White Fire (38 page)
The police station loomed up through the blowing snow, its windows glowing with yellow light, perversely inviting. All were apparently at work despite the storm. She walked up the steps, stomped off the snow in the vestibule, shook out her woolen hat and scarf, and went in.
“Is Special Agent Pendergast in?” she asked Iris, the lady at the reception desk, with whom she had gotten friendly over the past ten days.
“Oh, dear,” she sighed. “He doesn’t sign in and out, and he keeps the oddest hours. I just can’t keep track.” She shook her head. “Feel free to check his office.”
Corrie went down into the basement, grateful for once for the heat. His door was closed. She knocked; no answer.
Where could he be, in a storm like this? Not at the Hotel Sebastian, where he hadn’t been answering his phone.
She turned the handle, but it was locked.
She paused for a moment, thoughtfully, still grasping the handle. Then she went back upstairs.
“Find him?” Iris asked.
“No luck,” said Corrie. She hesitated. “Listen, I think I left something important in his office. Do you have a key?”
Iris considered this. “Well, I do, but I don’t think I can let you in. What did you leave?”
“My cell phone.”
“Oh.” Iris thought some more. “I suppose I
could
let you in, so long as I stay with you.”
“That would be great.”
She followed Iris back down the stairs. In a moment the woman had opened the door and turned on the light. The room was hot and stuffy. Corrie looked around. The desk was covered with papers that had been carefully arranged. She scanned the surface with her eyes but it was all too neat, too squared away, to expose much information.
“I don’t see it,” said Iris, looking about.
“He might have put it away in a drawer.”
“I don’t think you should be opening up any drawers, Corrie.”
“Right. Of course not.”
She looked frantically around the desk, this way and that. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” she said.
And then Corrie caught a glimpse of something interesting. A page torn out of a small notebook, covered with Pendergast’s distinctive copperplate handwriting, its top part sticking out of a sheaf of documents. Three underlined words jumped out:
Swinton
and
Christmas Mine
.
“Is it over here?” Corrie bent over the desk, as if looking behind a lamp, while “accidentally” pushing the notebooks with her elbow, exposing a few more lines of the torn page, on which Pendergast had printed:
mete at the Ideal 11 oclock Sharp to Night they are Holt Up in the closed Christmas Mine up on smugglers wall there are 4 of
“
Really
, Corrie, it’s time to go,” Iris said firmly, with a frown on her lips at noticing Corrie reading something on the desk.
“Okay. I’m sorry. Now, where
did
I leave that darn phone?”
Back at the hotel, Corrie quickly wrote out the lines from memory, then stared at them thoughtfully. It seemed obvious Pendergast had copied a note or old document that mentioned the place where the attack on the cannibals would take place: the Christmas Mine. In the Griswell Mansion, she had seen a number of maps of the mining district, with each mine and tunnel marked and identified. It would be simple to find the location, and maybe even the layout, of this Christmas Mine.
This was interesting. This changed everything. She’d suspected the mercury-crazed miners had been hiding in some abandoned mine. If they were killed in a tunnel or shaft, their remains could still be there somewhere.
The Christmas Mine
…if she recovered a few bone and hair samples from the remains, she could have them tested for mercury poisoning. Such a test was cheap and easy; you could even send away for a home kit. And if the tests were positive, it would be the final feather in her cap. She would have definitely solved the old murders and established a most unusual motivation.
She thought about her promise to Pendergast—to stay in the hotel, to abandon any attempt to find the person who’d shot at her and decapitated her dog. Well, she
had
abandoned the attempt. Pendergast shouldn’t have withheld information from her—especially information of such crucial importance to her thesis.
She glanced out the window. The blizzard was still going strong. Since it was getting on toward Christmas Eve, everything was closed, and the town was almost completely deserted. Right now would be a perfect time to pay a little visit to the archives in the Griswell Mansion.
Corrie paused for a moment, then pocketed her small set of lock picks. The Griswell place would most likely have a period lock—no challenge at all.
Once again she bundled up and ventured out into the storm. Encouragingly, nobody except the snowplows was out and about as she made her way through the deserted streets. Some of the Christmas decorations, evergreen garlands and ribbons, had blown loose in the wind and were flapping and swinging forlornly from lampposts and street banners. Strings of bulbs had also come loose and were sputtering erratically. She couldn’t see the outline of the mountains, but she could still hear, muffled by the snow, the hum and rumble of the lifts, which had been kept running despite all that had happened and the almost complete absence of skiers. Perhaps skiing was such an ingrained part of Roaring Fork culture that the lifts and snow-grooming equipment simply never stopped operating.
As she turned the corner of East Haddam, she suddenly had the impression someone was behind her. She spun around and peered into the murk, but could see nothing except swirling snow. She hesitated. It might have been a passerby, or perhaps her imagination. Still, Pendergast’s warning echoed in her mind.
There was one way to check. She retraced her steps—still quite visible in the snow. And indeed: there were additional footprints. The footprints had apparently been tracing hers, but they had suddenly veered away and gone off into a private alley—at just about the point where she had spun around.
Corrie suddenly found her heart beating hard. Okay, someone
was
following her. Maybe. Was it the thug who’d been trying to drive her out of town? Of course it might also be coincidence, paired with her justified sense of paranoia.
“Screw this,” she said out loud, turned back, and hurried down the street. Another corner and she found herself in front of the Griswell Mansion. The lock, as she figured, was old. It would be a simple matter to get inside.
But was the place alarmed?
A gust of wind buffeted her as she peered inside the door panes for signs of an alarm system. She couldn’t see anything obvious like infrared sensors or motion detectors mounted in the corners; nor was the building posted with an alarm warning. The place had an air about it of neglect and penny pinching. Maybe no one felt the piles of paper inside had any value or needed to be protected.
Even if the place
was
alarmed, and she set it off, were the police really going to respond? Right now they had bigger fish to fry. And in a storm like this, with high winds, falling branches, and ice, alarms were probably going off all over town.
Looking around, she removed her gloves and quickly picked the lock. She slipped inside, shut the door, took a deep breath. No alarm, no blinking lights, nothing. Just the shudder of the wind and snow outside.
She rubbed her hands together to warm them. This was going to be a piece of cake.
H
alf an hour later, hunched over a pile of papers in a dim back room, Corrie had found what she needed. An old map showed her the location and layout of the Christmas Mine. According to the information she had dug up, the mine was a bust, one of the first to become played out and be abandoned, way back in 1875, and as far as she could tell never again reopened. That was probably why the crazed miners had used it as a home base.
She took another, more careful, look at the map. While the mine was high up on Smuggler’s Wall, at nearly thirteen thousand feet in altitude, it was readily accessible by the web of old mining roads on the mountain, now used by four-wheelers in the summer and snowmobilers in the winter. The mine stood above a well-known complex of old structures situated in a natural bowl known as Smuggler’s Cirque, which was a popular tourist destination in the summertime. One of the buildings, by far the tallest, was famous for holding the remains of the Ireland Pump Engine, supposedly the largest pump in the world when it was constructed, which had been used to dewater the mines as the shafts were dug below the water table.
The Christmas Mine would surely be sealed—all the old mines and tunnels in Roaring Fork, Corrie had learned, had been bricked up or, in some cases, plated with iron. The mine might be difficult or even impossible to break into, especially considering the snow. But it was worth a try. She had every reason to believe the remains of the cannibals would still be there, perhaps secreted away someplace by the vigilantes who killed them.
As she looked over the papers, maps, and diagrams, she realized that—quite subconsciously—a plan had already formed in her mind. She’d go up to the mine, locate the bodies, and take her samples. And she’d do it now—while the routes out of town were still impassable, and before Pendergast could force her to return to New York.
But how to get up there, way up the side of a mountain in a furious storm? Even as she posed the question, she realized the answer. There were snowmobiles up at the ski shed. She would simply go up to The Heights, borrow a snowmobile…and pay a quick visit to the old Christmas Mine.
And now really was the perfect time: Christmas Eve day, when ninety percent of the town had left and everyone else was hunkered down at home. Even if somebody
was
tailing her, they’d never follow her to the mine—not in weather like this. Just a brief reconnaissance up to the mountain and back…and then she’d hole up in the hotel until she could make arrangements to leave town.
It occurred to her that it wasn’t just Kermode’s thugs she should be aware of, but the weather as well. If anybody else would be crazy going out in this storm, then wasn’t she acting a little crazy, too? She told herself she’d take it one step at a time. If the storm got too bad, or if she felt she was getting into a situation she couldn’t handle, she’d abandon the recon and head back.
Pocketing the old map of the mine and another map of the overall mining district showing all the connecting tunnels, she made her way back to the Hotel Sebastian, keeping an eye out for the suspected stalker but seeing no sign. In her room she began to prepare for the task ahead. She packed her backpack with a small water bottle, sampling bags, headlamp with extra batteries, extra gloves and socks, matches, canteen, Mars Bars and Reese’s Pieces, her lock-picking tools, a knife, Mace (which she carried everywhere), and her cell phone. She took another look at the Christmas Mine map she’d liberated from the archives, noting with satisfaction that the underground courses of the tunnels were clearly delineated.
The hotel concierge was able to provide—most useful of all—a snowmobile route map of the surrounding mountains. She also managed to “borrow” from hotel maintenance a claw hammer, bolt cutter, and wrecking bar.
She bundled up, loaded her car, and headed down Main Street in the storm, windshield wipers slapping. The snow was lightening a bit, the wind dropping. The snowplows were still out in force—snow clearing was amazingly efficient in this town—but even so the storm had gotten ahead of the clearing and there were three to four inches of snow on most of the roads. Nevertheless, the Ford Explorer handled well. As she approached The Heights, she rehearsed what she would say to the guard on duty; but when she actually arrived at the gate she found it open and the guardhouse empty. And why not? The workers would want to be home on Christmas Eve—and who in their right mind would be out in this storm anyway?
The heated road beyond was not bad, even though the snow was overwhelming the ability of the heating system to keep up. She almost got stuck a few times. But she shifted into 4L and managed to keep going. At least on the way out it would be mostly downhill.
The clubhouse came into view through the blowing snow, its lights on, the big plate-glass windows casting an inviting yellow glow. But the parking lot was empty, and Corrie pulled up close to the side of the building, got out of the car. In a storm like this, she doubted anyone would be inside. Nevertheless, she didn’t want any prying eyes observing her taking one of the snowmobiles from the ski shed. After stamping and brushing the snow off herself, she walked around to the front and tried the door.
Locked.
She peered in the little row of panes to the right of the door. Inside, the place was lit up and festooned with decorations. A gas fire burned merrily in a fireplace. But nobody could be seen.
Just to be safe, she walked around the rest of the building, staring through windows, the wind, though abating, still crying in her ears. It was the work of five slow, careful minutes to satisfy herself that there was no one home.
She headed back to the side of the building, ready to continue up toward the ski shed. As she walked across the parking lot, she noticed that the snow had almost ceased. The unpaved road leading to the shed would still be passable. She got into the Explorer, started the engine. Everything was going her way. She’d have her pick of snowmobiles to choose from…and she still had the key to the shed padlock.
But then, as she was pulling around the circular driveway to the clubhouse and back toward the main, heated road, she noticed a second set of tire tracks in the snow, lying on top of hers.
C
oincidence? It was certainly possible. Corrie told herself that the tracks might be from someone in the development—after all, there were dozens of houses up there. Perhaps it was just some resident, hurrying home before the storm got worse. On the other hand, she’d been followed earlier, back in town. And why had the car pulled in to the parking lot? She felt a surge of apprehension and looked around, but there were no other vehicles in sight. She glanced at her watch: two o’clock. Three hours of daylight left.