Toms River Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Dan Fagin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fagin, Dan.

  Toms River : a story of science and salvation / Dan Fagin.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53861-1

  1. Drinking water—Contamination—Health aspects—Toms River Region. 2. Cancer—Toms River Region. 3. Groundwater—Pollution—Health aspects—Toms River Region. 4. Water quality—New Jersey—Toms River Watershed. 5. Toms River Watershed (N.J.)—Environmental conditions. I. Title.

  RA592.N5F34 2013

  363.7209749′48—dc23 2012017030

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design: Daniel Rembert

  Jacket illustration: including images © Ray Yeager (water), © Bigstock (water tower)

  Web asset credit: Excerpted from Toms River by Dan Fagin copyright © 2013 by Dan Fagin. Published by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  v3.1

  Every Tree

  carries the snow with its own grace

  bends to the breeze with its own sway

  etches the clouds with its own stroke

  bows to the ice with its own resolve

  rights its trunk clenched by its own roots

  drenches itself in its own desire

  and creates its own spring.

  —Lois Levin Roisman

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Marking Time

  Map

  I. THE ICE CREAM FACTORY

  1. Pirates

  2. Insensible Things

  3. First Fingerprints

  4. Secrets

  5. Sharkey and Columbo at the Rustic Acres

  6. Cells

  7. On Cardinal Drive

  II. BREACH

  8. Water and Salt

  9. Hippies in the Kitchen

  10. The Coloring Contest

  11. Cases

  12. Acceptable Risks

  13. Friends and Neighbors

  III. COUNTING

  14. Two Wards, Two Hits

  15. Cluster Busting

  16. Moving On

  17. Invisible Trauma

  18. A Cork in the Ocean

  19. Expectations

  IV. CAUSES

  20. Outsiders

  21. Surrogacy

  22. Blood Work

  23. Associations

  24. Legacies

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Prologue: Marking Time

  On the rare occasions when Michael Gillick needed to know what day it was, he could check his pillbox. It was the size of a small briefcase and had seven compartments, one for each day of the week. Each compartment was subdivided into sections, for the five times each day that Michael took his pills: seven o’clock in the morning, noon, 3:30, 8:30, and eleven at night. (He set his cell phone alarm to the times, to make sure he did not forget.) Once a week, Michael or his mother would refill the compartments, in a careful ritual that was the pharmacopoeial equivalent of turning the hourglass.

  For a typical week, he counted out 138 pills: tiny pink morphine tablets for pain, yellow steroids to normalize his immune system, white phenobarbitals for seizures, and blue oval-shaped antihistamines for nausea and dizziness. There was also Prevacid for heartburn, Corgard for high blood pressure, and a yogurt pill for indigestion. Three times a day, Michael took a powerful blood pressure medication called Regitine. Years earlier, the drug’s manufacturer—the company’s name at the time was Ciba-Geigy—had stopped making Regitine in pill form, but Michael had secured a large stockpile and had been working his way through it ever since.

  Michael lived with his parents in a ranch-style house on a shady street in the comfortable Brookside Heights section of Toms River, New Jersey. He did not get out much. He loved movies, but a trip to the theater was an ordeal because he was extremely small. Strangers would point and say, “Oh, what a cutie!” Once, when he was fourteen, he stepped out into the lobby to look for a bathroom, and a woman demanded to know why he was wandering off without his mother. He had tried dating, but it did not go well. When Michael was sixteen, he developed a mad crush on the girl who delivered the newspaper. He would watch her from his bedroom window every morning. But when he finally got up the courage to try to speak to her, he kept his eyes on the floor. Later, he realized why: He did not want to watch her watching him.

  Born in 1979, Michael was now a man. He stood four feet six inches tall and weighed about one hundred pounds.

  If Michael held a job or attended school, there would be other ways to measure the passage of time besides his pillbox. Michael had tried one semester of community college. He was definitely smart enough—he ended up with straight A’s—but everyone in the Gillick family agreed that school put too much stress on his damaged body; a job would be even worse. So Michael stayed home instead. Most days he would sleep until noon, watch soap operas in the afternoon, exercise (he liked lifting light weights), mess around a bit on the guitar, and then play video games or watch professional wrestling for hours and hours after dinner.

  Michael was a night owl, but he had his reasons. Staying up until three o’clock and watching television was far superior to trying to sleep. There were two nightmares he could not shake. In the first, he watched through his bedroom window as the family dog ran out into the street and was hit by a passing car. The second nightmare, far worse, came from the horror movies and fantasy video games Michael loved. It featured a hideous, blood-soaked man brandishing a huge knife in a howling thunderstorm. “I’ll always be with you, and in the end, I’ll come for you,” the man would tell Michael as lightning crashed. Then the ghoul would kill Michael’s parents and older brother, one by one, as Michael watched. After one especially horrific night when Michael was young, his mother asked a police sketch artist to come to the house and draw the imaginary man based on Michael’s description, but it didn’t help much. The gruesome killer was true to his word: He kept coming back. His name was “Sir Kan,” and only later did Michael and his mother invert the name’s syllables and figure out its significance.

  The towering fact of Michael Gillick’s life was that he had cancer. He had always had cancer. When he was three months old, Michael was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a fast-spreading cancer of the nervous system. By that time, the disease was already so far advanced that it was apparent that he had been afflicted even while still inside his mother’s womb. The doctors had told Linda and Raymond (Rusty) Gillick that Michael had only a fifty-fifty chance of reaching his first birthday. They missed their guess by decades, but survival came at a terrible price. Tumors cost Michael the full use of his left eye and ear, ruined his balance, and shifted the location of his internal organs. Steroid drugs stunted his growth and bloated his face, while chemotherapy weakened his heart and lungs, destroyed the lining of his stomach, and dissolved his bones to the point that walking was painful. When he was younger, Michael’s body was so sensitive that he would scream if anyone so much as touched him. Now he mainly just felt exhausted, breathless, and nauseated—and that was on a pretty good day. On the bad days he could hardly move. And while his pharmaceutical regimen seemed to be holding his neuroblastoma in check, no doctor ever dared tell him that he had beaten it.

&nb
sp; Michael had no memory of living any other way, so he tended not to wallow in his problems. When he was younger, he had at times doubted his Catholic faith, but he had since come to believe deeply in an afterlife and in a god that was both just and merciful—even if there was precious little evidence of that in the circumstances of his own life. He salted his Catholicism with New Age ideas about the healing power of crystals (he sometimes wore one around his neck) and tried hard to avoid being morose. “Every night you’re still alive, that’s been a good day—even if it’s a bad TV day. Tonight is wrestling, so it’s a good day,” he would say. “People take things for granted, and they shouldn’t.” Michael always made a special effort to sound upbeat when his mother, who ran a cancer support group, asked him to talk to a newly diagnosed child.

  Only his parents and a few close friends knew the secret behind Michael’s stoicism: He was waiting. Michael had long ago resigned himself to the fact that he would never be healthy, but there was something he wanted almost as much—sometimes, even more. What Michael Gillick wanted was justice. For as long as he could remember and with a certainty he could never fully explain—“I just feel it, here,” he would say, tapping his scarred chest—Michael was absolutely convinced that something, someone, was responsible for giving him cancer and making his life so painful. And thanks to a remarkable sequence of events in his hometown of Toms River, events in which Michael and his mother played a significant part, he was now equally certain he knew who had done it.

  “When I first heard about what might have caused my cancer, when I was young, I said, ‘I want to live and fight, so I can see them punished,’ ” he recalled years later. “I said, ‘I won’t die until I get retribution.’ I didn’t know the word retribution at the time, so I probably said ‘revenge.’ That’s what I want. We’re still waiting for it, and we’re not going away. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a lot more we’re going to find out, and when we do, it’s going to blow people’s minds.”

  Many of his neighbors didn’t believe him, and it was easy to understand why. Michael’s convictions about the cause of his illness threatened almost everything that the people of Toms River believed about themselves, their town, and even their country. With its strip malls and package stores, its subdivisions and ball fields, Toms River was no different than thousands of other towns. It had grown very fast—as fast as any community in the United States for a while—but growth was the engine that created its wealth. If the detritus of Toms River’s prosperity had been quietly buried, dumped, or burned within the town’s borders, then many residents seemed to regard that as a necessary if unpleasant tradeoff, like rush-hour traffic or crowded beaches in July. Besides, environmental risk was everywhere. The choices that the people of Toms River had made over the decades—to defer to authority, to focus on the here and now, to grow at almost any cost—were hardly unique. If Michael Gillick was right, then all of those choices were wrong—and not just in Toms River.

  Michael had been waiting for a very long time, and he was willing to keep waiting. In bleak hospital wards as far away as New York City and Philadelphia, he and his mother had met dozens of other young people from Toms River with cancer—far too many to be a coincidence, he was certain. Many of those friends were gone now, gone forever, but Michael was still here, waiting. He had sat through hundreds of committee meetings and press conferences and strategy sessions in lawyers’ offices. He had waited for the results of scientific investigations that seemed to drag on forever, including the big one—the one that was supposed to prove that he and his mother were wrong, that they were just being emotional, hysterical. The so-called experts had gotten a surprise then, hadn’t they?

  Michael and Linda Gillick had started out knowing nothing, and now, more than thirty years later, they knew almost everything. Along with many other people, some of whom they had never even met, the Gillicks had helped to uncover the secret history of Toms River: a dark chronicle of dumpers at midnight and deceptions in broad daylight, of corporate avarice and government neglect. They had fought the fears and delusions of their own neighbors, and they had been vindicated. Now Michael felt he was closer than ever to achieving his final goal. It was just a matter of biding his time, and then the whole truth would come out at last. He could wait a little longer for that.

  For a larger version of the following image, click here.

  PART I

  THE ICE CREAM FACTORY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Pirates

  Who Tom was, if he ever was, is the first unsolved mystery of Toms River. He may have been an adventurer named Captain William Tom who helped chase the Dutch out of New Amsterdam in 1664 and then prospered as the British Crown’s tax collector in the wildlands to the south, in the newly established province of New Jersey. Or he may have been an ancient Indian named Old Tom who lived on the cliffs near the mouth of the river and spied on merchant ships during the Revolutionary War on behalf of the British or the Americans, depending on which side paid the larger bribe.

  The people of Toms River, in their infinite capacity for self-invention, prefer a different origin story, one that features neither taxes nor bribery. Despite some doubt about its veracity, the story is enshrined on park plaques, in local histories, and even in a bit of doggerel known grandly as the township’s “Old Epic Poem.”1 According to this version, a man named Thomas Luker came alone to the dense pine forests of central New Jersey in about 1700 and settled near the bay, on the northern side of a small river that would bear his name. He lived peacefully among the natives, took the name Tom Pumha (“white friend” in the Lenape language), and married the chief’s daughter, Princess Ann.

  Today, just up Main Street from the spot where their wigwam supposedly stood, is a bank that used to be known as First National Bank of Toms River. For decades, First National fueled the town’s frenzied growth with easy credit before it finally imploded in 1991 under the weight of hundreds of millions of dollars in bad real estate loans and a Depression-style run on its assets by frantic depositors. There was nothing apocryphal about its spectacular collapse, which was the largest bank failure in New Jersey history and a harbinger of even more jarring local crises to come, but no plaques or epic poems commemorate the event. In Toms River, history has always been a fungible commodity.

  Before the chemical industry came to town in the 1950s and the supercharged growth began, the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Toms River was the American Revolution. In the years before the war, because of its quirky geography, the village had been a haven for small-time piracy. Cranberry Inlet, a narrow passage between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay, was one of the few places on the New Jersey coast where ships could safely wait out storms. But captains who brought their ships in through the inlet to seek shelter in the bay became sitting ducks for the local riffraff, who could slip out of Toms River in whaleboats, attack the ships, and steal their cargo before scurrying back to hide in the shoals. Scavenging shipwrecks was another lucrative pastime. If too few boats ran aground on their own, enterprising locals occasionally moved things along by posting lights in unfamiliar places on the beach to confuse ship pilots looking for the inlet.

  With the coming of the Revolutionary War, such underhanded tactics suddenly were not only legal, they were regarded as acts of patriotism. The men of Toms River pursued British shipping with gusto and cooperated with American privateers who seized Loyalist ships and sold their contents at auction in the town square. The British struck back in 1781 by torching the town’s salt works. After losing still more supply ships, the Redcoats returned the following year to burn the entire town, including all fifteen houses, the rebuilt salt works, and the local tavern. Holed up in a small stockade in what is now Huddy Park in downtown Toms River, an outnumbered force of twenty-five rebel militiamen led by Captain Joshua Huddy tried unsuccessfully to hold off the attackers. An account of the raid in a Tory newspaper described the subsequent rout: “The Town, as it is called, consisting of about a dozen houses, in
which none but a piratical set of banditti resided, together with a grist and saw-mill, were with the blockhouse burned to the ground, and an iron cannon spiked and thrown into the river.”2 Huddy was captured, held in irons on a prison ship for two months, and then hanged without a trial. His execution was a major diplomatic incident that enraged General George Washington; the uproar even led to a brief suspension of the Paris peace talks that ended the war.

  In the thirty years that followed, the population of Dover Township (the town’s official name until 2006, though almost everyone called it Toms River) quadrupled and its “banditti” went straight, more or less.3 They prospered as merchants in a bustling port that featured two inns and was a busy stop on the coastal stagecoach route. Unfortunately for the town, a storm in 1812 sealed Cranberry Inlet, and with it the community’s chief source of income and main connection to the outside world. (Exactly 200 years later, Hurricane Sandy would devastate parts of Toms River and the shoreline communities, destroying more than 400 Ocean County homes and causing major damage to more than 1,100 others. Sandy came close to reopening Cranberry Inlet but did not quite succeed because so many hardened structures had been built in Ortley Beach during the real estate boom of the 1960s and 1970s.) With the closure of the inlet in 1812, Toms River was once again unimportant, and it would stay that way for the next 140 years. Its population stagnated at less than three thousand for a century before edging upward starting in the early 1900s with the arrival of the railroad and summer tourists from Philadelphia and New York. Toms River was the sleepy center of what was, literally and figuratively, a backwater county. The 1920 census of Ocean County recorded about twenty-two thousand people in a county of almost nine hundred square miles, a third of it under water. Most were still farmers or tradesmen, with a sprinkling of wealthier landowners.