Douglas Preston - White Fire

“If you say so. But I’m done talking. And I’m staying in Roaring Fork whether you like it or not.”

As Pendergast began to speak again, she got up so abruptly she knocked over her chair and left the room without waiting to hear him out.

It was one of the most prominent Victorian mansions on the main drag. Ted, who was a fountain of information on Roaring Fork, had told Corrie its story. The house had been built by Harold Griswell, known as the Silver King of Roaring Fork, who made a fortune and was then bankrupted by the Panic of 1893. He committed suicide by leaping into the main shaft of the Matchless Mine, leaving behind a young widow — a former saloon dancer named Rosie Ann. Rosie Ann spent the next three decades hiring and firing lawyers and bringing countless lawsuits, trying tirelessly to recover the repossessed mines and properties; eventually, when all her legal options ran out, she boarded over the windows of the Griswell Mansion and became a recluse, refusing even to shop for basic provisions and subsisting on the kindness of neighbors, who took it upon themselves to leave food at her door. In 1955, the neighbors complained of a bad smell coming from the house. When the police entered, they found an incredible scene: the entire house was packed floor-to-ceiling with tottering stacks of documents and other bric-a-brac, much of it amassed during the woman’s endless lawsuits. There were bundles of newspapers, canvas bags full of ore samples, theater bills, broadsheets, ledgers, assay reports, mining certificates, depositions, trial transcripts, payroll records, bank statements, maps, mine surveys, and the like. They had found Rosie Ann’s wizened body buried under a ton of paper; an entire wall of documents, undermined by gnawing mice, had toppled over and pinned her to the floor. Rosie Ann Griswell had starved to death.

She died intestate with no heirs, and the town acquired the building. The hoarded documents proved a historical treasure trove of unruly proportions. Over half a century later, the sorting and cataloging process was still going on, fitfully, whenever the impecunious Roaring Fork Historical Society could scrape together a grant.

Ted had warned Corrie about the state of the collection, which was very unlike the sleek, digitized newspaper archive that he ran. But after combing through the papers for evidence of a cannibalistic gang of killers and coming up empty-handed, Corrie decided to look into the Griswell Archive.

The archivist, it seemed, came in only two days a week. Ted had warned Corrie that he was an unqualified asshole. When Corrie arrived that gray December morning, with a few flakes drifting down from a zinc sky, she found the archivist in the mansion’s parlor, sitting behind a desk, messing around with his iPad. While the parlor was free of paper, she could see, through the open doors leading off it, floor-to-ceiling metal shelves and filing cabinets packed with stuff.

The archivist rose and held out his hand. “Wynn Marple,” he said. He was a prematurely balding, ponytailed man in his late thirties, with an incipient potbelly but retaining the confident, winking air of an aging Lothario.

She introduced herself and explained her mission — that she was looking for information on the year 1876, the grizzly killings, and also on crime and possible gang activity in Roaring Fork.

Marple responded at length, quickly segueing to what was evidently his favorite subject: himself. Corrie learned that he, Marple, had once been on the Olympic Ski Team that trained in Roaring Fork, which is why he had fallen in love with the town; that he was still a rad skier and a hot dude off piste as well; and that there was no way he could allow her into the archives without the proper paperwork and approvals, not to mention a much more specific and narrower scope of work.

“You see,” he said, “fishing expeditions aren’t permitted. A lot of these documents are private and of a confidential, controversial, or—” and here came another wink— “scandalous nature.”

This speech was accompanied by several lickings of the lips and rovings of the eyes over Corrie’s body.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself not to be her own worst enemy for once. A lot of guys just couldn’t help being jerks. And she needed these archives. If the answer to the killings wasn’t here, then it had probably been lost to history.

“You were an Olympic skier?” she asked, larding her voice with phony admiration.

That produced another gust of braggadocio, including the information that he would have won a bronze but for the course conditions, the temperature, the judges . . . Corrie stopped listening but kept nodding and smiling.

“That’s really cool,” she said when she realized he was finished. “I’ve never met an Olympic athlete before.”

Wynn Marple had a lot more to say on that point. After five or ten minutes, Corrie, in desperation, had agreed to a date with Wynn for Saturday night — and, in return, gained complete and unrestricted access to the archive.

Wynn tagged along after her as she made her way into the elegant yet decayed rooms, packed with paper. Adding to her woes, the papers had only been roughly sorted chronologically, with no effort made to arrange them by subject.

With the now-eager Wynn fetching files, Corrie sat down at a long baize-covered table and began to sort through them. They were all mixed up and confused, full of extraneous and misfiled material, and it became obvious that whoever had done the filing was either negligent or an idiot. As she sorted through one bundle after another, the smell of decaying paper and old wax filled the room.

The minutes turned into hours. The room was overheated, the light was dim, and her eyes started to itch. Even Wynn finally got tired of talking about himself. The papers were dry, and dust seemed to float off the pages with every shuffle. There were reams of impenetrable legal documents, filings, depositions, notices and interrogatories, trial transcripts, hearings, grand jury proceedings, commingled with plats, surveys, assay results, mining partnership agreements, payrolls, inventories, work orders, worthless stock certificates, invoices, and completely irrelevant posters and broadsides. Once in a while the tide of documents yielded a colorful playbill announcing the arrival of a busty burlesque queen or slapstick comedy troupe.

Infrequently, Corrie would turn up a document of faint interest — a criminal complaint, the transcript of a murder trial, WANTED posters, police records pertaining to undesirables and transients who were suspected of or charged with crimes. But there was nothing that stood out, no gang of crazies, no one with a motive to murder and consume eleven miners.

The name of Stafford turned up regularly, especially with respect to the smelting and refining personnel records. Those records were particularly odious, with ledger pages that listed killed workers like so much damaged equipment, next to sums paid to their widows or orphans, never amounting to more than five dollars, with the majority of the sums listed as $0.00 along with the notation “no payment/worker error.” There were records of workers crippled, poisoned, or injured on the job who were then summarily dismissed with no compensation or recourse whatsoever.

“What a bunch of scumbags,” Corrie muttered to herself, handing over another batch of papers to Wynn.

At one point a handbill turned up that stopped Corrie.

THE AESTHETIC THEORY

A lecture by

MR. OSCAR WILDE OF LONDON, ENGLAND

The practical application of the principles of the aesthetic theory, with observations upon the fine arts, personal adornment, and house decoration