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Vic had come along only because she’d asked him to, but Caroline was glad he was here. She hadn’t had a minute alone with him, and there was something she had to tell him. The other night at her Asperger’s RDI group—Relationship Development Intervention—which always met at Caroline’s friend Billie’s house, a new mom had shown up, a woman who had the kind of straight blond-highlighted pageboy that three quarters of the women in northeastern Tallahassee sported, even though maintaining such a hairstyle in the raging humidity took buckets of time and money and products. This woman quickly let it be known that she didn’t want to waste time discussing RDI, or what she called piddle-ass therapy. She wanted to talk about how the mercury in vaccination shots had ruined their children. “I’m involved in a lawsuit right now against drug companies,” she’d said. “That’s where we ought to be directing our energies! We need to be exposing these people. They’ve ruined thousands of kids with those vaccines. My daughter’s life is ruined! My beautiful daughter is ruined!”

What a thing to say about your daughter, Caroline thought, but then realized she’d thought similar things but had never said them aloud. Sometimes, in her darker moments, she wondered if the reason she spent so much time trying to fix Ava was because she couldn’t fully love Ava the way she was.

The women in the RDI group had tried to comfort the angry woman and counter her arguments, saying they doubted that the shots were the only cause, if they were a cause at all, and that they’d chosen to put their energy toward doing something to help their children now; but the woman didn’t want to hear any of it. There was something about the way the woman went on and on, about her entirely understandable and justifiable but out-of-place anger, that stayed with Caroline and eventually drove her to do some detective work. And she’d unearthed something amazing, which was what she needed to tell Vic about.

Above the Canterbury Hills pond, a huge orange and blue blossom burst in the sky amid cheers and hoots of appreciation. Caroline gave up waiting for Vic to sit down with her, slid off the metal picnic table, and went over to stand beside him. “Listen to this,” she began.

She told him how she’d gone snooping through her father’s bedroom and had found a folder in an envelope in one of her father’s dresser drawers. The folder was labeled Prenatal Study—Memphis University Medical School. When she opened it, she discovered medical records and typed narratives with her father’s name signed at the bottom.

On the papers were names of hundreds of pregnant women who’d been given, in the early fifties, prenatal cocktails containing radioisotopes at the Memphis University Medical School. It was part of a government nutrition study.

She’d known that her dad was involved in some experiments in the fifties, experiments he didn’t like to discuss, but she’d had no idea what they were really about. In the folder was correspondence between Wilson Spriggs and someone at the Atomic Energy Commission regarding their radioisotope distribution program, which Dr. Spriggs was taking advantage of. The cocktails given to the pregnant women were made with radioactive iron that came from the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, uranium pile.

From what Caroline could figure out, a random sample of pregnant women visiting the prenatal clinic would have a blood sample drawn on their first visit, radioactive iron administered on the second visit, and finally another blood sample taken on the third visit to determine how much of the iron had been absorbed. The women were told only that they were getting vitamins that would be healthy for them and the baby. No consent forms were signed.

As she finished talking, a spidery, spangly star with tails whiz-banged overhead. “My favorite color!” yelled a nearby kid.

“Sweet Jesus,” Vic said. “Your father poisoned all those people.”

They both turned toward Wilson, who was holding a lit sparkler someone had given