The miners were buried in the Roaring Fork cemetery, and their fate was pretty much forgotten. The mines closed up, Roaring Fork dwindled in population, and in time it almost became a ghost town. Then, in 1946, it was bought up by investors and turned into a ski resort — and now of course it’s one of the fanciest resorts in the world — average home price over four million!
So that’s the history. This fall, the original Roaring Fork cemetery was dug up to make way for development. All the remains are now stacked in an old equipment shed high up on the ski slopes while everyone argues about what to do with them. A hundred and thirty coffins — of which eight are the remains of miners killed by the grizzly. (The other three were either lost or never recovered.)
Which brings me to my thesis topic:
A Comprehensive Analysis of Perimortem Trauma in the Skeletons of Eight Miners Killed by a Grizzly Bear, from a Historic Colorado Cemetery
There has never been a large-scale study of perimortem trauma on human bones inflicted by a large carnivore. Ever! You see, it isn’t often that people are eaten by animals. Mine will be the first!!
My thesis advisor, Prof. Greg Carbone, rejected my two earlier topics, and I’m glad the bastard did, if you’ll excuse my language. He would have rejected this one, too, for reasons I won’t bore you with, but I decided to take a page out of your book. I got my sweaty hands on Carbone’s personnel file. I knew the man was too perfect to be real. Some years back, he’d been boning an undergraduate student in one of his classes — and then was dumb enough to flunk her when she broke it off. So she complained, not about the sex, but the bad grade. No laws were broken (the girl was twenty), but the scumbag gave her an F when she deserved an A. It was all hushed up, the girl got her A and had her tuition “refunded” for the year — a way of paying her off without calling it that, no doubt.
You can find anybody these days, so I tracked her down and gave her a call. Her name’s Molly Denton and she’s now a cop in Worcester, Mass. — a decorated lieutenant in the homicide department, no less. Boy, did she give me the lowdown on my advisor! So I went into the meeting with Carbone armed with a couple of nukes, just in case.
I wish you’d been there. It was beautiful. Before I even got into my new thesis idea, I mentioned all nice and polite that we had a mutual acquaintance: Molly Denton. And I gave him a big fat smirk, just to make sure he got the message. He went all pale. He couldn’t wait to change the subject back to my thesis, wanted to hear about it, listened attentively, instantly agreed it was the most marvelous thesis proposal he’d heard in years, and promised he would personally shepherd it through the faculty committee. And then — this is the best part — he suggested I leave “as soon as possible” for Roaring Fork. The guy was butter in my hands.
Winter break just started, and so I’m off to Roaring Fork in two days! Wish me well. And if you feel like it, write me back c/o your pal Proctor, who will have my forwarding address as soon as I know it.
Love,
Corrie
P.S. I almost forgot to tell you one of the best things about my thesis idea. Believe it or not, I first learned about the grizzly bear killings from the diary of Arthur Conan Doyle! Doyle heard it himself from no less than Oscar Wilde at a dinner party in London in 1889. It seems Wilde was a collector of horrible stories, and he’d picked up this one on a lecture tour of the American West.
The manservant, standing in the shadows, watched his peculiar employer finish reading the letter. The long, white fingers seemed to droop, and the letter slid to the table, as if discarded. As the hand moved to pick up the glass of pastis, the evening breeze gently lofted the papers and wafted them over the railing of the balcony, over the tops of the lemon trees; then they went gliding off into blue space, fluttering and turning aimlessly until they had vanished from view, unseen, unnoticed, and completely disregarded by the pale man in the black suit, sitting on a lonely balcony high above the sea.
4
The Roaring Fork Police Department was located in a classic, Old West — style Victorian red-brick building, impossibly picturesque, that stood in a green park against a backdrop of magnificent snowy peaks. In front of it was a twelve-foot statue of Lady Justice, covered with snow, and — rather oddly — not wearing the traditional blindfold.
Corrie Swanson had loaded up with books about Roaring Fork and she had read all about this courthouse, which was noted for the number of famous defendants who had passed through its doors, from Hunter S. Thompson to serial killer Ted Bundy. Roaring Fork, she knew, was quite a resort. It had the most expensive real estate in the country. This proved to be annoying in the extreme, as she found herself forced to stay in a town called Basalt, eighteen winding miles down Route 82, in a crappy Cloud Nine Motel, with cardboard walls and an itchy bed, at the stunning price of $109 a night. It was the first day of December, and ski season was really ramping up. From her work-study jobs at John Jay — and money left over from the wad Agent Pendergast had pressed on her a year back, when he’d sent her away to stay with her father during a bad time — she had saved up almost four thousand dollars. But at a hundred and nine dollars a night, plus meals, plus the ridiculous thirty-nine bucks a day she was paying for a Rent-a-Junker, she was going to burn through that pretty fast.
In short, she had no time to waste.
The problem was, in her eagerness to get her thesis approved, she had told a little lie. Well, maybe it wasn’t such a little lie. She had told Carbone and the faculty committee that she’d gotten permission to examine the remains: carte blanche access. The truth was, her several emails to the chief of the Roaring Fork Police Department, whom she determined had the power to grant her access, had gone unanswered, and her phone calls had not been returned. Not that anyone had been rude to her — it was just a sort of benign neglect.
By marching into the police station herself the day before, she’d finally finagled an appointment with Chief Stanley Morris. Now she entered the building and approached the front desk. To her surprise it was manned, not by a burly cop, but by a girl who looked to be even younger than Corrie herself. She was quite pretty, with a creamy complexion, dark eyes, and shoulder-length blond hair.
Corrie walked up to her, and the girl smiled.
“Are you, uh, a policeman?” Corrie asked.
The girl laughed and shook her head. “Not yet.”
“What, then — the receptionist?”
The girl shook her head again. “I’m interning at the station over the winter vacation. Today just happens to be my day to man the reception desk.” She paused. “I would like to get into law enforcement someday.”
“That makes two of us. I’m a student at John Jay.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “No kidding!”
Corrie extended her hand. “Corrie Swanson.”
The girl shook it. “Jenny Baker.”
“I have an appointment with Chief Morris.”
“Oh, yes.” Jenny consulted an appointment book. “He’s expecting you. Go right in.”
“Thanks.” This was a good beginning. Corrie tried to get her nervousness under control and not think about what would happen if the chief denied her access to the remains. At the very least, her thesis depended on it. And she had already spent a fortune getting here, nonrefundable airplane tickets and all.
The door to the chief’s office was open, and as she entered the man rose from behind his desk and came around it, extending a hand. She was startled by his appearance: a small, rotund, cheerful-looking man with a beaming face, bald pate, and rumpled uniform. The office reflected the impression of informality, with its arrangement of old, comfortable leather furniture and a desk pleasantly disheveled with papers, books, and family photographs.