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.

Corrie almost had to laugh at the odd quaintness of it. This had to be the lecture where Wilde heard the story of the grizzly killings. And clipped to the handbill was a sheaf of news items, letters, and notes about the lecture appearance. It seemed ludicrous that the rough miners of Roaring Fork would have had any interest whatsoever in the aesthetic theory, let alone personal adornment or house decoration. But by all accounts the lecture had been a great success, resulting in a standing ovation. Perhaps it was the figure Wilde cut, with his outré dress and foppish mannerisms, or his preternatural wit. The poor miners of Roaring Fork had precious little entertainment beyond whoring and drinking.

She quickly leafed through the attached documents and came across an amusing handwritten note, apparently a letter by a miner to his wife back east. It was entirely without punctuation.

Wynn, reading over her shoulder, made a snorting laugh. “Illiterate bastard.” He tapped the lecture handbill. “You know, I’ll bet this is worth money.”

“I’m sure it is,” she said, hesitating, and then clipping it all back together. As charming as the miner’s letter was, it was too far afield to merit inclusion in her thesis.

She shuffled the papers aside and moved on to the next file. She noted that when Wynn carried the bundle back to the shelf, he slipped out the handbill and tucked it in another place. The guy was probably going to sell it on eBay or something.

She told herself what he did was none of her business. The next big bundle arrived, and then the next. Most of the papers dealt with milling and refining, and this time almost everything related to the Stafford family, which, by all indications, became more oppressive as their wealth and power increased. They seemed to have survived the silver panic of 1893 nicely, and even used the opportunity to pick up mines and claims at pennies on the dollar. There were plenty of faded maps of the mining districts, as well, with each mine, shaft, and tunnel carefully marked and identified. Strangely, though, there were precious few records of the smelting operations.

And then a document stopped her cold. It was a postcard dated 1933, from a family member named Howland Stafford to a woman named Dora Tiffany Kermode. It opened Dear Cousin.

Kermode. Cousin.

“Jesus!” Corrie blurted out. “That bitch Kermode is related to the family who squeezed this town dry.”

“Who are you talking about?” Wynn asked.

She slapped the document with the back of her hand. “Betty Kermode. That horrible woman who runs The Heights. She’s related to the Staffords — you know, the ones who owned the smelter back in Roaring Fork’s mining days. Unbelievable.”