Chapter 7: Waiting

Three weeks in a six-room motel in Calloway, Nevada was, Dana decided, the strangest assignment she'd ever taken. She had called her editor on day four and told him she needed three more weeks and couldn't explain why. He had trusted her in the past and trusted her now, which she was aware was a significant professional gift. She spent the three weeks doing what journalists do when they're waiting for the story to be ready: she reported the surrounding context. She talked to everyone in Calloway who would talk to her. Not about Mira — about the town. About what Calloway was, who lived there and why, what the mine's closure had cost and what it had preserved. About the particular quality of small communities — the way the knowledge of everyone's business was simultaneously burden and safety net, the way collective decision-making was simultaneously democratic and suffocating. She talked to Pete every morning at the gas station. He was, she realized, exceptional — the kind of person who would eventually leave Calloway and be significant somewhere and would probably, if she stayed in contact, be a useful connection in ten years. She told him this. He looked startled and then pleased. "Did you find out what you came for?" he asked, on day eight. "Almost," she said. "Three more weeks." "That long?" "These things take time when they're worth doing right." He nodded, in the way of someone filing a useful piece of information. Martin came to find her on day twelve, at the diner, and sat across from her without ordering. "The investigation that Mira started," he said. "Is it going to be enough?" "I think so. If what Katherine Osei says holds." "And the people responsible — the holding company, the people who knew and didn't say —" "The ones with legal liability will face it," Dana said. "The ones with only moral liability —" She looked at him. "That's harder. But it doesn't stay secret. That's something." Martin looked at his hands. "I told her to stop," he said. "You know that. She knows that. And she's coming back anyway." Dana picked up her coffee. "People are more complicated than their worst moments. You know that too." He said nothing, but the quality of his silence changed.