Mountain Rampage

by Graham, Scott

  “What the hell is going on up there?” Sartore barked over the phone. “I’ve already heard from three different sets of parents.”

  “You know college kids,” Chuck said. “They love drama.”

  “How much drama are we talking about?”

  “More than I’d prefer. But things are settling down.”

  “That’s not the sense I’m getting. What’s this I hear about your brother-in-law’s knife?”

  Chuck braked to a stop where the driveway reached the gravel road. He filled Sartore in on the appearance of the cop at the mine, picturing the professor’s bushy white eyebrows working up and down in consternation as he listened.

  “You understand,” Sartore said when Chuck finished, “this is a multi-year contract we’ve signed with the park service. The plan is to start with Rocky Mountain and expand from there. Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone. The opportunities for Fort Lewis and the School of Anthropology—and for you, too, I might add—are significant.”

  “I know, professor.”

  “And this is the first year,” Sartore said, gaining steam. “The very first summer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This whole thing with your guy’s knife?” Sartore thundered. “And blood? And now you’re saying it’s human? It’s absolutely the last thing we need.” The professor’s heavy breaths came over the phone. “Don’t you have something else you want to tell me about?”

  “I was getting to that.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “A small section of the tunnel floor gave way. No one was hurt.”

  “The parents who called made it sound like it was the end of the world.”

  “College kids,” Chuck reiterated.

  “I hired you for a reason, Chuck. I tracked you down after all these years. You’re my adult up there, my boots on the ground. There’s as much opportunity for you in the summers ahead as there is for the college. But not if things keep going the way they are right now. You’ve got to keep a lid on things there, understand?”

  “Perfectly, sir.” Chuck hoped the professor was thinking the same thing he was: three more days, just three more days.

  “Keep me up to speed on this situation with the knife,” Sartore said. “And make damn sure nothing else happens up there, because right now, your ass is on the line.”

  “Got it, professor.”

  Chuck pulled around the conference center and threw the truck into park, steaming. Who was Professor Sartore to put him on the spot for events beyond his control?

  He cut the engine and sat behind the wheel while he calmed himself down. The truth was, he couldn’t blame the professor for being so concerned. A lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours, none of it good. If he wanted to work for Sartore again next summer, he had to do as the professor said—keep things quiet from here on out.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if the professor’s outburst came as a surprise. His volcanic temper was legendary on the Fort Lewis campus. Chuck remembered Sartore ripping into students for unsatisfactory work two decades ago. The professor hadn’t changed in the years since.

  Chuck took a steadying breath and got out of the truck, heading toward the conference center. The massive log building and the matching lodge next door had been constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression in the 1930s. A banquet room took up most of the first floor of the conference center. Smaller meeting rooms honeycombed the second. Chuck had texted ahead to set up the meeting in Parker’s office, which occupied a front corner of the building’s third floor.

  Chuck climbed the steps to the top story, knocked on Parker’s office door, and entered when the resort manager called out for him to come in.

  Parker’s large office was done up in L.L. Bean chic. A plaid Pendleton blanket lay over the back of a leather sofa against one wall. Lacquered rainbow trout on plaques hung above the couch. A life-size, chain-saw sculpture of a bear hewn from a thick stump of wood filled a corner of the room. The bear stood on its hind legs, paws upraised, mouth open in full roar.

  The resort manager stood behind his desk at a wide picture window overlooking the fields and, across the expanse of grass to the south, additional resort buildings, including scattered rental cabins, rows of condominiums, a snack stand, and, off to one side, horse stables.

  A few hundred yards farther south, two-story brick buildings lined three blocks of Elkhorn Avenue, comprising Estes Park’s compact business district. Beyond, on a hillside facing town, perched the famous, eggshell-white Stanley Hotel with its distinctive red roof.

  In his Durango High School days, Parker had been a slight, fidgety student, prone to biting his nails and obsessing over girls, grades, and his bad acne. Chuck’s former close school friend hadn’t changed much in the intervening years. Parker was still given to quick, nervous gestures and to voicing seemingly every concern that crossed his mind. He was still thin, too, with a long, aquiline nose, darting eyes, and a close-cropped beard that almost hid his acne scars.

  Parker waved Chuck toward one of the horseshoe-shaped club chairs in front of his expansive oak desk. The resort manager wore jeans and a bright blue polo shirt, the Y of the Rockies logo on its breast.

  He turned to look out his office window, his fingers drumming the top of a binocular case on the windowsill, before pivoting back to Chuck. “Jim called me.”

  “The police officer?”

  “He told me about the knife. Said it belongs to your foreman.”

  “My crew leader, Clarence.”

  “He’s your wife’s brother, right?”

  “That’s him. He’s worked for me for a couple years.”

  “He’s not that old, as I recall.”

  “Twenty-five. Out of the University of New Mexico School of Anthropology. Says he had nothing to do with it. I believe him.”

  “Like you have any choice—your brother-in-law.” Parker dropped into his suede-leather office chair, its arms outlined by brass rivets. “You know I did you a favor, having you stay here this summer, setting you up with your own cabin, letting your students room in Raven House.”

  “We’re paying you good money, and you know it. Besides, you didn’t seem to think this whole thing with the blood was that big a deal last night.”

  “That was before I heard about the knife.”

  Chuck sat forward. “No crime has even been alleged at this point.”

  “You have to understand my position. The owners…” Parker’s voice trailed off.

  “The owners what?”

  “They’re new. A couple of oil-and-gas guys, brothers, out of Texas. They kept me on as manager, even gave me a raise. Just in time, too, with Joanie off to Colorado State next week. But they’re control freaks. They don’t like it when things get messy. They’re all about ‘standards.’”

  “Name one thing my students have done this summer that has not lived up to your ‘standards.’”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  Chuck pressed on. “You and I both know the source of your problems.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Clarence and Kirina, my other crew leader, have had to call me more than once this summer on account of your people in Falcon House.”

  Parker straightened in his chair. “You never told me anything about that.”

  “It was always late, past midnight. A little too much drinking, a little too loud with the partying. They settled down when I talked to them. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “But you’re telling me now.”

  “You’re the one accusing my people of whatever’s going on over there. You need to remember that this pool of blood on the ground wasn’t necessarily found next to Raven House. It was found between Raven House and Falcon House—between your people and mine.”

  “But it’s still your brother-in-law’s knife we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  “All I’m asking, Parker, is that you give Clarence the benefit of the doubt until
we learn more from the police.”

  The resort manager steepled his fingers in front of him, his elbows on the arms of his chair. “Your wife’s brother.”

  “My wife’s brother.”

  “You want me to sit around and wait for whatever the police decide to do.”

  “Not much else we can do, the way I see it. I got the sense from the officer that it’ll be a while before they get any official lab response on the blood they found. The field school ends Friday. Three days and we’ll be gone.”

  “Three days.” Parker folded his hands in his lap. “I’ll be counting.”

  Chuck descended the main stairway, his footsteps echoing in the building’s cavernous central hall with its enormous support beams and huge, elk-antler chandeliers hanging from thick chains. He pushed through the heavy, wooden entry doors and stood aside as a troop of chattering Girl Scouts, green sashes over their shoulders, filed into the lobby.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and walked toward a pair of Adirondack chairs arranged on the covered porch at the front of the building. He lowered himself stiffly into one of the chairs, its high back creaking as he leaned against it. A couple leaned on the railing and looked out at the fields, where a group of youngsters played kickball, another bunch of kids shot arrows toward a tall, wooden backstop on the far side of the expanse of grass, and, just across the conference center parking lot, a dozen adults stood in line at the edge of the yellowing grass, fly poles in hand, honing their casting skills under the tutelage of a gray-bearded man wearing a multi-pocketed fishing vest and a hat ringed with feathered flies.

  Chuck texted Clarence. Any word from the police?

  Clarence’s reply was immediate. Nothing yet. I’m thinking tomorrow.

  Stay close. Don’t go anywhere.

  Wouldn’t think of it.

  Chuck checked the time on his phone. Coming up on four o’clock. Clarence was probably right—the cops, having been up all the previous night, were finished for the day.

  The chair squeaked as Chuck shifted to pocket his phone and rested his head back, closing his eyes. The yellow pine slats were dry but sturdy, unlike those mine floorboards. He’d walked back and forth along those floorboards dozens of times over the last three weeks, their knots and nails aglow in the light of his headlamp. Starting at the tunnel’s mouth and continuing nearly its full length, the boards were cut to uniform size, roughly five feet across, long enough to cover most of the bottom of the tunnel from one side to the other, but short enough to account for variations in distance between the side walls—all except the floorboards at the back of the mine.

  The planks covering the last few feet of the tunnel bottom were different, he now remembered. Each of those boards had been cut to fit precisely from one side of the tunnel to the other, leaving no open space showing on either side.

  He caught his breath. The section of floor at the back of the mine had been constructed with a specific goal in mind: to hide all signs of the vertical shaft.

  ELEVEN

  The drive into town took less than five minutes. Chuck turned down Elkhorn Avenue, past the bookshop and knickknack stores, and parked in front of Estes Park’s public library, a sleek, stone-and-glass structure built on the banks of the Big Thompson River at the east edge of town. He pushed through the heavy glass front doors and headed for the research librarian’s desk at the back of the main floor.

  Chuck had posted daily progress updates on the field school’s blog site throughout the summer, along with reports of the students’ upcoming work schedule. Anyone who knew of the vertical shaft’s existence and was following the updates would have known Team Nugget was set to uncover the shaft upon dismantling the last of the floor in the tunnel today.

  What if someone hadn’t wanted the shaft uncovered, and had gotten hold of some blood to make the puddle, expecting that the anonymous report of it to the police would force Chuck to keep the students in town and away from the mine, at least for today, and perhaps for the remainder of the week? What might there be about the vertical shaft that, all these years later, was still worth keeping secret?

  Chuck slowed to take in the view through the two-story wall of windows rising beyond the research desk. The Big Thompson River meandered past the back of the library through the heart of the flat, park-like valley from which the town of Estes Park derived its name. A mile farther east, the river entered V-walled Big Thompson Canyon and plunged, roiling, to the plains. Through the upper windows at the back of the library, Longs Peak, the 14,255-foot monarch of Rocky Mountain National Park, rose ten miles south of the Y of the Rockies complex, the mountain’s sheer east face, known as the Diamond, purple with afternoon shadow.

  In the early 1900s, mountaineering guide Enos Mills summited the peak almost three hundred times as he led groups of flatlanders up the arduous route to the top of the mountain. Mills claimed the term “naturalist” for himself and devoted his life to a single cause: alerting an entire generation of Americans to the beauty and preservation value of the magnificent mountain wilderness seventy miles northwest of Colorado’s capital. His tireless work led directly to Congress’ 1915 pronouncement of the four-hundred-square-mile expanse of rivers, streams, high alpine meadows and jagged peaks directly west of Estes Park as the nation’s thirteenth national park, forever protected from human development.

  The librarian seated at the research desk observed Chuck with twinkling eyes. She was well into her seventies, her mouth a bright red slash of lipstick beneath a powdered nose and rouged cheeks. A mauve blazer covered a silky white blouse fastened at the throat with an opal brooch. Her curled hair, dyed brunette, was shellacked into place. A cane fashioned from a gnarled tree branch leaned against her desk.

  “Never grows tiresome,” the librarian said. Her voice was earthy and well-worn, almost masculine.

  “You’ve got the best seat in town,” Chuck responded.

  “That’s what they tell me every time I ask for a raise.”

  Chuck glanced around. A middle-aged man read a magazine in an upholstered chair at the foot of the rear wall of windows. Several other easy chairs, aligned to take in the view of the river and Longs Peak beyond, were empty, and the aisles between the stacks of books leading away from the windows were deserted. The hordes of summer tourists in Estes Park obviously had more important things to do than visit the local library, and the locals were busy serving the visitors.

  “I’d like to learn what I can about Cordero Mine,” Chuck told the librarian. “On Mount Landen, near Trail Ridge Road.”

  The librarian crinkled her nose. “Cordero? Never heard of it.”

  “You’re not alone. I’ve been assigned to do some archaeological work on it with a crew of college students. I spent some time in here a few weeks ago trying to do some preliminary research, but I couldn’t find a single mention of it.”

  The librarian’s face lifted in a bewitched smile. “A mystery,” she said. “I like it.”

  She took hold of her cane and pushed herself to her feet. She was under five feet tall, her shoulders bowed and misshapen. She limped heavily as she rounded her desk. A three-inch lift was glued to the sole of one of her brown, square-toed shoes to make up for a distinct difference in the length of her legs.

  The librarian led Chuck down one of the aisles away from the wall of windows.

  “Walk this way,” she told him. She wiggled her buttocks and gave a quiet snort of laughter as she shuffled down the aisle between the stacks of books, leaning on her cane.

  They came to a row of computers lining an inner wall. The librarian took a seat in front of one of the machines and pulled a rolling chair from the next computer over for Chuck. Her knobby fingers danced across the keyboard in front of her.

  Chuck watched the monitor over her shoulder as she worked her way from the Larimer County Records Department to the department’s mapping center to a bird’s-eye view of the Mummy Mountain Range. Controlling the computer’s mouse with nimble rolls and clicks, the librari
an zeroed in on Mount Landen.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  Chuck pointed at the east flank of the mountain, above tree line.

  The librarian used the mouse to zoom in from above until the collapsed logs of the miners’ cabin became discernible in the grainy satellite photo.

  “Ah-ha,” she said.

  With deft movements, she created a blinking, dotted-line box around the mine site, freed the boxed section from the satellite photo, and somehow transferred the freed section to another website, this one administered, as near as Chuck could tell, by an obscure branch of the U.S. Department of Mineralogy. There, the librarian pasted the box into a waiting screen, entered a series of coordinates in a search bar—numbers she’d memorized, apparently, from the Larimer County website—and clicked enter.

  The Department of Mineralogy website popped up with a lengthy number of its own.

  “Gotcha,” she proclaimed.

  Before Chuck could say anything, the librarian sped on with her search, copying the number and moving to yet another website, this one operated by the State of Colorado. There she pasted the number into another search box and clicked the mouse.

  This time there was a slight pause before the site displayed a few cryptic lines of text against a light-blue background:

  Joshua Weed, Hiram Longstrom

  Application No. 681, Claim No. 394

  September 8, 1861

  The librarian sat back from the computer and crossed her arms in front of her in satisfaction. She lifted a gnarled finger from the fold of her elbow and pointed at the screen. “No wonder you didn’t find anything. See the date?”

  “A few months after the start of the Civil War, right?” Chuck asked.

  “Yep. No wonder there’s no more information about it than this. The federal government had a few more important things to do than record and follow up on the last few mines being punched in the ground at the tail end of the Pikes Peak gold rush way out here in the middle of nowhere.”