Who finally actually spoke. You know they're going to ask you to stay involved. He said the investigation. They're going to want you accessible. I know.
Eleanor said. Are you going to do it? Eleanor thought about it honestly about what staying involved meant. the phone calls, the meetings, the slow grinding institutional process of building a federal case, months or years it would take to move from documentation to accountability about Frank's land about the Callaway lumberyard. Rosa on the planning board learning procedure sitting at a table that used to exclude her.
She thought about the other towns on George had tracked the ones where the same methodology was playing out right now today in the particular silence of people who believe they are completely alone there. She said Michael nodded. He wasn't surprised or where there's something I want to ask you. Eleanor said anything the people we might be able to reach. Eleanor said that in those other counties, in other places where this is happening, if someone in one of those places starts documenting the way I did and they need support, need to know that they're not alone while they're still in the middle of it, can we build that?
Michael looked at her for a long time. A way for isolated people to know there's a network. He said they have to make the call before they have to make any call. Eleanor said just knowing it exists changes what you're capable of. From the beginning I knew and it changed how I moved through every single one of those seven months.
If I hadn't known. She paused. I might have folded in April. Michael was very quiet. I never would have folded.
He said I don't know that. Eleanor said simply. I know that knowing I wasn't alone made it easier to act like I wasn't afraid. Act like you're not afraid. long enough changes the actual situation.
Michael looked at the window at Silver Creek beyond it at the particular late afternoon light of a November day in Montana of cold and gray and very clear. The kind of light that shows you things exactly as they are, he said finally. We can build that. Eleanor nodded. She picked up her coffee cup, found it cold, set it back down.
She stood up and took the cup to the small sink in the back and rinsed it out with the automatic efficiency of a person who never lets small tasks pile up. Call Frank, she said. He deserves to know how today went. Go call Frank, Michael said. Her phone, she dialed.
Frank answered on the second ring the way he always answered immediately because Frank Donnelly had spent his whole life attending to things that needed attending to. Frank Eleanor said today went well. I need you to know that. A silent. Then Frank's voice rough with something he wasn't naming.
Well, well enough that I want you to call your attorney tomorrow morning. Eleanor said, "Tell him the federal investigation is formally open and that the documentation he'll need is in the record." She paused. And Frank, we're on the right road. That the silence on the other end was long.
She could hear Frank breathing. She could hear very faintly through the phone the sound of wind moving across his land. The 60 acres that had belonged to his family for generations. The land that Grant Holloway had taken from him through a fabricated liability and a fear that had been deliberately carefully manufactured. Eleanor, Frank said.
His voice was completely steady. Thank you. Don't thank me yet. Eleanor said. We've got road ahead.
I know. Frank said. Thank you anyway. She said good night and hung up. Ignore.
She stood in the back of the shop with the phone in her hand for a moment about the road ahead about the federal case and the months it would take in the other towns and the network that didn't exist yet but would. Rosa on the planning board and Derek calling his brothers and Bill Harmon sitting in the corner of the shop this morning with with his coffee steady and present showing up the way he should have been showing up all along. and doing it now without ceremony because some debts get paid quietly about Thomas. She thought about what he would say about all of it about the notebook the call about the 347 people and the federal investigators and the 6 years and 7 months of documentation that had just become the spine of something much larger than Silver Creek. They would say, "I told you so."
He would be grinning when he said it. Gravel in a barrel laugh. She felt it move through her, not grief or not at this moment. Something warmer, something that had his voice in it without being sad. She walked back into the main shop.
Michael was still there, sitting at the workt looking at the wall where Thomas's photograph hung. He was something, Michael said. He didn't look away from the photograph. He really was, Eleanor said. He used to say.
Michael stopped, dick his head slightly. What? Eleanor said. Michael looked at her mother. He used to say that the two of you together were unstoppable because you were the patients and he was the motion.
He said alone you were both extraordinary. Together you were something that didn't have a name. Eleanor looked at the photograph. Told you that she said many times. Michael said he was very proud of you.
Always in the way that people are proud of things they understand the full value of. He paused. I don't think he was wrong. Eleanor looked at Thomas's photograph for a long time. Wrong about much, she said finally.
The shop was quiet. Outside Silver Creek moved through. It's late November afternoon. Its people in their businesses and homes and the Golden Eagle and the planning board meeting Rosa was preparing for and the lumber yard where Derek was walking the property again with his brothers. All three of them, for the first time since the sale, saying things to each other that had needed to be said for a year.