Poor Rock

Thirty years of crushed rock went into that water and the lake handed most of it back.

Rosalind Keele is an environmental engineer, forty-four, and she has been hired to put a number on it — how much of the shore is mill tailings, how deep it runs, and what it would cost to make somebody responsible for it. It is a six-figure question. The answer is under her boots for two miles.

The Trevarrow family has lived on top of that shore since 1897. They were here when the mill was running and they were here when it stopped, and they have been remarkably relaxed about a stranger with a coring rig ever since she arrived, which is the first thing that bothers her.

Mason Trevarrow is polite, useful, and always somewhere nearby. He carries her equipment without being asked. He knows the shore the way other people know a hallway in the dark. He will talk about the mill all evening and he will not talk about the family, and when she asks why nothing grows on the beach he gives her an answer that is true and is not the reason.

What she is actually standing on is not waste rock.

It is a hundred and thirty years of something the mill was built to bury, and the family did not stay because they could not afford to leave. They stayed because somebody had to keep the shore, and because the last person who tried to hand that job to somebody else is still down there.

Rosalind has spent her whole career being the person who writes down what is really in the ground.

Nobody has ever wanted her to stop quite this badly.