Mountain Rampage (32 page)

A heavy silence carried from the room into the hallway. Chuck hung his head.
Kirina
. “The other girl,” the professor said. “Her, too.”

“
Sheila
,” Kirina spat. “I spotted her leaving his room, her shirt half-buttoned. She saw me and ran. I chased her up into the woods and hit her with a tree branch. I had a length of cord from the dig in my pocket. I wrapped it around her neck. I could have finished her off. I should have. But…but…” She choked back a sob. “I'm not a killer. I'm
not
a killer. But what choice did I have?”

“
What choice?
” the professor erupted. “I've given you the opportunity to fulfill your grandmother's legacy, but you've turned into your grandfather instead.”

“No,” Kirina shot back. “I've turned into
you
, doing what's necessary to get what's mine.”

“And now look what you've brought us to.”

“Wrong. Look what
you've
brought us to. This fairy-tale idea of yours.”

“I was right. What Chuck found proves it.”

“It doesn't matter anymore. It's too late.”

“No, it's not. No one knows anything yet. Everyone saw your shooting the officer for what it was: an accident. All you have to do is go back out there and say you're sorry. As for the girl, even if she thinks it was you, the cops will convince her it was Clarence. We're so close, Kirina.”

“I can't do that. I won't.”

“Clarence doesn't love you. He never has loved you. This is perfect, don't you see? He'll get what he deserves, what you know he deserves.”

“I won't see him rot in prison.”

“You'll be far away. We both will. And rich, fabulously
wealthy.” A brief silence passed. “We're almost there,” Sartore said. “It's actually better this way. They'll take Clarence, and we'll be free to take what is rightfully—”

“That's all you can think about, isn't it?”

“It's what my mother, your grandmother, wanted—for herself, for me, for you.”

“But Clarence—”

Sartore broke in, his voice harsh. “
He doesn't love you
. He
never
loved you.”

“No!
No
!” came Kirina's anguished cry, thick with heartbreak, startling Chuck. She flew into the hallway, her hands clamped over her ears, and came up short at the sight of him. “You,” she breathed, lowering her hands.

Chuck stepped back. “I wasn't…I didn't…”

Before he could say anything more, a fireball launched up the rear stairwell and a blast of superheated air rolled down the corridor, punching him backward to the floor.

F
IFTY
-T
WO

Kirina stumbled, thrown forward by the blast of wind. She found her footing, her back to the wave of heat, her hair blowing around her face.

The fireball dissipated at the head of the rear stairs. In its wake, a wall of flames climbed from the stairwell, setting the end of the corridor ablaze. The flames ate past the closed doors to the bathrooms at the far end of the hall and reached a pair of open dorm-room doors. The fire split in two, sucked into the facing rooms.

Chuck crab-walked backward down the hall away from the fire. Above him, long wisps of smoke gathered around Kirina's head like a witch's garland.

Kirina looked down at Chuck with sorrowful eyes. She turned and strode away from him, headed straight for the flames.

Chuck pushed himself to his feet. “Kirina! No!”

He charged after her, but the heat pumping down the hallway forced him to stop. He backed away as Kirina increased her pace, sprinting into the wall of fire.

She disappeared, swallowed by the inferno. The flames shifted and she reappeared, still running, her hair trailing, ablaze, behind her. Then the fire closed around her once more, this time for good.

Chuck fell back, mouth agape, as the fire resumed its march down the corridor. He stumbled backward through the thickening smoke, past Kirina's room, transfixed by the oncoming wall of flames.

Sartore stepped from Kirina's room into the corridor. He turned his back to the flames and aimed Hemphill's gun at Chuck's chest.

“Kirina,” Chuck said, struggling to breathe the hot, smoky air. He pointed at the flaming hallway behind the professor.
“She…she…”

Sartore spoke without emotion. “She was weak. She didn't understand.”

Chuck backed out of the hallway, retreating from the gun in Sartore's hand. He came up against the balcony railing. The professor followed Chuck onto the balcony.

“She was your daughter?” Chuck asked.

Sartore leaned his back against the door to the upstairs corridor, closing it against the smoke and hot air. He spoke with a slow, even cadence, as if time was of no importance. “In name only.”

With the door shut, the relative coolness of the common room replaced the intense heat of the upstairs hallway.

Chuck wiped perspiration from his eyes. How long would the door hold back the flames? And what was the fire doing below, in the first-floor hallway? He glanced down from the balcony. Smoke poured through the open doorway leading from the lower corridor into the common room, but, at least for the moment, no flames ate into the room.

He considered reasoning with the professor about the imminent danger presented by the fire, but it was obvious Sartore didn't care.

Chuck remembered the excessive anger the professor had directed at him over the phone when things had begun to unravel earlier in the week. Now he knew the real cause of Sartore's rage.

“You used her,” Chuck accused the professor. “You used Kirina, your own child.”

“I gave her an opportunity. She chose not to accept it. But, fortunately, my backup plan—you—enabled me to learn what I needed.”

That's why Sartore had called, after all these years, to offer him the field school position. “I found what you were after, didn't I?”

Sartore's eyes glinted. “Another of your many discoveries. That's what I appreciated about you as a student—so inquisitive, such a thinker—and why I selected you for this job. You and Kirina both. Between the two of you, I knew I'd strike gold—which is precisely what you did for me.” Sartore looked Chuck in the eye. “And now you have before you the same opportunity I presented to Kirina. You can be as wealthy as you've ever dreamed, Chuck. Wealth you may share with your lovely young wife, your two little girls, and Clarence, too, should you so desire.”

“The mine,” Chuck said.

“My mother's discovery. Thanks to her hard work so many years ago, you have a decision to make—and you don't have long to make it.”

Chuck stared at the gun in Sartore's hand, less than three feet away. The professor was sure to pull the trigger if Chuck tried to wrestle it away from him. Chuck risked a glance over his shoulder at the front doorway. Should he try to escape the dormitory? No. Sartore would gun him down before he reached the bottom of the stairs.

Chuck feigned a cough and pointed at the smoke gathering in the rafters. He slid along the railing and backed down the first step. Sartore followed, the gun thrust before him.

“What decision are you talking about?” Chuck asked as he took a second backward step.

“Whether to be a rich man, or a dead man.”

Chuck continued backing down the stairs. “We both know the answer to that.”

The professor followed. “You'll have to convince me you'll be good to your word.”

“The gold.”

Sartore nodded once, short and sharp. “From the beginning.”

“And your mother?”

“My
brilliant
mother. She figured it out. She was one of the park's first female rangers, raised in Estes Park. Her family—my family—homesteaded here. Her grandfather worked claims all through the Mummies before the park was created. When my mother went to work for the park service in the 1950s, she explored the old claims in the park, her grandfather's and others, out of curiosity. One day, deep in Cordero Mine, she made an incredible discovery.”

“Thomas Walsh,” Chuck said.

In the dim room, the professor smiled, his eyes glowing. “My mother found exactly what Walsh found in Ouray.”

“Calaverite.”

“A massive pocket of it. But I needn't tell you that; you've seen it.” Sartore's face darkened in sudden anger. “And then you had to go and tell everyone else.” He regained his composure. “But there's still time. A few loads, before the authorities find out, will be more than enough for us.”

“For
us
?” Chuck asked, nearing the bottom of the stairs. He glanced around the room, taking in the smoke pouring from the first-floor hallway and gathering overhead, the boxes on the tables, the gear bins and tools in the corner—and his pack, resting against the wall at the foot of the stairs.

He gulped. The skull stowed inside his pack and the 1950s lipstick container found beneath the floor of the mine tunnel. The two objects were related.

Chuck stepped backward to the last stair. His pulse, already racing, quickened even more.

The skull wasn't that of a small-statured, Civil War-era miner from a century and a half in the past. Rather, the skull was that of a woman who had been murdered just a few decades ago.

F
IFTY
-T
HREE

Chuck looked up at Sartore from the bottom step. “What was your mother's name?”

The professor's eyes took on a faraway look. “Sandy. That's what everyone called her. Her full name, though she never used it, was Cassandra.”

Chuck blinked. The
Cassandra Treasure
.

“And your father?”

The professor's voice filled with contempt. “My
so-called
father. He was the only one who ever called her by her given name, when he wanted to humiliate her—which was all the time.”

Chuck backed from the final step to the wooden floor of the common room. Sartore stood three steps above, his eyes clouded by the past. Beyond him, at the top of the stairs, the door to the second-floor corridor exploded outward. Flames burst from the upper hallway, enveloping the balcony and lighting the room.

Still backing away from the professor, Chuck angled between the tables toward the front door. Sartore descended the last of the stairs. Perspiration seeped through tendrils of hair plastered to his forehead. The flames consumed the balcony and licked across the ceiling above.

“My mother wanted to tell the park officials about her discovery,” the professor said, the gun still trained on Chuck's chest. “She was convinced they would give her a share of the takings—and back then, they very well might have. But my father believed the park bosses would keep it all for themselves. My mother and father fought over the decision, ferociously. I was just a boy, hiding in the corner. My father made threats, waved a gun around, even threw my mother across the room. But she wouldn't leave him. She loved him no matter what he did to her. Then, one day, just like that, my mother was gone.”

“He killed her?”

Sartore continued as if Chuck hadn't spoken. “I would give anything to know she didn't do what my father said. He told people she'd abandoned me and run off. He stayed in town for a while, started buying things for himself. Clothes, a new car. But people began to talk—until, one day, he didn't come home either.

“He'd mined enough of the calaverite to set himself up for the rest of his life. It was easy to disappear in those days. My aunt and uncle took me in, and I was left to listen to all the whispers behind my back.”

“But you waited all these years,” Chuck said.

“I left town as soon as I was old enough. I wanted to get away, live my own life—which is exactly what I've done, and exactly what I would have continued to do if I hadn't met Kirina's mother.”

The horrible vision of Kirina being swallowed by the flames struck Chuck between the eyes. He forced the image to the back of his mind. “She really is—was—your daughter?” he asked again, playing for time.

He'd backed far enough between the tables by now to catch a glimpse of the fire advancing steadily down the first-floor corridor toward the common room. Overhead, flames from the second-floor hallway rolled far across the ceiling. Smoke gathered beneath the flames, twisting in wraith-like coils. Heat built in the room like an oven.

“Her mother left me when she became pregnant, though she never told me,” Sartore said. “I didn't know I had a daughter until one day last year when Kirina called. She said she'd always known about me, that I was the reason she'd chosen to study anthropology. I agreed to meet her. When I saw her, I knew. She was my mother all over again. It brought back everything I'd lost. I understood then that I never should have turned my back on my mother's discovery, her dream.”

“This whole summer was staged,” Chuck said in amazement.