Mountain Rampage (22 page)

Chuck pictured Clarence's short, stocky build, his pot belly, and his long, dark hair. “One that's easy to spot in binoculars, I suppose.”

“Even at night,” Parker said.

“You saw him the night of the blood?”

“No.”

“The night before last?”

“Not then, either.”

“Good.”

“But I saw him other nights. Lots of other nights. Your brother-in-law, from what I've seen, has gotten around quite a
bit this summer.”

“Making his way over to Falcon House?”

Parker nodded. “Several of the girls' rooms. Lights on, lights off. Curtains open, curtains closed. Doesn't seem to matter to him.”

“If it makes you feel any better, he told the police.”

“As well he should have.”

“You don't miss a thing around here, do you?”

“Oh, I'm sure I miss plenty. But I consider it part of my job to catch as much as I can.”

Chuck angled back toward the cabin after exiting the conference center. Upon entering the trees, he turned and made his way through the forest to the back of the dormitories, avoiding Parker's long-lensed gaze. Above the dining hall, the crime-scene tape was gone, the place where Nicoleta's body had lain impossible to pick out on the slope. The mobile command vehicle and police cars were gone, too, as if the murder never had taken place.

He entered Raven House through the back door and found the students at work alongside Clarence and Kirina in the common room, with its knotty, aspen-plank walls running all the way to the second-story ceiling. Finds from the mine site, most dug from beneath the collapsed cabin, lined the front room's wooden tables. Each item was stored in an annotated Ziploc bag. The students talked among themselves while they toted their laptops from find to find, typing up written descriptions of each.

By the end of the course, the students were to have completed full logbooks of everything recovered from the mine site, including discovery date, grid location, and physical description. Based on the fact that all twelve students were working when Chuck entered the room, it was clear they still had plenty to do.

Chuck stuck around for the remainder of the morning, growing increasingly antsy as the minutes ticked by. He couldn't
stop thinking of the errand he'd sent Janelle on with the girls. What would Elaine make of the black material? Would she recognize something about it that would shed light on the hidden shaft, the puddle of blood—even the murder?

T
HIRTY
-S
IX

“I recognized it the instant I saw it,” Elaine said, leaning on her cane as she settled in her chair beside the dumpster. “It was what I suspected.”

Unable to restrain himself, Chuck had left the students in Raven House at the beginning of lunch hour. He drove the field school van to the library, where Elaine abandoned the research desk and led him to her break site at the side of the building, a brown leather purse over her arm.

She leaned her cane against the wall, extracted the baggie of black material from her purse, and set it on the ground before lighting a cigarette. Chuck drew up the bent library chair he'd used yesterday afternoon and sat down.

Elaine exhaled a long stream of smoke, a dreamy look on her face. “Two a day,” she said. “That's all I allow myself.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “The first drag is always so fucking great.”

The legs of her maroon pantsuit rode up on her calves, showing thick ankles. She sat up straight, elbow on folded arm, cigarette hovering in front of her face, and eyed Chuck through a tendril of smoke. “Your wife's a real beauty. Quite the catch.”

Chuck nodded in agreement.

Elaine toggled her head, her face alight. “And those two little girls. Darlings.”

“I'm afraid I can't take credit for them.”

“It's better for girls to take after their mothers. I took after my father, and look what happened to me.”

Chuck spoke without thinking. “I bet you were quite the looker before…” He faltered.

“Before this?” She indicated her twisted frame with a wave of her cigarette. “Polio. I was one of the last to ever get it. I was the age of your girls, or thereabout. Go figure.”

“Something tells me it didn't keep you out of mischief.”

“That's one of the good things I got from my father.”

“I'll have to keep my girls away from you, then.”

“I imagine you'll help them find plenty of mischief on your own. Especially the younger one; she's going to be a handful.”

“She already is.”

“The minute I saw your wife and girls, I knew you were a lucky man.” Elaine paused. “Are you sure you don't want to keep it that way?”

“What do you mean by that?”

She pointed at the baggie on the pavement beside her chair. “This stuff has some bad juju to it. I can feel it.”

Chuck studied her. She didn't seem the type, not remotely, yet she was talking in riddles just like Sheila—and as if she knew of the skull and skeletal remains at the bottom of the mine.

“I've been lucky enough so far,” Chuck said. “I'm willing to take my chances.”

Elaine sighed, smoke escaping her lips. “Of course you are.” She tapped ash from the end of her cigarette and settled back in her seat. “Okay, then,” she said, as much to herself as to Chuck. “Ever heard of Thomas Walsh?”

“Walsh? Afraid not.”

“You said you're from Durango. The Thomas Walsh Public Library is just over the mountains north of you in the little town of Ouray.”

“Sorry, never heard of him.”

“But you've heard of the Hope Diamond.”

“Who hasn't?” He fixed his eyes on the black material in the Ziploc.

She smiled. “Patience,” she said.

She took a pull on her cigarette before continuing. “Once upon a time, Thomas Walsh was one of the richest men in America, if not
the
richest. For many years, Walsh was one of
Colorado's most famous self-made men, but hardly anyone remembers him anymore.”

“Except you.”

“I like what he did for the people of Ouray. He was a humanitarian of the highest order. Treated his employees better than any mining boss ever before him, or since.”

“Finally,” Chuck said with another glance at the plastic bag. “Mining.”

Elaine blew a stream of smoke straight up into the air. “Not at first. He started out as a hotelier in Denver's early days. He had his own place, owned it free and clear. All he had to do was run his hotel and have a nice life. But the gold bug bit him instead.”

“The gold bug?”

“It got people in different ways. Take Horace Tabor. He ran a mercantile in Leadville during the gold-rush years. He made his fortune grub-staking others, which was a fine way to go. Didn't even have to get his hands dirty. But that sort of thing wasn't for Thomas Walsh. He wanted to do it all by himself. And when he got the fever, he got it bad. He was smarter than your average prospector, though. Most of them headed into the hills and started digging and panning wherever they wound up—and just about all of them ended up broke and hungry and empty-handed in a matter of weeks.”

Chuck leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, warming to Elaine's tale despite himself. “But that wouldn't do for our guy.”

“No. Our man Walsh made a study out of the gold rush. He taught himself geology, mineralogy, anything that would help him in his quest. He left his wife and kids in Denver and headed into the mountains. A year passed. Another. Still another.”

“
Three years?
”

“Try ten. He prospected for a full decade, the fever burning
in him all the while. He wouldn't stop. Eventually, he worked his way to the San Juan Mountains, the most rugged and remote mountain range in Colorado, in the far southwest corner of the state, down where you live.”

“Ten years,” Chuck said. “By then the rush was over.”

“Long over,” Elaine concurred. “Which, ultimately, is what led to his success.” She held her cigarette at her side between her fingers. “Everywhere he went, he was too late. The big discoveries had already been made. By the end of his decade of searching, mines were going bust all around Colorado. The lodes had been found, dug, carted out. Horace Tabor had made his fortune and was busy building opera houses and hobnobbing with governors and senators. But Walsh still prospected. He took breaks a couple of times, back in Denver, played at being a family man again, ran the hotel with his wife. But he kept studying, kept scheming, and, before long, he'd be back at it in the mountains, putting to work the latest of what he'd learned.”

“Until he got to Ouray,” Chuck said.

“Which, like everywhere else, was all played out by then.”

“But he figured something out.”

“Ouray was where his studies finally paid off—resulting in his enormous fortune. He built the library in Ouray, and the hospital, too. Eventually, he left the mountains with his riches. Denver wasn't good enough for him anymore, so he headed east to Washington, D.C. Back then, that was where the wealthiest Americans gathered. He built himself the most opulent home ever constructed in America—sixteen thousand square feet of pure decadence. And his two kids?” She tut-tutted.

“Not good, I take it,” Chuck said.

“All that money, from a father they'd hardly seen while they were growing up, flowing into their pockets just as they hit adulthood? You tell me. The oldest, a boy, drank too much. He went on to get hooked on opium along with his wife, a high-society
girl, the daughter of the publisher of the
Washington Post
. They were both killed when he drove his car into a brick wall.

“And then there was Evalyn, the daughter. She held herself together a while longer. She hosted parties at her parents' home in Washington that were legendary for their excess, with seventy-five-foot-long banquet tables loaded with every conceivable delicacy. To be invited to an Evalyn Walsh party was to have truly made it in young Washingtonian society. And when it came to her own personal adornment, nothing was too ostentatious, or too expensive. When his only daughter was twenty-five, Thomas Walsh gave Evalyn the world's most famous gemstone, the Hope Diamond, as a wedding present. She treated it like a dime-store trinket, hanging it around the neck of her Great Dane, once even losing it in the cushions of a couch.

“It was she who put the final exclamation point on the curse of the Hope Diamond. Not long after her daddy bought it for her, the Walsh family fell from grace. The money ran through Thomas' fingers like sand until, finally, it was gone. At about the same time, Evalyn's husband left her for another woman, sending Evalyn on a downward spiral, addicted to alcohol and opium like her brother. She sold the Hope Diamond to support her drug habit, and finally died of pneumonia.”

“What became of her father?”

“As you might guess, he'd been happiest during the years of his quest, when he was alone with his pickaxe, roaming the mountains. He didn't know how to handle himself once he became rich and everybody wanted a piece of him. When the money ran out, he sold the house in D.C.—it's the Indonesian Embassy these days—and moved back to Denver, where he spent time as a guest lecturer at the Colorado School of Mines, explaining to eager young engineers what he'd figured out over
the course of all those years in the mountains.”

“Which was?” Chuck asked.

Elaine picked up the bag of black material and tossed it to him. “What's that look like to you?”

“Coffee grounds.”

“And coffee grounds are worthless, are they not?”

He nodded.

“That's what everyone else thought, too.”

T
HIRTY
-S
EVEN

Chuck squeezed the Ziploc between his fingers as Elaine continued.

“By the time Walsh made it to Ouray, he'd seen thousands of played-out mines. He went way up into the San Juans, to a high mountain cirque called Yankee Boy Basin that was lined with abandoned shafts.

“The Yankee Boy mines had produced marginal amounts of silver, not gold, and they'd gone bust years before. But thanks to all his research, Walsh noticed something different about the mines in the basin. The tailings dumped down the mountainside during the digging of a mine usually are gray—the color of the hard-rock interior of the mountain. But the tailings from the played-out silver mines in Yankee Boy Basin weren't gray, they were black. And when Walsh picked up a handful of the stuff and worked it between his fingers, he found it had the consistency of—”

She allowed Chuck to fill in the blank: “Coffee grounds.”

Elaine tapped the air with her cigarette in approval. “Geologists were just figuring out back then that gold exists in numerous forms,” she explained. “There's the pure kind, shiny and yellow, in the form of grains and nuggets. But there are other forms as well, wherein gold is mixed with other minerals and is not readily apparent to the naked eye. One of those hidden forms is gold suspended in an ore known as calaverite, which looks as gray and unremarkable as any worthless mineral. When calaverite containing suspended gold is exposed to oxygen and moisture, however, a chemical reaction takes place. It turns from gray to black, and becomes loose and crumbly.”