A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar Read online

  “The mine?”

  “Yes.”

  Lee paused. Rayna waited.

  “Up near, you know, timberline.”

  Rayna stopped dabbing and looked at the back of Lee’s head quizzically, waiting again for further elaboration, and somehow knowing that none was coming. Lee stonewalled her, gave nothing away. Rayna smiled at the back of his head.

  “You don’t know where it is?”

  “The mine?”

  Rayna reinserted the applicator in the Mercurochrome bottle, screwed the cap closed. Lee, turning around and picking up his shirt, couldn’t stop looking back at her, as if he was afraid she’d disappear; she easily caught him looking and smiled and he got self-conscious, which made him blush pink.

  “Don’t put that shirt on, yet, or you’ll ruin it.”

  “Look, I don’t—”

  “It’s totally cool if you don’t want to tell me. As long as you know where it is. I mean, some people come up here, they’re looking at the old plat maps, which are pretty much useless, and nobody told them that the U.S. Forest Service resurveyed all those old mining claims in the seventies as part of that whole national hazmat public lands cleanup thing that never happened, so they could just go to the County Clerk and, you know, get the exact coordinates.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “If you had GPS on your BlackBerry, I think you could use that.”

  “I don’t. Have a BlackBerry. Or GPS. To speak of.”

  Rayna tilted her head in a way that she hoped would make Lee even more self-conscious. She liked his awkwardness. There was a warmth and a truth in it.

  “You don’t look like a guy who’d worry that I’d steal it, is also what I’m saying,” Rayna explained.

  She stared at him, waiting. Nicely waiting.

  Lee twisted the wedding band on his finger, baring his teeth, a grimace he tried to bluff into a smile.

  “You, ha, no . . . oh, c’mon . . . you think I’d buy a mining claim without even knowing where it is?”

  She did. She knew he had. And while his false bravado disappointed her, it didn’t surprise her either.

  FOUR

  Rain poured down all that day, from low-hanging cast-iron skies, across the Divide and along the long grade to the Eisenhower Tunnel and the guidebook-quaint mountain town Victorians of Georgetown and Silverthorne. Lee’s grey Jeep pulled to the curb in front of a small, new, quasi-Brutalist courthouse composed of a lot of concrete and a little glass. Windbreaker up over his head like a deconstructed umbrella, Lee sprinted up the steps to the front door and got drenched anyway.

  The County Clerk’s office was empty of petitioners when Lee came in. He was dripping water, still shedding pieces of rotted wood from his clothing, his arms and face dotted with the bright red antiseptic that had smeared a little in the rain. Lee was a fleshy candle, melting, sweating red, and the fat man behind the counter put down his can of Red Bull and regarded Lee skeptically, his eyes going eventually, and irritably, to the water puddling on the slate tile floor where Lee was standing. The fat County Clerk cleared his throat.

  “If somebody comes in and slips on that floor, I would have to testify that you were responsible.”

  “Testify?”

  “In the legal sense.”

  “What other sense is there?”

  “Aren’t you a Christian, sir?”

  “I’m looking for someone who can help me locate some property I purchased recently, up near Argentine Pass?”

  The fat man drained his Red Bull and just watched the puddling water grow.

  “I’m sorry about the water,” Lee said, self-conscious and polite. “Do you have a mop or something, I could use it to . . . ?”

  “No, I don’t. Have a mop. My point, completely. I have to wait until janitorial arrives. Five-thirty, six o’clock. And in the meantime? Georgetown resident breaks her neck.”

  Lee nodded and thought about it, and carefully backed out of the office, closing the door behind him.

  The fat man, county employee Douglas Deere, of Idaho Springs, heard rustling sounds out in the hallway and two dull clunks. Then Lee came back in, sans windbreaker and boots. He did a soft-shoe dance, sopping the water off the floor with his stocking feet, and explained:

  “It’s property I acquired recently, on, well, from the previous owner who lives out of state, so . . . And the documentation is not so good, I mean, the legal description from the original claim, but there’s no posts or markings up there to indicate a lot line and I’d rather not pay for a full-out survey if I can help it. Being strapped for cash . . . and so forth.”

  He finished sock-mopping, then crossed to the counter, feet slapping on the cold tile, leaving dewy footprints as he unfolded his sodden plat map for the fat man’s inspection.

  “I understand the U.S. Forest Service resurveyed all those old mining claims in the seventies.”

  “Hazmat recon. Early EPA.”

  “Oh, uh-huh.”

  “Another federal boondoggle.”

  “Mmm.”

  “United Socialist States of America.”

  Lee hoped that by saying nothing the fat man might quickly move off the subject. He was right.

  “It’s a mining claim?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You with the Slocumb Group?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Those bastards are buying up everything like it’s a fire sale. I expect they want to strip-mine the mountain the way they did down at Cripple Creek, rat-bastard devil Hindoo immigrants. Now it all looks like landfill.”

  “Oh.”

  The fat man glanced up at Lee incuriously, then disappeared down a row of county records and returned after only a moment with a huge, dusty, leatherbound book that he splayed out on the counter and expertly flipped through to find the U.S. Geological Survey’s topographical detail of the area around Loveland and Argentine Passes.

  “That’s the Belmont Lode,” he said.

  Lee didn’t feel the need to respond.

  “Gold mine?”

  “Well, um, most of the original documentation reports it as a silver mine, but, yes,” Lee said. “The initial claim dated 1872 was for gold, though I’ve heard—”

  “The Argentine District was generally known for its silver. First strike in Colorado, matter of fact, 1864. It’d be a drift mine, I’m guessing.”

  “What?”

  “Horizontal.”

  “Oh.” Lee had no idea what he was talking about.

  “You’ve probably also heard how they’d often lie about the mine to keep the criminals away.”

  “I have. Yeah.”

  The fat man stared hard at Lee, and they shared a conspiratorial smile Lee all of a sudden wasn’t sure he wanted to be a part of.

  “Doug Deere.”

  “I’m Lee. Lee Garrison.”

  They shook hands.

  “How’d you come to buy a gold mine, Lee?”

  “eBay.”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “I bought it from this ad on eBay.”

  Doug was staring again.

  “I know that sounds stupid, but the seller seemed legit, the price was fair, and I’ve hiked and jeeped those peaks, and pretty much everything else up there, for twenty years; jeeped and hiked and camped the whole Divide—it’s all so beautiful, in the end it didn’t seem to matter.”

  “Your own private slice of heaven,” Doug said.

  “I guess.”

  “A pristine corner of high-country paradise. I gotcha.”

  “If I could find it,” Lee added. Doug sounded like a Coors commercial, and Lee started to wonder about the wisdom of letting him in on the hunt.

  Doug Deere studied the map book, marking coordinates right on the page, then drew crisp lines between them with his straightedge. There was a high school class ring wedged on his pinky finger; he smelled like mildew and Old Spice, and his wavy ginger hair was razored up in a low shark-fin fauxhawk. Doug put his ruler against the page and ripp
ed the whole topographical map right out of the county book.

  “Put your boots back on, Lee. I’ll drive.”

  It was late afternoon by the time they got back to the switchback, the rain had stopped, and the road turned to Play-Doh. Doug Deere moved with relentless force, like a steam engine, up the steep muddy slope from his embedded Subaru Forester, through the trees, dipping in and out of long shadows, wheezing, always on the edge of breathlessness. Lee tried to remember his Junior Lifesaving CPR because he thought he might need it, but called up instead murky memories of Noreen Finn in a madras bikini at the Platte River Club pool. Pale and willing.

  “In the old days,” Doug huffed. “When they. Surveyed their mines. They’d. Triangulate the property corners, notch three trees. Or mark with rocks.”

  Not too far behind him, Lee aimed a big flashlight into the blue shadows where the trees were thickest.

  “There we go!” Doug shouted.

  The beam found a twisted, ancient, Rocky Mountain bristlecone with two vertical, barkless scars gone grey with age. Doug made a spot check with the survey coordinates on the Blue Lark plat map.

  “Ding-dong!”

  Lee was just catching up as Doug ricocheted off into the darkness.

  “They’d mark the B-cones on account of they live so long. Ho! Cairn of rocks. Here’s another one!”

  “It’s getting dark, Doug. Maybe we should think about coming back tomorrow.”

  Crashing, stumbling, branch-breaking sounds came from the shadows where Doug Deere had all but disappeared.

  “Ow—sweet Mary—OW.” Then: “Ding-dong!”

  Lee arrived under a low pine canopy as Doug Deere’s big hands clawed a man-made mound of stones away from a bigger rock held fast in the mountainside. Lee trained his light over Doug’s shoulder.

  “There. There. There. Yes.”

  Doug brushed the rock clean, revealing crude numbers carved into its surface. Latitude and longitude. Again Doug consulted the plat map.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s three.”

  “One more.” Gesturing vaguely: “Prolly over there. But the mine should be . . . right up here.”

  “Doug, it’s getting pretty dark.”

  But the clerk was up again, out from under the canopy before Lee could find his feet with the flashlight, moving with surprising quickness for such a big man. Lee’s beam washed across the silver siding of a ruined mine building behind which Doug disappeared.

  “Five, six, seven, eight, nine . . . ”

  The ridges of the mountains above them were on fire with light from the setting sun; everything below was flooded indigo, shadowed, dark, massive. Lee’s thin beam of light flickered in the trees.

  “Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine . . . ”

  Doug stood just up from the buildings in a treeless, jumbled, rocky clearing with the faint suggestion of an old access road angling through it. Lee stopped and aimed the flashlight up, past him.

  “Should be right here,” Doug insisted. “By the map. The primary egress, the main opening of the darn thing, a.k.a. the adit, should be . . . right . . . here.” He peered into the darkness at the mountainside as if, just by looking, the Blue Lark would reveal itself.

  “We can come back tomorrow.”

  “No sign of an opening of any kind. Be rare to see a shaft mine up here. So.”

  “I really appreciate your help, Doug,” Lee said firmly and sincerely. “Now I know where it is, I mean exactly where it is. I know it’s here. I’m not in any kind of rush, I’ve got time, and I know you’ve probably got other—”

  “Unless they were lying,” Doug cut him off. “Because sometimes they lied, so that nobody would know exactly where the mine was.”

  “Right,” Lee said. “We’ve been over that,” he added. He let the beam of the flashlight drop to his side, hoping that would be a signal that it was time to call it a day.

  “Or, maybe it’s all flopped, like a mirror,” Doug speculated, “and you gotta count it backward—they did that a lot—especially with the better strikes.”

  Doug turned, looked right at Lee, and didn’t see him.

  “Which means thirty-seven paces southeast in the mirror version.”

  He walked down the slope, heavy, his boots sliding. For a moment Lee was afraid he’d fall and come crashing down on him, but then Doug was brushing past, lost in calculations.

  “I’ve got to go, Doug. I’ve, you know, got school tomorrow, and a long drive home.”

  Doug ducked under the low beam of a framed doorway. The floorboards of the mine building groaned under his weight.

  “If this shack held the stamping machinery,” Doug mused, “it’d be downslope from the mine proper ’cause nobody’s gonna want to heft a full ore cart uphill . . . ”

  Doug wandered out onto the wooden deck, carefully skirting the place where Lee fell through.

  “Doug. That wood’s bad.”

  “Say again?”

  The dark made it harder to see exactly what happened, but there was the sound of wood splintering and the windmilling of Doug’s arms as he suddenly disappeared down in a shower of rotted pine and pique.

  Rayna’s General Store was still open, which surprised Lee since it was late, and, from the telltale television-blue light glowing in every front room of every house along the main road through Basso Profundo, the two dozen residents didn’t appear likely to reemerge from their houses again until sunup.

  The store was, Lee decided, still open because Rayna knew he and Doug were still up on the mountain. He didn’t care to speculate what this meant. Rayna worried him in a vague, unexplored-territory way.

  Lee plucked more splinters out of Doug’s big back and applied Mercurochrome to the wounds. Rayna, peeling the paper off the Band-Aids and handing them to him, just listened while Doug railed:

  “How about this: It’s (ouch) coded or something. The map, I mean. That used to happen all the time. They didn’t want anyone to (ouch) find their (ouch) mine. Which means we may have to get some special equipment up here, like, where we can x-ray the mountain and (ouch) find the cavity within.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Rayna said.

  “Everything important is complicated,” Doug shot back. “We live in the twenty-first century,” he added. “We’re not a couple of yahoos from Kansas come to Colorado on a goat with a shovel in 1883 intending to find our fortune.”

  Lee was on the receiving end of Rayna’s worried look.

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying,” Doug said. “I’m just pointing things out.”

  “I’m sorry.” Rayna looked hard at Lee again, and her eyes softened almost imperceptibly as she tried to communicate, well, something, and Lee literally took half a step back from her.

  “He doing all the talking, now?” she asked.

  “He likes to talk,” Lee admitted.

  “I thought it was your mine.”

  “He’s helping.”

  “Is he?”

  Lee had never had too much success solving women, including the one to whom he’d been, for a long enough time to make it not an accident, married. Not so much the mystery of them as the calculus, calculus being the one branch of mathematics Lee was unable to get a handle on in school. Lee didn’t like change, not integrally or differentially, and particularly not personally.

  “Not an x-ray, it’s, what, like an MRI machine,” Doug wandered on, in a kind of verbal scavenger hunt. “CAT scan. You know. But portable. Looking for the space in the rock where the tunnels are.”

  Lee put the tweezers down.

  “I think we’re done, Doug. Wait a second before you put on that shirt, let the Mercurochrome dry.”

  “You know what? Kinda operation we’re talking about here could be a ‘Holy Moses’ scenario, by which I’m talking about something akin to the tragic story of Nicholas C. Creede, after whom the town of Creede is named,” Doug mused. “You ever been to Creede, Lee?”

  “Maybe drove through i
t,” Lee said. “Is it up near Fraser?”

  Doug looked his same question at Rayna. She frowned and shook her head. Doug nodded, professorial, another lively disquisition imminent; took a deep breath; and before Lee could head it off, launched in:

  “Well, Nicholas C. Creede’s sad tale ends in suicide by morphine, July 13, 1897, alone, emasculated, in the garden behind his Cherry Creek mansion, wearing stained satin underwear—given to him years before by a Texas working girl—and a single wool sock, following an unhappy encounter with his wife in the taproom at the Brown Palace, where she was attempting to rekindle the matrimonial fires. He’d kicked her out the previous January. Paid her twenty grand to pack her corsets and doilies and whatnot and hightail it back to Fort Wayne, Indiana, surrendering all further claims on him or his fortune, which included, evidently, the family jewels. See, Creede had, in fact, figuratively quitclaimed his junk to the lovely young actress Edith Walters Walker after she gave birth to a love child resulting from a backstage tryst at the Cripple Creek Opera House in the tumble of her assembled costumes for her title role in the popular Victorian melodrama Maria Martin; or The Murder in the Red Barn. Based on a notorious crime committed in Suffolk, England, around 1826 or 7, where young Maria Martin was shot dead through the heart by her lover, Wee Billy Corder. Subsequently buried under the floor of his barn, Maria rotted, and Billy sent forged letters to her family from her, implying that she had eloped with him and moved to Belfast: ‘sorry we didn’t say goodbye.’ Unfortunately, about six months later her stepmom had a dream in which Maria appeared and told her she’d been murdered and buried; the body was found badly decomposed but wearing the green scarf Maria had received as a communion gift from her parents, and Corder was arrested in London, where he was running a ladies’ boardinghouse with his new wife, also named Mary. Wee Billy pled his innocence until the very end when, with the noose around his neck, seven thousand people watched him die. His body was dissected, and his head was subjected to phrenological examination, the conclusion being that the skull had overdeveloped in the areas of philoprogenitiveness and imitativeness, with little evidence of benevolence or veneration. Later, his skin was tanned by surgeon George Creed, no relation to Nicholas, and used to bind the written account of the murder.”