then finding out who had ordered and paid for those glowing analyses of the Eurydice’s ore might offer something tangible. Maybe that was what Victoria had discovered. I certainly didn’t have a complete set of the assays, and I didn’t think anyone outside of the Prospect Financial offices did, either. But if I could find out who ordered them… it was a long shot, indeed. I dug out my credit calling card, phoned Nevada information, then the number for Kepler Assay Lab in Henderson.
“Ah, this is Kiki Belknap,” I said when the lab receptionist answered. “I’m Tony Royce’s secretary at Prospect Financial? Listen, Mr. Royce is out of the office at the moment? But I need to be connected to the first person he ever talked to down there ?
“
“Miss Belknap,” the voice replied stiffly. “As you must be aware, discussion of assays is confidential. Information can only be released to the person originally requesting the assay.”
“And for the Eurydice Gold Mine in Idaho Springs,” I said breathlessly, “who exactly was that? We don’t seem to have it in our files.”
Kepler Assay Labs disconnected. I slammed down the phone. So much for long shots. The sheriffs department could get the information, but for that you needed a subpoena and all kinds of time. I glanced at my watch: 12:15. I didn’t have all kinds of time. And then I remembered what Marla had said to me a week ago. The mine was producing gold during the Second World War, and FDR had it closed down with that order of his, L-208… . I turned this over in my mind. L-208. I thought about executive orders, pushing the idea back and forth and over again, the way I kneaded bread. Then I replayed what Macguire had learned about some man at Prospect and his last conversation with Victoria Lear: They were arguing about World War II.
Shouldn’t there be public records about all this somewhere? Back to long shots.
I leafed through the phone book and called first the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, where I got switched to the Division of Minerals and Geology, which eventually transferred me to the Office of Active and Inactive Mines, where a very helpful person told me that I could find out a mine’s history by getting it pulled ? for a fee ? from the state archives. Imagining a football stadium full of red tape, I called the state archives.
“Hi there,” I said in a friendly voice when the archivist answered. “I’m wondering if I could get a quick look at the file on the Eurydice Mine in Clear Creek County. I need it this afternoon.”
“Oh, is that you, Ms. Lear?” the archivist said with a laugh. “I recognize your voice. But the last time you wanted a quick look at that file, you were here for an hour!”
My skin chilled to the bone. Now I knew whose voice mine resembled so closely it had scared Albert’s secretary. I replied, “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
I sprinted out to the parking lot and gunned the van toward Macguire’s photo place. While they were hunting for the roll of film, I put in a call to Tom.
“Have you found out anything?” I asked.
He sighed. “This guy Albert Lipscomb is bad. Want to know how bad? We just found the body of that bank teller he cozied up to last week. Dottie Quentin. She was supposed to be watching her neighbors’ place. Neighbors had a hot tub. The teller was strangled and then her body was placed in the hot tub with the wooden top on. The neighbors found her when they came back from vacation.”
“Oh, Lord.” The man with the pictures had returned. I said into the phone, “So what does all this mean?”
“It means Marla is lucky Albert, if that’s who it was, didn’t kill her. So far though, only a few people here seem to think Lipscomb would come back to settle a score with Tony and Marla. Killing the teller, that they could see, Albert didn’t want her to talk. But why come back?”
I said, “I don’t know. Maybe Albert and Tony are in on something together and are trying ? successfully, as it turns out ? to throw law enforcement off their trail. Have you found out anything about Marla?”
“Only that you were right. Shockley’s out for blood. Hers.”
I said I wasn’t surprised and signed off. I paid for the pictures and rushed back to my van, where I slid the envelope open.
Macguire’s graduation pictures showed joyful, silly, mugging faces of teenagers atypically dressed in blouses above long chiffon skirts and pristinely white shirts and striped ties. The first picture after the graduation batch was of Macguire’s scarred Subaru on a dirt road with pine trees in the background. I was willing to bet this was up by the Grizzly Creek campsite. Then Macguire had held the camera out to take a picture of himself swathed in a camouflage-cloth poncho. The rest of the photos were of Tony and Marla in the rain, busying themselves around the campsite. They’d pitched the tent on a mound. They’d lit the Sterno, heated and then eaten the soup I’d sent up. Then they’d hauled water out of the creek, cleaned up their dishes, and put the trash into the trunk of the Mercedes. This was all as Marla had reported.
I peered at the pictures of Tony. He wore an unzipped rain jacket, and under it, a sweatshirt with “University of ? ,” but I couldn’t see the rest. It didn’t look as if he had the white monogrammed shirt on underneath the sweatshirt, but it was hard to tell with the fading light and the rain.
The next-to-last photo of the batch was a zoom-in on Marla and Tony’s faces. Tony seemed to be laughing at something Marla had said. Marla, with a look of intense irritation, was staring straight at the camera. In the last picture, Tony had reached over to hug Marla, a movement that exposed his right forearm and wrist. A glimmer of light had caught the movement on film.
He was wearing a gold watch.
15
As I exceeded the speed limits on my way to the state archives, I tried to convince myself that Tony was a rich enough dude to have two watches. But why would he have told Marla not to wear her own timepiece? Maybe it was just an issue of psychological control. He wanted to be the one telling time. Having been married to a doctor dedicated to psychological control, I knew the telltale signs.
Still, I thought as I accelerated the van toward downtown Denver, the fact that Tony was wearing a gold watch at the campsite made things look doubly bad for Marla. I was glad that I, and not the police, had Macguire’s photographs.
I parked in front of the dull-looking government building, pushed through the vaultlike door to the basement archives, turned a corner, and arrived in a large, well-lit room with two desks, several long tables, a couple of rooms with microfilm machines, and row upon row of stacks. The smiling, frizzy-haired woman identified herself as the archivist. She asked me for three dollars for file retrieval of records for the Eurydice Gold Mine in Clear Creek County, then gave me a puzzled look.
“Goodness,” she trilled, “you’re not who I thought, you were. You sounded just like someone else on the phone. So friendly! But so much in a hurry!”
“Victoria Lear’s my friend,” I lied. “I know she’s very thorough, but always quite rushed. A good businesswoman, though, don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” the archivist replied noncommittally, as another patron had shown up at the desk. I knew questions concerning Victoria Lear’s visits to the archives would be fruitless. Colorado librarians take patron confidentiality as seriously as priests do the seal of confession. The frizzy-haired librarian directed me to sit at one of the long tables, and I acquiesced. At least I had received a vital piece of information: Victoria had been here.
When the archivist brought me the legal-length file with its typed tab: EURYDICE-CLEAR CREEK, I felt a wave of panic. What was I looking for, and how would I know it when I found it? Could I see what Victoria had seen? A grandfather clock standing by a near wall said two o’clock. I ordered myself to get going.
Something related to World War II. That was what the argument between Victoria and someone at Prospect had been about. I flipped to the beginning of the file and perused an inspection report from 1915: At present the work is confined to driving a crosscut to cut the Jack vein. I read another from 1918: I secured the samples you asked for and will bring them to Denver tomorrow. In 1922, the mine produced 161.8 tons of gold ore, and employed ten people. In 1930 an inspector indicated the character of ore as Gold, Silver, Lead, Zinc. In 1931, a new inspector noted that there was No fire protection and that the mine was not producing: Their objective is to sink the shaft deeper and get under the ore. In 1937, the same inspector stated: The gold and silver ore has played out. There is a large quantity of lead-zinc ore, and mining this on a small scale is their current objective. But by 1944,
