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 hadabandoned 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 wasfollowing 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 wasalarmed, 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.
55
Half 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 wastailing 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?