Dr. Dombrowski looked at the page. He took the binder out of Calvert's hands, which Calvert had not expected, and held it, and read page eighty-one, and then turned to page one hundred and four, and read that, and then turned back to eighty-one.
"And there's Mrs. Gallagher," Calvert said, more quietly. "Francis Gallagher's widow. She wrote a letter to the Herald in April of '61. It's in there too, behind the green tab. She says her husband told her the night before that Kostka wouldn't send them into the Mammoth breakthrough because the water was making, and that the company was mad about it. She says she knows who killed her husband and it wasn't who they said. The Herald printed it on page fourteen under the obituaries. That was the only time anybody wrote it down that I could find. Besides my grandfather."
Nobody said anything. Mr. Hufnagle had taken his glasses off and was rubbing the bridge of his nose. Ms. Garrigan had stopped writing.
Dr. Dombrowski closed the binder and handed it back. He looked at Calvert for a long moment over the top of his reading glasses, and then he looked at the cardigan, and Calvert did not know whether he recognized it or whether he was only looking at a boy in an old sweater that did not fit him.
"My father," Dr. Dombrowski said, "was carried out of the slope by Tibor Kostka. Did you know that?"
Calvert felt the floor of the gym go very far away.
"No, sir," he said.
"He died at the surface. In the lamp house. Thirty minutes later. I was fifteen years old. I was in the lamp house." He said it in exactly the same dry voice in which he had asked about the sources. "Tibor Kostka brought him up and laid him on the bench and went back down for the next man. I remember his hands. I saw him go back down. At the inquest he was asked whether he had ordered the advance, and he said, I was the foreman. That's all he said. I was the foreman. He didn't say yes. I noticed at the time that he didn't say yes. I was fifteen and I noticed. And I have spent twenty-six years—" He stopped. He took his glasses off and folded them and put them in the breast pocket of his sport coat, very carefully, as if they were the thing that needed attention. "Thank you, Mr. Beckwith," he said. "That's very thorough work."