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.