OUTSIDE CORRESPONDENT Bill Donahue has never been poisoned. Nor does he hail from a small town. But an old twist in his family tree makes him uniquely qualified to cover the situation in Fallon, Nevada, where high levels of arsenic were discovered in the municipal water supply 30 years ago.

"My great-great-great-great-uncle, Charles Mitchell, was a physician with the British naval ship the Vigo and one of Napoléon's surgeons," says Donahue. "He signed an autopsy report stating that Napoléon died naturally, of cancer, an assessment that is now in question." That's because, as historian Sten Forshufvud argued in his 1961 book Assassination at St. Helena, the emperor was more likely murdered, gradually, with arsenic.

It's a long leap of space and time from St. Helena, an island off the coast of Africa, where Donahue's ancestor may have joined in an imperial cover-up back in 1821, to the present-day crisis in a hardscrabble town some 70 miles east of Reno. But when the Portland, Oregon-based writer traveled to the Silver State to interview Fallon residents, who drink and bathe in what amounts to a solution of poison, he discovered a newfangled mystery with its own fatal implications.

In concentrated doses, arsenic kills quickly, but the low-grade, diluted version running in Fallon faucets has worked its mayhem over decades, not months. And recent Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions have finally split Fallon's ranks. On one side stand those who believe that the EPA‹which has directed the town to help build and pay for a treatment plant‹has the people's best interests at heart. On the other, outback populists who would rather the feds leave Fallon alone. "The EPA is coming in and telling them, 'Do this,' and it is easy to understand why some of them say, 'To hell with them, I am going to live my life,'" says Donahue.

Donahue, 36, also writes for Mother Jones and DoubleTake. "America's Little (Well...) Actually Kind of Serious (Um...) Maybe It's Worse Than We Thought (Hmmm...) Pretty Damn Big (Gulp!) Arsenic Problem" begins on page 42.