White Fire

54

At eleven o’clock that morning — Christmas Eve day — after buttering two hundred pieces of toast, washing twice that number of dishes, and mopping the kitchen from wall to wall — Corrie went back to her room, bundled up in her coat, and ventured out into the storm. The idea that Kermode or her thugs might be out in this weather, waiting for her, seemed far-fetched; nevertheless, she felt an electric tickle of fear. She consoled herself with the thought that she was on her way to the safest place in town — the police station.

She had decided to confront Pendergast. Not so much confront him, exactly, but rather to make another pitch about why he should share with her the information he’d apparently gotten on his trip to Leadville. The way she saw things, it was unfair of him to withhold it. She had, after all, discovered the Swinton connection and shared the name with him. If he’d found information about the old killings, the least he could do would be to let her include it in her thesis.

The wind and flying snow came buffeting down the street as she turned onto Main. She leaned into it, holding her cap. The business district of Roaring Fork was relatively compact, but even so it proved a damn long journey in a blizzard.

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.