Ms. Garrigan wrote that down. Then she looked at Dr. Dombrowski.
He took his glasses down off his forehead and put them on and stepped forward, past the other two, and stood in front of the center panel for a long time. He read the transcription and then he bent down and read the photograph of the page itself, his nose almost to the board, the way Mick had wanted to. Then he straightened up.
"Mr. Beckwith," he said. His voice was dry and very precise, a lecturer's voice. "Let me ask you the question I would ask a graduate student. You have a sworn inquest, with testimony from the superintendent and from two surviving miners, which concludes one thing. And you have a private notebook, written by one man, never entered into evidence, never cross-examined, which says the opposite. Why should a historian believe the notebook?"
Calvert had known this question was coming. Mrs. Agard had asked it of him three times, in three different ways, and the first time he had not had an answer and had gone home and not slept. He had an answer now. He took a breath.
"You shouldn't," he said. "Not by itself."
Dr. Dombrowski's eyebrows went up a very small amount.
"It's one source, and it's an interested one," Calvert said. "My grandfather was there. He went in with the crew. If the advance was the foreman's fault alone, then the fire boss who signed off on the morning inspection was in trouble too, because he would have had to approve the workings before anybody went in. So he had a reason to write down that he warned them. I know that. I put that in the process paper." He pointed at the binder. "So I went looking for something that wasn't him."
He opened the binder to the yellow tab and turned it around so the judges could see. "In the inquest transcript, page eighty-one, there's testimony from the hoisting engineer at the top of the slope. A man named Elmer Hosler. He's asked about the phones and he says the second level west phone rang into the superintendent's office at about five twenty-five that morning, and he could hear the superintendent shouting into it, and he says he didn't hear the words. Nobody asked him another question about it. They moved on. Then on page one hundred and four, the superintendent testifies that he had no contact with the second level crew that morning before the fall." Calvert turned another page. "Those can't both be true. Somebody called up. And somebody yelled at them. That was in the record the whole time. It's just nobody put it next to anything."