based on an advisory threshold that Halloran had an active role in setting."

A silence. The refrigerator hummed.

"My dad knew that," Phyllis said finally. "He wrote it in the letter. The part nobody seemed to read."

Maren had read it. She turned to page four of her legal pad, where she'd transcribed Edgar's exact language: I have found correspondence suggesting the company ran their own tests in 1996 and 1997 and that these tests came out different from what they told the EPA. I have photocopies I made before returning the documents to my friend who prefers not to be identified.

"I need those photocopies," Maren said.

The photocopies were in a fireproof lockbox in Phyllis's basement, which was also where Phyllis had stored forty-three folders of her father's materials, newspaper clippings and correspondence and receipts and maps hand-annotated in a wobbling blue ink that hurt Maren to look at. She took photos of everything on her phone and drove back to Cleveland with the documents in the passenger seat, the folder buckled in with the seatbelt, which she only realized when she stopped for gas and found this funny in a way that made her a little worried about herself.

At the office, she put everything on the conference room table and didn't look at it for two days because she needed to file a motion in the securities case and bill thirty hours she had not yet billed and call her mother back.

Then she looked at it.

Halloran Chemical had been acquired in 2003 by a company called Arcterra Group, which had been acquired in 2011 by a Dutch conglomerate with a long name and a short acronym, which had been partially divested in 2018 through a bankruptcy reorganization. Following the corporate lineage took Maren three weeks and the help of a law school friend who did M&A in New York and owed her a favor. At the end of the chain was a subsidiary still incorporated in Ohio, still listed as active, still paying quarterly filings.

She filed a complaint in October. The defendant's counsel responded in December with a motion to dismiss citing the statute of limitations, the consent decree, and the prior 2008 assessment. The motion was forty-eight pages long and footnoted. It was thorough and confident in the way that things are when they have worked before.

Maren wrote a sixty-two page opposition.

The judge denied her opposition in January. She filed a motion for reconsideration in February. The judge denied that too.

She appealed in March.

"You should think about what this is costing you," her partner Michael said. He stood in her office doorway in a way that meant he wasn't staying. "Not just financially."

"I know what it's costing."

"The firm isn't going to keep absorbing—"

"I know, Michael."

He looked at the wall of documents, the pinned maps, the printouts, the photograph Phyllis had given her of Edgar Pryce standing in front of the barn with seventeen cattle, a photo from 1988 when the operation had been healthy, and his expression shifted into something she couldn't read. Not unkindness. Something more like exhaustion.

"Do you think you're going to win?" he asked.

"I think Halloran ran internal tests in 1996 showing PFOS contamination at seventy times the level they reported. I think they knew and they filed false data. I think the 2008 assessment was an artifact of a threshold they shaped." She paused. "I think Edgar Pryce had seventeen cattle and then he had none, and then he spent the last twelve years of his life writing letters in progressively worse handwriting because his nervous system was failing, and I think he died thinking no one had read them."

Michael left. She turned back to the wall.

The Sixth Circuit reversed in August on a procedural ground she had not expected, not the statute of limitations but a standing question involving the 2004 amendment to the consent decree. She read the opinion twice, sitting at her desk at eight in the morning with cold coffee, and then she called Phyllis.

"We lost the appeal," she said.

"Okay," Phyllis said.

"I want to re-file in federal court on a different theory. The 2004 amendment, I think there's a constitutional due process argument embedded in how it was structured. It would essentially reset the limitations clock."

A long pause. "My father would have liked you," Phyllis said.

"I hope that's true."

"It is. He liked people who were specific."

The federal complaint was filed in November. It was seventy-one pages long and cited thirty-seven scientific studies, eleven of which had been published since the original Ohio filing and contained new data on PFOS half-lives in human tissue. Maren had read all thirty-seven. She had read the primary sources for most of them. At some point, without meaning to, she had become someone who understood fluoropolymer chemistry reasonably well.

The defendant's counsel filed a motion to dismiss in January. Different firm, different counsel, the Dutch conglomerate had brought in a larger firm from Washington. The motion was sixty pages and cited case law from four circuits. It was, technically, better than the first one.

Maren wrote an eighty-page opposition.

She filed it on a Wednesday and went home and made pasta and opened a bottle of wine she'd been saving for something, though she wasn't sure this was that something. She sat at the kitchen table and thought about Edgar Pryce at his own kitchen table, writing in blue ink that would eventually become unreliable, trying to be specific.

She thought about the swimming she'd done at ten, before she'd given it up, the particular quality of water before you knew what was in it.

The judge denied the motion to dismiss in March.

Maren read the order standing at her kitchen counter at six in the morning. She read it again. She forwarded it to Phyllis with no subject line and no message, just the PDF, and Phyllis called back twelve minutes later and said okay again, but differently.

Discovery opened in April. The defendant's counsel produced documents on a rolling basis, as they always do, paper as strategy, volume as attrition. By June, Maren had received forty-two thousand pages. She had a second-year associate helping her now and a new agreement with Michael that she would not discuss the case's economics for the next eighteen months. She had a wall in the spare bedroom at home that had started to look like the office wall.

In the forty-two thousand pages, on page 31,847, in a folder labeled Internal Correspondence (Technical), Non-Responsive and produced apparently by error, were the 1996 tests.

Exactly what Edgar Pryce had described. PFOS levels in the groundwater plume. Seventy-one times the reported figure. A covering memo from a vice president of environmental affairs that said, in the last paragraph, recommend we do not forward to EPA at this time pending further internal review, and then, below that, in different ink: agreed.

Maren sat with the document for a while. Not eleven minutes. Longer.

Then she called Phyllis and read her the last paragraph, slowly and specifically, the way Edgar would have wanted.